Daemon did, in fact, think he might get a laugh. But not this laugh. It re-arranges something of Jaime in his perception— a man who seems to have not laughed in years, and perhaps not cried. This isn't the giggles, this is an unhinged thing, draining pressure out of a wound.
Interesting.
(The laughing fit covers a brief moment, half a heartbeat, in which Daemon tips his head a split-second before the dragon at the cave entrance shifts. Attention, then release. Nothing.)
The knight gets up, and the prince watches him, contenting himself with consuming protein. Letting him have the moment. He is very tall; Daemon himself is average, though something happens in battle, and his stature seems to shift into a thing far more fearsome than he should be. For now it suits him to remain on the unassuming side.
"It is."
Lightly. Only proper for Targaryens.
"But I don't think any less of you for your perversions, Ser Jaime. I cultivate quite a number, even outside the necessities of my blood."
"No need to think of my perversions at all, seeing as they no longer
matter," Jaime states. "She no longer matters and they are all dead. Two
poisoned and the third stepped off a windowsill of his own distraught
volition. It no longer matters. It was the worst kept secret in the Seven
Kingdoms and it no longer matters."
It's the first time Jaime has spoken of his taboo relationship with his
twin sister or the children he'd been unable to claim as his own so openly
(so bitterly) and of his own volition. Catelyn Stark got him to talk, but
only after pouring copious amounts of wine down his throat to the point
that he was sloshed beyond reason with a tongue so loose he had no real
control over the words that spilled from his mouth.
He's never had the ability to speak of it so directly, always keeping this
precious secret to himself. Always treasuring it. Holding it in high,
loving regards that were not shared. Had he known this is how things would
turn out, he would have taken the children and fled; ran to Essos, let them
live out their lives as something other than pawns destined to die for the
political advancement of their mother-aunt.
Perhaps that's why he keeps talking in spite of better judgement.
"They were all deemed Baratheons. My twin sister was married to the
usurper, you see. She had me convinced that we were two halves of one
whole, a single soul split between two bodies. And I bloody believed it. I
thought she wanted children that would be ours, but she wanted pawns
that would be hers. Pieces that she could move across the board; means of
securing power and alliances. Seven Hells, I don't even think she cares
that they're all gone now that she's got what she wanted."
The Iron Throne. It always came back to that blasted thrice-damned throne.
Power for power's sake is an empty pit. It's not strength, or authority, or influence. Just violence. Daemon knows well— and he doesn't always find the pursuit of it worthless. An empty pit still has its uses. But all it does is consume, and to think it ever does anything else is to fall down inside of it.
For a time, he's silent.
"Jaime."
A gentle warning so that he's not sneaked up on; on his feet, now, Daemon extends a hand to his shoulder, bracing. His grip is solid, long-fingered hands still strong despite age. No apology for his twisted humor or flippancy, because he's not the sort to apologize (hates it, is bad at it, sounds insincere, is not actually sorry most of the time), but he is quiet out of respect for that brutal confession.
The knight stiffens under the other man's touch, tense for the few moments it takes him to sort out that his grip is meant in kind and not as a threat or warning. People simply do not touch Jaime with kindness, nor do they call him by name or express unspoken sympathy (and understanding?) for the children he lost.
It makes his eyes sting with unshed tears and he blinks them back, refusing to let them spill.
"They didn't know. That I was their father. They believed I was their uncle who happened to be in the Kingsguard. They didn't—" He purses his lips, looks down. "No, that's not true. She did. My daughter, Myrcella. She figured it out, clever girl, and she told me that she was glad that I was her father. And then the poison I didn't know she'd been supplied with kicked in and she bled out in my arms."
Jaime steps away from the other man's touch, scrubbing at his eyes with his stumped arm as he shoves all the emotion that bubbled up to the surface down before turning to face him.
"Last thing a Targaryen likely wants is a Lannister bitching and moaning. Forget I said anything. What have you managed to learn about this place?"
"You should know better than to try and tell a Targaryen what he wants," Daemon says quietly. He gives Jaime a break, and steps past him towards the cave's entrance, and Caraxes; the light is filtered through the edge of a wing membrane, but the bulk of what's visible is an indistinct column of red scales. Difficult to tell which end is which, on the long neck of the Blood Wyrm.
"The girls are always the cleverest."
Myrcella, a daughter, dying in her father's arms. It was brutal enough to have been told the news of Lucerys, crippling to lose little Visenya, whose body was littered with beautiful, delicate scales. An abomination, Rhaenyra whispered, and Daemon let her believe that his disgusted reaction was about the deformities, and not the fact that she would have rejected her own babe.
"Mine are twins."
Not close the way that Jaime and his sister had been, to apparent ruin, but if they were, Daemon would support it, no matter their sex. In times past, he might make a joke about it being convenient if they decided to take only one husband between them— but now Rhaena's betrothed is dead, devoured by a Hightower boy on a dragon he doesn't know how to control, and Daemon fears Jaecerys isn't far behind. He should have left the girls in Pentos, and found them half a dozen lovers each, whomever they wanted. What might he do if he outlives Rhaena, or Baela? Watches them die? The madness he's been accused of, probably.
How Jaime has managed to avoid succumbing to any sort of madness is a wonder to all. He has more than enough reason to, has been traumatized by enough to last him several lifetimes. The slaying of his king and the torment and ostracizing he had to endure as a boy of barely seventeen. Listening to Queen Rhaella scream as that same king raped her and his Kingsguard brothers held him back, reminding him that they were Kingsguard, not Queensguard and he was forbidden from coming to her aid. Lord Stark and his eldest son being tortured and burned alive for Aerys’s twisted amusement while he stood by like a good little obedient sentinel. The sight of the blade coming down on his wrist and seeing his hand detach from his body and the scream that ripped through his throat. Myrcella bleeding out in his arms. The Sept of Baelor smoldering with the telltale green smoke of wildfire as his twin sat smirking on a throne she had stepped over dead children to reach.
