#aemond's pov is so fun to write

[jaimeslanisters]

dominoes cascading in a line — the library

Aemond Targaryen x Lannister!Reader

You beam, bright and happy, and he wonders if the real treasure in the Rock wasn’t in its gold or its wealth but rather in the daughters it produced. or moments in aemond's life with a lady of house lannister

crossposted on ao3 masterlist word count: 2.5k notes: surprise bitch. i bet you thought you'd seen the last of me i promised you guys a dominoes before pawn, didn't i? (: pawn will be coming up and i will be hitting 100k with the next chapter lol sos

Aemond had been six when he first realized his father didn’t love him. It hadn’t been a momentous occasion or anything like that. There hadn’t been an offhand comment or a particular action that had prompted this realization, no big dramatic scene that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

He had just looked up one day and looked at his father, at the rotting king in all of his glory, and known that Viserys Targaryen would never care for any of his children with Alicent Hightower, that he would be a stranger to all but one of his children.

He had been six and it had been his birthday.

The children of Viserys Targaryen had had differing responses to that disquieting truth. Aegon lashed out, drinking and whoring and failing at being anything resembling a leal son. Helaena turned inwards, closing herself off from everyone except her brothers, focusing her attention on caring for her insects in a way their father would never do for her. Daeron was inarguably delusional about the whole thing. Father loves us! He’d used to cry, face bright and red, fists clenched at his side. It’s just really hard for him to show it! He loves us! He loves us! He loves us!

At least, he had been delusional. Across the continent in Oldtown, perhaps he had come to terms with it. Father hadn’t gone along to accompany him and say goodbye even if Lord Hand Lyonel Strong had tried to insist on it, had wanted to frame it like an act of goodwill and diplomacy.

Father had said no. He hadn’t given a reason or tried to excuse his behavior. He simply hadn’t wanted to.

Even Daeron couldn’t be foolish enough to try and twist that truth.

Aegon strayed. Helaena hid. Daeron lied.

Aemond couldn’t afford to do the same.

If his siblings couldn’t confront the truth, couldn’t face it, he would. He would be their shield, their sword.

That involved training with the knights in the yard, focusing rather than goofing off like Aegon and their Velaryon nephews. It involved learning all the warrior arts and practicing until he felt like he was about to collapse and then continuing to train past that point until he actually did.

But mostly it involved studying.

Otto Hightower no longer lived in King’s Landing - he hadn’t since even before Aemond had been born - but that did not mean he had relinquished his tight control on his family that still remained in the capitol. His grandfather must have exhausted the ravens and the couriers with the long journey from Oldtown to King’s Landing, sending a couple of letters every month. Sometimes there would be one for Helaena and those were usually accompanied by an ivory statue of a bug or a book that he bought her as a present. Rarely there would be one for Aegon and his brother would always read it as soon as it was handed to him and tear it to shreds as soon as he was done. Once, Aemond had managed to snatch it from him before he could and, in the seconds before Aegon had tackled him to the ground in an uncharacteristic fit of violence, he had managed to catch onto one line.

The greatest curse onto this family is that you were born before Aemond.

It had been easy to let Aegon snatch the letter away after that. He hadn’t tried to get a hold of another letter since.

His grandfather had plenty to say to Aemond directly as it was.

There was always a letter for Aemond from Grandfather. Otto Hightower was not an affectionate man and the letters were always dry and straight to the point, outlining lessons and books that Aemond needed to read if he was to be a good and faithful son of House Targaryen. Rarely did he ever express any emotions in his words and, if he did, it was always shadowed by a sharp reminder of his duty to his family and to the realm.

Still, reading his letters always made Aemond desperately wish that his grandfather was still the Lord Hand, that he was still in the capitol to personally supervise his studying, to give him critiques and the rare praise.

Otto Hightower was a cold father. A poor father if his mother’s neurosis was anything to go off of.

But a poor father was better than no father at all.

It didn’t matter at the end of the day. He didn’t need anyone to hold his hand through the process, certainly didn’t want anyone to. Years of being on his own with only books for company had trained him well. He was used to holing up in the library, hidden away in the back by stacks and stacks of books with only an old, half-deaf septon for company. People didn’t usually come looking for him but people never came looking for him in the library.

Which is why it was especially a surprise when you stumble onto his hiding spot, eyes wide like a doe.

Since the week of your arrival, admittedly, Aemond has been avoiding you. If he thinks back to it, about how his cheeks had flamed red with embarrassment, how you had smiled and he had thought there was never anything as beautiful in the world, he wants to throw himself off the highest tower in the Red Keep out of pure and utter shame.

As sweet as you are and as kind as you can be, you’re a Lannister.

People always said that there was no limit to Lannister pride or ambition and that certainly had to be true for even a little lioness like yourself.

You might be kinder and sweeter than Aemond had thought you would initially be but that didn’t change the fact that there was only one reason that a daughter of House Lannister would stray so far from the Rock.

You were looking for a husband and, if there really was no limit to Lannister ambition, you could only have one goal set in mind.

Aegon.

With the image of you turning your pretty smiles onto Aegon playing before his eyes, he straightens up in his seat as you slow to a stop in front of him.

“My apologies, my prince. I did not expect to find anyone else here.” You say, stumbling slightly over your words in your rush to explain yourself. In your arms, you clutch a book tightly to your chest and it’s only the fact that he’s read that specific book more than a dozen times over that he can recognize it without seeing the name.

His throat is dry and there’s nothing he wants more badly than to just nod and turn back to taking extensive notes on the history of the Andals landing in the Fingers and stubbornly ignoring your existence.

Instead, he rises to his feet, bowing his head, wishing desperately he didn’t feel that slight warmth inside of his chest. “It’s no problem.” He looks down at the book in your arms and, before he can stop himself, he blurts out. “Are you reading Watchers on the Wall?”

You nod, smiling, and Aemond wonders if this is how animals feel when they first stumble into a trap, when their feet land into the snare and they’re yanked upwards to dangle defenselessly.

It can’t be. He doubts they enjoy it as much.

He starts pushing you on the book, carefully and cautiously. You may have just convinced someone else to give you a summary of it, after all, in order to endear yourself to the royal family.

But just as you had when you had first met him, you catch him off guard again.

You’re sharp and quick-witted and, if the fact that you had asked Maester Rodrik to give you further insight on Brandon the Breaker meant anything, you were just as voracious with learning as he was.

He wants to resent you.

He wants to resent you so bad.

But he can’t, not with the way your eyes light up as you talk about the Wall, about the Night’s King and his corpse queen. You lean in close to him, closer than anyone who wasn’t a member of his family has ever done. It’s not inappropriate, nothing that someone would scold or deride you for, but it’s closer than anyone has ever wanted to be to him.

It’s intoxicating and, for once, Aemond understands why Aegon is constantly imbibing, why he drinks more wine than he does water.

If it feels as nice as this does, some of his brother’s behavior finally makes sense.

When you finish your conversation, and you rise to your feet to leave, Aemond feels an unfamiliar panic rise up in him and, before he can think it through, he speaks. “If you’re not busy, you can stay and read some more. There are other stories in the book that I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on.”

You smile as bright and lovely as ever.

You settle back in your seat and Aemond turns back to his notes except now, he can’t think about the crossing of the Andals, can’t make his mind focus on all of the petty kings that had fought in vain against the invaders. All he can think is about how the two of you are sitting close enough that, when you flip a page in your book, the sleeve of your dress catches on his tunic.

It’s all appropriate. You’re both ten. You’re children sitting and reading in a library. Not even the most pious septon could find fault nor could the most insidious gossip find any fodder for their rumors.

But it doesn’t stop his heart from beating loud and hard in his chest.

No one ever wants to be this close, save his mother.

There must be something wrong with you. There must be. Perhaps you think that he’ll tell Aegon about your sweetness, about your cleverness, and your desire to learn.

He won’t care, he wants to tell you. He won’t care about anything except for what’s between your legs.

But he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say anything. He just sits with you, listening to the sound of you turning the pages quietly and the rustle of your clothing.

Eventually, he turns back to his notes, forcing his eyes to focus on the book in front of him.

House Shell was only one of several Houses to ally with the Andals when they first arrived, believing that their only chance of survival was capitulating to the vastly stronger invading force. Their faith was ill-placed.

Eventually, he gets a fraction of his focus back but you’re still there, teasing at the periphery. Occasionally he’ll get a whiff of the fragrant oil that you must use in your hair or you’ll hum or mumble about something you read. You don’t just fade into the background. You seemingly are impossible to minimize, impossible to shove into a box.

Aemond sighs, wishing he was stronger. How could he be a loyal and brave son of House Targaryen if the first pretty girl to give him attention made his head spin like this? What would his mother say? What would Grandfather say?

He continues to read, burying his head deep into the book until the only thing he can think about is the Shells - the Shells and the complete and total destruction of their House. He focuses on the story of Dywen Shell, about how the Andal warlords roasted him inside his own longhall. He focuses until he can hear the screams and wails of the Shell family as they watched their patriarch burn, until he can almost feel the flames licking up his sleeves.

He scratches down his notes, pretending that he doesn’t notice you similarly keyed in on your book.

What part is she at?

If you had stopped at the Night’s King and his corpse queen… next up was the Rat King. After that was Symeon Star-Eyes. They were both popular stories, ones that people told to their children without ever having touched Watches on the Wall. The book went into slightly more detail, particularly with Symeon. The songs liked to say he was blind and that he had placed sapphires in his eyes to show his devotion to chivalry.

The maester who wrote the book had a starkly different opinion. Symeon Star-Eyes was, more likely than not according to Maester Lewys, a sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch, renowned for both his skill in combat and his abnormally bright blue eyes. Chivalry, the maester postulated, would not be introduced into Westeros until after the coming of the Andals, well after the death of Symeon.

You hadn’t been wrong when you had said that the truth was remarkably less interesting than what the singers liked to peddle out.

Far off in the distance, Aemond hears the belltower ring, indicating the turn of the hour. For the first time in his life, he feels a flash of relief that he has to meet up with his brother and nephews in the yards for sword training. While their words could be cruel, they at least were easier to understand than you were.

“I have to go,” he says, gathering up his books and notes as quickly as he can.

You hum, rising to your feet. “I should also probably go and meet up with Princess Helaena. Our septa can be awfully strict about punctuality.”

“It’s a virtue,” he replies, more out of instinct and a desire to fill the air with something than truly believing his words.

He regrets it immediately when you snort in laughter. “Perhaps you could teach us instead of her. You might be less inclined to rapping me on my knuckles when I slip up on a proverb.”

The words spill out of his mouth before he can stop them. “You can come to the library at this same time tomorrow if you want to avoid her. I wouldn’t mind.”

He would mind. He would mind very much if you showed up tomorrow with your easy smile and your bright eyes.

You don’t notice this internal conflict, though. You blink owlishly up at him, as if stunned by the offer. The silence drags on and Aemond feels that all-too-familiar sensation of humiliation and shame creeping up his neck and he opens his mouth to apologize, to take it back, but then you grin broadly at him. It lights you up entirely, brightening even this dark corner of the library.

“Thank you for the offer, my prince,” you quietly reply. “I think I might just take you up on it.”

You bow your head, dropping into a slight curtsey. Your manners are impeccable. Everything about you is designed to endear, to paint the picture of a perfect lady, one gracious and honest and kind.

He knows it's a lie. He knows that you’re hiding something fierce, something mean within you. He wishes he didn’t know that you were. He wishes he didn’t remember that snarl on your face when he had scared you, the way you had seemed ready to claw out his eyes.

He wishes you had never left the Rock.

Aemond doesn’t say any of it, doesn’t poke and prod until he can see that flash of rage that you had shown. He simply nods and prays that you don’t take him up on his offer.

[bronzefuryfic]

i love writing i love writing i love writing

[earth4angels]

𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐢'𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐚𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮.

jacaerys velaryon x aunt!targaryen reader ͟ ͟ ͟ friends to lovers, sexual content but no smut, incest (reader is aunt), fluff, semi angst(?), aemond being dumb, jace knows how to fight, i refuse to believe laenor never taught his kids how to defend themselves. slight switch of povs, basically the dinner fight, but added my own take, not edited.

summary: after the accident in driftmark the relationship between y/n and jacaerys became distant, when it came to the petition of the heir to driftmark, feelings came back full force. it took a bloody fight yet again to get jacaerys to act on his feelings before it was too late. but also, to unite the house of the dragon.

a/n: um? this is probably more than 1k words, i really went in. i had so much fun writing this & gosh.. do i have the guts to expand their relationship BUT ANYWAYS ENJOYYYY

somewhat based on this request. jace tag list: @jacaerysgf, @star611, @jules420, @gracexthoughts, @astrxq, @reyndaisy, @hxtd

For as long as Jacaerys can remember, he had always felt deep affection for his dearest aunt who was no more than a year older.

At first, it started with a childish admiration for how she spoke to him, how she would run her fingers through his curls when he would run towards her after sword training, read stories about the doom, or Visenya who she claimed was the best warrior to ever exist. Jacaerys admired her, she was his favorite aunt not that he had many but besides Helaena, she was his favorite. Again, it started with a childish crush. The smallfolk had a joke spread about how if anyone wanted to find Y/N, one had to look for small Jacaerys who followed closely behind her like a pup.

She never minded the talk, she loved her siblings and her nephews, it was one thing that differed her from her own brothers, who grew to despise the Velaryon boys. She loved Jacaerys, the way he always spoke of his growing bond with Vermax, the small adventures they would take to the gardens, or the adventures they took through the secret passages, and the library. She especially loved the moments he would sneak her strawberry cakes during her high valyrian studies when no one was looking. To her, Jacaerys was so dear to her heart, she dreamed childishly how it would be if they married.

She never understood why the hatred grew to the point everything that pointed toward her older sister was prohibited. Her siblings never had a close relationship with their father, but she did, she enjoyed the stories her father told her, but she mostly loved building and painting his replica of the seven kingdoms with him. Her father, King Viserys had always talked to her about protecting their own, as it was said, the House of the Dragon had to stay together to hold the realm united.

"Damn bastard," Aemond muttered under his breath as he rushed past her dusting his now muddy training gear. She narrowed her eyes at her brother, the word bringing her to wince. It was not the first time she heard it, at the age of 6, her mother had prohibited her from spending time with her half-sister and her children since the fight at Driftmark. She understood why, but she could not bring herself to be cold towards her half-family.

"Brother, enough." Y/n had her hand up to his shoulder, Aemond's one eye glared at her, "You must learn to let go of this anger, it is treason to speak of that word out loud."

Aemond scoffed, "Of course, my dear sister, protecting the bastards, you still defend them after what they did to me?" Aemond had snatched his eyepatch from his eye, showing its bright blue glow of a gem towards her.

"Brother... we were all children! Luce was only protec-" She choked as she was now slammed against the wall, a hand tight around her neck, she wildly stared at him, alarmed.

"Protecting? Dear sister, you are more than a fool. You rather protect bastards than the blood of the dragon?" Aemond chuckled in disbelief, "You, the same as father are fools."

He let go of her as she slumped against the wall, her hand clasped around her throat as she heaved, trying to get air back into her lungs. She watched teary-eyed from the loss of air the shadows of her brother grow distant with the further he went down the hall.

"Y/n?" a voice spoke from the opposite side of the hall. She looked back to meet the face of her once-best friend. "Seven hells! What happened?!"

Jacaerys rushed towards her, lifting her carefully as if she were the most fragile jewel to exist. In a sense to Jacaerys, she was.

She blinked, confused as to where he had come from. The last time she saw him, they were children, and he had promised to write her, yet after five ravens, the letters stopped, causing her to believe he had grown to hate her for what happened that night. It was then she realized why Aemond was so upset, why her mother suddenly left her and Heleana from embroidery to attend the council. Her mother avoided greeting her half-sister. Today was the petition of who was going to take over Driftmark. The house of the dragon was united once again, but not in the way she wanted to.

"Nephew?" She asked, confused again.

"Come, sit here. Let me get you some water," Jacaerys had placed her in the comfort of the shade of a tree. He had removed his cloak, placing it on the ground for her to sit as he ran to get her water. She stayed in silence beside her dry coughs that slipped once in a while. Jacaerys appeared again with a glass of water, she muttered a soft thank you before she drank till her throat was once again free from the harsh itches.

She looked toward him, finding him looking at her softly, his eyes burying themselves in the soft lilac color of her eyes. She blushed, coughing to avoid looking at him instead she focused on the grass beside her, picking at it softly.

"So... care to explain why you have a red mark on your neck?"

Y/n bit the inside of her cheek before she focused her stare on the blank blue sky, if Jacaerys was not paying attention he would have missed the soft murmur of her voice, "It was nothing."

Jacaerys opened his mouth to argue when the bells of the castle banged so hard that they echoed through the hallways.

"Don't think I won't let this go y/n," he spoke softly beside her, she only blinked in response. He shook his head as his tongue touched the roof of his mouth and he let go, making a sound that almost sounded like a click.

"You should go, my sister would probably be worried as to why you are taking so long. It is rude to keep your mother waiting."

Jacaerys rolled his eyes, before he lifted a hand towards her, a gesture for her to grab onto it. She stared at his pale hand, taking a moment to admire the changes, he was muscular now, and no more stood the boy who almost looked easy to push around. She followed the path of his hand toward his face, her breath hitching when she realized he still wore the necklace she had made him when they were children.

"You... you kept it?" Y/n stuttered, pointing to his neck. Jacaerys hummed, touching it delicately, his fingers rubbing softly at the soft shells. She had made that the day of Laena's funeral, she went and followed the path towards the beach to find seashells. She made it in hopes for him to feel better. She never thought he would keep it after all those years.

"Why wouldn't I?"

She stood up on her own avoiding his touch in fear she might want to curl into the safety of his hold.

“Go figure. You stopped writing to me.”

“What?” Jacaerys stood in front of her, stopping her from stepping another step further from him, “I never stopped? What do you mean I stopped? I sent so many ravens to you. I never heard from you after the fourth or fifth one.”

Now she was confused. “I sent you ravens too! You never sent me any back, I waited… I figured you just blamed me for what happened,” she muttered.

Jacaerys did another click with his tongue, before he reached out to her, her small hands fitting perfectly well inside his.

“Whatever happened that night, it’s forgotten. We were children, you were not even there for me to blame you. Aemond being your brother changes nothing, I still care for you just as much as I did when I was a child.”

She tightened the hold of his hands between hers before looking into his eyes, all she found was a soft gaze, not anything that was malicious, as she would find mostly in Aemond’s eye.

She opened her mouth, then closed it, she did not want to tell him how she felt for him. It was like Jacaerys had read her mind, though he was one year behind her, he always looked after her, to Jacaerys - she was everything he wanted in a wife, and he dreamed of making her as such.

“I’ve missed you, did you not?” he lifted one hand to caress her braid that was left falling off her shoulder to slowly reaching for her cheek where he held her delicately once again.

Y/n smiled, the fluttering feeling in her stomach making it hard to not release a giggle, she felt home.

“Of course I did Jace, I missed you so much.”

Ser Arryk spoke from the entrance of the garden, his armor glittering with the rays of the sun reflecting it, “Princess? The queen is expecting you in the grand hall.”

She nodded, feeling regretful of not spending more time with Jace, she had so much to tell him, to get caught up on.

“Thank you Ser Arryk, I will be there in a minute.”

She looked towards Jace again finding him still looking at her, a glint of mischief flashed, she narrowed her eyes making him smirk, “I guess you have to go aunt.”

The way he said it made her want to clench her thighs together, she cleared her throat, “I’ll see you soon my dearest nephew.”

He laughed like the word from her mouth was the biggest joke he had heard. His curls bouncing with the shake of his body, he reached down for her hand, placing a lingering kiss, “Princess.”

