dragonwarder | (no subject)

[His first response to that is a sober nod. His facial expression is not unsympathetic; if they hadn’t failed to come to terms about the North earlier, it might have been more fully consoling. As it is... well, it’s rare that he’s ever seen anyone who left him again. Most farewells have turned out to be permanent, or near to it, whether or not he’d had the chance to say good-bye.]

But is it possible that she might remember after all?

[He has a sad face, he knows it, but his eyes are sadder than usual.]

I do not know. I have not seen such feats before. Only -- what happened to you.

[Daenerys goes quiet for a few moments and polishes off the last of her ale, rolling the neck of the bottle between her fingers while avoiding Jon's eyes once she spots the sad reflection in them. She's too empathetic to see that right now.

She might slip. Even as she feels her heart tightening in her chest.]

It does not matter. There is nothing to be done for it.

No. And I know what it is, to hold on to hope too long and have it fail you in the end.

[He’s still watching her, even though she’s avoiding his gaze.]

But that doesn’t mean it will. Impossible things still sometimes happen.

[She should know that better than most.]

[She does not know what he is trying to say, with that statement. If he is trying to commiserate with her, or if he is speaking on a personal experience.

And impossible things have happened to her before. She hatched three dragons at her breast, and raised them to adulthood. But when she'd once prayed for a miracle, hope had done nothing for her except to destroy her.

The ale nudges her thoughts to dark places, and she has to bite her lip to shove memories of Drogo's dead eyes back into the deep recesses of her mind.]

Once in a lifetime. Yes.

[She tries to keep her voice even. If I look back, I am lost.]

I am glad you came back. I do not have many familiar things left in this city.

[That makes his expression shift from sympathy to curious disbelief.]

Really?

[He scoffs — Who, me? Are you sure? — and takes a drink of the ale, which is near the end of the bottle now.]

I’ll try not to disappoint you.

But there’s no saying there’s a limit on luck, good or bad. Three impossible things have happened to me in the last year. My sister coming to me at Castle Black was the least unlikely.

[It is easier to leave that one alone. Focusing too much on genuine emotion will just leave her vulnerable -- and that is not a place where she wants to be, just now.

However, she manages the slightest of scoffs when he mentions his impossible miracles and how many of them he has had. Uncanny.]

I hatched three dragons. Perhaps we have reached our limit. I suppose we will know for certain when one of us crosses the fourth threshold.

Don’t think luck is like a bottle of ale. [He sets his, now empty, aside.] And I didn’t say that every impossible thing to happen to me was good.

[One of them was seeing the Night King.]

How does someone go about hatching three dragons?

[Her smile fades again. What should have been a happy memory was inevitably tainted by the circumstances that had lead her there. She cannot imagine Jon genuinely caring or wanting to know of her late husband, or how she had laid upon his funeral pyre with her eggs —given to her as a wedding gift for the marriage she had been sold into.

Even if she had come to love Drogo, there was nothing to erase what came before it.]

Fire.

[Her eyes drop to the burned patch on the grass. It would be disingenuous to imply that fire’s hand was the only hand. Summerhall was enough to prove that it took more than fire alone.]

It is not a happy tale.

[That can’t be all of it, he thinks, before her gaze drops. If it were as simple as that, the dragons would never have gone away to begin with.

And then she looks down, and he regrets having asked so easily.]

I’m not asking you to tell me something you don’t want to tell me. Today or any day.

It's alright.

[It wasn't exactly a private affair. There were hundreds of witnesses, even if...what remained of her khalasar bearing witness was somewhat different than the whole of Westeros knowing.

But Jon does not seem the sort for courtly gossip.]

"Fire and blood". You must provide both to hatch a dragon.

Your words.

[And the North’s words, the Stark words: Winter is coming. That also means more than it seems to, Your Grace.

It isn’t the time to say such a thing, so he doesn’t, only nods to show that he’s listening.]

Edited 2020-02-27 02:46 (UTC)

Yes.

[She looks at the bottle of ale that she's finished and reaches for another from the collection he had brought. She is going to need it, if she is going to tell this story.

And even still, she is not certain she can tell the whole thing. Not yet.]

It was the eve of my husband's funeral. He'd fallen prey to infection, from a wound he took defending my honor. I'd sought help from a healer, but ... she had betrayed my trust.