Who could blame him if he one day snapped? He was a rather lonely man, looked down upon and called derogatory names for his finest act who barely had anyone he could call friend back in the world/time he belonged to. A petty, jaded part of him almost wished that he would; they believe him mad, why not live up to those expectations?
He lifts his nose into the air prissily, deciding to cease commenting on twins and children and shift the conversion elsewhere as Daemon moves towards his dragon.
“What then, do you wish to know? If any of your brethren are still living? That winter is coming and the Night’s Watch warns of Others from beyond the Wall that will come for the living?”
Edited (oof, those phone tag typos… 🥴) 2023-02-14 01:33 (UTC)
Are those intermingled with so much Westerosi blood really his kin, in any ways besides the technical? No matter how strong the magic of their line, there is more mongrel in them than Targaryen. More of the people who made the Lannisters, and produced this man, cracking at every edge and waiting to shatter.
Westeros has not changed. Perhaps nothing will make it.
"Valyrians live in a post-apocalyptic world, amongst people who hate us. I will give my life to buy more years for my children from our lost gods. Of course I wish to know their, our fate, for as far as I can uncover it."
Fourteen fires. The hypocritical barbarians have half the gods, what use could they ever be? Caraxes shifts and passes over the cave entrance, his long body casting dark, then light shadows, the large fork of his tail like spears; he makes sounds like a great flint trying to spark as he stretches and finds a new comfortable position on the sand.
After a moment—
"My grandmother was beloved by the north. She spent long months there in the cold dark, hosting tourneys with wildling women and thawing the Stark warden. She sold her jewels to Braavos to build the men of the Watch a better castle because the Nightfort disturbed her so. Her dragon would not fly past the Wall."
He speaks of his blood with affection and investment in the continuation of his bloodline for more than the sake of power and prestige. It's incongruent, crashing up against the image of the Targaryens that he grew up with. Rhaegar was supposed to be the odd one out, the one who cared in ways that his father and recent predecessors hadn't, not the one who best resembled his pureblood Valyrian ancestors.
It makes Jaime's head spin.
"Her name is Daenerys," he supplies Daemon with, sounding almost bored. "She is the last of your direct line, whisked away to Essos as a newborn when Robert took the throne. I don't know the names of her dragons, but she has three of them and I've only seen one. All black with red wings — not nearly as large as your... friend, but still massive."
Caraxes didn't unsettle him so much as what he was capable of. In truth, he knew little about dragons as they simply were not talked about after Robert took power and Rhaegar always spoke of them in generic and whimsical made up sounding terms, like the more accurate terminology had been lost to time along with them. It wasn't the beast that got to him so much as his own traumatic relationship to fire and the horrific memories of Rickard Stark being cooked alive in his armor.
"The North." A scoff, a roll of his too bright green eyes as he pulls back on the layers of bullshit he wears like armor. (People tell you you're awful enough and eventually you'll begin to believe. It becomes easier to just fall in line with assumption than to fight it.) "They loathe me in the North, and yet I was headed there anyway. To see an oath through, to help with whatever it is that's supposedly coming for us from the Lands of Always Winter."
Always fire. They live in fire, they dire in fire; if one cannot have a dragonrider's death, then their body will be cremated anyway, and spared the insult of turning to rot. Daemon's brave girl Laena and Rhaenyra's loyal Harwin had died burning, accidental sacrifices to gore open the path towards unity. A nightmarish trade. Spells of Old Valyria are not always asked for, though. Sometimes they create themselves, from fire and blood.
"Daenerys."
An echo. Daemon stands so still. Jaime can't know the insanity of what he relays so thoughtlessly. Though a dragon may have many riders over their long lives, riders only have one. The death of a dragon is the death of the soul. Daemon knows the deep searing weight of teasing on the edges of it whenever he commanded Laena's Vhagar during her pregnancies, and seducing his grandfather's Vermithor. To bond with three, and at once—
The dragon must have three heads.
A good family name. His eldest aunt was Daenerys. Grandmother wanted her to be heir, but Grandsire wouldn't allow it, and then little Daenerys fell so cold and ill, and they'd been too cowardly against the Westerosi after Maegor's death; there weren't any dragon eggs or hatchlings in King's Landing. She died with nothing capable of warming her before anyone could even get to Dragonstone. Dragon eggs were kept in the Pit from then on, and Daemon... will not voice any of this, no matter how his thoughts spin.
"I hear they appreciate oaths, in the North," Daemon says eventually. "They trust their own and keep to the old ways. Sensible people who swore themselves rightly to my wife. Do you believe in prophecy, Ser Jaime?"
"Sensible is one word for it," he grumbles. And yet: "I swore an oath to the Lady of Winterfell's mother. To keep her and her sister safe and in Winterfell. If they are threatened, then I must join her in defending them."
Jaime doesn't notice his own slip up, going over his histories in his head to figure out which wife Daemon might be referring to. He doesn't know the analogues of history nearly as well as his little brother, but he always had a keen interest in wartime affairs, knights, and swords with good names. He had aimed in his youth, after all, to be a knight worthy of songs. To have ballads sung about him long after he was gone.
Rhaenyra, perhaps?
"Me? Seven, no. I think they're a load of horseshit. Prince Rhaegar, however, I recall believed in one involving— What was it he always told me? The dragon has three heads? Whatever it was, he fully believed himself and his siblings to be those dragons. Can't say it came true."
He doesn't make the connection with Daenerys's three dragons, his prince having presented the prophecy to him as the three heads being that of Targaryens and not their mounts. Of course, at the time, everyone had believed that the dragons were long gone, never to grace the skies again.