She watched as he turned, walking towards the grand hall passing Ser Arryk who bowed his head. Her stomach was still fluttering, all she wanted to do was jump and roll in the comfort of her bed, but she needed to meet her family and yet again witness another rift between the family.

"Her children," a long pause echoed through the grand hall, Y/n had her hands interlaced with each other, squeezing them so hard her skin was becoming white. She quickly glanced around the room, noticing her brothers smirking with anticipation, to her half-sister's family. She came across the eyes of her prince, who looked seconds from using his sharp sword to kill. She licked her lips, the anxiety building, she knew what was coming, and honestly, she was looking forward to it.

"ARE BASTARDS! And she is, a whore," Vaemond exclaimed.

Echoes of gasps and murmurs were heard, but Y/n blocked it as it all happened quickly. The blood splattered harshly like a quick burst of wind splashing her dark emerald dress. She gasped, her body being pulled back by Aegon who quickly acted to wipe off the blood off her dress and the little that landed on her face.

She would lie if she said she did not enjoy what she saw, in fact, she was glad it happened. That word being tossed around needed to be acted with a consequence, and she was proud of Daemon for warning those who followed Vaemond in speaking of her family that way.

The court ended and she was left rushed to her chambers, her ladies-in-waiting rushing to prepare a quick bath as her father requested them to have dinner together.

"You all can go," y/n spoke as she untied the laces off her dress.

"Princess-" Elydia, her closest handmaiden reached towards her to help her protested.

"Please, I need to have some moments alone, I will notify when finished."

"Princess."

She sighed, the weight on her shoulders becoming too heavy, she rolled her head side to side to relieve the pain. As she sunk into the rose-covered bath, moaning in bliss from the warmth she was sunken into, a knock was heard from her bed chamber. A familiar series of knocks, one that she missed hearing, sparking a rush of adrenaline.

She rushed to throw on a light blue gown, her hair soaking the silk material, making her breasts noticeable. Her footsteps were rushed as she reached the familiar wall by her bed, she knocked a similar tune before she pushed into it.

Jacaerys stood behind the wall, in his hands laid a wooden box with letters, her letters.

"Hi," he spoke softly, his voice sending butterflies all over her body

"Hi," she moved aside to let him enter her room, her eyes flickering quickly to the door of her room before eyeing the male before her, "What are you doing here? If my guards, see you... the scandal we could be in!"

He smirked, his plum juicy lips - she did not want to stare so much but she could not help observing him - quirked to the side, "That did not stop us when we were children."

She scoffed, "You said it yourself when we were children."

He smiled mockingly before he stopped in his tracks. He did not expect to see her so... vulnerable. The fantasies started to play out in his mind, he recalled all those moments he thought of her late at night. The fire ignited inside of him when he saw her in the garden, her hair flowing through the wind, her soft features to her soft lilac eyes.

Jacaerys wanted to propose to her mother a betrothal, to finally make y/n his, to act out all the fantasies he thought when she appeared in his mind.

"Jace?" She whispered, feeling self-conscious about the way he stared at her. He looked ready to bounce, his brown eyes scanning her up and down, she squeezed her thighs together.

"You... aunt I can see you wholly," he cleared his throat to avoid his voice sounding so raspy.

"Excuse me?" Y/n was confused until he gestured to her body, "Oh... Oh!" Her cheeks blossomed with a deep scarlet red tint; she rushed across the room to grab her robe tightly wrapping it around her body.

Jacaerys cleared his throat again, "Um... I just wanted to stop by before we saw each other at dinner again, the letters you had sent me."

Her cheeks still stained with red walked towards him, gathering the box between her hands, "So what with it?"

"I received and sent you letters y/n. I never stopped writing to you, I even made Mother annoyed with how many times I have asked her if there was ever anything sent to me."

She blinked her confusion, "Jacaerys I always wrote to you, your letters never came but I always sent you updates how things were here - "

"I know of everything, but I am giving you complete honesty on the fact that I never stopped," he stepped towards her, his hand on her cheek with his thumb rubbing soft circles calming her.

"What do you want me to do with that information? Do you know how much our families hate each other? How much Aemond goes around cursing Luce's name, your name? I shouldn't even be talking to yo-"

She stopped when he stepped closer, she felt his breath on her lips, her eyes darted down his lips to his eyes. Her breath hitched, he was so close. So close, she just wanted to taste how soft his lips truly were.

"Tell me to go, and I will. I will never bother you again, but tell me, you never want to see me, and I will."

Jacaerys hoped she never spoke of the words, as he wanted to kiss her, to tell her of the once confession he wrote in those many letters. She was just so pretty; he wanted to steal her and take her to Dragonstone where he wanted to marry her. He wanted to taste the sweetness between her legs, to have her scream, moan out his name, to fill her belly with the future heirs of Westeros.

His hand stayed on her cheek as he continued to stare, waiting for her to speak. Her breaths came out shallow and she began to shake with need.

"Don't go," she whispered, her hands reaching to grab his shoulders, pulling him closer towards her, "Please don't leave me."

"Gods," he wrapped his arms around her as he shakingly asked her, afraid she will finally reject him, but he hoped, "Can I kiss you?"

She gasped, the dazed look in her eyes fading as she began to pull away, "No... No... we can't Jacaerys! We are not betrothed, we are not promised to each other, my virtue could be quest-"

Her rambles were left to the old gods to wonder as Jacaerys placed his lips on her, "No offense, but you talk a lot."

She groaned against his lips at the jab he made but melted into the kiss, a kiss she longed for as the feelings that she did not want to admit surfaced. She only read books about the acts of kissing, yet she felt as if she knew with the way she kissed Jacaerys.

Her core suddenly felt tingly with how he was holding her, his hand deep inside her hair as the other ran down the silk of her gown to hitch a leg around his waist as he guided her down her bed.

"Jace..." she moaned, her throat begging for air as she pulled away, yet he did not stop, his lips trailing down her cheeks, prepping her with soft kisses to finally nipping at her throat. She moaned again.

"I have always wanted to do this," he whispered against her throat, "I badly want to take you, to have you sore, so fucked out of your mind that you forget your own name," he raised his head, his elbow by her head to prep himself just so he can look down at her.

She breathed heavily, "You..." she reached out, "You can't..."

"I would never dishonor you that way, but I will fight to make you, my wife. I will speak to mother, to my grandsire."

"Jace..."

He placed a kiss on her nose, smiling when she let out a giggle, "Tell me you also want me."

"I never wanted to admit it, but I do, I have always wanted you."

A knock disturbed their sweet bubble, and they both scrambled away from each other as y/n pulled her gown down. Jacaerys grabbed his cloak she did not even realize he had removed as he moved to the secret passage again.

"Princess? The queen requests your presence, dinner will start shortly."

She looked at Jacaerys as he whispered, "I will see you soon aunt." Y/n rolled her eyes but still smiled as she nodded.

The wall closed, and as if nothing happened, the room became quiet once again, she gathered her thoughts as she replied, "Almost done, please help me dress Elydia."

The entire time she was prepped for dinner she was smiling to herself. She could not wait to see her prince again. She had even requested for her hair to be loose, just two small braids creating a crown decorated her. She had wanted to look perfect for him.

Dinner was awkward, to say the least. Her family was beyond divided, as she sat beside Helaena, it was too quiet, the only noises came from the cooks who were walking around to place the food on the table. She watched as Aemond sent nonstop glares towards her nephews.

She had found out through Helaena that Aemond had lost against Jacaerys during training. Jacaerys had taken his sword one minute into sparring. It finally made sense why Aemond was so upset when she came across him in the garden. Her lips tugged into a quiet snicker at the idea of her brother being put in his place.

As she drank her wine, her father spoke.

"It pains me to see our family divided. As the house of the dragon, we must be united to have the kingdom prosper in peace. All of you must leave behind your childish arguments! Do it for me, your father, your brother, your husband, your grandsire. Leave behind this anger!"

As her older sister stood to make a toast in hopes of making peace with her mother, she made eye contact with Jacaerys who was already looking at her. He smiled softly at her before he looked towards his mother, his mouth turning into a smirk as he hid it behind his glass of wine. Her eyebrows furrowed, and as she was going to question her sister's voice came through.

"... It has been decided for the good of our families, and to make the future of House Targaryen stronger, that Princess Y/n, and my son, Prince Jacaerys be wed. They shall be in the future the King and Queen of the Seven Kingdoms."

Alicent shot up from her chair, "What?!"

Viserys wheezed but held strong as he banged his hands onto the table preventing an argument once again, "I wholeheartedly agree to this proposal as my dearest grandson himself asked to be wed to my beautiful daughter. They are to be wed as soon as possible."

Y/n couldn't help but smile widely, "Thank you, father," she looked towards her oldest sister, "Sister."

"Har! Har! Har!" Daemon raised his glass with a mischief glint in his eyes, his mouth into a wide smirk, he enjoyed seeing Alicent and Otto Hightower's plans get ruined.

Her mother could not argue against the newest betrothal since the King had officially declared it. She also had made peace with her once close friend as they toasted to each other. However, that did not stop her brothers from having a mind of their own, their mouths ready to retaliate.

As the night passed, and her father was no longer there to hold the peace, she held her breath as she knew, no she felt the anger boiling from her family. Aegon was the first to let out jests, and with that followed Aemond who did not hold back.

Jacaerys stood, his hand slammed into his uncle's shoulders to sit him back onto his seat, "You will keep your mouth shut about my betrothed. Jest all you want about me, but my wife-to-be, you will keep shut. Understood?"

Aegon snickered, satisfied with the reaction, he lifted his hands up in surrender.

She did not want to admit how it ignited such a need for her soon-to-be husband. She has never found him any hotter than what he looked like. His curls covered his dark gaze, his veiny long hands clasped together as to hold himself back.

"Boys. Enough. Let's finish dinner without any more arguments." Rhaenyra spoke in hopes of stopping the tension that was boiling.

It was enough for a moment. As Lucerys snickered at the pig that was placed on the table, in hopes for his uncle to join in the fun, as he believed it was an innocent act of jest. The blood came and what was a peaceful dinner, turned into the dragon's war.

"I dare you to say that again," Jace spoke from beside her, his hand holding hers to calm himself.

"Are you not proud of your house, dear nephew?" Aemond mocked, Aegon snickered, as the adults surrounding them stopped their dinner to hear what was going on, "I thought you considered yourself a strong knight."

A growl-like rumble came from Jacaerys as he rushed to punch her brother over and over. She scrambled towards them, yelling for them to stop, Aemond had gotten two hits through, but Jacaerys had the upper hand as his knuckles were bloodied. The guards had come to pull her brothers and nephews apart.

"Enough! All of you, back to your chambers! Now!" Rhaenyra spoke, sending them to their rooms. Y/n felt the angry tears stream down from the exhaustion of the fights between her family.

She yelped when a hand pulled her into the shadows of pillars. With a scream stuck in her throat, she widened her eyes at Jacaerys who had his hand on her mouth to stop her from screaming.

"Come back home with me, we will marry before the old gods," he whispered.

"But if I leave, I can potentially make mother and grandsire even more mad..."

"You are already promised to me, the realm will soon learn of it, ravens are being sent as we speak. Nothing will be able to stop our union, please. Just come home with me."

She hoped she was not making a mistake, for she loved Jacaerys so much more than waiting around for her family to come between her happiness. She only hoped, this union, would unite the realm and stop any possible war that Helaena had spoken of. As she kissed Jacaerys in the shadows, the said sister smiled as she poked another thread into a gown to continue the embroidery.

"From the blood of red and green, the pain will end as the union will bring peace once again."

[melrosing]

also if there is one thing i'm finding grating about S2 so far it's that they're having a bit of fun with the headspaces of Daemon/Aemond/Aegon etc, like the freudian stuff, the inferiority complexes, etc etc, but when it comes to Rhaenyra/Alicent/Rhaena/Rhaenys etc it's just like 'it's hard to be a girl in man's world' like I feel as though I've seen Rhaenyra complain about a dozen times re. feeling dismissed by her vassals and stuck in passive role, and it's just not fun. it makes her less interesting as an individual character, and more of a symbol of How Things Were For Women And Kind Of Still Are Really Makes You Think. asoiaf is a lot more deft w this. characters like Cersei, Arya, Brienne etc do constantly grapple with the whole 'it's a man's world' shit and it's important that they do, but you've still got Cersei wrestling with the legacy of her father's violence/the mad complexities of her incest with Jaime/her complex relationship w trauma and Arya's got the impact of war/her wolf visions/her complex relationship w home and Brienne has her relationship w knighthood/her gender trouble/her romance w ole jam, and all of that is complementary to 'god does it suck to live in an uber patriarchy'. Rhaenyra and Alicent etc have so much scope for this stuff as well but the writers just clearly aren't having as much fun w it as they are the guys. the writing of the women is a lot more 'worthy'. i want them to get weirder with it!! Rhaenyra is married to her goddamn uncle and they're only exploring how deranged that is from Daemon's POV! Rhaenyra's kind of just sighing at the sidelines like 'i guess men will be men even my uncle'. Alicent's sons with their burgeoning oedipus complexes and Alicent meanwhile just like 'it's hard having such crazy sons when you only want peace and prosperity'. like i could go on. I am glad HOTD is trying to wrestle more meaningfully with these questions than GOT did but we're venturing a little into Barbie 2023 territory here of the ole Patriarchy 101 and wouldn't it be better if girls ruled! anyway

[huramuna]

growing on you - oneshot.

modern aemond x (ex) girlfriend reader

content: smut (specifics under the cut), afab reader, angst, unhealthy coping mechanisms, descriptions of depression and its effect on the body, probably an unhealthy relationship, aemond being an idiot, probably ooc aemond, reader not described, no use of y/n, targtowers seek therapy: the story, fluff at the end bc hehe

work is 18+, minors do not interact or you shall be smited.

word count: 7.4k (oops)

a/n: i've had this one in the drafts for a while. tweaked to be a fun 'lil angsty end of year holiday fic. as is my motto: fuck it we ball. a/n 2: i pivoted from a third person pov fic to a second person pov fic 3/4 through writing this using the find and replace tool, so if there are grammar errors, i apologize! also my first time doing second person pov, weehee.

monsters - all time low ft. blackbear • why do i - set it off ft. hatsune miku

warnings: p in v, creampie, cockwarming, slightly tipsy sex

Everything in your life was enveloped by him. your clothes smelled like him, small strands of his hair were woven into every nook and cranny of your apartment together, his fitness regime protein powder and ketogenic supplements were littered in your kitchen cabinets. 

You couldn’t get rid of him, not even if you tried. Aemond was all you'd ever known— you have known one another since the age of seven, and have been in a relationship since fourteen. You were both now twenty-six. Twelve years you’ve been together romantically (longer, even, but you were both too stubborn to admit it) and nineteen years you’ve been in each other's lives in some capacity or another. 

You’ve been involved together longer than you’ve not known each other. You hardly knew who you were without Aemond— a thought that scared you deeply. 

It’s been two weeks since he moved out, only temporarily he’d said. He needed space. He would still pay his share of the rent and you didn’t need to worry about that. 

But what about everything else? What about him warming you at night? Comforting you when you had nightmares? What about his items in the fridge, surely you’d spoil if he didn’t use them soon. What about Vhagar? Their— no, his geriatric cat that he took with him to God knows where— she must be terrified, surely. 

Was he giving Vhagar her medicine before bed? Of course he was— he was the more responsible one anyway. 

You paced back and forth until the soles of your feet ached and then some. Knowing Aemond for so long, you had intimate knowledge on everything about him, you were woven into each other's DNA like vines on a trellis, growing and expanding until you swallowed all of the other plants whole. 

That is what happened, wasn’t it? You grew too large, too comfortable and became stagnant. You weren't unaware of his rising workload at his firm, but he had always been a workaholic— throughout their teenage years, through college and grad school. It never slowed him down so you didn’t understand the change in behavior. 

Aemond was closed off. He always was a bit emotionally stunted due to his upbringing or lack thereof from his father and everything that happened surrounding his eye, but he had a soft side for you, always for you. You could retrace every part of him perfectly from memory, always could make him laugh, could comfort him when he recused himself, and the rare times he did cry, you were there. 

But the last few months there was a shift— a change in him. Where he had been hard to open before, like a rusty hinge just requiring some oil, he was now padlocked, ironclad and impenetrable. Attempts to talk were shrugged off, ignored or diverted. 

“Please, just talk to me, Aemond,” you said one night as you sat on the couch. You were watching your collective favorite show and he wasn’t even commenting on it like he usually did, he was silent and deadpanned. “I don’t understand what’s wrong if you don’t talk about it.” 

“There's nothing wrong, therefore, nothing to talk about. I’m just tired from work,” he responded gruffly. “Stop whining.” 

His tone was clipped and harsh, sending a wave of hurt trickling through your body. you were overly emotional, where he was under emotional— usually, you balanced each other out and struck a good middle ground, but in times like these, during fights, things would get explosive. 

The tears started right away, your little sniffling cries stifled by a hand over your mouth. You turned away, wrapping yourself in the blanket. 

“Seriously?” he growled, “I didn’t even say anything and you’re fucking crying again.”

“I d-don’t appreciate your tone, Aemond— you’re being mean,” you sniffed, wiping away tears that were soon just replaced by new ones. “Please, don’t be mean to me.” you were always soft hearted, and it was one of the things Aemond loved about you— or he had loved at one point. 

“I’m not being mean,” he pinched his brow, “you’re overreacting and I do not have the capacity to deal with your antics anymore.” 

Of course, your mind hit the panic button. ‘Anymore’ meaning that he didn’t want to deal with you at all, ever. The tears increased and you recused yourself further into a ball. 

“Fucking hell.” he cursed, getting up from the couch and stomping outside to the balcony, lighting up a cigarette. He was out there for about an hour— you had cried yourself to sleep. 

It was many situations like that for weeks that finally just… broke him. 

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said one day, slamming his keys down on the kitchen table, “I seriously cannot deal with your childish shit anymore— I’m working my ass off at the firm, actually bringing in money and I still have to come home and tend to you. you’re twenty-six, grow up and stop crying at every little thing. It’s fucking infuriating.” 

“You know I can’t control that part of me!” you screamed back, your temper rising immediately to match his. The words flowing out of your mouth didn’t feel like yours, but some sort of defensive mechanism. “You can’t do this anymore? You’re not doing anything Aemond, except pushing me away. God, you haven’t even touched me in weeks.” 

“Oh, so this is about sex?” he countered, getting closer to you, nostrils flaring. “You’re mad because I won’t fuck you? Are you that desperate?” 

That one stung, to be sure. Aemond had been your first and only— you only ever knew him, only ever had him. “No, not just sex,” you murmured, “you haven’t even… just touched me normally. No hugs, no little caresses, nothing— it's as if I’m an aversion to you.”

He backed up from you, “Maybe we’re just too close,” he admitted, “We’ve been together too long. It's not fun anymore, it’s not new— it’s the same old, same old, going through the motions for release, not because I actually like it.” 

“I don’t understand.” you said, your voice sounding disconnected from your body. The tips of your fingers felt numb, the numbness spreading through your body, your heart pounding in your chest as if it wanted to escape. 

“I need space. I need to think about this.” 

“This?”

“Us. I need to think about us and if this is something I really want,” he paused, “You’re… too much and not enough right now.” 

“Wh— Aemond, please,” you whispered, your voice broken, “What can I do? I’ll… I’ll change, I won’t cry or whine anymore— please.” 

He stared at you, his prosthetic eye unmoving while his remaining one bored into you, “I will think about it.” 

“What… does this mean?”

“We are taking a break, alright? I’ll have my essentials out and I’m going to stay with Aegon.” 

“Please— don’t go. I need you.” 

That was the end of that conversation. That was the last time you spoke, two weeks ago. You expected him to text you at some point, to check in on you, to maybe try to talk things out. 

Nothing. There's been nothing. Radio silence. 