[She chances a glance at Jon, and forces herself to hold his gazen. He will surely think her a monster -- and maybe she was. But it was the truth of what she had done, and she did not regret it. No one would understand.

And that was fine. But she would own her decisions, especially given what they had lead to.]

In exchange for his life, I took her's upon his funeral pyre and Drogon, Viserion, and Rhaegal were born.

[He can tell that she’s trying to hold his gaze, but when she tells him the truth of it, his expression turns troubled, and abruptly, he looks... anywhere else. Off into the trees around them, frowning.

Daenerys must have been very young when this happened; she’s still rather young now.]

She killed him? Did she think to go free, after something like that?

[Or had she been daring the rest of the khal’s followers, or his young widow, to kill her?]

No. I am sure she expected to die. Her village...the Dothraki had raided it. I had stopped them from taking many of the women, including her.

[Her jaw shifts, and her eyes drop away from Jon down to the bottle of ale. She has not drank a drop, even though she knows it would help with this story. Perhaps that was why she was avoiding it.]

It was why Drogo had taken his wound. One of his warriors had become angry with my how I exercised what little authority and sway I had, and Drogo defended my right to do so.

[Out of her nose comes a tired exhale.]

My act of kindness was not enough to forgive what had been done to her kin, I suppose. She wanted to die, and she wanted to leave with her spit in my eye.

[He’s quiet for a long moment.

Vengeance, not quite misplaced, leading to a young wife’s fury, he supposes. He’d learned about the Dothraki as a boy... that they fight mounted and without fear... but not the inner workings, any more than he’d understood much about wildlings before he met any. He does not know what the other riders would have done to the woman if Daenerys had not. The Dothraki are the scourge of the Free Cities and beyond, and, well... this woman who had betrayed Daenerys, he understands her a little because he had known Olly.

And because, in the end, he’d hanged Olly.

He reaches for another bottle of ale.]

That sort of justice, it’s never easy. It shouldn’t sit light on you.

But you wouldn’t be the first ruler to have executed a murderer.

On the contrary, it sits quite lightly on me. Drogo's death and my unborn son's murder...those are what sit heavily upon me.

[She had only spoken to two other people of Rhaego -- it seemed odd to think of him anymore, now that she had reared three dragons. But, much as she liked to think, rearing them and rearing the blood of her blood ... it was not the same.

Still, she does not have a problem admitting her sin, even if she does not look Jon in the eye when she says it. The witch's death was not a death she regretted, by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, sometimes, she wishes she could play it over again. And again. And again.

Whenever she was angry, as if it would somehow heal it, she wants to do it again. And that is the urge she must constantly fight.]

Those people Cersei squeezes dry every moment she sits upon the Throne, the sacrifices my people will make to take it from her so that others may know their freedom, every moment I spend here and not there...there are things more concerning than one unavoidable death.

Edited 2020-02-27 06:21 (UTC)

[Her unborn son.... That turns his look penetrating, not sure what she means, but still not horrified.

Can he say that Janos Slynt’s death weighed heavy on him? No, and the man had done nothing but refuse an order... but in a way that could have brought the whole Night’s Watch, and then all seven kingdoms, to ruin. He had been a necessary example.

It hadn’t forestalled a mutiny, but it had been necessary.]

And the Army of the Dead. That, too.

[But he says this gently. It’s another thing she’ll have to face.]

This healer might have chosen differently if she’d known she would give you dragons.

[But something about all of this teases at him, prodding at the edges of his mind. The eggs had been old, dead, they must have been, and they had been brought to life in a fire.

He had been dead once too, and the Lord of Light had brought him back, or so it seems. A god he doesn’t believe in - a god of fire.

He drinks some ale down in one big gulp.]

[The Army of the Dead. Yes, that too, if it even existed. She decides not to press it.]

I doubt that very much. They are miracles themselves, after all.

[Suddenly, again, she misses them -- her dragons. The palm not wrapped around the neck of the bottle opens and closes thoughtfully, and she can see the imprint of where scales had wanted to grow earlier when her anger had started to rise.

A cruel jest of this world, to curse her with their skin instead of their presence.]

A pity they are all male.