"Wise of you. Prophecies are delusions of convenience. No one should need a dream to understand that a massive wall built with magic is meant to keep something dangerous out." Fucking prophecies, fucking Aegon the Conqueror, spinning a fairy tale to sooth his artist son's gentle heart. A father's folly despite all he'd done. "... But that's not a prophecy. It's a prayer."
And perhaps easy for a fanciful person to twist into something else. The Targaryen crest of a three-headed dragon, all their lullabies and old spells, legends of how exactly they came to have the blood of the dragon in the first place.
In High Valyrian, he says, "But two heads to a third sing. From my voice: The fires have spoken, and the price has been paid with blood magic."
Spooky, or beautiful? Daemon stands still, but Caraxes shifts, restless.
"Three is powerful number in blood magic, and the magic of Targaryen blood is very real."
What did Rhaegar see? A dream, or merely wishful thinking? If he believed the fantasies of their origin, did he want a love story? If he believed the nightmare of it, did he want destruction? Perhaps three siblings could have willed something great into being, if one alone is powerful enough to bring dragons back into the world. Or perhaps her brothers needed to die in a sacrifice to make it possible. (If he knew their names and their reasoning, he'd laugh. Three dragons, named for the three men in her life, who each died terribly. Fire and blood.)
For a moment, Jaime contemplates lying. He's a good liar — a very good liar — and can spin a tale with a straight face to the point that he sometimes wonders if he's remembering the truth wrong and it's the lie that's the reality. Why lie about that here, though? There's no Cersei or little birds whispering in Qyburn's corrupt ear. No one he needs to protect her from.
Having ties to him won't endanger her here.
"Brienne of Tarth," he answers. "She is Lady Sansa Stark's sworn sword. We swore that oath together."
Even if she has been the one to uphold it for the both of them, for the most part. Jaime might have financed her journeys with Lannister gold, commissioned custom armor for her, and gifted her with a priceless Valyrian sword that he insisted she keep, but he's done little himself. He had been hoping to change that, but fate intervenes in intention in the strangest of ways.
Such as bringing him here.
"A prayer, you say? Huh. He spoke those words with reverence, yes, but never the faithful sort that you see septons get themselves worked up with." Born into the Faith of the Seven, Jaime has no personal stake in it. Religion is as much of a farce to him as prophecies.
Jaime doesn't know how much he believes in the magic blood of the Targaryen line, but he can't deny that they're simply built different and magic would honestly explain a lot. He is just jaded beyond reason and likes to think that if there were more magic in the world, it wouldn't be nearly as miserable as it was.
Septons, penitents and their Faith of the Seven are utterly unlike the gods of Old Valyria— primordial forces meant to be bargained with, not worshiped. Rituals, not rules. Prayer is offered in song and in battle, and the most holy offering is a blood sacrifice. Daemon will trade himself for his children. He knows the gods will listen and he will be devoured, taken away to the annihilation of their culture.
"Perhaps your prince was, too."
How much of what a Targaryen should be has been lost by Jaime's time? Just about everything, he imagines.
Daemon moves finally, and with his movement, Caraxes stills and becomes calm again. His attention is pulled back to the younger knight properly.
"A lady swornsword? I like the thought of that. Women are infinitely more reliable. They tend to make more sensible vows."
Much as Jaime wants to argue in Rhaegar's Valyrian favor, even a poor student of history such as he understands that by the time his prince was poised to inherit the Iron Throne, Aegon the Conquerer's bloodline had been significantly diminished. Although they'd kept up the tradition of intermarrying best they could, their numbers weren't what they once were and they were forced to marry into the Great Houses of Westeros in order to ensure their survival. Rhaegar was a Targaryen, yes, but his great-grandmother had been a Blackwood, his great-great-grandmother a Dayne... The bloodline had been considerably diluted and it was honestly a testament to the strength of their Valyrian ancestry that the Targaryens he knew in his youth were still silver-haired and purple-eyed.
though sometimes those features don't shine through at all cough jon and coughjaimehimselfcoughcough
"He thought in the only way he knew how," he finally settles on in Rhaegar's defense. "With the admiration he had for his House and his heritage, I've no doubt that he would have thought differently had he been able to."
Rhaegar tried, but he also for some unfathomable reason also saw fit to kidnap Lyanna Stark and instigate a war and wound up dead instead of seated on the throne that should've been his.
Jaime won't pretend to understand why he did that, only that the kidnapping and the death of Ned Stark's sister does not line up with anything he knew about the Prince of Dragonstone. It didn't make sense, but he's long given up on trying to wrap his head around that.
What's done is done. History cannot be rewoven, especially not by him.
"She is the most sensible person I've ever met," Jaime declares without hesitation. "Stubborn, yet honorable to a fault. She sets her mind on the impossible and defies expectation by seeing it through. She's far more knightly than I'll ever be."
Genetics are like shuffling cards, and Targaryen genetics are no more dominant or recessive than any other; they might be dealt any which way. Rhaenyra's bastards were as Targaryen as her father's children by the Hightower whore, and yet all three came out with brown hair and eyes, while her half-siblings had all the markings of 'real' Valyrians. Bastards with good hearts whose dragon eggs all hatched, and silvery usurpers who had to command their beasts cruelly and used them for nothing but ruin.
(If Viserys had just let Daemon have Rhaenyra when he asked, everything would have been fine.)
"Mm."
Just a monosyllabic sound, for Rhaegar. There's nothing much he can offer, here. Two hundred years is two hundred years, and clearly, much has been lost. He isn't surprised. He wonders what Daenerys knows, if anything. If she's lost, or if her dragons make up for it. Daemon has had far more than her, and has felt unbearably alone in their world.
Anyway—
"Pity you've taken one of those useless vows and can't wed her."