You felt isolated— you had no family, as your parents were estranged from you. you couldn’t go to Aemond’s family, as close as you were to them all, it just simply wasn’t an option. 

You didn’t have friends. All you knew was Aemond. 

It was early in the evening and you were in a deep pit of self-loathing. You decided to text him. 

You swallowed thickly— the green meant he either turned off his phone or blocked you. You hoped that it wasn’t the latter. 

The next few weeks were a blur. You felt like you were barely living, merely going through the motions to stay alive— not that you really were. 

You woke up, went to work, came home, scrounged up food and then went to sleep. Rinse and repeat.

Weeks become months of your monotony, and no word from Aemond. He still had half of his stuff left in the apartment, you felt like you could barely breathe. At every turn there was something to remind you of him. 

You’d lived in this apartment together for four years, the evidence of your relationship etched into the very walls. It was like the space was closing in on you and you couldn’t catch your breath, barely keeping your head above water. 

You had to move out— you had to get away. 

You managed to find a place, a cheap studio above a coffee shop downtown. The landlord was an old lady who was sympathetic to your situation and agreed to let you take the space quickly. 

There was still the matter of your and Aemond’s current apartment— or, rather, it was just Aemond’s now. 

Saving yourself the embarrassment of seeing if you were still blocked, you called Aegon. He was a better messenger than none. 

“Hey, Egg,” you said, sitting on the couch. you bounced your knee up and down, biting at the skin of your lip. You and Aegon were amicable, not necessarily as close as you and Aemond, but you grew up together. Aegon ran in different social circles than you and you were somewhat polar opposites so you never really stuck— you did have your phases of friendship, though– which pissed Aemond off to no end. “Um, I don’t know if this is the right way to go about things but, do you mind relaying a message to Aemond for me?”

“Yeah, ‘spose I could. What’s up?” Aegon replied, his tone nonchalant like usual.

“I’m moving out of the apartment into my own place, so I guess he can go back. I’ll have all my stuff out by tomorrow.”

“Fuckin’ finally,” Aegon said, “He’s been driving me up the wall with his tidy, feng shui bullshit. He rearranged my whole place like five times and has taken up all the space in my cabinets with that nasty no-carb shit,” he paused for a moment, “I… didn’t mean that in a bad way to you, ‘course. I’m sorry it had to come to this. He’s a fucking idiot.”

That made you laugh, genuinely. Your first laugh in months. “Yeah– he… tends to do that. He left half of his stuff here, it feels like I’m living in the twilight zone. I just… gotta get away, you know?”

“Hey, I get that– you don’t have to explain yourself to me. He’s a dickhead and doesn’t understand how good he has it. If you want, I can bring my truck over tomorrow and help you move stuff.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, Egg.”

“I want to– please.”

Your brow furrowed– Aegon usually wasn’t so persistent on anything unless it involved drinking or drugs. But, you hadn’t had real human contact in eons besides at work so… maybe it could be good.

“Okay, see you tomorrow. Thank you, really.”

–

It was rainy the next day– nasty and wet, droplets pouring down like tears. It felt somewhat familiar.

But, Aegon showed up like he promised, rolling up in his old, fading yellow pick-up truck. His hair was much shorter than you remembered and he looked actually well kept– Aemond must’ve been whipping him into shape.

He waved and ran through the rain, standing under the eave, “So– it’s raining.”

You snorted, “I think I can see that,” you teased with a tiny smile, “Not sure when it’ll let up.”

“I brought uh…” he paused for a moment to think, stretching out his arms in a square shape, “Y’know?”

“A tarp?” 

“Yup– that,” he gave a lopsided grin, inviting himself in through the open door, “you aren’t going to kick me out if I don’t take off my shoes, right?”

You glanced down at his boots– they were a bit muddy and definitely wet. Aemond wouldn’t have let him step two feet through the threshold without taking them off. But– you weren't Aemond. “No, keep them on if you want. It’s not my problem if you track dirt through the place anyway.”

He nodded, taking his phone out of his pocket for a moment and shooting a quick message to someone. “Sorry I haven’t been around, it’s just… he’s my brother. It would be kind of… I dunno, crossing some sort of unsaid boundary if I visited his… girlfriend?”

“Ex-girlfriend. I guess,” you corrected softly– but you didn’t really know yourself what it was. He wouldn’t talk to you, “It’s fine. I didn’t expect anyone to really reach out anyway, because of that… unsaid boundary thing.”

“We should’ve. you’re a part of our family with or without Aemond. Me, Helaena and Daeron have a whole group chat about it. Even mom asked where you’ve been,” he scratched the back of his head absentmindedly as he sent out another text, “Someone should’ve checked up sooner.”

“You’re acting like I’m some sort of neglected puppy, Aegon,” you turned to him, “... do I really look so terrible?”

Aegon glanced up at you, his mouth formed in a hard line. He cracked his knuckles, shrugging his shoulders. “I won’t lie to you. You look half dead.”

You blinked. Hard. Moving towards a mirror in the hall, you looked at yourself. Dark circles under sunken eyes, your skin was a pale pallor and your hair needed a trim desperately, your split ends curled and fettered. You were gaunt, as well– having lost a bit of weight over the months. “Jesus,” you muttered. Glancing over at Aegon, he was texting again. “Sending an update to the group chat, I guess? ‘Good news, she’s still alive, barely’?”

He snorted, “Yeah– something like that,” finally, he locked his phone and slipped it in his pocket. “I made sure to text Aemond, too.”

Your mouth felt dry at the mention. “Why?”

“He asked.”

“Asked?”

“He asked me to… make sure you were okay.”

Goosebumps prickled at your skin, the ever familiar feeling of nausea and despair swirling in the pit of your stomach. Nibbling at your lip more, you turned away, feeling a bit too exposed. “And what’d you say?”

“I said you were alive but you are not okay.”

Your lips pursed into a line as you tasted a bit of copper in your mouth from chewing on your lip. “I guess that’s right,” you muttered, “Why would he ask?”

“Aemond is… complicated. you know that better than anyone. I don’t know what kind of bug he has up his ass these last few months but… even through all of this, he still cares.”

“Like hell he does,” you snapped, feeling the sting of tears, “If he did, he would’ve given us a chance to talk it out, to… to try, maybe even go to therapy, I don’t fucking know– he would’ve reached out– anyone should’ve reached out,” your hand went to your hair, right at your hairline at your scalp, picking at the hairs there– another self-destructive habit you’ve picked up in your months of isolation, “I’m so fucking alone, Aegon. He knows… you all know I have absolutely no one else. I’ve been going through this on my own. I have no friends, no family– no brother to go live with when I need space, no family group chat. I don’t have shit, Aegon. All I’ve ever known in my life is him and you and Helaena and Daeron and mom. Why… why does it feel like I was cast off the island without even… a tribal council or something?” you sniffed, the tears coming in full force now. 

Aegon was silent, coming up behind you. “I’m… sorry,” he murmured, putting his hands on your shoulders, as frail and skeletal as you were, “We should’ve been better. We… will be better.” he turned you around and pulled you into his chest, enveloping you in his arms. “We thought you would’ve been… fine without him. He made it seem like that– that you were strong enough. I only figured it out yesterday when he was up my ass about texting him as soon as I saw you. He needed to know if you were feeding yourself, if you were keeping up with your medication, if you still had nightmares. A fuckin’... laundry list of questions– I told him to stick his questions up where the sun don’t shine and to see for himself,” he took a breath, “He settled on one question– if you were okay.”

“I think he got his fucking answer, then,” you whispered, “I am not okay. I haven’t been okay in months. I… I need help.”

“I know,” Aegon shifted you slightly to look at your face, “We’ll help you– I promise, you won’t be alone anymore. Look, I’ll even add you to the group chat, okay? I’ll rename it to ‘Aemond Sucks’, how does that sound?” 

You cracked a tiny smile, sniffling. “Yeah… I’d like that.”

– 

You ended up moving your belongings to your new place the same day, effectively ridding yourself of the constant shadow of Aemond’s memory.

Aegon even took you to Michael’s and HomeGoods to get stuff for your little studio, so you could really make it yours. It was a bit intimidating at first– you weren't used to being able to decorate things the way you wanted, as Aemond always opted to keep things simple and minimalistic. 

You, admittedly, went all out. Your new studio looked like a Pinterest board titled ‘cottagecore’. You were incredibly happy with it all, practically jumping up and down at it.

“It looks so good! I love these little mushroom chairs you picked out, Egg,” you hummed, patting some plush felted stools in the shape of mushrooms, which you put near the window. “I bet Helaena would love it.”

“Let’s take some pictures for the group chat, Hel will literally be all over this. you two always love that cottagecore, fairycore, fantasy… shit.” he grinned, stooping down to take some very out of perspective pictures of the mushroom chairs, making them look fifty feet tall.

You settled into your new place quickly, having Helaena, Aegon and Daeron over quite often for drinks and movies. Your health steadily improved until you were mostly back to normal physically– there would be a lot of scars internally, however that would take longer to heal, if you ever would. You had developed a trust issue complex since Aemond’s unceremonious exit from your life and hadn’t gone on any dates, you didn’t know when or if you would ever be ready. They did you the courtesy of not mentioning Aemond, until Daeron said something odd.

It was about four months after you moved in, and almost a full year since you’d last seen Aemond. You were all a few mixed drinks in, Aegon had made them and you were heavy on the alcohol, light on the ‘mix’, and you were all kicked back on the couch, with Aegon laying on the mushroom chairs stacked next to each other, lazed back like a cat. 

“Mom says she wants you over for Christmas dinner,” Daeron said, taking a sip of his drink, “She figured it’d be fine with Aemond going off with his new…” he blinked, catching himself. 

Helaena nudged Daeron in the ribs as a warning, staring at their friend warily.

“... his new? His new what?” you asked, your voice so quiet that it must’ve been like a squeak.

“... new girlfriend.” he finished.

You were silent for a while before sighing. “I figured it would happen eventually. I can only hope that it… wasn’t too soon after we broke up– or whatever… happened.”

“We all told him it was fucked up that he just left and ghosted you, lovey. Even mom got on his ass about it, and he is her favorite child who usually can do no wrong.” Helaena put her drink down, wrapping her arm around you. “You should come to Christmas dinner, everyone would be super happy to see you! And Aemond won’t be there, so even more reason to come. Please.” she whimpered, using her best puppy-dog face.

You mulled it over in your mind for a few moments. You couldn’t think of anything more painful than being alone during the holidays, so you nodded.

–

It was snowing on Christmas day, the flurries coming down and melting against your skin as you waited for Aegon to pick you up. You were wearing a red checkered tapestry dress with a flannel jacket, a white fluffed scarf wrapped around your neck and lower face. As soon as you saw the familiar color of Aegon’s truck, you practically booked it into the passenger seat. 

“Merry Christmas, you look fantastic,” Aegon mused, ever the charmer. “I’ve got the heater on full blast, I promise– but y’know my old boy’s puttering these days. We’ll need to get some speed for it to really warm up.” 

“Mmm,” you murmured, your teeth chattering, “S’cold.” 

He reached back and grabbed a well-used blanket, draping it over your legs. “Better?”

“... yeah– but,” you blinked, raising a brow. “What do you have this in the truck for?”

Aegon laughed as he began the drive to his family’s estate. “I think you know.”

“Please don’t tell me you’ve fucked someone on this blanket, Aegon.”

“Someones– not just someone. But I keep it clean, no worries!”

The drive to the Targaryen estate was about an hour and a half from town, nestled deep into an expansive forest where there weren’t any other homes in at least five miles. It was a gorgeous, Victorian style mansion and according to Daeron, was most certainly haunted. You had been here numerous times, of course, but it’d been a while. As you pulled up in the driveway, you saw Alicent standing outside the door dressed in a gorgeous red and green festive dress, hair curled to perfection. Nothing less was expected of Alicent, though.

“Oh, my darling,” Alicent cooed, holding her arms out to caress who she thought of as her fifth child. “It’s been too long, I’ve missed you.” 

Your heart warmed under Alicent’s caress, someone who had become more of a mother figure to you than your actual mother. You sniffed, pressing your forehead into Alicent’s shoulder. “Missed you too, mom.” 

“Come on, you both can cry inside in the nice toasty house, yeah? I’m freezing my balls off here, mom.” 

Alicent huffed, ushering both of you inside. “Don’t be vulgar, son– it’s Christmas.”

Helaena and Daeron were already there, as well as Otto, who gave you a stiff nod as a greeting, as was his usual means of communication.

You settled into the kitchen, Alicent pouring everyone apple cider and dishing out at least six types of holiday themed cookies. About an hour after arriving, there was a knock on the door. 

“Oh, that must be Rhaenyra and Laena. Can you answer the door, darling? I need to take the roast out of the oven. I’m sure they would be happy to see you!” 

“Mhm!” you mused through bites of cookies. You loved Rhaenyra and Laena, who were technically married with husbands, as was Alicent, but the three of them were in a secret, not so secret to anyone with eyes, polyamorous relationship. It always amused all of their kids when they tried to hide it. 

You turned the doorknob, fully expecting to see Rhaenyra and Laena. It was not. 

Aemond.

“Fuck.” you blurted out, eyes wide. It had been the better part of a year since you had last seen him. His hair was longer now, gathered into a low bun at the nape of his neck, his cheeks a bit more gaunt. He still wore his earrings and his rings– including the one you had given him almost a decade ago. 

“Shit.” he responded, seemingly caught equally off guard by seeing you again. The pupil of his non-prosthetic eye dilated until the iris was almost consumed in black, before he flexed his hand and reeled himself in. 

You couldn’t help but notice he was alone– no ‘new girlfriend’ as Daeron had put it. “Aemond,” you breathed, feeling like you were outside of your own body, your head filled with fluff and static. “Merry… Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.” he responded gruffly, “Can I come in?”

“Oh– yeah, duh,” you chastised yourself, stepping aside to let him in. “Sorry.”

“Mm.” he grunted in his usual manner. That seemed to be a habit he hadn’t dropped. 

You all but retreated to the kitchen, the expression on your face telling everything. Aegon, Daeron, and Helaena gathered around you.

“I didn’t invite him, I swear.” Aegon whispered.

“Well, neither did I!” Daeron professed.

“Don’t look at me, I didn’t invite him. He left me on read three weeks ago when I sent him a picture of a bug on my windowsill.” Helaena sniffed.

A new voice chimed in. “I invited him,” Alicent spoke, breaking up the little posse, “I told him to come over or he would be grounded for three months.” 

All four of you stared at Alicent, deadpanned. 

“Mom– he’s… almost twenty-seven. you can’t ground him,” Daeron said, confused. “And moreover, why? Wasn’t he busy?”

“Well, first off, he is my son, so I wanted to see him for Christmas. Two, I believe we have someone here who has some unresolved issues with him.” Alicent responded, staring right at you pointedly.

“... I don’t know… I… I don’t know if I can talk to him. It’s been too long… I feel like I was just getting over all of this.”

“Well, do I have any say in this?” Aemond barged into the circle, his hands in his pockets. 

You suddenly felt overwhelmed, the familiar bubbling of everything being too much rising in your stomach. You were teleported back to months ago when you were barely alive, trapped in your own mind. “I… I need… I need a minute.” you muttered, your voice sounding distorted as you made your way to the bathroom, turning on the faucet. Chest heaving, you were already crying, the waterworks starting somewhere between the hallway and the sink. 

“You’re always fucking crying, I can’t take it anymore.” Aemond’s voice from months and months ago echoed in your head, causing the tears to flow more. You bit against your lip, tasting blood right away as you willed yourself to stop crying. 

“S-stop… stop crying,” you whispered, fingers messing up your hair as you held fistfuls of it. You couldn’t catch your composure for the life of you, sliding against the bathroom wall onto the floor.

Vision blurring, you don’t know how long you were incoherent for. When you came back to yourself, Aemond was in front of you, crouched down.

“Hey,” he murmured softly, the door closed behind him, “It’s okay.”

You swallowed, still numb as he pried your fists from your head, out of your hair, smoothing it down.

“Look at me, can you do that? Nod if you can hear me.”

You nodded slowly, the feeling coming back to your extremities in a sprightly tickling sensation. You blinked tears from your eyes, the liquid smearing your vision. 

Aemond rasped a thumb over your eyes, effectively clearing the obstruction from your vision. “Just breathe,” he continued to whisper. It was ever reminiscent of when he would calm you down after a nightmare, voice low and scratchy in a way that comforted you. He was so close now, closer than he’d been in forever. He still smelled the same, the scent triggering a deep aching within your chest. A scent that took you forever to get rid of, but you never truly could. “Can… we talk?” he asked then, his voice sounding more vulnerable than ever. 

It felt like whiplash, visions of your previous fights plaguing you, where he had been so closed off, so far away, so distant that you couldn’t reach him– and now, he was here. In the present, in the flesh. In front of you, opened. Not opened completely, but you could see it, like the slit of a cracked door, the light bleeding through. It was there.

“... yeah.”

“I… I’m… I’m sorry. What I did was fucked up. It was fucked up and wrong and you didn’t deserve any of it.”

“You’re right about that,” you muttered, pulling your knees up to your chest, wrapping your arms around them. “I didn’t deserve it.” 

Aemond’s mouth twitched slightly before he sat down next to you, propping up his legs in a criss-cross. He opened his mouth to speak a few times, before closing it. His hands flexed and unflexed in quick succession– he was clearly thinking very carefully about his next words. “... I’ve… got issues. You know that better than anyone. I don’t know what was going through my head those months that we fought. I can hardly remember it now, it was like… I was in a fog, a haze– I was working myself half to death, I just wanted dad to notice, to fucking… appreciate me,” he put his hands on his head, “I was so… tied up in this illusion that if I made junior associate at the firm so young that he would congratulate me on my achievement and…” Aemond let out a sigh, “And… in the process… I pushed you away.”

You looked at him, feeling your gaze soften ever so slightly. You knew that his father was a sore spot for him and that trauma ran deep. “You didn’t just push me away, Aemond,” you sighed, reaching out a shaky hand to pry one of his from his face. “... if you would’ve just talked to me, I could’ve helped. You didn’t push… you… you shoved, you shoved and ran in the other direction.”

His one violet eye danced towards you. “I know. I’ve been kicking myself for it. When Aegon told me you weren’t doing well… I almost left work to see you.”

“... you did?”

“Yeah. Aegon basically told me not to– that… this was something you needed space for. Kind of like I did but… maybe in a more healthy way.”

“A text wouldn’t have hurt.” 

He reached into his pocket and took out his phone– his wallpaper was still the same as it was, a picture of you, him and Vhagar very unhappy in an elf costume. He scrolled to his notes app, which was filled with messages addressed to you. “... I thought it might, after what Aegon had said. I was… ashamed of how I acted, how I handled the whole thing– how I left you alone without a word. He told me how you looked… dead. I didn’t want to make it worse.”

Your eyes scanned the messages, picking out some words. The main ones that caught your gaze were ‘sorry’, ‘love’, ‘regret’. A huge breath left your lungs, feeling as if everything had been knocked out of you at once. You felt like you were being whipped back and forth in the wind, trying to grab onto anything. If you both weren’t so stubborn and just messaged one another– well, no. You did message him, one time. “I thought you blocked me.” 

“... for five minutes, maybe.”

“God, we’re so fucking stupid, Aemond.”

“You aren’t– don’t say that. I’m literally a dumbass. All of my siblings told me so, even my own mother, and you know she never curses.”

The tiniest of smiles cracked onto your face as you jostled his shoulder. “Yeah… you are a dumbass. I am allowed to say it at least once. So, um,” you shuffled slightly, “Daeron kind of let it slip that you had a new girlfriend?”

Aemond pinched his brow. “Of course he said that. He is twenty-one years old and still doesn’t know how to use his goddamn ears. I said I was seeing a new therapist, not that I had a fucking girlfriend.”