All of them? But they’ll live a long time. Didn’t Balerion come out from Valyria before the Doom?

[That’s what he remembers.]

My father, he had the maester at Winterfell give me all the same lessons as his trueborn children. So when I was a boy, I wanted to be Prince Aemon the Dragonknight, or young king Daeron who conquered Dorne. All the stories of your family.

[And now, it occurs to him that he’s met every last living Targaryen.]

I knew your great uncle. The last Aegon’s brother. He was the maester at Castle Black. A good man.

And after that, they will be gone. Unless they are hiding more eggs in Asshai.

[Daenerys smiles ruefully as Jon recounts the stories of her ancestors. Each of them, their light snuffed out like a dying candle. How many Targaryens had lived to an old age, to see their children grow healthy before some tragedy befell them?

Enough, and not enough. She would certainly leave no legacy. After her, the Targaryen line would die for good. A true pity.

She has to think for a moment, of which ancestor Jon speaks of last. It had been so long since she'd recited the family tree. Viserys had abandoned the practice long before she became of age herself, and so her memory was spottier than she would have liked.

But she traces the name from "the last Aegon" after a few long moments.]

Aemon.

[She notices how he uses past tense. But then, she had long operated under the assumption that she was the last living Targaryen, so the news does not wound her. She had not even known that he was alive, so what was there to mourn?]

I never knew him. I knew very little of my family. I was but a babe when we were forced to flee Dragonstone into exile.

[It occurs to her suddenly that it is unlikely much of Westeros knew how she had survived, or what exactly had happened in the wake of the Rebellion. Or that they even cared.

Now is the time to drink the ale, to hide the bitter smile that comes to her lips.]

Aemon, [he agrees, his face brightening a little.] I owe him my life.

[But he sees the way she sips at the ale.]

He went up to Castle Black long ago, when his brother became king. He was also the oldest man I’ve ever met. Blind by the time I knew him, and for a long time before. But wise, and kindly.

Dragonstone... how do you find it now?

Complicated.

[It was, after all, where she had been born...and where her mother had died. And though she had no clear memories of the entire affair, something about it had subconsciously stuck with her. Enough to make her emotional, when she witnessed those dark halls.

She had not been there very long, but the throne — it had felt right. More correct than she imagined the Iron Throne might feel. If she had the choice, she would move the capital back there.

The dragons would certainly like it better. Perhaps she would consider it.]

But...correct. The dragons love the sea, and the open skies.

[He hesitates over whether or not to say this next thing.]

I was looking forward to seeing it, and seeing them. My journey — I was born somewhere down south, don’t know where. But since then, I’ve never left the North.

It’s the other reason why I went to Everest. To see some of this world. No dragons there, but —

[He shrugs, half-humorously. Maybe that would be expecting too much.

As to the false pretenses of his journey, there’s nothing either of them can do for that just now.]

When we took back Winterfell — that was complicated.

I am sure you will see a dragon before too long.

[Though...perhaps not anytime soon. It was never a happy time for her, when the dragon came calling. But he does not need to share those burdens with her.

Besides, he says something more interesting not long after.]

How do you mean?

The Boltons betrayed my brother to take the North for themselves. Before that, Theon Greyjoy betrayed him to take Winterfell for the Ironborn. When we took it back... no one I’d known there as a child still lived, other than Sansa. Not even the cook or the smith.

[He’s already spoken on this a little, back when he tried to explain why the Northerners were done with southron rulers. But this is more personal, now.]

We rode through the North looking for support and found it lacking... some because they regretted supporting Robb, some because the bulk of the force was made up of wildlings. They didn’t hate Bolton as much — at least he was a Northman, even if he’d sold the Starks out to the Lannisters for his own gain.

Even so, we nearly lost. We would have lost, if it hadn’t been for the support of my sister’s cousin in the Vale. Bolton was executed, I gave him to Sansa to kill, but then there is always the matter of how many lords there are to please at a time when I can’t await on their pleasure; even a normal winter would be troublesome, would have required preparation that’s been set aside while people fought amongst themselves, but this won’t be a normal winter. And then there is the fact of so many changes. The Boltons did considerable rebuilding. It’s the home I remember, but it’s changed. And I was only in it for a few moons before I left it.

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and in this tag, we feature irony

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