Rhaegar's own children were far more Dornish than they were Valyrian, though Jaime would argue that was only in their coloring. Little Rhaenys had her father's regal facial features, sharply prominent even as a toddler. (He remembers, too, Aerys dismissing the little girl for being too Dornish, claiming he could 'smell' it on her. Holding a grudge against both Rhaegar for not producing silver-haired children and his sister-wife for not birthing a daughter for Rhaegar to wed.)
"Pity I what?"
It takes him a moment to understand, and once he does, he's practically rambling as he tries to catch up with the underlying meaning(s) of the Rogue Prince's words.
"Brienne is a friend at best, to insinuate that I would— That I—" He can't even deny it, so he shifts gears: "If I wanted to, my vows would not be a problem, as I was released from them not long ago. A white cloak no longer sits on my shoulders. A one-handed man who was seen as both useless and a threat to high climbing Tyrells was done away with first chance they got to whisper in a young, impressionable king's ear."
Jaime's own son. Dismissed from the Kingsguard he'd devoted his life to, sacrificed his youth and innocence to, by his own godsdamned son.
Pale eyebrows arch at the fumbling, amused. Sure, buddy.
"Sounds like your only remaining expertise," since he got the hand chopped off, rip, "is finding yourself in improbably awful situations. Not exactly the worst motivation to keep such a sensible woman close."
What else does he have for entertainment around here? Might as well torture this guy about his lady knight. Caraxes huffs smoke, and it sounds like laughter.
"Freed from your vows and the Red Keep, can't be all that bad. And now you're here to make a wish. Perhaps your luck will turn, Ser Jaime."
Jaime's head whips around to finally regard Caraxes dead-on at the almost eerie sound of draconic 'laughter.' he's curious, but oddly not afraid; intrigued, almost.
Instead of commenting on anything Daemon has said, the golden knight remarks: "We used to have lions — beneath the Rock. They were sad, toothless things that hadn't seen the sunshine in generations, much like the hatchlings I'm told were small and underdeveloped that had spelled the end for dragons until Daenerys birthed hers in fire, or so they say. Lions have disappeared from Westeros, but dragons have returned to it."
He takes a step towards the entrance (and Caraxes). Then another, and another— Pausing still a decent distance away, he looks back over at the Rogue Prince.
"Perhaps that's a sign that your House is once more on the rise."
And his is about to come crumbling down.
Here lies House Lannister, brought down by its own ruthless ambition. A Lannister always pays their debts.
"Valyria is gone. My House has no home, and if your miracle princess takes the Iron Thone, she will have to decide if she is a Targaryen at all, or something new."
Refugees surviving in a hostile world, needing to keep power or be run out as heretics, needing to keep their bloodline close to maintain the tenets of their culture and their race. It's over. They are bred out, and have been for some time. Daemon knew, when he saw the ruins, just how foolish the Conqueror had been.
His dream. What a fucking joke.
Less dismal, perhaps, is watching Jaime regard Caraxes. It's always interesting observing someone getting used to a dragon. There's nothing like them.
"You'd have to have slain quite a number of lions," he observes. "Hundreds of the fucking things prowling around in my time, and just a handful of dragons. Are you all so self-devouring?"
Jaime laughs. A mirthless, almost bitter laugh as he shakes his head at the thought of swearing allegiance to the daughter of the man whose throat he slit. ...and yet, when it comes to the array of options of people to perch themselves on the Iron Throne, oddly a Targaryen Princess doesn't seem like a bad idea. Especially not when—
"They call her 'The Breaker of Chains.' It's said that she overthrew the slavers of Astapor and liberated the slaves of both the Red City and Meereen. The armies she has brought with her to Westeros to reclaim her birthright are said to genuinely love her and have faith in her power, in her ability to bring forth change. Hells, they say that the Dothraki consider her to be some sort of deity for being supposedly fireproof. They call her 'The Unburnt,' too. She has a whole host of titles."
He waves his lone hand dismissively at the list in his head, not caring whether he recalls the paragraph of scrawl beneath her name in the treaty they all signed. (In the treaty Cersei immediately broke by refusing to send aid to the North.)
"My point is, where we Lannisters and the Lions on our house sigil may be a dying breed, victims of self-sabotage... You Valyrians manage to keep finding ways to survive. Even if that means marrying someone who isn't your cousin to ensure that survival. Is survival not Targaryen of her?"
"In Valyria, Targaryens were a House of little renown," Daemon says. It is known (hah), but almost never spoken of aloud, for fear of retribution from the ruling powers that be. "We loved our dragons too much to be economic forces. We bonded with them as deep as children, as deep as lovers, instead of only using them as cudgels. Husbands and wives ruled the House side by side, hand in hand."
There were wars of annihilating subjugation, there were dragon-roads of immense trade, and the Targaryens were only footnotes, if that. It was the work of a woman—
(legend says she had a dream, but Daemon believes she was a fucking geologist and this horrid Westerosi influence has made a competent woman into a mystic)
—that spared them, when their peers were too egotistical. Her name was Jor-El.
"Valyrians came to have dragon's blood one of two ways. Either they used magic, or they forced slaves fuck monsters. Which do you think is more likely, I wonder."
Caraxes stretches; the sound of the ocean mingles with the sound of his breathing, a dull, rhythmic roar.
"I suppose most of the people in my day would assume the worst and go with the latter. It would compliment the narrative that's been spun in the wake of your house's decline." A narrative that the Mad King unfortunately fed into. (A narrative where people both condemned Aerys for his madness but also condemned Jaime for putting an end to it.) "And yet I'm inclined to say it was magic. Magic is..."
There's a heavy pause as Jaime once again seems transfixed by Caraxes, green eyes taking in every little movement until he sucks in a sharp breath and turns his attention back to the prince.
"Prophecies are a load of shit, but magic is real; I've seen it. I've seen one of the Others. It moved as if it were still living in spite of the eye-less face and decaying flesh that barely clung to the bone. When split in two, both halves of it continued to crawl. It snarled and did not stop until one half was burnt and the other was pierced with dragonglass."