“A therapist?”

“... things got really dark for me after I moved back into our… no, my… place. After you officially moved out. It felt lifeless, all of your things were gone, the fucking warmth sucked out of the place. It felt like it’d been sterilized of anything… good. I feel into something– I don’t know, a depression? I guess, that’s what Aegon called it. He suggested I see a therapist, citing me as ‘an emotionally stunted asshole who needs more therapy than him’.” he exaggerated the last bit with air quotes, rolling his eye.

“... he isn’t wrong. I mean, I love your family, but all of you are all kinds of fucked up. Maybe I am too, practically being a part of it.”

Aemond chuckled, giving a tight lipped smile. “We are fucked up. I realized that… I really do not give a shit what my dad thinks, because nothing will ever be good enough for him. He’s so far gone now that he probably doesn’t even know we exist. I’ve come to terms with that and honestly… it feels like a weight has been lifted.”

“I’m glad you could… work through some of that, Aemond.” you say sincerely, resting your cheek on his arm absentmindedly. 

“... I want to talk about us.”

“... us. Okay.”

“I don’t expect you to want to jump right back into things. It would be unfair to think that– but… maybe we could try?”

Your chest feels a bit tight at his admission– he wanted to try. Every fiber in your being wanted to say yes and jump back into it like you’d never left. But you knew you couldn’t. There were still parts of you scarred by this whole experience, some parts that may never heal. It would take a long time and a lot of talks like this to even get some semblance of what the both of you had. “Well… before we were together, believe it or not, we were friends. Could we… try that for right now?”

His chest visibly deflated a bit, but he nodded. “Whatever you need, okay?”

–

The days following Christmas, leading up to New Year’s were… different. You and Aemond were back in contact, going out for coffee and lunch a few times.

On the day before New Year’s eve, you texted him.

Turns out, timing the movie to sync with 12 am on New Year’s day to Toby Maguire saying ‘Pizza time’ was difficult. Well, it wasn’t difficult for normal people– but you and Aemond were a bit tipsy, as Aegon had left some hard apple ciders in your fridge, to which you both indulged.

“Okay, okay,” Aemond stared at his phone, “5… 4… 2… wait, no, fuck, 3… 2… I think we fucked it up– just go, go!”

Quickly, you started the movie. “Maybe we should’ve practiced– can we start over?” you plopped on the couch, sinking into the sofa and taking a swig of the cider.

“Doesn’t work like that, sweetheart. Can’t turn back time.” he mused softly, squatting down on one of the mushroom stools. “Pretty comfy.”

“Aegon picked those out, nifty, huh?”

“Nifty.” he parroted. 

The movie continued on, but as it went on, there was an unspoken tension growing. Aemond hadn’t sat on the couch, but rather, the stools that were on the other side of the room. It felt like a chasm had formed, the strain almost palpable. 

You chewed on your lip anxiously, contemplating whether or not to say anything. But, you had both been trying a new technique called ‘communication’ – a pretty cool and helpful thing that Aemond’s therapist had taught him. You remember laughing when he posed it that same way– but it was extremely important. You cleared your throat. “Why are you sitting all the way over there?”

“... um. I wanted to try the mushroom seats, I guess.”

“You don’t want to sit next to me?” you countered, feeling especially brave. 

“Is that… alright?” 

“Um, duh. I invited you over for pizza and a movie so we could… sit together. Not for you to be half a mile away sitting on a mushroom.”

“As long as it’s alright with you.” he murmured, sitting up from the mushroom stool and making his way over to you, sliding onto the couch, still a few feet away from you.

You weren’t sure if it was the atmosphere, the pent up emotions, the small buzz of alcohol, or a destructive cocktail of all three, but you inched closer to him. Closer, closer… until your thighs were touching. You glanced up at him beneath fettered lashes. “Hi.”

“Hey.” he responded, his voice low and warm. It caused a balmy and comforting vibration to go through you, reverberating in your chest. 

You became all too aware of your movements, your closeness to him, the skin of your thigh grazing against his jeans as you got as close as you could. Your lips parted slightly as he stared back down at you. “Can… we?”

“Can we, what?” he murmured, lacing his fingers through your loose hair, gently grasping it at the nape of your neck. “Use your words, sweetheart.”

“... kiss. A little bit.”

“Just a little bit?” 

“Mhm. A teeny bit.” you leaned up, Aemond meeting you halfway as your lips came together. The culmination of your year apart, all of the emotions, the sadness, the frustration and anger, the passion, love, tears– all of it came together at this moment as the two of you melded together perfectly, as if you’d never left. You couldn’t help but let out a sigh of contentment, followed by what could only be articulated as a moan. 

It caught both of you off guard, Aemond pulling away for a moment, his lips still ghosting over yours. “Fucking hell,” he breathed against your skin, sending goosebumps tingling from your tailbone up to the nape of your neck, the hairs on your body standing on end. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you,” you responded before latching onto him once more. It started off loving and slow, your lips moving against one another like two old lovers dancing together– then it began to heat up, your mouth parting to accommodate his tongue, gnashing against yours as their dance turned up a notch. Your hands roamed his body, everything you committed to memory for so many years still in its same spot. It felt good, it felt like home. “Please, Aemond– I… I need you. It’s been so long… too long…”

“Too long since I’ve had you, had this,” his hand reached down, cupping your mound still hidden beneath your panties. Somehow, you foresaw this moment before it happened and thankfully wore a light dress. “Let me in, love.”

You parted your legs, feeling the ever familiar crook of his fingers slide down the front of your panties, testing the waters. The pad of his thumb and middle finger locked on instantly to your clit, swirling the sensitive bud, sending electric shocks through your extremities. You bit your lip to stifle a moan, pressing your forehead against his. “Need you inside, now.” you all but growled as you peppered little kisses along the soft flesh of his neck.

He wouldn’t keep you waiting long, as it seemed he needed this as much as you did. He parted your panties to the side, propping you on top of him and sliding you down his length, earning a hissed gasp from both of you. It took all of his strength not to burst in you right then, as you enveloped him in your tight, wet heat. “You were made for me,” he breathed, biting down on your shoulder, leaving red marks. One of his favorite things to do was to mark you, leaving hickies in his wake as he worshiped every inch of exposed skin he could reach. “Melded so perfectly, just for me.” he grabbed the flesh of your bottom, squeezing gently at first, then landing a smack on it as he began to thrust up into you.

You nodded fervently, hiccuping little moans as you dug your face into his shoulder, biting him in turn. Your nails sunk into his skin, indenting against his spine as they always had, as they always were meant to. It felt much like a pianist resting their fingers on the ivories after a long break, the pads of your fingers sinking into the ridges of his very being. You were meant to be here, he was meant to be here. You could feel your end coming on all too soon, his cock filling every nook and cranny of you, bullying that spongy, delicate sweet spot just right. You began to clench, your tell-tale sign to him that you were close. 

“I love you,” he whispered, panting slightly, using one hand to push your face back so you could meet his gaze. His wild, pupil-blown out gaze, cheeks reddened, mouth parted, brow furrowed. “I love you, I fucking love you. I missed you– fuck.”

“I l-love you,” you responded before he parted your lips with his thumb, “Love you so much– p-please, s’close.” you whined into his mouth.

“Let go, sweetheart, c’mon,” he grinned against your lips, nipping and biting at them. “Come for me.”

That was all you needed, the twine of your climax coming undone right in your core, snapping like a taut thread. Your usual habit was to hide your face in his shoulder when you came, whimpering and panting– but he didn’t let you this time. He held your face, staring at you intently as if you were a piece of fine art on display, and he was a connoisseur. 

You clenched around him tightly, spurring him to his own end. His hard wrought fingers gripped your ass like it was a lifeline, grunting as he found his release deep within you, where it was always meant to be. 

Coming down from your high, you slumped against his chest, mouth parted. Embarrassingly enough, a little drool wetted your lips. You were fully and thoroughly fucked out, not even registering that Tobey Maguire said “Pizza time!”

“Happy New Year, love,” Aemond murmured against your hair, nestling you tightly against him. He didn’t pull out– he preferred it this way, having you warm him through until you both fell asleep. 

“... Happy New Year,” you whispered back.

–

Two and a half months later, it was Valentine's day. You and Aemond were officially dating again as of January 2nd, much to the surprise of no one. 

You both took things as slow as you could, keeping separate apartments for the time being– but you’d given him a key to your place about two weeks in, and he was there all the time, taking much needed leave from work. 

Unlocking the door to your apartment, you walked in, seeing Aemond lounging on the couch with a scruffy brown furball on him. 

“Oh, Vhagar! You brought my baby,” you mused, dropping your items (with some grace, so as not to scare the geriatric cat), walking over, “Oh, I hope she remembers me.” you frowned, kneeling down and offering your hand to her.

“Of course she’ll remember, she yelled at me for a good three months at Aegon’s when we were without you.”

Vhagar sniffed your hand for a good minute before blinking her sleepy, lazy eyes at you, then promptly rubbing her scraggly cheek fur on your hand. You were elated, scratching her cheeks, hearing the tinkling of a little bell. 

“A new collar?” 

“Mhm, take a look.”

You swirled the collar around, looking for the name tag– only to find… a ring. An opal and moonstone ring. Your heart stopped in your chest as you stared at Aemond.

“I would get down on one knee– I was intending on you coming home and Vhagar running to you and then you finding it… but she’s on me, and I can’t get up. Cat rules,” he mused, unclipping the collar from her neck and slipping the ring onto your finger. “I know we’ve only been dating for… a month and a half, so stop me if it’s too soon.” he grinned, his toothy smile.

Vhagar gave a croaking meow, promptly jumping off of Aemond’s lap. As soon as the old cat was off, you threw yourself at Aemond, blubbering. “This… this…” you sniffed, unable to form words.

“Just so there isn’t any confusion… will you marry me?” he asked, wiping your tears away with his thumb.

“Yes, yes– I will,” you sniffle, burying your face in his chest and sobbing. 

He let you sob on him, getting his shirt all snotty and wet, all while smiling. 

After crying for at least ten minutes, you manage to take a picture, sending it to the group chat, with the caption: “I think we should add him to the chat now, guys.”

Ding.

“Is this group chat named ‘Aemond sucks’?” 

[presidenthades]

Who is your favorite TargBro ?

I answered this question last year, but I never saved the post to my masterlist so you all get to read my answer again!

I don’t think it’s a secret that I have a big soft spot for Aegon. And for all of S2’s issues, they did a pretty good job fleshing out Aegon’s character (I need to give TGC credit for his acting, of course).

It’s kinda funny because I started in the fandom more as an Aemond fan and didn’t care for Aegon. But some really good Aegon fics (I have recs somewhere on my masterlist) won me over.

I have fun writing about Aegon, especially his POV/internal monologue, because he doesn’t take himself seriously. He has a sense of humor and self-deprecation, which is an excellent base to work with when writing dramedy. He also has a volatile temper, so his mood can shift quickly.

This means that Aegon is very interesting and entertaining to write. That is the most important quality in a character: they have to be interesting. A character could be the paragon of virtue, but if they’re boring, then they’re not a character I’m drawn to.

Aegon has the advantage of being the Targbro whose POV I’ve written the most. I’m still early in Aemond/Luce’s fic, and Daeron has gotten zero POV time thus far. So maybe my preferences will change as I continue to write fics. But at this very moment, if I were forced to pick only one Targbro to write about forevermore…

[asumofwords]

Smoke, Fire and Ash

AEMOND WEDDING POV PART 1

Warnings: This fic includes noncon, dubcon, manipulation, violence, death and inc3st. Tags will be added as the fic goes on. Thoughts of manipulation and hurt, violence and assault. Obsessive themes and possessiveness.

This is a dark!fic. 18+ only. Read at your own discretion. Please read the warnings before continuing.

Summary: You are the eldest daughter of Rhaenyra and Daemon Targaryen. You are forced to navigate the difficult surroundings of your upbringing and the eventual disintegration between your family and the Hightower's relationship. What will happen when your older and estranged uncle suddenly takes a more sinister interest in you? (Dark!Aemond x Reader)

Masterlist

Characters: AEMOND!POV, Aemond Targaryen X Reader, HOTD characters.

Word count: 5.7k

Note: The highly requested and anticipated Aemond!POV from the wedding to the fateful night. Thank you all for showing so much love and excitement for this, I had fun writing it. As always read the warnings and please, please don't expect anything happy, or fluffy or healthy. This is a Dark!fic. Anyway.... enjoy you heathens <3

BOLD ITALICS ARE INNER MONOLOGUE

AEMOND POV CHAPTERS 50-52

PART ONE : A Union of Green and Black

Aemond had anticipated the raven returning to Kings Landing. He had waited for it patiently, spending his days assisting his mother and brother, or roaming the realm for the letter that would give him the answer he knew was coming. And when the day rolled over, and he had been in his chambers, and Ser Cole had summoned him to the Small Council Chambers, he had known his answer had arrived.

‘Queen Rhaenyra of House Targaryen, First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar and of the First Men, Ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm has accepted King Aegon’s terms of treaty…’

Queen?

That whore did not deserve the title Queen. 

When King Viserys had died, Aemond had turned to Ser Willis Fell, “Is Aegon king?” The One-Eyed Prince asked, “Or must we kneel and kiss the old whore's cunny?” 

And when word had arrived to Kings Landing that the Whore of Dragonstone had named herself Queen, and aquired Viserys' crown, Aemond had scowled and raged in his chambers alone.

Must we kneel and kiss the old whore's cunny?

It felt like they were now. 

A treaty, Aemond inwardly scoffed. 

‘Princess Y/n Velaryon, the Princess of Dragonstone has accepted the betrothal to Prince Aemond Targaryen.’

Aemond had known you would have had said yes.

You had no other choice. 

The wait for the next moon was agony, and Aemond found himself so restless that he returned to Harrenhal to see a pair of familiar, piercing green eyes. Alys Rivers had waited for his return, and upon his arrival, did not seem at all surprised.

"I saw you were coming in a dream."

He believed her. 

He spent the next days fucking himself into her, spilling his seed deep into her womb as she so graciously welcomed it. She would open her mouth when he asked, and swallow his seed greedily like she was told. He would thrust roughly into the back of her throat and piston his hips into her core for hours until she begged for mercy, and cried upon his member. She would cook for him, and dote on him, and whisper praise into his ears. 

Eventually the time came, and he had to make his leave back to Kings Landing. He had given her a necklace of Valyrian steel, with three large green emeralds dripping from its centre as a parting gift. She had received the gift in thanks, and taken his cock into her mouth in appreciation. 

When Aemond had returned to Kings Landing, he felt nothing but excitement to the date. You were to be his. You were to leave your whore mother and bastard brothers and spend your life with him in Kings Landing.

Would you attack him again?

Would you behave?

He hoped you would put up a fight. 

When the day came, Aemond sat upon Vhagar’s back and flew to Dragonstone to claim what was rightfully his. What would have always been his. What was fated by the gods and prophesied by those who had the sight.

Aegon had clapped him on the back in a parting farewell, and told him to make you 'squeal like a pig'. 

Charming.

As he flew across the ocean and began to see the small speck of Dragonstone become larger and larger, his heart raced in his chest and blood began to pump itself into his cock. 

You would be his. 

Finally his.

How many nights had he dreamed of this? How many days had he agonised over your absence?

How many words had he exchanged with his mother and brother, forcing them to his will? Forcing them to accept that you would be his.

How many times had they argued that it would not work? That you would try to kill them, or die trying.

And how many times had he said ‘I know.’

He didn’t care. 

You were his the moment you were born.

When Aemond had circled the active volcano, he had expected to find Caraxes, his uncle sat astride the large red dragon, to tear him from the sky, all fire and fury. He had waited for Syrax and Melys, and any or all of the Blacks dragons to rain the Seven Hells upon him.

And yet there was none. The island was still, and there were no dragons to be seen. It was almost eerily quiet.

Aemond had landed on the island, and his first thought was the smell. It was sulphuric to its very core, and the smell of coal and dragon was strong as it was carried through the oceans breeze. 

Waiting for him on the top of Dragonmont were several guards and a knight who had introduced himself as Ser Darke. Aemond had eyed the knight who was tall, and handsome by any standards. He wondered if this was your personal knight. 

And then he wondered if this knight had taken your maidenhead. 

Aemond felt himself sour until the knight with dark hair had handed him cream and red robes.

The ceremonial robes of Old Valyria.

Aemond had dressed himself with no fuss nor shame in the eyes of the Old Gods, and any of the guards who had dared to watch him. And then he was moving, finally making his way down to you. 

His grandfather Otto’s voice carried across the wind, and Aemond watched as he got closer, listening to the elder Hightower prattle on about the greatness of Aegon and his treaty. 

Aegon was too thick to think of a treaty. 

That was his mother and Otto’s idea. 

He watched as your eyes flitted from Otto to him, mouth slackening. And then he felt it. The burning gaze of his uncle, Daemon Targaryen. The Rogue Prince had given him a one over, before looking down to his daughter. 

Asking with his eyes to smite his nephew.

Aemond walked to stand in front of you beside the alter, and his breath had stopped in his lungs. 

You were beautiful.

Stunning.

Regal.

Every part the blood of Old Valyria.

A true Targaryen through and through. 

Your silver hair had shone in the light and your violet eyes had danced dangerously as you observed the man in front of you. Your robes fit you perfectly, and the headdress sat delicately upon your head. He wished to caress you, to promise you the world.

You were enchanting. Ethereal. Not of this world.

And you were his.

Candles were lit, and Aemond could scarcely pay attention to the world around him. He did not care. He was too preoccupied with how your teeth kept pulling at your lips nervously, or how your gaze would concentrate hard on his face. More specifically his eye.

Does it frighten you like the others?

Or do you see through it? Do you see through the horror of it and see the man beneath? The boy beneath?

Aemond's mouth had dried when he had run the sharp edge of dragonglass down your lip, watching as blood rushed to the surface of your mouth. He wished to step forward to lick it off the crimson droplets. He wished to taste its coppery tang upon his tongue. He wished to soothe the wound, and chase away the pain with his lips.

And then you had returned the favour, only your hand was not as gentle as he had been. Your hand did not hold awe, or reverence, or pride in it as you slid the glass down his parted and waiting lips.

Your hand had been rough, and cruel, and had sliced through his lip with far more force than had been needed. It was full of anger, and resentment, fury and rage. A loathing and sense of betrayal. 

His zaldristos.

He relished in the pain, and welcomed the sharp sting, because it was you who was doing it. It was you giving yourself to him. Aemond would suffer any pains, swim any sea, do anything to have you. He would scour the realm in search of you by foot if he had needed to.

You would always be his.

And you would never be without him again. 

He had sliced his own palm and held the blade towards you.

Your turn little one.

Your palm had opened from its stiff grip, and in your palm lay the evidence of your assault upon him that fateful night. His shoulder twinged as he looked at it. You had gotten him good that evening. Deep and sharp. The Maester had been uncertain if they would have been able to seal it. And so Aemond had told them to burn it. To melt the flesh together so that he may heal in the way of a dragon.

He had thought of you when the Maester had burnt his wound shut and sewed the rest together. It had felt like the night Lucerys had taken his eye. Except he had felt proud of you. He had felt proud that you had that fire. That anger and that rage. It had made his cock uncomfortably hard, and despite having lost a lot of blood, when the Maester had finally left his chambers, and his mother had stopped fussing and went back to hers, Aemond had tugged himself to his peak, using the arm on his injured side to relish in the pain you had delivered.

Like an angel of death.

You had hesitated to slice your palm and he had been patient. You could take as long as you wanted, but you would be his forever more. 

When the blood pooled he grasped your hand, desperate to pour every inch of love into his wound that bled, hoping that his essence would flow into you, and that you would feel his devotion and admiration. Hoping that his love would seep into your heart and unfreeze it, and bring you back to him. 

Your hands were bound together in ceremonial thread, and the final words were said. 

“Ry kivia mazvestraksi.” Of darkness and light.

He was the darkness and you were his light. His entire being revolved around you like the sun.

Aemond’s cock twitched in his robes, and his heart soared.

What a triumph. 

He stepped forward, closing the gap between the two of you and pressed his lips against yours. The bitter taste of copper had brushed into his mouth with his first cautious kiss. He was so anxious, but so overjoyed. 

You were finally his. 

Mine.

You were like opium. Your lips were so soft and tender against his own, and he could taste your essence on his tongue. Aemond tried in vain but he could not hold back any longer. His hand came to pull you in closer, grasping at the back of your head as he deepened the kiss. To drink you in like a man starved. Your blood the elixir of life, and he a dying man.

He licked at the blood to clean you, to have all of you, to taste you further and he almost moaned. Your sharp little teeth nipped at him and his hand tightened in your hair. He felt a breath puff out of your lips, and onto his, and imagined that you would do the same when he fucked you. 

If he pulled your hair when he pressed himself up inside of you, would you sigh into his mouth? Would you moan and squirm in his grip as he fucked his seed into you?

When he pulled back, your pupils were dilated and your sweet little lips were smeared with your combined blood. You looked feral. Blood thirsty.

Bursting with rage. 

His sweet little niece. 

It made him harder, and he was thankful that the robes were loose.

“Mēre ñelly, mēre prūmia, mēre soul, sir se forever.” 

One flesh, one heart, one soul. Now and forever.

You were his. 

And he was yours.

Your blood ran through him, and his through you. 

Now and forever.

His wife. 

“Wife.” Aemond tested the word on his tongue and he knew in that moment it was meant to be.

It felt right.

It felt perfect.

It felt that the Gods knew you were destined to be together. Aemond had always known that the Gods made you for each other. He could always feel a magnetic pull to you. Drawing him in like a Siren.

As if you were tied by two threads, and no matter where you would be, no matter where you would go, no matter how hard you would try to pull, or cut, or tear the thread between you, it would not budge.

And you would always return to each other. 

Mine.

As soon as your hand had left his, you had thrown yourself into your fathers arms. Daemon had watched Aemond over the top of your head. His eyes bored into Aemond’s as he expressed all the things he were to do to him if he had even the slightest inkling that he harmed his precious daughter, with only his eyes.

His favourite daughter.

His first child. 

Aemond had blinked slowly at the man and watched as his uncle had cooed into your hair. His heart ached at the sight and he did not know why. 

You had raced back into the castle, leaving Aemond with Otto and Ser Cole, watching as you and the others who resided on Dragonstone, trudged slowly and solely back inside. 

Aemond had watched how Daemon fought desperately to not say a thing to Otto nor him, nor Cole. How his mouth had twitched and his hand had repeatedly tapped on the large hilt of the Dark Sister Blade. 

Aemond admired the mans tenacity. 

The young Prince had redressed himself out of the ceremonial garb and back into his riding leathers. He, Otto and Cole had walked and waited for you at the entrance of the castle to return. Little words being said between the three men. 

When you had returned, you were in-between the hulking figure of your father and the handsome knight. 

So he was your knight.

Aemond made a mental note to inquire into who this knight was, and if he had any loved ones he cared for.

Was he a first son? A second son? A third? Did he had sisters? Or brothers?

Jealousy rolled through Aemond as he thought of the Prince knowing you intimately. Doting on your every command. Bringing you your every desire. 

Did he come to your chambers at night, when all had gone to rest, and warmed your bed? 

Had he pierced your maidenhead and watched your blood streak his length? Had he whispered praise to you and brought you to your peak? Had he tasted you the way Aemond had? Had the made you cum on his hands as the Prince had done?

Aemond wanted to slice the knights head from his shoulders, and his cock from his body. 

Heat rose in his body until Otto had spoken, and broke his tumbling thoughts. You had all but scoffed at his grandsire and looked up at your father with large, sad eyes. You had embraced, and Aemond once again felt a sting in his heart. 

And also jealousy. 

He wondered for a split moment if you had ever been intimate with your father, but the thought came and went just as quickly as it had arrived. 

No.

Neither of you would have. 

You had stormed away and Aemond had watched your hips sway as you marched up the grassy hill beside the castle, Otto calling out to you in confusion, and the loud laugh of Daemon flowed into the air. Aemond had to stop himself from smiling. Otto huffed under his breath, wondering where you were going.

Aemond knew exactly where you were going.

For it was the way that he came.

He followed you up the hill, not too far behind, but not quite racing either. He had all the time in the world. For the rest of your shared lives, you would be his. The grass crushed beneath his feet, and as he rounded a rocky corner he came face to face with a vision, sitting atop the famed Vermithor.

Your hair shimmered in the light and your leather riding clothes were snug on your figure. Aemond groaned under his breath as his cock twitched in his leather pants. A smirk wound its way on his face as he watched you spot him. 

Vermithor was large, and mean and old. Just like his Vhagar was. HIs scales were bronze and his teeth were mangled and what a sight you were to be atop the old dragon. You had claimed the famed Vermithor, the Kings dragon. A dragon that had made men kneel.

You did not need a dragon to make Aemond bend the knee.

You could have uttered Dracarys, right then and there. Daemon and your knight could have easily subdued and slain Otto and Ser Cole, and you would have had the upper hand in the war. 

But you didn’t. 

You kept true to the treaty.

His little spitfire, zaldristos, darling niece, barely spared him a single glance as she commanded her great dragon into the sky, his bronze scales shimmering in sun. 

Aemond had cooed out to Vhagar, moving around the cliffs face to find her patiently waiting for him, having sensed him through the bond as he pulled himself up the ropes and onto her back. The war dragon pushed herself into flight roughly, and called out into the air. 

He had flown beside you, watching how well you had bonded to your new dragon, and so quickly. When a Targaryen would lose their dragon, that would be it. They would never bond with another. 

But not you.

Oh no, not you.

Not his wife.

And that’s what made you his.

The journey to Kings Landing was far too long for his liking as his swollen member pressed painfully into his pants. He had tried to adjust himself to relieve the throbbing, but to no avail. 

Aemond had thought the whole journey home about laying you down in his bed, parting your thighs and lapping at your waiting cunt. He had imagined licking, and suckling and fucking you on his fingers until completion. Stretching you open for his cock so that you would be ready. 

He had imagined thrusting into you, holding you to him as you moaned and writhed beneath him, praising him, crying for him, wailing as the tip of his cock pushed up against your womb. He had imagined you panting, and wanting, and begging for his seed. 

‘Please uncle, please give me it. Give me your seed.’

‘Put a babe in me, husband.’

‘Please fill me, Aem.’

‘I love you.’

I love you.

Those words were all that the Prince desired to hear.

But he knew that he wouldn’t. 

You would most likely kick, and scratch, and bite at him. Hiss and curse, and spew vile insults. This image of you, all fiery beneath him, crying and sobbing, clawing and cursing, also made his cock throb. 

Either way, he would have you. 

You had arrived and disappeared before he had caught up. But there was only few places he knew he would find you. And so when his gut told him to go to the Godswood, he had followed it, and he was right. 

There you stood, palm on the bark, head bowed, no doubt begging the Gods for mercy. For a miracle. Asking for them to slay him and his brother and any other who carried the Hightower blood, just as he had with the Strongs. He knew that you would be asking for protection from the monster you had married. 

But he did not have to be cruel.

He could be good to you, if only you let him.

“The God’s won’t hear your prayers.” He had spoken, not being able to help himself. Not being able to try and get the fire within you to burst, to have you race at him again, blade in hand. 

He watched in excitement as your little hand balled itself up in anger against the tree, a smear of blood being left behind. Aemond grinned. 

Yes.

Yes, show me how much you hate me.

Show me your passion for me.

“Come. I will show you to our chambers.” 

Our chambers.

Our.

He liked how it sounded on his tongue. He liked the way our sounded. 

Us.

Our

We.

One flame, one flesh, one heart, one soul. Together. 

Forever.

As you had always been destined to be.

You had turned, lips pulled down into a frown as he smiled brightly at you, joy coursing through him.

Our.

Us.

Your lips were scabbed where the cut was, with no blood lingering around your face, except for the symbol upon your forehead which he had pressed with a sacred thumb. You had left it undisturbed, just as he had. 

See? We are already one.

We are the same.

“I wish to return to my old chambers.” You had demanded, but so softly, almost as if you were testing the waters. 

Aemond could not help but tilt his head. 

Gods, such a good wife already.

So obedient and good.

All mine.

“No.” Was all he had said, enjoying the anger that flashed across her face as he turned and began walking to his chambers.

No, not his.

Your shared chambers.

Ours.

The entire walk he thought of the possibility of taking you as soon as the chamber doors opened. Of bending you over the table in the centre of the room and rutting into your tight, wet heat. Of laying you down on the bed and ripping your riding leathers from your body, and thrusting himself deeply inside. To fuck into your wet cunt and have your screams and the slapping of skin carry through the entire Keep for all to hear. 

Yes, she is mine.

She has always been mine.

She will always be mine.

He had watched you enter the chambers, eyes flitting around the space and knew immediately that your eyes would look to the passage door. That immediately you would be looking for a way out. Or reminiscing on your previous visit.

And you had. 

Creatures of habit rarely change their design.

The passage was neither blocked, nor barricaded, and if you wished to attempt an escape, you were free to do so. Though he knew that you wouldn’t. 

“You wouldn’t be able to leave that way, if that’s what you are thinking of.” His voice called across the room.

A lie.

Which you seemed to believe. 

Such a good little girl.

He had offered you wine. Spiced Dornish wine, of the deepest red.

Your favourite.

He had remembered.

He remembered everything.

Everything you liked, and disliked. Everything you had said. Everything you had done. Everything that you had worn. Everything. He remembered it all.

You were in his head, every moment of every day. Every single waking hour he thought of you. Even as he lay in the bed of another, even as his cock filled Alys, even as she moaned and writhed beneath him, he thought of you. 

And then your sweet little eyes had caught the faded red cover of your favourite book, sitting proudly on a pile of books he had compiled for your arrival. Books in which you had read to him. Books in which he knew you would like. Books in which he had remembered you liked.

It was all for you.

Everything was for you.

Do you not see? This is all for you.

“Sit.” He had commanded, to see if you would obey, to test the waters to see how much you would put your all into this treaty. For yourself. For your mother. For your family. 

And you had sat, and his heart had soared. 

You were making an effort. 

You were trying to make this work.

You could see that he loved you, and maybe you were coming to terms that you loved him too.

“Drink.” Aemond commanded again, and you followed his orders.

His cock jumped in his breeches and he had to subtly move himself as he sat. 

Would you open your mouth if he told you to? Would you cum if he commanded it? Would you take his member into your mouth and suck if he asked?

Would you be a good little wife for him? 

His fiery little zaldristos, tamed and claimed by the mighty dragon that he was.

He lost himself in the images of you coming to your knees before him at the fireplace, with a wordless command. A simple finger gesture, a subtle point of his index to his feet, and the good little wife you were would be anxious and excited to please him. You would come to stand before him and kneel. Your tiny little hands, hands that had caused so much damage, hands that had scarred him, hands that had-

“The King wishes for us to dine with him this evening. To celebrate our union.”

He watched as your chest paused, and your face paled. Your lips had parted and your little hands had curled tightly around the goblet. 

Ah.

“He will not touch you.” 

A promise. 

I will kill him if he ever has you.

When you had not said a word, and he had stood before you, your eyes glazed over as your mind no doubt reeled at the thought of being reunited with your eldest uncle. Aemond did not take offence when you had jumped at his palm. 

“I will have the maids come and dress you for the evening.” 

And they had. In the dress he had your favourite tailor in Dorne make for you. 

One black dragon, one green dragon. 

Together as one. 

One.

Us. 

Aemond had watched you be bathed and dressed and could not help but notice at how you were, despite being present physically in the room, not present mentally. You had drifted away behind your eyes and numbly let the women wash, dry and dress you. Even as he had touched the small of your back and led you out of the chambers, and cooed small compliments to you, you had not come back to the present. 

Aemond had even tried mentioning Lucerys, to see if that could rise you from whatever depths you were lost in, and yet you did not come back to him.

He felt a pit of anxiety settle in his stomach.

He thought of Helaena, and how he had gradually watched her do the same. With each passing day, he watched his beloved sister, the sweetest and kindest of all, fade into a nothingness until not even she herself could stand it any longer, and threw herself from her window in Maegor’s Holdfast.

“Zaldristos.” He had uttered, small panic in his voice. 

Please do not go with her. 

I cannot loose you too.

Please Gods, do not let her go to madness. I will do whatever you ask me to.

Do not take her from me.

You had swallowed thickly after he spoke his prayer, and your eyes had met him. The spell had been broken, and the Gods had listened. You were back, and the first thing your eyes did was open widely, almost in shock of your hazy mind, looking down at the dress that fit you more perfectly than he could have ever imagined. 

Aemond reminded himself to tip the tailor. 

You had walked together, as one, to the intimate Dining Chambers, and were announced to the room as you entered. ‘His Lady Wife Y/n Velaryon.’

‘His Lady Wife.’

His.

Aegon sat with his small council around him, their mother and grandfather waiting at the table. Aegon had this mischievous glint in his eye which made Aemond inwardly cringe. He had remembered the look that Aegon would get when he wished to start trouble, and this evening would be no different. 

“There they are!” The King had stood, arms wide and Aemond inwardly groaned. 

His brother was a prick.

The crown on his head must weigh heavy on his skull, for his brain was surely being crushed by the force.

Aemond watched as Aegon tried to goad you into a fight, and he felt himself bristle instead.

She is mine.

Mine to love. Mine to touch. Mine to hold. Mine to torment, and fuck, and put heirs into.

Mine.

He had pulled a seat out for you, and you had sat, and he was proud of how well you were behaving on your first night back in the Red Keep. He had expected you to launch yourself across the table, all claws and teeth and rip his brothers, or his mothers, throat out. 

Would it be a sin if he said he was disappointed that you didn’t?

Aemond could sense his good Lady Wife stiffening beside him and heat pouring from her body as Aegon continued to try and lure her into a fight. To try and get her to react to him. The air was tense from the other Lords at the table as they all watched in anticipation of a very tumultuous celebration of a very tumultuous union.

“I don’t think I’ve heard my niece be so quiet before. Have you broken her already, Aemond?” 

Not in the way I would have liked to.

Not in the way you had tried to.

Aemond hummed. 

“Don't tell me she has snatched your voice too, brother? One minute in her cunt and already you’ve gone soft.” Aegon snickered.

Fucking cunt.

Aemond watched as Otto tried, and failed, to diffuse the tension as he saw the warning signs of Aemond’s temper begin to simmer. It was fine for the Princess to be riled, she could not act if she wished to annul the treaty, but Aemond? 

Aemond could do as he pleased. 

And if he pleased to launch himself across the table and strike his drunken brother, he would. 

Aegon laughed loudly and Aemond felt you stiffen beside him. 

All instincts kicked in, and Aemond felt suddenly protective of you. 

I won’t let him touch you. 

You are mine now.

I won’t let anyone harm you again.

You are mine.

Conversation moved about the table, and Aemond felt he could relax, but only just. Aegon continued to drown himself in his cups, and he watched as you did not move to eat your supper, instead drinking from your goblet. 

“Tell me brother, have you bed her yet?”

Aemond felt blinding rage course through him. 

You fucking cunt. You fucking piece-

“Do you remember how it is done? I’d be happy to show you.” 

Even the Lannister laughed, and Aemond had to control his breathing as to not take the blade at Ser Coles side and thrust it through the two of them.

You keep laughing, Lannister, and I will fuck a silver haired babe into your wife as a gift.

You keep laughing and I will make you watch me do it.

Willingly or not. 

Alicent tried, and failed, as she always had, not that she ever fully tried, to chastise Aegon, to rein him in. But he was King now, and he had the Kingly arrogance to match. 

“We should hold a bedding ceremony, to ensure that the deed is done properly. I can talk you through it.”

You fucking bastard.

He thinks I don't know how to fuck a woman? He thinks I don't know how to bed my own wife?

My niece?

If only he knew the things he was capable of. Of what he does to Alys. Of how she begs for it, and cries for it, and pleads on her knees, mouth open and eyes wide.

Or demands it, legs spread, cunt weeping and waiting for him.

“Come now brother, surely you have not forgotten what I showed you on your thirteenth name day.” Aegon laughed, pulling his goblet up to his lips. 

Aemond’s heart ached and his stomach dropped. 

He did not want to remember that.

He wished to forget.

He wished to forget their hands on him. Their mouth on him. How Aegon had laughed as he watched. How Aemond had not wanted to. How he had cried after and felt shame and anguish. How he had felt confliction and disgust. 

He had wanted it to be you. 

He had wanted to lay with you as his first. 

But you weren’t his first. Nor his second, nor would you be his third.

Aegon saw to that.

Aegon had taken something from him in which he could never get back. 

Aemond’s jaw clenched tightly as he watched his brother, the feeling of the older woman’s crawling hands on his body. 

“The King is merely joking with you, My Prince. We are all in good spirits for this union.” Otto spoke. 

Fuck you too.

“You heard the old bat, we are all in good spirits! You are finally wed to the one woman who had given you any attention at all. Sure, she is a bastard-“

“Watch your tongue.” You had sneered, finally breaking your silence. 

Aemond pulled from his sickening thoughts and felt your anger beside him run through him. Your blood in him. He had never been so angry. He had never felt so vengeful. So provoked. Not even in Storms End did he feel such wrath. 

He wished to kill his brother. 

“So she speaks!” Aegon declared proudly to the table, looking at the Lords as they all smiled unsurely, “Finally. There is my niece who I know and love. Though I fear if you are able to speak, perhaps my brother did not fuc-“

Aemond shot up from the table, ready and willing to do it. 

It could be so easy. 

It could be so easy to kill him. Right here, right now. Before all the Lords and his mother. He could snuff the life out of the man he called his brother, his King, and he could do it without a second thought. He would gladly watch the light fade from those violet eyes. He could watch the wa-

“Aem, brother.” Aegon mock cooed, “You know I am only teasing. Come, let's raise our cups to this fine union!” 

He was mocking him. 

Mocking him.

He was saying he was not a man. Questioning his manhood again. Questioning his ability to be a man.

All lifted their cup and Aemond turned to look at you, you were already watching him. Your mouth was parted and pupils dilated and a flush lay on your cheeks. You were so angry. You were angry with him. But your eyes looked frightened. 

Aemond watched as your hand came to soothe him, to touch him. He didn't want to be touched. He kept thinking of his thirteenth name-day and his skin crawled. And seeing you look up at him like that. In pity.

It disgusted him.

He didn’t want your pity. 

“To my brother, may she warm your heart and your cock, and may you make me a grand-uncle soon enough. And to my wonderful niece, may you warm his bed, and birth his heirs, and feel the warmth of his love.”

Aemond bitterly drained his cup, and watched as his wife did the same. If he sat for a moment longer at this table, and had to look at his brothers shit eating grin a moment more, he would ride atop Vhagar and set the entire Keep ablaze. 

“Excuse us, I wish to spend time with my wife.” 

Aemond left the room, not even waiting for you, as he knew you would follow him. You would not sit alone in the chambers with Aegon or his mother. He knew you would not do it, and so the dutiful zaldristos followed him, just as he planned.

Thanks so much for reading along with me, if you wish to be added to the tag list please let me know :) Likes and reblogs are greatly appreciated ! Enjoy <3

Tag List:

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Bold is who I cannot tag!