Jaime might have looked at it with an expression akin to 'an ice zombie, in front of my salad?' but on the inside, it scared him shitless. He was fucking terrified of the potential that threat carried, of the very real possibility that the fabled Night King was real, of Westeros being taken over by these mindless creatures while they were too busy bickering about whose arse should be seated upon that godsdamned Iron Throne.
"Perhaps if she succeeds in helping save Westeros from the Army of the Dead, she might be. Until then, my allegiance remains with Sansa Stark." and Brienne of Tarth
"Of course magic is real." Daemon is an awful lot closer to Jaime than he was before, when he shifts attention back. His tone of voice is slightly impatient; of course doing a lot of heavy lifting. A shift to dark and wry, "How do you think they got any results out of violating slaves?"
Magic is real, and magic is a nightmare.
Daemon likes it that way. He has to. It's a part of him.
"Is Sansa Stark doing anything to stop the 'army of the dead'? Sounds like you might want to keep a closer eye on that problem than shrugging it off to a girl you're frightened of."
Daemon walks past him to the mouth of the cave, surveying glimpses of the beach outside. Caraxes looks in at them with one big yellow eye, but doesn't linger. Handy thing about his long neck, he can periscope about at will, surveying in all directions.
"I've seen things like that. Not precisely, but close enough to envision it without thinking you mad."
The twisted creatures in the ruins of the Freehold were unlike anything Daemon had ever seen, surpassing even the freakshow monsters and cursed familiars of the witches of Asshai and the Shadow Lands, and it was on that damned journey he came to understand too much about the world. It makes perfect sense, actually, that the Wall was constructed to keep out things.
"Our world is older than we can conceptualize, I think. We will never understand the true scope of what has lived there, or that yet will live."
Jaime rears back with a jerk when Daemon draws nearer, a vision of Aerys flashing in his mind's eye. (Perhaps through the memory sharing link they share here?) A decrepit old man with a gold-silver beard and hair that hung to his waist, wild purple eyes, and long, discolored nails that curled like a nautilus shell.
I'll give them naught but ashes, the old man cackled. Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat. Burn them all. Burn them in their homes, burn them in their beds. Burn them all! BURN THEM ALL!
He blinks it back, a momentary internal struggle taking place as the prince peers out of the cave's entrance, Jaime forcing his walls back up, burying the traumatic recollection.
"I don't need to understand it to know that it wants to fuck us all over."
It should unnerve Daemon more, but even if he were disgusted — it's more like pity — he wouldn't show an outsider. Instead he is stoic in the face of Jaime's secondhand horrors, because no matter how much of a monster King Aerys was, he was a Targaryen. And as a Targaryen, it was his right to do as he wished with his kingdom and his subjects. Burn their homes, burn their children, burn everything. Those things were all his, to cherish or to carelessly destroy.
Admirable? No. But the way of things. Smallfolk do not choose their kings.
"But you don't care very much."
Or else he'd be kneeling for the Breaker of Chains, is his implication.
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hieroglyphics2023-02-02 11:18 pm
no subject
Interesting.
(The laughing fit covers a brief moment, half a heartbeat, in which Daemon tips his head a split-second before the dragon at the cave entrance shifts. Attention, then release. Nothing.)
The knight gets up, and the prince watches him, contenting himself with consuming protein. Letting him have the moment. He is very tall; Daemon himself is average, though something happens in battle, and his stature seems to shift into a thing far more fearsome than he should be. For now it suits him to remain on the unassuming side.
"It is."
Lightly. Only proper for Targaryens.
"But I don't think any less of you for your perversions, Ser Jaime. I cultivate quite a number, even outside the necessities of my blood."
no subject
"No need to think of my perversions at all, seeing as they no longer matter," Jaime states. "She no longer matters and they are all dead. Two poisoned and the third stepped off a windowsill of his own distraught volition. It no longer matters. It was the worst kept secret in the Seven Kingdoms and it no longer matters."
It's the first time Jaime has spoken of his taboo relationship with his twin sister or the children he'd been unable to claim as his own so openly (so bitterly) and of his own volition. Catelyn Stark got him to talk, but only after pouring copious amounts of wine down his throat to the point that he was sloshed beyond reason with a tongue so loose he had no real control over the words that spilled from his mouth.
He's never had the ability to speak of it so directly, always keeping this precious secret to himself. Always treasuring it. Holding it in high, loving regards that were not shared. Had he known this is how things would turn out, he would have taken the children and fled; ran to Essos, let them live out their lives as something other than pawns destined to die for the political advancement of their mother-aunt.
Perhaps that's why he keeps talking in spite of better judgement.
"They were all deemed Baratheons. My twin sister was married to the usurper, you see. She had me convinced that we were two halves of one whole, a single soul split between two bodies. And I bloody believed it. I thought she wanted children that would be ours, but she wanted pawns that would be hers. Pieces that she could move across the board; means of securing power and alliances. Seven Hells, I don't even think she cares that they're all gone now that she's got what she wanted."
The Iron Throne. It always came back to that blasted thrice-damned throne.
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For a time, he's silent.
"Jaime."
A gentle warning so that he's not sneaked up on; on his feet, now, Daemon extends a hand to his shoulder, bracing. His grip is solid, long-fingered hands still strong despite age. No apology for his twisted humor or flippancy, because he's not the sort to apologize (hates it, is bad at it, sounds insincere, is not actually sorry most of the time), but he is quiet out of respect for that brutal confession.
It matters. His children matter.
Even if it's only mattered.
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It makes his eyes sting with unshed tears and he blinks them back, refusing to let them spill.
"They didn't know. That I was their father. They believed I was their uncle who happened to be in the Kingsguard. They didn't—" He purses his lips, looks down. "No, that's not true. She did. My daughter, Myrcella. She figured it out, clever girl, and she told me that she was glad that I was her father. And then the poison I didn't know she'd been supplied with kicked in and she bled out in my arms."