[humanpurposes]

Hello my lovely tumblr people! I really wanna do something fun to celebrate the festive season (and an unexpected follower milestone, woo!) soooo I'm gonna post a few Christmas themed fics throughout December, and get excited because I even made a horrible graphic for it ✨

Lineup so far

Hysteria Part 2

How Michael Gavey Stole Christmas

Requests

For the FIRST TIME EVER I'm officially gonna ask for requests 😈 I’ve included prompts and characters down below, sticking to HotD and the Ewan Mitchellverse.

Send me an ask with the following: a character, a prompt, and any specifics (modern or canon era, kinks, tropes, fluffy, smutty or angsty vibes, whatever you fancy).

Disclaimers, prompts and characters under the cut!

Disclaimers:

I've never opened my requests before so I don't really know what to expect. This blog is based purely on vibes so we'll see how it goes.

Unless stated, I'll assume afab!reader/pov character.

I'll aim for 1000k words for each request.

I'll decide what to write based on vibes and I might not get round to all of them.

Requests are open from now until Sunday.

Prompts

30 festive writing prompts for your WIP/one-shots, you're welcome

List of Christmas (but make it sexy) prompts

Winter Prompt List!!!

Characters I'm down to write for

HotD

Aemond Targaryen

Aegon II

Helaena Targaryen

Rhaenyra Targaryen

Alicent Hightower

Daemon Targaryen

Baela Targaryen

Rhaena Targaryen

Otto Hightower

Tyland Lannister (woof)

Alys Rivers

Ewan Mitchellverse

Tom Bennett

Billy Washington

Michael Gavey

Osferth

Abraham

Ettore

Ask for Billy Taylor, Jace or Luke and I will block you 😙

Can’t wait to see what yis come up with!

[lagosbratzdoll]

https://www.tumblr.com/fragileheartbeats/748430968090755072/ok-so-i-watched-promo-and-im-embarrassed-instead?source=share

TB actors can't have fun...

And I don't know why but some of this post feels racist. That white guy makes black actors look plain, wtf?

It’s a very weird post to be sure.

I don’t care to address most of the other points because other people have spent months trying to drum into their heads that much of the hate that Rhaenyra faces is baseless and driven by misogyny.

“So it's straight up an insult to the actors not the characters. And weren't blacks the one who were angry because Criston and season 2 Aegon are too hot? And I mean Aemond is so famous and one of the reasons is because he's sexy and sorry to break it to you but Alicent is more beautiful and feminine that Rhaenyra... So yeah bullshit. Just Aegon himself is enough to make you guys all look plain.”

This made me laugh. I can’t lie. Steve Toussaint ribbing his cast mates, who he knows, will never be the issue they keep trying to make it. Everyone’s reaction to this has been strange. A couple of weeks ago, a tweet comparing Corlys to a horse had almost 5k likes. When black people were like, that’s a weird thing to tweet, everyone kept gaslighting us. 

People kept telling us it wasn’t racially motivated, and they argued that the fact that only a crackship involving a dark-skinned black person was generating this much vitriol was simply coincidental. Keep in mind, in this fandom, everyone ships everyone, and I mean everyone. The fandom will hop, skip and jump over racism and racist posts to make ugly white people the victims. 

In that vein, what explanations would the Greens offer for their usurpation? “She’s a whore and her children are bastards”? Do you honestly believe that Anno Domini MMXXIV, sane individuals will start screeching about “bastardy” and “whoredom” as moral failings? I need all of you to be serious. No matter how much you freaks try, Bobblehead and Crescent Moon will never be the victims you keep trying to frame them as. That last part about Alicent and Rhaenyra, what a weird thing to put out into the universe. 

Also, I read the comments and I have to wonder where people are getting this George is anti-feudalism and anti-monarchy reading from. George is anti-war, and that is very clear in his writing, but the rest is just personal bias leaking through. Where is this coming from, considering the smallfolk are rarely individualised? Outside of prologues and epilogues, there are only four lowborn POVs in the entire body of work. There’s no movement to end monarchy and the concept of nobility. The main cast of characters are in the middle of various plots to reclaim/hold on to their ancestral seats. Well, except for Daenerys who is fighting slavery and Jon who is busy being dead. 

[aemondtargaryensfire]

A Ravenous Desire- Aemond x fem!Reader

Chapter One, Part II

Series Masterlist

Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x fem!Reader

Warnings: 18+ Minors DNI, AFAB reader, she/her pronouns, cannibalism, self-cannibalism, descriptions of cannibalism and murder, mentions of incest, violence, blood, gore, death of a pet, death of major characters, self-harm, descriptions of illness, mentions of a head injury

Chapter Summary: Aemond always knew there was something wrong with him; something different. After a traumatizing event as a child, Aemond is led down a path of utter self-destruction, ultimately forcing him to run away from his home and everything he knows. A recounting of Aemond's life and childhood, and how he ended up on his own.

Word Count: 16.2k 👀

Author's Note: Sorry for the wait! This chapter is a big boy. I knew this part would likely be longer than the first part from Reader's POV, but I meant for this to stay at about 8k words. Oops! I don't anticipate future chapters being this long, but I had a lot that I wanted to include and accomplish in this part and Aemond is so fun to write for.

Chapter One, Part II

Aemond had lived most of his life feeling as if he was a specter, an invisible spirit that lurked within the halls of his familial home. He couldn’t connect with people, even his family, no matter how hard he tried. He felt wrong. Like he had a missing or malfunctioning part. This was endlessly baffling to him, and as much as he tried to fight against this part of himself, in the end he grew to accept this peculiarity. He had little choice in the matter.  

In his early years, when he still longed for connection and he still made attempts at interacting with others, Aemond would often find himself crying in his mother’s arms, his words muffled as he pressed his face into her chest and his tears stained her blouse. He cried to her of his desire to have friends, of how tired he was to be himself. Her attempts to calm him with her soft shushes and assurances did little to quell his aching heart.  

“Everyone feels like this sometimes, my love.”  

It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying, in the beginning. When Aemond started school, he went into it with the enthusiasm only a young child unaware of the harsh nature of life could. His family, with the exception of his mother and sometimes Helaena, never really seemed to like him, merely tolerating him. His older brother, Aegon, could be downright cruel with his snide comments and Aemond had hardly gotten to know Daeron before he was whisked away to Old Town. He rarely saw his half-sister or his nephews, who were young enough to feel more like cousins, but it always felt like there was an innate sense of resentment underlying each interaction and neither party was pleased to be in the other’s presence. His father was an entirely different matter; one that confused him enough to result in even more tears that often left him feeling nauseous. But surely, Aemond reasoned, he would be able to find someone in one of his classes that he could bond with. Someone who enjoyed looking through history books, trying to piece together their meaning with the few words they collectively knew at their young age. Perhaps they could help him solve them, like a puzzle! Or maybe they could explore the woods surrounding his house, climbing trees and looking for rocks or bugs for Helaena. He would have someone to play sword fights with, and Aegon wouldn’t be able to push him away and claim that he needed to play by himself because he was too small to play with him; that he needed to “properly toughen up” on his own.  

This enthusiasm began to die almost as soon as he walked into the classroom on his first day, seeing that everyone had seemed to have become friends already. That would certainly make it harder for him. Still, he persevered and approached more than one group in a desperate attempt to make friends. One little boy, who had light hair that almost looked like his, was carrying a backpack with a keychain that had a little dog on it, the tail wagging with his every excited movement. Aemond thought this was cool, and so he walked up to him and told him as much. 

“Your keychain looks like a real dog ‘cept I know real dogs are not p-purple. You have a dog? My mommy said we could get one someday, but I dunno if...” 

Aemond looked down at his shoes as he spoke, tapping his toes together and rambling on until he noticed how quiet the boy had become. He looked back up with a shy smile on his face, hoping that the boy was maybe waiting so that he could respond. But the rejection was clear on his face, and even if Aemond hadn’t explicitly recognized it as such, he knew. He knew by how wide the little boy’s eyes were, how his eyebrows were furrowed, as if wondering just what he was looking at. A hapless bystander looking at the strange creature before him.  

On another day, he saw a little girl looking through the books stacked on the classroom bookshelf by herself. Aemond knew a lot about books, he thought, so he went up to her and offered to help her find one. He pointed to several different books, trying as hard as he could to sound out their titles and figure out what they were about, so he could help her find the book she wanted.  

“Hey this one looks good! Wh-where the...will..Wild!”, he grinned victoriously, “...Things...Are! Where the Wild Things Are!” He held it out to the girl, but she had already found the book she was looking for and she was walking away before he could even get her name or tell her his. This pattern continued through his entire first year, and then in the next, and the next, until he finally just...stopped trying. No matter what he did, his peers continued to turn away from him and refuse his many offers of friendship, and so he decided to just give up. Aemond never understood why the others shunned him so; why people would often keep their distance from him, watching him like he was a ticking time bomb. He felt as if he must have been something truly strange or dangerous with how his classmates looked at him sometimes. 

He knew why now. He could understand their trepidation, in hindsight. 

With every passing year, Aemond grew to have a preference for silence and solitude. The mysteries of sentences and words and the pieces of history he studied fell together as he sat, on his own, surrounded by his books in the sizeable family library. When he walked through the woods, he walked alone, not looking for anything in particular but still feeling as if he was searching, endlessly searching for something. Sometimes one of his family’s loyal security guards, Criston Cole, would offer to play with him and teach him how to swordfight with the little wooden swords in the shed. But Aemond never felt like he was truly learning anything, and he couldn’t understand why he was too small to play with Aegon, but he not too small to play with Criston, who was an adult and a lot bigger than both him and Aegon. It seemed as if everywhere he looked, Aemond was faced with constant reminders of the rejection he experienced at every turn.  

He could sense his mother’s exhaustion with having to comfort him almost every day after school, but he knew she would never say anything. So, he decided to just keep these feelings to himself. He felt it selfish to take up so much of her time. And despite Helaena’s astute observations and hunches that something was wrong, as she’d often stare at him with her big eyes before smiling at him and muttering something cryptic, it was difficult to truly connect with her. She spoke in riddles more often than not. There was little comfort to be found from her or anyone else.  

And so Aemond resorted to other options to express the pain he couldn’t ignore. As a child, he developed a tendency to harm himself, particularly in those moments where the loneliness became suffocating and it hurt to breathe. Most often, Aemond would find himself pulling roughly at his scalp, pulling his hands away with clumps of his fine light hair tangled in between his shaking fingers. Scratching was another habit he picked up as he grew older, sometimes unnoticed by even him until he went to shower and found the raw and bloody scratches on his legs. It was comforting, in its own way.  

For so long, Aemond only had himself. He had his books, and a never-ending collection of more to be discovered. He always held onto the hope that, one day, things would be different. He would make do until then, as hard as it was.  

Then he found Vhagar. He had been outside, walking around in the woods surrounding his home and kicking at rocks and sticks, muttering under his breath and trying with all his might not to cry after another day of school, another failed attempt at befriending someone and an encounter that reminded him of how unexplainably repellant he was. He had been so hopeful this time. He found he preferred being ignored over the hurtful comments he received on occasion. Scratch...scratch...scratch. He couldn’t keep crying all the time, over kids who didn’t matter. Stupid, mean, loud kids... 

He barely noticed her at first, his eyes downturned and blurry with unshed tears. He could hear footsteps approaching him, and then a gentle nudging at his right hand, his scratching hand. His first instinct was to step back, fearing she was wild and trying to eat him. At his closer inspection, she didn’t look wild. Her fur wasn’t matted as he would expect the fur of a wild mutt to be, and she didn’t bare her teeth at him viciously. Aemond figured she must have been a stray then, or simply sent straight to him by some higher being as she looked up at him with her deep and loving eyes, soothing something in his soul. The tears in his eyes vanished, and when he knelt down to pet her, she tackled him and began licking his face, pulling a genuine laugh out of him that warmed his chest. She didn’t care about who he was, what strange quirks he had, or what family he came from. She just wanted him.  

From that day on, Aemond went hardly anywhere without his beloved Vhagar. Not even his father forbidding him from allowing her in the dining room would stop them. He’d simply eat outside or in the kitchen, with her. She would follow him through the house and, most often, into the library, earning herself a bed and a permanent spot by one of his favorite desks. School was tricky at first. Having such a large dog like her always following him around would have surely been frowned upon in a school meant for “proper” children from affluent families. Once he convinced his mother to let him walk with her to school every day, so long as he woke up earlier and dressed for the weather, he was lucky enough to find her a spot by the window of his classroom. He could often hear her panting just outside, and when his teacher wasn’t looking, he would sneak over to the window to wave to her. Who needed stupid kids when you have your dog outside, watching over you?  

(Alicent hadn’t taken much convincing; she would have used every ounce of social or political power she had to keep her son and his scruffy dog together, truthfully. To hear her child laughing and talking joyfully through the house or through the open windows was the greatest gift a mother could receive.) 

Before Vhagar, Aemond felt he had spent most of his life watching the people around him find their person or their thing that touched them and made them feel whole. Even at such a young age, he would watch and observe others, attempting to draw conclusions from his observations that could provide him with the answer he so longed for: what did he need to do, to have the same thing? With Vhagar, he knew that his prayers had been answered as he now had his thing that made him feel whole, a soul that spoke to his own. If there truly were gods that watched him from beyond, they had listened to him and deemed him worthy of such a thing. Loneliness had been his constant companion for most of his life, until now. Now Vhagar was his companion, and he didn’t need anyone or anything else. Things were perfect, for a brief time.  

That was, until his half-sister and her children gathered with the rest of the family after the death of a distant relative. Aemond had hardly met Laena before her death during childbirth, and so he found it hard to feel as sad as he felt he was expected to. After he noticed his cousins, Baela and Rhaena, he could tell that they were sad after the loss of their mother and unborn sibling. Aemond couldn’t imagine losing his own mother, his rock, and even the thought of such a thing brought tears to his eyes. After the funeral service and ceremony, he set out to try and comfort the girls, to offer them support after their tragedy as he approached them with a small, sympathetic smile. Unfortunately for him, the girls weren’t alone and his nephew, Jacaerys, was already there glaring daggers at him.  

The animosity between Aemond and his siblings and the other half of the Targaryen family had been present for as long as he could remember, due to old grudges between their parents and arguments surrounding topics of succession and inheritance. Topics that, at the time, Aemond couldn’t be bothered to truly care about. However, his mother had always made it clear to him, from the moment that he could talk and lend a listening ear, that the presence of Rhaenyra and her children posed a threat to his family. Though he didn’t fully understand why when he was younger. It appeared that a similar sentiment had been shared with his nephews. With one look, Jacaerys managed to convey his anger and distrust towards Aemond and effectively turn his cousins against him. He never even had a chance. 

After that, Aemond gave up on reaching out to his extended family as he used to, choosing to stick by Helaena and his mother or wander off on his own with Vhagar for the remainder of the day. The day of the service had initially begun as sunny, with bright blue skies and crisp clean air. It was a setting unsuitable for the grim affair and the events that would soon follow. The official reception had recently ended and with the rest of the guests gone, the family decided to gather back at the Targaryen home. The tension was palpable as the adults sat around on the backyard patio, decked out in their dark dress clothes and teetering on unspoken tension with their drinks in hand. The children were left with nothing to do but sit and look for ways to entertain themselves as the adults exchanged short and biting comments beyond their understanding. Rhaenyra and her brood had only been there two days, and already three arguments had broken out between her and Aemond’s mother and grandfather, regarding the family legacy, inheritance, blah, blah, blah. None of that mattered to Aemond. The whole situation exhausted him, and he couldn’t wait for them to pack up and go back to Dragonstone.  

A lull in the awkward conversation had led Rhaenyra to get up and walk around the property to “get some air”, which Aemond found funny since she was already outside. It was as he was stifling a chuckle and scratching behind Vhagar’s ears that he noticed his elusive uncle, Daemon, walking not far behind her. Daemon always wore too much cologne, and he would often stand around quietly, observing the people around him with a smug look on his face. And he looked at Aemond as if he were an ant to be squashed. The man creeped Aemond out, especially when he would stare at him while speaking in hushed tones with his father. Even as he wondered why Daemon was following Rhaenyra, Aemond was relieved to be finally free of his watchful presence. The atmosphere was still tense, but thankfully less so and he felt like he could finally take a deep breath without Daemon around.  

Aemond couldn’t remember who first proposed that they play a game. It may have been Aegon or Jacaerys, or maybe it was a unanimous decision made simultaneously by the present children to end their boredom. As the adults busied themselves with their casual conversation full of thinly veiled insults, the children jumped up and began to play games of tag and catch with things found around the yard. Aemond continued to sit and watch, alongside Helaena, but he couldn’t deny that watching the other kids play with each other filled him with an excited energy. This must have been contagious, as Vhagar sat up and she started to pant excitedly as she watched along with him. It felt as if all of the family tension had melted away, the kids shaking off years of distance with each game and laughing together as if nothing had ever pushed them apart. Then one of his other nephews, Lucerys, turned his attention to Aemond and Vhagar, and he jumped up and down and proposed a game of fetch, luring Vhagar over to him.  

Vhagar was old, and far too big and worn out to be engaging in games with energetic children. But the environment had spurned something within her and she was eager to play with the young kids, chasing them around. Aemond, happy as he was to see his beloved dog so spirited, couldn’t help but stand and watch with his arms crossed in indignation and barely contained jealousy. Little Lucerys was exuberant, and he grabbed a stick off of the ground and shook it in front of Vhagar’s face, calling her over to him before he took off running. And thus began the chase. Giggling as he went, Lucerys carried the stick with him and ran through the woods surrounding the house. Soon enough almost all of the kids had joined in as they made their way through the trees, running behind Vhagar and unknowingly closer and closer to the edge. All but Helaena, who remained sitting beside her mother with her bottom lip between her teeth, unable to focus on anything besides the dark clouds gathering in the sky and the unsettling pit in her stomach.  

Aemond was furious by this point. They were all having fun with his dog, and yet they’d always turned away from any opportunity to play with him. That was his dog, they had no right to play with her. She would definitely be sore from running too much and then all she would want to do is sleep for the next week instead of spending time with him. Aemond ran quickly to catch up, not able to hear Helaena’s quiet calling for him past the sounds of his thumping feet and the wind as it picked up and rushed past him.  

It happened very quickly. Lucerys got tired from his running, and he threw the stick for Vhagar to catch it, unintentionally throwing it past the edge of the forest and into the previously concealed road. Aemond ran past the rest of the kids and broke through the trees, watching as his dog ran into the road, mouth open with her joyful pants as she went to retrieve the stick. He bent down to coax her back to him, holding his arms out to her and breathing a sigh of relief that her attention was on him again. And then he watched as she was crushed by a passing semi-truck, moving too quickly to even think about stopping in time.  

Aemond watched as the one shining light in his life was quickly snuffed out. The image of her crushed body was burned in his eyes. The sounds of the collision and the screeching brakes of the truck played on repeat in his ears to a deafening degree. The other kids caught up quickly, and their simultaneous screams and sobs drew the adults to the scene. Aemond simply remained in the same position with his arms still held out, frozen. Maybe if Alicent or one of the other adults had gotten there sooner, things would have ended differently. But she didn’t. No one did. Aemond didn’t want to look at his dog’s body as it lay on the road anymore, but he couldn’t move his eyes. He couldn’t move his neck to look away. All at once, the all-consuming emptiness and loneliness he had felt for most of his life returned, falling over him like a thick and suffocating blanket.  

Hot tears burned in his eyes, and he could feel them as they started moving down his cheeks, the salty droplets falling into his mouth, agape in horror. His chest was tight, so tight he felt himself wheezing, and his eyes blurred with his tears and the bloody image of his deceased friend. His heart felt like it was beating out of his chest and being squeezed in a vice all at once. She was gone, forever. He would never see her again, never play with her again. He was going to be alone again. There was nothing left. Nothing, nothing, nothing...The feelings were so crushing and overwhelming, and Aemond didn’t know what to do with himself or what to do with his hands as they shook before him. Aemond suddenly began scratching at his face, pulling at his hair and struggling to catch his breath. He couldn’t see it anymore, he couldn’t, the sight was too much for him... 

His scratching hands moved up to cover his eyes almost instinctually and his hands grasped around them for only a moment, shielding them from the sight before him. The relief was so short lived but significant that Aemond’s fingers moved of their own volition, pushing in and then grasping around the spherical shape of his left eye, digging in deeper and deeper until he could grab it firmly and pull—yank it until the pain finally pulled his gaze away from Vhagar’s body. Something animalistic and angry urged him to continue to push through the pain, pulling harder and harder until the eye was out of the socket and then giving one final tug to break it free from the nerves and muscles that once held it in place.  

Aemond’s screaming drew his mother to him, and she nearly collapsed at the sight before her. Her son, ever the quiet and sensitive child, was pulling his own eye from his head. She could feel the depth of her child’s screams in her own throat, in her own chest, so full of pain and devastation. She ran to him quickly, collapsing to kneel at his side and grabbing his hands to try and urge him to let go of his eye. But she had arrived too late, and the eye had already been torn so violently from its socket, the small thing nestled in her son’s tiny and shaking hand.  

“Aemond, my love, what have you done!”  

Alicent held onto him, shushing him as she had always done and rocking him in her arms. She held onto his other hand tightly as he kept trying to move it back up, towards his right eye this time. He meant to finish the job and remove his other eye, Alicent realized in horror. Aemond’s shrill screaming never ceased, and the piercing wails hurt her ears.  

His screaming hurt his own ears. But at least he wasn’t looking at Vhagar anymore. 

“Please, stop, stop, stop...” Alicent begged, shutting her own eyes and continuing to rock him as soothingly as she could, remembering all of the times that she had rocked him to comfort over the years. As a baby, after his first day of school, when he would trip and fall or hit his head. She feared that no amount of rocking could soothe what had been done this time. She feared it with every bone in her body as her rocking picked up in pace and tears fell down her cheeks.  

The rest of the family had caught up quickly, led to the site by the screams, save for Viserys who was still struggling with making his way through the trees with his cane and Rhaenyra and Daemon, who could be heard running through the trees from another direction. Helaena let out a scream as she broke through the tree line and then moved to cover her ears with her hands, muttering to herself quietly and shutting her eyes so tightly it must have hurt. “Can’t go back...ruined, ruined, ruined! What has been lost--” 

Alicent turned to Rhaenyra’s children at the rest of the family’s arrival, rage distorting her features as she shielded her son with her body and yelled in a futile attempt to be heard over his screams. “What happened! I demand to know what happened at once!” 

Rhaenyra’s face was one of horror as she finally caught up, followed by Daemon, and she knelt by her sons, quickly moving to Lucerys’s side with her hands brushing his dark curls from his sobbing face, “Luke, what happened? My sweet boy, what happened?” 

“W-we were—we were just playing...and I threw the stick...” a hiccup through tears, “and she ran out into the road— I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to mother I promise!” 

Jaceaerys nodded in affirmation, holding onto his younger brother’s shoulders. “We didn’t know we were so close to the road!” 

Viserys finally caught up, eyes only on Rhaenyra and her children and tactfully avoiding looking at his own son as he screamed in agony. “You shouldn’t have been anywhere near the road! You’re lucky no one got hurt!” 

“I didn’t know!” 

“It wasn’t his fault!” 

Baela and Rhaena held onto each other, nodding their heads along and echoing the boys’ explanations.  

“We didn’t know, we promise!” 

“Really, mother, it was an accident”, Aegon spoke up, his eyes darting from Alicent’s face to what he could see of Aemond.  

“We were just playing!” 

“It was just a game!” 

“Enough!”  

Overlapping voices were abruptly brought to an end by a devastated mother as she turned to Rhaenyra, “My son has lost his dog—his eye because you couldn’t watch your beast of a child!” 

“Alicent!” Viserys finally chose to look at his wife and son, but only to reprimand them and without an inkling of comfort or concern to spare. 

Rhaenyra stepped forward, shielding her own sons and baring her teeth in motherly rage towards Alicent, “Excuse me--” 

At the mention of Aemond’s eye, there was a simultaneous pause among the family as their attention was torn from Vhagar and the feud between Rhaenyra and Alicent. With Alicent shielding him, many of them had assumed Aemond’s crying to be solely from the devastation of losing his dog. They hadn’t seen the more gruesome truth.  

“His eye? What?” Rhaenyra finally moved forward enough to see the bloody scene, gasping at the sight, “Luke had nothing to do with any--” 

“The sight of it has driven him to madness!” 

“I don’t understand how this could happen, how could he have done this to himself?” Rhaenyra stuttered out, her eyes conveying her confusion. 

“Have you any idea what that dog meant to him!” Alicent roared, the crushing reality of what her son had lost setting in.  

Daemon’s voice broke through the chatter, calm and collected, as he stared down at Aemond. “They were playing, no one could have known it would end like this.” 

“Someone should have been watching them!” Viserys repeated, banging his cane on the ground for emphasis and looking around at the group, as if looking for someone to blame.  

“Do you expect these children to be under constant surveillance, then? Games of tag or fetch rarely result in bloodshed.” 

Daemon spoke up again, moving to stand in between Rhaenyra and Alicent and taking on an expression of nonchalance, seeming completely unphased by the situation as he continued.  

“This was a terrible accident, plain and simple. No one is responsible for the loss of the boy’s eye except for him.” 

Alicent could only gasp and stare at Daemon as she heard the words leaving his mouth, continuing to stroke Aemond’s hair and rock him gently. Alicent struggled to get out her next words as she looked around at her family, all of whom appeared to be agreeing with him.  

“But, the--” she shook her head in indignation, “this never would have happened if they had just left him alone!” They all thought her son mad. And she was sure she saw them looking at him with only pity, or even disgust. Alicent was desperate. Viserys hobbled up beside her, lowering his voice only slightly as he addressed her.  

“He needs help, Alicent.” 

By this point the pain had dulled into a sharp throbbing, and Aemond had finally stopped screaming, his throat raw. His own sobs continued to tear through him, but rather than be interested in the family quarrel, he found himself enraptured by something else. His own eye, nestled in the palm of his hand. 

The smell of it was what hit him first; the smell of the blood. He noticed the shape and feeling of it next, round and wet. Slimy. It reminded him of when he would eat grapes, peeling the delicate skins off of them with his teeth and then biting into the flesh— 

“Aemond, please we must get you to the hospital!” 

Alicent’s exclamations barely broke through his musings and the ringing in his ears as he continued looking at his eye. Aemond’s sobs lowered in volume as he remained frozen in his spot, looking at his lost eye with his remaining one. He wasn’t filled with disgust, or regret, or fear, or any of the other more logical feelings a boy who had just torn his own eye out should have been feeling. He was fascinated.  

Criston Cole came up suddenly and scooped Aemond up into his arms, Alicent rising with him and still holding onto his hand. Somehow, he ended up in the backseat of a car, lying down with his hands cradled to his chest, his mother and Criston in front, whispering harshly. At some point it had started raining, the light tapping of rain drops on the roof of the car making it somewhat harder for Aemond to pick up on their conversation.  

“You’ve no idea how bad it was before...” she glanced back at him, assuming he was unconscious, knocked out from the sheer pain and trauma of what he had just experienced. Alicent began crying, moving to hold her face in her blood-stained hands. “I’m going to lose my son again...he’s never going to be the same...” 

Tears bubbled up in Aemond’s eyes again as he listened to her. Or, more accurately, tears bubbled up in his eye. He only had one now, he reminded himself. Even as he listened to his mother sob, all Aemond could do was continue to stare down into his hand. The smell of his own blood was stuck in his nostrils, and he began to move the eye around in his left hand, rolling it around like a marble. It was so small, he thought. A buzzing began in his ears, and the tightness in his chest was ever present. Aemond slowly lifted the eye up to his nose, smelling the strong metallic smell of the blood and rather than react with disgust, he found that he just wanted more of it. More, more, more... The thought was so quick it’s still unclear to him how he decided to do what he did next. 

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, as he popped his own eyeball into his mouth. The taste was unlike anything he’d ever had before, sending adrenaline coursing through his veins and igniting a warmth in his chest, not unlike the one he had always experienced with Vhagar by his side. And the texture, though it initially had him reeling back, grew to be comforting as he continued to chew. It was still a part of him, after all. He was merely returning it, albeit in a different location than where it had resided before.  

The buzzing in his ears subsided, and his chest felt looser. Pain was still etched in his veins and on his skin, but with every chew he found himself a little bit calmer, his mind a little bit clearer. The rest of the day was a blur of scans and exams, doctors and nurses flitting in and out of his hospital room, with his mother holding onto his hand in every moment she could. Aemond was rushed into surgery when he was first brought in, in an attempt to save the optic nerve and to ensure that infection wouldn’t set in. It was quickly determined that the eye couldn’t have been attached, even if he hadn’t eaten it. The trauma to the socket and nerves was too great. The doctor gave a grim shake of her head when Alicent asked as she grabbed his hands and searched for the eye before he was put under for surgery. When she came up short, she stared at him for a moment and then shook her head as she kissed him on the forehead, possibly attributing the missing eye to him dropping it on the way to the car.  

Aemond did remember the hospital psychiatrist commending him for not crying as he lay in the hospital bed, the stitches on his eyelid fresh and already beginning to itch. “You’re very brave. You must be a very tough little boy.” He noticed the pity in her gaze before he chose to look down again at his clenching hands, picking at the dried blood crusted beneath his fingernails. The psychiatrist had been called over when it was discovered that the missing eye was the result of self-injury, and she tried numerous times to convince Alicent to allow them to admit him for the night for evaluation. Alicent adamantly refused them, insisting that Aemond would be better off at home, surrounded by people who loved him and that he had merely been upset at the loss of his dog. There was nothing more to it, and she was insulted at the insinuation.  

His mother was given information on local counselors, as well as physical therapists and support groups to assist him in the...adjustment. He would need to learn how to write and read with only one eye, and his other motor functions would be harder now, too. A lot of things would be harder now. Appointments were made for physical and psychological checkups, as well as fittings for a prosthetic eye in several months. By the time they returned home well into the night, Aemond felt numb and all he wanted to do was go to bed. He wasn’t entirely surprised that no one had waited up for him, not even his father. He had no welcoming party, no comforting hugs or well wishes. It had never been clearer to him than in that moment that he really only had his mother, as she helped him get ready for bed and she sat in the chair beside his bed all night, her warm hand holding onto his. In the following weeks she made sure that he took his antibiotics and pain medications, that he ate and got out of bed for more than a few minutes at a time. On more than one occasion, Aemond awoke in the middle of the night in pain, crying out for Vhagar and searching for her in the dark, his hands finding only the indented spot on his mattress in which she used to sleep beside him. His mother’s comforting embrace and her heavy-handedness with the pain medication sent him back to sleep relatively quickly, to his relief. 

Whereas the time before Vhagar had been vivid, the years remembered clearly as being a time of isolation and loneliness and each one a sharp and piercing reminder of his deficits, the next several years were mostly forgettable, a stretch of time in which he simply existed. No number of therapists or self-help books, provided to him by his mother, could help him. 

When he was younger, the loneliness Aemond experienced caused him a great amount of pain. He spent an endless amount of time analyzing himself, trying to figure out what was wrong with him and what he could do to fix himself. After he lost his eye, and he was further ostracized from his family and his peers, the loneliness grew into a kind of emptiness instead. An emptiness, that he learned, could only be filled or quelled by one thing. It started to make sense to him why people looked at him in fear; his appearance finally matched up to the unseen thing they’d always run away from.   

Aemond continued to think about the taste of his eye, the way he had felt after eating it, and the lingering curiosity gnawed at him. The sense of calm he’d felt and the brief comfort were hard to forget.

Aemond continued to harm himself. In the year following the loss of his eye, it wasn’t hard for him to find ways to illicit pain. He’d scratch at the stitches holding his eyelids together or rub his hand against them, pressing on the small round piece of plastic that had been placed in the socket until it was sore. He had to be more creative once the stitches were removed and a prosthetic eye was placed in the socket. He quickly returned to his familiar habits of scratching and hair pulling.  

But there was a difference now. Every time he scratched hard enough to draw blood, the smell pulled him back, and he’d find himself licking at his scratches, tasting the blood on his tongue. Soon enough the motivation changed, and his scratching moved from being one of habit to being a source of comfort and a reminder of what he had experienced in the backseat of that car. He found a way to comfort himself and he didn’t need anyone’s help in doing so. He would often chew at his fingers, pulling off small pieces of the skin surrounding his nails and holding them in his mouth, savoring the taste of his blood and the pleasant sting left behind. Though initially comforting, the relief he felt at these actions was short-lived, and nothing in comparison to how he had felt eating his eye or how he would feel once he progressed even further.  

It was after a particularly difficult day that these behaviors progressed to a level that changed everything, and perhaps set into motion the path towards his inevitable doom. After the incident with Vhagar and his eye, Alicent had used her influence as the wife of Viserys Targaryen to allow Aemond to complete most of his schoolwork from home with private tutors, away from the eyes of others. After a few years, she put her foot down, forcing Aemond to go back due to her concerns that he rarely left the house. She told him that he needed to be around others his own age, and that his self-isolation was causing more harm than good. He was a teenager, he needed to be out doing the things that teenagers did. Aemond had hardly enough energy to argue with her on the matter, and he felt he owed it to the one person who had stuck beside him to at least try.  

School had always been hard for him, but returning after his injury was a new challenge. The reactions of his classmates to his prosthetic eye, which was a dark sapphire blue color in contrast to his natural violet, and the overall drastic change in his appearance resulted in a particularly strong reaction. That was the first time that Aemond felt the desire to harm others, to rip the cruel smiles off of their faces; it would not be the last. Aemond stormed home, walking the same route that he and Vhagar used to take, heading straight for his bedroom and ignoring his mother’s concerned calls as he fought back tears. He jumped onto his bed, face down, punching the mattress and trying not to scream or cry. He moved then to bite on his own arm to keep from screaming, his teeth clamping down through his sleeve until he tasted blood, and he knew that he had punctured his skin. Even so, he kept going, the blood filling his mouth and he grabbed his sleeve and pulled it up quickly, clamping back down on his arm and groaning in satisfaction at the sensation and taste. It was a unique sensation. The combination of sharp pain and the blooming warmth in his chest was exhilarating and he wanted to keep going, keep biting, keep eating. 

Fortunately, for Aemond, he didn’t get much farther than the initial bite and the consumption of a small section of skin before he was interrupted by Helaena’s fist banging on his closed door. She uncharacteristically yelled out for him, first asking if he was okay before stuttering out a question, asking him if he could help her with something outside. Aemond snapped out of it, grabbing the bleeding wound on his arm and yelling out at her to leave him alone, jumping up from his bed and moving to his bathroom. The reflection in the mirror, of his face red and covered in his own blood, shocked him, and he could no longer deny that there was something truly and fundamentally wrong with him. This thought process was aided by his desire to do it again, and the realization that he had broken past some invisible barrier and was closer to feeling just as he did when he was ten, and therefore just as he did when he was with Vhagar.  

Aemond began wearing an eyepatch the very next day in the hopes that this would keep others from staring at him, with mixed results. He still received stares, of course, and the endless cacophony of whispers still followed him through the building. But he convinced himself that the reactions of his peers were less mocking than they had been previously, and more intimidated or even fearful. He didn't mind too much after a couple of weeks had passed and his classmates grew bored, seemingly content with leaving him alone as he wished.

In the halls of his school, Aemond did his best to blend in and simply get through each day. He was certainly no honor student, either, the subjects that the school taught rarely piquing his interest. But independently, Aemond was a student, of philosophy, of history. There was no problem or question that didn’t have an answer hiding somewhere among all of those books in his family’s library. He knew there was something different about him, and as he wrapped bandages around his arm that day, he decided to find out what that was. Aemond began to view his differences as less of a deficit and more of something he finally had to himself. The last time he had something like that was with Vhagar. Aemond’s affliction and newfound desires became somewhat of a new hobby, and the central focus of his life for years.  

The library in the Targaryen family home was vast, rivaling some university libraries. Aemond eagerly moved from shelf to shelf, poring through each of them in search of an answer. He read book after book on predatory animals, as well as fiction books about vampires and beasts and monsters that hid in the shadows of the darkness. Mental notes were made when he found a similarity or something else in common with the monsters: he also had a strong sense of smell, a keen sense of hearing, and he had always been quick to anger or tears, often imagining himself hurting those who had wronged him. Years were spent in search of a book that would hold the answer to Aemond’s affliction, without any luck. It appeared to him that he had made his way through most of the family library, and he still had no answers. 

He decided, in an act of desperation, to approach his father on the matter. He had no plans to share anything with him, especially about himself, but he figured that if anyone knew about the Targaryen family history, it would be his father. In the last years of his life Viserys spent much of his time in his study, attending to his political duties and hiding away from his family, or passed out in his chair under the influence of his many painkillers. Before his illnesses crept in and kept him in a near constant state of exhaustion, he would often eat dinner with the rest of the family or even tell the children stories. He was an enthusiastic historian when it came to talking about the Targaryens, and sometimes it seemed he told these stories more for himself than for their entertainment or benefit.

Aemond had heard the stories of Aegon and his sisters Visenya and Rhaenys, of their conquest and their founding of King’s Landing. He remembered the legends about the dragons and the sheer grandiosity of Old Valyria. However, Aemond had always gotten the sense that his father was hiding something when he told his stories. He would get excited, his speech speeding up, and then he would catch himself and shake his head, insisting that it was late and that the children were to head to bed soon. With the emergence of Aemond’s new desires and his endless searching, he found his curiosity sufficiently piqued at the memories of these stories, even more than it always had been, and he ached to learn more.  

On the night that Aemond approached him, Viserys was drowsy and barely conscious in his work chair after a day of meetings and paperwork. He hadn’t sat for supper with the rest of the family, and Aemond had scarcely seen him for more than a moment in almost two days. Aemond knocked on the large door, light and hesitant to begin with and then harder and harder until his father’s voice could be heard on the other side, sounding more than irritated at the intrusion. “Yes?” 

Aemond entered the room hesitantly, his eye raking over the room until it landed on his father, sitting by the fireplace with a pile of papers in his lap.  

“Father?” He resented how small his voice sounded.  

Viserys turned slowly, leaning forward in his chair only slightly and moving his head to the side until he noticed Aemond.  

“Oh, Aemond. What is it?” 

He fell back in his chair with a huff, turning to face the fire again. 

Aemond felt awkward and unwelcome in the crowded space. He sat uncomfortably on a couch near Viserys’s chair, careful not to disturb the various piles of books or files on the other half of the seat. When Aemond hadn’t started talking, too preoccupied with orienting himself in the room and trying to figure out how to broach the subject, Viserys turned to look at him again with an eyebrow arched. Aemond noticed his eye flit briefly to the artificial eye nestled in his left socket before he quickly turned back to the fire. He could have sworn he saw disgust in his eyes, and he found himself regretting not putting on his eyepatch before he came in. Despite the lump in his throat, he pushed on.  

“I was wondering if you could tell me more about...our family history. Old Valyria?” 

Viserys cocked his head to the side and adjusted himself slightly while setting his papers down by the side of the chair, his eyes studying Aemond as a small smile creeped up on one side of his mouth.  

“Well, there’s much to know. We could spend days talking about my family history.” 

Aemond flinched. His family history. Not theirs. Not Aemond’s.  

“Hmm.” He looked down at his lap, wringing his hands together anxiously. “I know, father. But I was wondering if you could tell me another story, like you used to. About Old Valyria? Do you know what the--” 

Viserys let out a deep breath, shaking his head and raking his hand over his face and effectively cutting Aemond off. “Not today.” He moved to stand, shakily, grabbing for his cane that had been resting against the chair. “Some other time, perhaps.”  