Jaime steps away from the other man's touch, scrubbing at his eyes with his stumped arm as he shoves all the emotion that bubbled up to the surface down before turning to face him.
"Last thing a Targaryen likely wants is a Lannister bitching and moaning. Forget I said anything. What have you managed to learn about this place?"
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"The girls are always the cleverest."
Myrcella, a daughter, dying in her father's arms. It was brutal enough to have been told the news of Lucerys, crippling to lose little Visenya, whose body was littered with beautiful, delicate scales. An abomination, Rhaenyra whispered, and Daemon let her believe that his disgusted reaction was about the deformities, and not the fact that she would have rejected her own babe.
"Mine are twins."
Not close the way that Jaime and his sister had been, to apparent ruin, but if they were, Daemon would support it, no matter their sex. In times past, he might make a joke about it being convenient if they decided to take only one husband between them— but now Rhaena's betrothed is dead, devoured by a Hightower boy on a dragon he doesn't know how to control, and Daemon fears Jaecerys isn't far behind. He should have left the girls in Pentos, and found them half a dozen lovers each, whomever they wanted. What might he do if he outlives Rhaena, or Baela? Watches them die? The madness he's been accused of, probably.
"This place is as we've been told. So far."
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Who could blame him if he one day snapped? He was a rather lonely man, looked down upon and called derogatory names for his finest act who barely had anyone he could call friend back in the world/time he belonged to. A petty, jaded part of him almost wished that he would; they believe him mad, why not live up to those expectations?
He lifts his nose into the air prissily, deciding to cease commenting on twins and children and shift the conversion elsewhere as Daemon moves towards his dragon.
“What then, do you wish to know? If any of your brethren are still living? That winter is coming and the Night’s Watch warns of Others from beyond the Wall that will come for the living?”
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Are those intermingled with so much Westerosi blood really his kin, in any ways besides the technical? No matter how strong the magic of their line, there is more mongrel in them than Targaryen. More of the people who made the Lannisters, and produced this man, cracking at every edge and waiting to shatter.
Westeros has not changed. Perhaps nothing will make it.
"Valyrians live in a post-apocalyptic world, amongst people who hate us. I will give my life to buy more years for my children from our lost gods. Of course I wish to know their, our fate, for as far as I can uncover it."
Fourteen fires. The hypocritical barbarians have half the gods, what use could they ever be? Caraxes shifts and passes over the cave entrance, his long body casting dark, then light shadows, the large fork of his tail like spears; he makes sounds like a great flint trying to spark as he stretches and finds a new comfortable position on the sand.
After a moment—
"My grandmother was beloved by the north. She spent long months there in the cold dark, hosting tourneys with wildling women and thawing the Stark warden. She sold her jewels to Braavos to build the men of the Watch a better castle because the Nightfort disturbed her so. Her dragon would not fly past the Wall."
Interesting.
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It makes Jaime's head spin.
"Her name is Daenerys," he supplies Daemon with, sounding almost bored. "She is the last of your direct line, whisked away to Essos as a newborn when Robert took the throne. I don't know the names of her dragons, but she has three of them and I've only seen one. All black with red wings — not nearly as large as your... friend, but still massive."
Caraxes didn't unsettle him so much as what he was capable of. In truth, he knew little about dragons as they simply were not talked about after Robert took power and Rhaegar always spoke of them in generic and whimsical made up sounding terms, like the more accurate terminology had been lost to time along with them. It wasn't the beast that got to him so much as his own traumatic relationship to fire and the horrific memories of Rickard Stark being cooked alive in his armor.
"The North." A scoff, a roll of his too bright green eyes as he pulls back on the layers of bullshit he wears like armor. (People tell you you're awful enough and eventually you'll begin to believe. It becomes easier to just fall in line with assumption than to fight it.) "They loathe me in the North, and yet I was headed there anyway. To see an oath through, to help with whatever it is that's supposedly coming for us from the Lands of Always Winter."
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"Daenerys."
An echo. Daemon stands so still. Jaime can't know the insanity of what he relays so thoughtlessly. Though a dragon may have many riders over their long lives, riders only have one. The death of a dragon is the death of the soul. Daemon knows the deep searing weight of teasing on the edges of it whenever he commanded Laena's Vhagar during her pregnancies, and seducing his grandfather's Vermithor. To bond with three, and at once—
The dragon must have three heads.
A good family name. His eldest aunt was Daenerys. Grandmother wanted her to be heir, but Grandsire wouldn't allow it, and then little Daenerys fell so cold and ill, and they'd been too cowardly against the Westerosi after Maegor's death; there weren't any dragon eggs or hatchlings in King's Landing. She died with nothing capable of warming her before anyone could even get to Dragonstone. Dragon eggs were kept in the Pit from then on, and Daemon... will not voice any of this, no matter how his thoughts spin.
"I hear they appreciate oaths, in the North," Daemon says eventually. "They trust their own and keep to the old ways. Sensible people who swore themselves rightly to my wife. Do you believe in prophecy, Ser Jaime?"
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Jaime doesn't notice his own slip up, going over his histories in his head to figure out which wife Daemon might be referring to. He doesn't know the analogues of history nearly as well as his little brother, but he always had a keen interest in wartime affairs, knights, and swords with good names. He had aimed in his youth, after all, to be a knight worthy of songs. To have ballads sung about him long after he was gone.
Rhaenyra, perhaps?
"Me? Seven, no. I think they're a load of horseshit. Prince Rhaegar, however, I recall believed in one involving— What was it he always told me? The dragon has three heads? Whatever it was, he fully believed himself and his siblings to be those dragons. Can't say it came true."
He doesn't make the connection with Daenerys's three dragons, his prince having presented the prophecy to him as the three heads being that of Targaryens and not their mounts. Of course, at the time, everyone had believed that the dragons were long gone, never to grace the skies again.
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And perhaps easy for a fanciful person to twist into something else. The Targaryen crest of a three-headed dragon, all their lullabies and old spells, legends of how exactly they came to have the blood of the dragon in the first place.
In High Valyrian, he says, "But two heads to a third sing. From my voice: The fires have spoken, and the price has been paid with blood magic."
Spooky, or beautiful? Daemon stands still, but Caraxes shifts, restless.
"Three is powerful number in blood magic, and the magic of Targaryen blood is very real."
What did Rhaegar see? A dream, or merely wishful thinking? If he believed the fantasies of their origin, did he want a love story? If he believed the nightmare of it, did he want destruction? Perhaps three siblings could have willed something great into being, if one alone is powerful enough to bring dragons back into the world. Or perhaps her brothers needed to die in a sacrifice to make it possible. (If he knew their names and their reasoning, he'd laugh. Three dragons, named for the three men in her life, who each died terribly. Fire and blood.)
"Join 'her'?"
The Lady of Winterfell?
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For a moment, Jaime contemplates lying. He's a good liar — a very good liar — and can spin a tale with a straight face to the point that he sometimes wonders if he's remembering the truth wrong and it's the lie that's the reality. Why lie about that here, though? There's no Cersei or little birds whispering in Qyburn's corrupt ear. No one he needs to protect her from.
Having ties to him won't endanger her here.
"Brienne of Tarth," he answers. "She is Lady Sansa Stark's sworn sword. We swore that oath together."
Even if she has been the one to uphold it for the both of them, for the most part. Jaime might have financed her journeys with Lannister gold, commissioned custom armor for her, and gifted her with a priceless Valyrian sword that he insisted she keep, but he's done little himself. He had been hoping to change that, but fate intervenes in intention in the strangest of ways.
Such as bringing him here.
"A prayer, you say? Huh. He spoke those words with reverence, yes, but never the faithful sort that you see septons get themselves worked up with." Born into the Faith of the Seven, Jaime has no personal stake in it. Religion is as much of a farce to him as prophecies.
Jaime doesn't know how much he believes in the magic blood of the Targaryen line, but he can't deny that they're simply built different and magic would honestly explain a lot. He is just jaded beyond reason and likes to think that if there were more magic in the world, it wouldn't be nearly as miserable as it was.
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Septons, penitents and their Faith of the Seven are utterly unlike the gods of Old Valyria— primordial forces meant to be bargained with, not worshiped. Rituals, not rules. Prayer is offered in song and in battle, and the most holy offering is a blood sacrifice. Daemon will trade himself for his children. He knows the gods will listen and he will be devoured, taken away to the annihilation of their culture.
"Perhaps your prince was, too."
How much of what a Targaryen should be has been lost by Jaime's time? Just about everything, he imagines.
Daemon moves finally, and with his movement, Caraxes stills and becomes calm again. His attention is pulled back to the younger knight properly.
"A lady swornsword? I like the thought of that. Women are infinitely more reliable. They tend to make more sensible vows."
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though sometimes those features don't shine through at all cough jon and coughjaimehimselfcoughcough"He thought in the only way he knew how," he finally settles on in Rhaegar's defense. "With the admiration he had for his House and his heritage, I've no doubt that he would have thought differently had he been able to."
Rhaegar tried, but he also for some unfathomable reason also saw fit to kidnap Lyanna Stark and instigate a war and wound up dead instead of seated on the throne that should've been his.
Jaime won't pretend to understand why he did that, only that the kidnapping and the death of Ned Stark's sister does not line up with anything he knew about the Prince of Dragonstone. It didn't make sense, but he's long given up on trying to wrap his head around that.
What's done is done. History cannot be rewoven, especially not by him.
"She is the most sensible person I've ever met," Jaime declares without hesitation. "Stubborn, yet honorable to a fault. She sets her mind on the impossible and defies expectation by seeing it through. She's far more knightly than I'll ever be."
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(If Viserys had just let Daemon have Rhaenyra when he asked, everything would have been fine.)
"Mm."
Just a monosyllabic sound, for Rhaegar. There's nothing much he can offer, here. Two hundred years is two hundred years, and clearly, much has been lost. He isn't surprised. He wonders what Daenerys knows, if anything. If she's lost, or if her dragons make up for it. Daemon has had far more than her, and has felt unbearably alone in their world.
Anyway—
"Pity you've taken one of those useless vows and can't wed her."
Daemon likes a bad bitch. She sounds cool.
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"Pity I what?"
It takes him a moment to understand, and once he does, he's practically rambling as he tries to catch up with the underlying meaning(s) of the Rogue Prince's words.
"Brienne is a friend at best, to insinuate that I would— That I—" He can't even deny it, so he shifts gears: "If I wanted to, my vows would not be a problem, as I was released from them not long ago. A white cloak no longer sits on my shoulders. A one-handed man who was seen as both useless and a threat to high climbing Tyrells was done away with first chance they got to whisper in a young, impressionable king's ear."
Jaime's own son. Dismissed from the Kingsguard he'd devoted his life to, sacrificed his youth and innocence to, by his own godsdamned son.
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"Sounds like your only remaining expertise," since he got the hand chopped off, rip, "is finding yourself in improbably awful situations. Not exactly the worst motivation to keep such a sensible woman close."
What else does he have for entertainment around here? Might as well torture this guy about his lady knight. Caraxes huffs smoke, and it sounds like laughter.
"Freed from your vows and the Red Keep, can't be all that bad. And now you're here to make a wish. Perhaps your luck will turn, Ser Jaime."
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Instead of commenting on anything Daemon has said, the golden knight remarks: "We used to have lions — beneath the Rock. They were sad, toothless things that hadn't seen the sunshine in generations, much like the hatchlings I'm told were small and underdeveloped that had spelled the end for dragons until Daenerys birthed hers in fire, or so they say. Lions have disappeared from Westeros, but dragons have returned to it."
He takes a step towards the entrance (and Caraxes). Then another, and another— Pausing still a decent distance away, he looks back over at the Rogue Prince.
"Perhaps that's a sign that your House is once more on the rise."
And his is about to come crumbling down.
Here lies House Lannister, brought down by its own ruthless ambition. A Lannister always pays their debts.
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Refugees surviving in a hostile world, needing to keep power or be run out as heretics, needing to keep their bloodline close to maintain the tenets of their culture and their race. It's over. They are bred out, and have been for some time. Daemon knew, when he saw the ruins, just how foolish the Conqueror had been.
His dream. What a fucking joke.
Less dismal, perhaps, is watching Jaime regard Caraxes. It's always interesting observing someone getting used to a dragon. There's nothing like them.
"You'd have to have slain quite a number of lions," he observes. "Hundreds of the fucking things prowling around in my time, and just a handful of dragons. Are you all so self-devouring?"
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Jaime laughs. A mirthless, almost bitter laugh as he shakes his head at the thought of swearing allegiance to the daughter of the man whose throat he slit. ...and yet, when it comes to the array of options of people to perch themselves on the Iron Throne, oddly a Targaryen Princess doesn't seem like a bad idea. Especially not when—
"They call her 'The Breaker of Chains.' It's said that she overthrew the slavers of Astapor and liberated the slaves of both the Red City and Meereen. The armies she has brought with her to Westeros to reclaim her birthright are said to genuinely love her and have faith in her power, in her ability to bring forth change. Hells, they say that the Dothraki consider her to be some sort of deity for being supposedly fireproof. They call her 'The Unburnt,' too. She has a whole host of titles."
He waves his lone hand dismissively at the list in his head, not caring whether he recalls the paragraph of scrawl beneath her name in the treaty they all signed. (In the treaty Cersei immediately broke by refusing to send aid to the North.)
"My point is, where we Lannisters and the Lions on our house sigil may be a dying breed, victims of self-sabotage... You Valyrians manage to keep finding ways to survive. Even if that means marrying someone who isn't your cousin to ensure that survival. Is survival not Targaryen of her?"
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There were wars of annihilating subjugation, there were dragon-roads of immense trade, and the Targaryens were only footnotes, if that. It was the work of a woman—
(legend says she had a dream, but Daemon believes she was a fucking geologist and this horrid Westerosi influence has made a competent woman into a mystic)
—that spared them, when their peers were too egotistical.
Her name was Jor-El."Valyrians came to have dragon's blood one of two ways. Either they used magic, or they forced slaves fuck monsters. Which do you think is more likely, I wonder."
Caraxes stretches; the sound of the ocean mingles with the sound of his breathing, a dull, rhythmic roar.
"Lions will return. And she is your princess."
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There's a heavy pause as Jaime once again seems transfixed by Caraxes, green eyes taking in every little movement until he sucks in a sharp breath and turns his attention back to the prince.
"Prophecies are a load of shit, but magic is real; I've seen it. I've seen one of the Others. It moved as if it were still living in spite of the eye-less face and decaying flesh that barely clung to the bone. When split in two, both halves of it continued to crawl. It snarled and did not stop until one half was burnt and the other was pierced with dragonglass."
Jaime might have looked at it with an expression akin to 'an ice zombie, in front of my salad?' but on the inside, it scared him shitless. He was fucking terrified of the potential that threat carried, of the very real possibility that the fabled Night King was real, of Westeros being taken over by these mindless creatures while they were too busy bickering about whose arse should be seated upon that godsdamned Iron Throne.
"Perhaps if she succeeds in helping save Westeros from the Army of the Dead, she might be. Until then, my allegiance remains with Sansa Stark."
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Magic is real, and magic is a nightmare.
Daemon likes it that way. He has to. It's a part of him.
"Is Sansa Stark doing anything to stop the 'army of the dead'? Sounds like you might want to keep a closer eye on that problem than shrugging it off to a girl you're frightened of."
Daemon walks past him to the mouth of the cave, surveying glimpses of the beach outside. Caraxes looks in at them with one big yellow eye, but doesn't linger. Handy thing about his long neck, he can periscope about at will, surveying in all directions.
"I've seen things like that. Not precisely, but close enough to envision it without thinking you mad."
The twisted creatures in the ruins of the Freehold were unlike anything Daemon had ever seen, surpassing even the freakshow monsters and cursed familiars of the witches of Asshai and the Shadow Lands, and it was on that damned journey he came to understand too much about the world. It makes perfect sense, actually, that the Wall was constructed to keep out things.
"Our world is older than we can conceptualize, I think. We will never understand the true scope of what has lived there, or that yet will live."
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I'll give them naught but ashes, the old man cackled. Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat. Burn them all. Burn them in their homes, burn them in their beds. Burn them all! BURN THEM ALL!
He blinks it back, a momentary internal struggle taking place as the prince peers out of the cave's entrance, Jaime forcing his walls back up, burying the traumatic recollection.
"I don't need to understand it to know that it wants to fuck us all over."
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It should unnerve Daemon more, but even if he were disgusted — it's more like pity — he wouldn't show an outsider. Instead he is stoic in the face of Jaime's secondhand horrors, because no matter how much of a monster King Aerys was, he was a Targaryen. And as a Targaryen, it was his right to do as he wished with his kingdom and his subjects. Burn their homes, burn their children, burn everything. Those things were all his, to cherish or to carelessly destroy.
Admirable? No. But the way of things. Smallfolk do not choose their kings.
"But you don't care very much."
Or else he'd be kneeling for the Breaker of Chains, is his implication.
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switching to using this journal bc i can, keeping with my show/tv mashup characterization tho
the prettiest
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