Aemond resolved to find something out; anything. He refused to let his father dismiss him so quickly, standing from the couch and stepping back in his father’s line of sight.  

“Do you know what the Targaryens did before they left Old Valyria? Did they do anything strange, or different?” 

Shock and irritation were evident on his face as Viserys surveyed Aemond, his eyebrows furrowed. He looked on at Aemond, for much longer than he ever had, his eyes boring endlessly into Aemond’s eye before running over the rest of his face. His tongue poked into his cheek, and he sighed before he responded. 

“The Valyrians, the Targaryens, were a vastly different people from the ones we know today. What they did, and what we know of it, is simply beyond our comprehension. It’s best to just leave it at that.” 

Aemond could only continue staring at his father’s face as he fought to understand his words. What did he mean by that? He shook his head, looking down at the ground and picking at the raw skin around his fingernails.  

“Why do you ask?” 

It may have merely been Aemond’s paranoia and unease ruling his mind, but the tone of his voice suggested that Viserys wasn’t truly asking, as much as he was trying to get a confession. Aemond feared that he knew about him, that he knew everything that he had ever done and everything that he wanted to do. He had to leave before he could figure it out. Aemond had never been very good at hiding his true feelings. He continued to stare down at the ground, avoiding his father’s eyes and feigning nonchalance. He fought at the urge to run away. 

“N-nothing. I was just curious.”  

Aemond couldn’t tell if his father was looking at him, his eye glued to the ground, running over the intricate patterns of the rug. He wanted, desperately, to flee from the room and this conversation. But his own damned respect for his father warned him to stay put until he was properly dismissed.  

“It’s been a long day, Aemond.”  

“I’m sorry. Thank you, father."

As Viserys began heading for his bathroom to ready himself for bed, Aemond nodded one last time before he turned to leave, with even more questions than he had to begin with.  

Feeling dejected, Aemond made his way to the door as quickly as he could without running, until a small pile of books on the top of one of Viserys’ bookshelves caught his eye. They were old, and dusty, but the spines held no title. Something told him to grab them for himself. For all he knew, they could be old journals or recipe books, and the exact opposite of what he needed or what could ever interest him. Still, he knew he couldn’t leave without them. With one last glance in his father’s direction to ensure he wasn’t looking, Aemond stood on his tip toes and grabbed the books, stacking them in his arms before exiting the depressing room.  

Once Aemond arrived back to his own room, he locked the door and dropped the books on his bed. At a closer inspection, they each had the Targaryen family crest, a dragon with three heads, and his fingers caught on the worn material as he ran his hands reverently over their covers. Aemond held no doubt, then, that he would find what he had been looking for in those books. His selfish father had simply been keeping them to himself. Aemond felt both relieved and overwhelmed at his discovery as he realized the challenges that lay head and soon enough, learning about the Targaryen family history became an obsession for him. He was smart, and he never really struggled academically in school, but it became difficult for him to focus on his schoolwork or anything else that wasn’t in those books. The truth was, that as smart as Aemond may be, he could barely make out the meaning of the words in the books. Many of the words were written in another language, he assumed Valyrian, and the rest were faded or scratched out, to begin with. Others seemed to be purposely written as riddles or puzzles. He felt as if they had been meant to confuse the angry teenaged boy that would find them, centuries later, who was simply trying to learn more about who he was. His ancestors were surely laughing themselves mad.  

There was something, some answer that lay in between the pages of those books that explained why Aemond was the way he was. He’d often toss and turn at night trying to solve the endless puzzles. One evening, after Aemond had refused supper and he stormed off into his corner of the library, some things finally began to make sense, like a switch had suddenly been flipped in his brain. From what Aemond could gather, he was not the only Targaryen with a fascination for blood; for flesh. The faded images that had previously made no sense to him fell together, depicting what looked like ceremonies or rituals. Aemond could still not make out why, why they were engaging in such ceremonies. Despite this, he found himself feeling remarkably less alone. He wasn’t a psychopath, as he had feared. Nor was he a freak of nature; he was a Targaryen.  

Aemond’s little discoveries served as crumbs that validated his existence and every sinful or disgusting thought he had ever had. For whatever reason, he seemed to be the only one still alive with this affliction. This was his heritage. He bore a curse that his ancestors had set into motion and that the generations before him had foolishly believed they had been rid of. Nonetheless, the Targaryens were powerful, curse or not. Aemond was powerful. Aemond’s bloodlust and hunger had rarely stretched beyond his own body, often when he felt upset. Though he sometimes found himself a little too fascinated by the smell some people had, the way their skin and flesh moved, thoughts about actually pursuing this violence were rare and not fully realized. Until the night of his nineteenth birthday. 

When Aemond grew tired of being cooped up in his bedroom or the library, or of walking around in the woods, he would often wander the streets of King’s Landing to clear his mind and simply observe the others around him. It made him feel a little less lonely, to be surrounded by all of these other people, even if they rarely paid him any mind.

It was a late night, after the bleak and unexciting celebration of his birthday. He never liked celebrating things like that with his family. He expected so little and still wound up disappointed every time. A walk by the pubs and bars always proved entertaining, the drunk patrons serving as the perfect distraction. One of them, walking by himself out of a small bar, stumbled near Aemond, scraping his knee. Aemond didn’t know this, however, and he reflexively moved to help the man up, who was laughing as he continued to trip and stumble even with Aemond holding onto his arm. The smell of alcohol was strong, making Aemond almost gag in response, until another scent took up space and filled him with a more pleasant sensation that pushed all thoughts or reason firmly to the back of his mind.  

It wasn’t out of the kindness of his heart that led him to offer to walk the man home, through the shadows of the dark alleyway. And it certainly wasn’t his kind, compassionate heart that made him sink his teeth into his neck, sneaking up from behind him and quickly clamping his hand over his mouth to muffle the sounds of his screams. It was the dark, animal, monster part of him. 

Aemond did feel guilty, after he finished. He couldn’t help himself when his own curiosity convinced him to look at the man’s wallet, searching for his ID and easily finding it, along with a couple of pictures of his loved ones and a ticket for a show he went to a couple of days ago, still crisp and new but beginning to crinkle around the edges from wear. Aemond was able to piece together small pieces of his victim’s life as he sat covered in his blood, still cloaked by the shadows of night. It was easier to think of the man, named William according to his ID, as being just a drunken degenerate when he was busy consuming his flesh. He realized, once he finished feasting, that this wasn’t the full truth. Aemond remained in that spot for an unknown amount of time, holding onto the pieces of this man’s life as his body went to work digesting the other, bloodier, pieces of him. Once William’s friends began looking for him, shouting out his name, “Will!”, Aemond had no choice but to run away from the scene.  

It wasn’t difficult for Aemond to return home, undetected, as his family had already retreated to their rooms for bed. He had a bit of a scare when his mother poked her head out of her room, checking on him as she heard him open his own bedroom door. Luckily for him, the hall was dark, and it concealed the stark splashes of dark red blood and viscera that covered his clothes and coated strands of his long white hair. He remained standing, half-in, half-out his doorway, his body angled away from her.  

“I just went for a walk.” 

“Are you alright? You sound different.” She moved in a way that suggested she was about to turn on the hall light, and Aemond was quick to stop her, biting out a quick response before diving into his room and feigning nonchalance as well as he could with so much adrenaline pumping through his veins. 

“I’m fine, mother. Go to bed.” 

Aemond got to work scrubbing the blood from his skin and hair in the shower, red swirls drifting down his skin and then down the drain. The guilt was strong to start, summoning tears from his eyes and making him feel slightly sick to his stomach. Beyond that, Aemond couldn’t ignore the other, more dominant, feeling that set his blood alight and made him feel satisfied. Physically, he’d never felt more full in his life. It was rare for him to finish a meal and feel as if he’d eaten enough. Most normal foods were indistinguishable from one another, and Aemond had always viewed eating as something he merely did out of necessity. He never had a favorite food, usually viewing it all as the same bland, unsatisfying mush that he needed to survive. Eating William was something else, the flavors of him sticking out to Aemond clearly, and memorized on his tongue. Aemond closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose as he remembered how he devoured the man. Fattier parts of him, like his thighs and parts of his stomach and chest, tasted richer and were greasier than parts of his arms or legs. Aemond savored those parts, and his stomach grumbled at the memory. 

The water began to turn cold with how long he’d been standing under it, and it awoke him like a harsh slap. It was disgusting for him to be looking at the crime he’d just committed so fondly, ignoring the humanity of the man he had killed. He tossed and turned for the rest of the night, the unfamiliar fullness in his stomach leaving him feeling comforted, and his guilt leaving him feeling restless.  

In the morning, even without a full night’s sleep, the difference in Aemond’s temperament was noticeable. He awoke several hours before he needed to, bounding into the sitting room where his mother sat with her tea and kissing her on the cheek with a greeting before he headed out to go on a run. There was a newfound energy, and purpose, in everything he did in the days following his crime. He had no trouble engaging in conversation with his mother, and even in talking to Helaena he found he had more patience for her endless riddles. He even found himself thinking she was some kind of hidden genius, her words reminding him more of poetic prose than mindless rambles. Aegon still got on his nerves, but less so, and he discovered it was easier to redirect him to other things than tell him for the hundredth time how annoying and stupid he was. 

Mentally, a war raged within him. Guilt. Pleasure. Satisfaction. Disgust. Anger. Should he turn himself in? He was a monster. But he felt so much better and stronger. That man wouldn’t have amounted to anything anyway. He was doing everyone a favor. But he didn’t know that; he couldn’t possibly. He looked like he was around Aegon’s age, and he was still so young. He wouldn’t go to any shows or concerts ever again. Was that a picture of his child in his wallet? A sibling? A niece? She would never see him again. His parents would never see him again. Unless they hardly saw him anyway, a burden to his family and a drunken fool. In which case, Aemond reasoned that he was doing them a favor. He hadn’t heard any reports of William’s body being found yet. No police officers had come to his door, demanding his presence for questioning. He had gotten away with it.  

Aemond felt happy, he felt strong. He saw the pleased look in his mother’s eyes when she was able to hold a conversation with him, the excited look in Helaena’s eyes when he listened intently as she talked about the bugs and insects she had been reading about, even as she often went off on tangents about their different traits or mating behaviors. Nor did he have to fake his interest and intrigue as he learned about the strange mating habits of praying mantises. He had even managed to strike up a conversation or two with some of his classmates. They seemed to like his dry sense of humor, and it felt different to be seen and appreciated, even for a short while. Over the course of several weeks, the guilt was pushed farther back in his mind as he justified his actions and a brighter, better version of himself emerged. This became even more apparent as his satisfaction and strength waned, returning to his previous self as William left his system.  

As much as he tried to deny it at first, Aemond knew why this was happening. And he was quickly able to deduce how he could solve this problem and return to the new and improved, energized, version of himself. He returned to the same street on King’s Landing in which William had met his cruel fate. The first couple of nights were a bust. He had a hard time finding the perfect victim, someone who was alone and enough of a degenerate to justify being eaten, and that still looked appetizing. Moving to other areas around the city proved more successful, and even more so when he lurked around later at night.  

He was especially proud of his second victim, an older man that Aemond had seen making crude comments to the other patrons of a local bar. He followed him out of the bar and across several blocks, until he felt they were properly concealed, and he slammed his skull into the pavement and began his feast. He didn’t taste as good as William had, but Aemond was proud of his choice, nonetheless. 

His third put up a fight. He was bigger than him and Aemond thought at one point that he was a goner, the man gaining the upper hand for only a moment before Aemond was able to flip him back onto his back and strangle him. Aemond took several months away from his hunting after that, as he waited for the scratches and bruises to heal, and for his confidence to build back up. There were others, some of them more memorable than the rest. Those that had IDs with them at the time of their death were remembered by Aemond, more out of necessity and to make it harder for any remains to be identified than with fondness. With each victim, it became easier for Aemond and his resolve strengthened. He felt like the man he was destined to be, a strong and worthy man. He was simply honoring his heritage and ridding the city of drunken fools in the process.  

Through all of this, the health of Viserys Targaryen worsened with each day.  

The last year before Viserys’s death was a significant period in which his rapidly deteriorating condition could no longer be ignored, and the family was forced to begin their preparations for his passing. Rhaenyra would often visit several times a month, alone or with only Daemon, whom she had since married a couple of years before in a rushed ceremony that had sent their father into a week-long bedrest from the sheer shock of the news. Aemond resented his sister’s visits for more than one reason.  

Aemond had always gotten the sense that Rhaenyra and Daemon had been looking at him strangely for most of his life, almost as if analyzing him. Alone or separately, Aemond felt uneasy with either of them nearby, always feeling as if they were preparing to act on a moment’s notice. Rhaenyra wasn’t nearly as bad when she was alone, sometimes even attempting to make polite conversation with him when the two were unfortunate enough to run into each other, but the tight line of her lips told the truth of her feelings toward him. Together, their watchful gazes were almost unbearable. Even more so after the loss of his eye. He remembered when he had heard them and his mother arguing in the hallway near his closed bedroom doors, the day after he had arrived back from the hospital. He didn’t know the full story of it, much of their argument muffled, but from what he gathered, Aemond’s act of violence towards himself caused concern amongst the family, and great pains were taken to keep this information out of the eye of the public. Rhaenyra and Daemon seemed to think Aemond would be better off elsewhere. Their main questions, which his mother had minimized, regarded where his eye had gone and what had compelled him to commit such a violent act against himself. Aemond had been seen carrying it to the car that would later take him to the hospital, and its sudden disappearance along with his change in behavior concerned them, markedly more than it seemed to concern his mother. He had never heard her yelling so loudly than on that day, her passionate defenses of him only further contributing to the existing division amongst the family. Aemond did his best to avoid both of them after that, heading out into the city or locking himself up in his bedroom until they left. Aemond seemed to spend more time out of the house than at home, with it becoming more and more crowded as his father neared death.  

Viserys wasn’t well enough to leave the home, so more than one doctor moved in and out of the house most days, carrying their medical bags and a permanent furrow in their brows. There was little to be done to improve the man’s worsening condition, Aemond overheard. All they could do was ease the pain he experienced in his final days. Before Otto, Aemond’s grandfather, officially took over for Viserys, he attempted to conduct his work from his bed, his employees carrying their briefcases and paperwork into the dank room to try and work on the many matters that had been piling up with every day. Rhaenyra, when she visited, would often join them, much to his grandfather’s displeasure. Aemond also couldn’t spend as much time with his mother as he was used to, as she was busy attending to Viserys in what she referred to as her “marital responsibility”, so he struggled to find a reason to be at home when he wasn’t just sleeping or cleaning himself up from another night in King’s Landing. The city saw an uptick in missing people in this time, Aemond was sure. His new hobby was a welcome distraction. Aemond could no longer avoid Rhaenyra or Daemon once his father finally passed.  

The flames of the rising conflict and disdain amongst the two factions of the Targaryen family had been stoked in the span of this time, only growing higher and higher with each year. Aemond had been apathetic in this area for most of his childhood, often finding himself bored and downright tired of it. There was an uptick in tension soon after he lost Vhagar and, subsequently, his eye. The issue of inheritance and whether or not Rhaenyra would take Viserys’s place over Aegon was only half of the story, the tensions grown even higher in their disagreements regarding the handling of Aemond’s accident.   

With the official announcement of his father’s death, Aemond found himself feeling conflicted and worried of what would come. It was hardly a surprise, the stench of death permeating nearly every inch of the house for months. This meant more than one thing for the family moving forward, however, and Aemond thought himself pragmatic enough to push aside his own personal feelings to remember how best to conduct himself once the family gathered once more. It had been ten years since the whole family had been together, and now more was at stake.  

Aemond had set out in the beginning of the day, as he was dressing for the funeral, to avoid his other family members as much as possible. He planned on leaving early and treating his sister and his nephews with the indifference he felt they deserved. He struggled with this, once everyone had arrived. Aemond initially took pleasure in the looks on his nephews' face when they saw him, after all those years had passed. What normally made him feel shame, now left him feeling imposing and tough, and he hoped that they felt regret for their actions and the slight that they showed the Targaryen family name merely by existing. He thought himself a threatening figure, wearing his eyepatch and standing at least a head taller than both of them.  

He struggled even more with maintaining his mask of indifference once actually at the funeral service and viewing the ease with which they all interacted with one another. The warmth, and love, was evident. He overheard their conversations as they shared memories with one another of his father, their grandfather, fondly remembering how kind and supportive he had always been with them. Aemond couldn’t do the same with his siblings, as they stood opposite them and coldly greeted guests. They had never had the privilege of visiting parks or going sledding with their father. Viserys had only ever read them bedtime stories a handful of times, at their mother’s request. They were greeted with nods or pats on the back from him every so often; their nephews always received warm hugs and greetings. It appeared that any remaining energy their father had left in his final years went towards his eldest daughter and her children, rationed out to those he viewed as priority. Anger simmered within Aemond and only built as the day went on.  

The end of the funeral service left the family face-to-face, and it was agreed that they would all meet at Viserys’s favorite upscale restaurant to discuss more official matters. A private dining room and dinner had been prepared for them at their arrival. The family sat around the large table, eating silently in the tense atmosphere. The presence of his estranged family squashed Aemond’s already nonexistent appetite, and he merely sat and observed as everyone else ate awkwardly. The scene reminded him of that day, years ago after Laena’s funeral, when the family sat around in the yard and danced around the tension. He hadn’t cared then about the leading cause of the tension, the succession. Now he held a clear allegiance, and the division was clearer to him than ever before. 

Many an evening had been spent sitting beside his mother, listening to her rant and rave over Rhaenyra and her illegitimate sons. She swore that this brought shame to the family, and that any inheritance she had been given was soiled with her rumored infidelity. She believed that this should have resulted in Rhaenyra’s inheritance being passed over to Aegon, Viserys’s eldest son. Aemond couldn’t help but agree with her, though it wasn’t necessarily a conscious or fully educated decision. Aemond had always been close with his mother, but he grew even closer with her in the years following the loss of Vhagar and his eye. She had been the only one to truly defend him; to look out for him and see him beyond his moodiness and outward appearance. Aemond grew protective of his mother, and he felt he had an obligation to defend her and her beliefs. Rhaenyra, and her children, were a threat to his family and he couldn’t allow them to spread their shame and sully the name of the family. Additionally, Aemond felt guilty for how distant he had grown from his mother within the past year or so, after he began exploring the truth of his affliction. Though he knew this was necessary to protect her, he felt as if he had betrayed her and more or less spit in the face of her loyalty all these years by hiding such a central part of himself. He would stand with her in any way that he had to.  

Finally, after what seemed like hours of only silverware clanging on plates and hushed whispers, Rhaenyra stood from her seat, a solemn look on her face and a glass in her hand. Aemond sat up even straighter in his seat, sparing a glance towards his nephews and preparing himself. Not only was the matter of succession in question, but other important matters, such as Viserys’s final will and testament and the distribution of his belongings and properties were also to be discussed. 

“I would like to say a few words, about my father.”

Aemond met his mother’s eyes, nodding to her in a show of support before he looked back at Rhaenyra and tried to make out her next move. 

“My father was a kind and intelligent man. He was a fantastic brother,” Rhaenyra paused as she looked towards Daemon, “husband,” a brief but lingering glance at Alicent, “father, and grandfather to my children.”  

Aemond tasted blood as he bit the inside of his cheek and tried to not release the bitter laugh growing inside of him. He arched his neck to stare up at the ceiling and braced himself, his nails digging into the flesh of his thigh as he narrowly held onto his composure. Of course, Rhaenyra would hold such favorable insights into their father’s character. She never had to beg for his love as he and his siblings had.  

“He loved his family, and he always acted in what he believed were the family’s best interests.” 

Rhaenyra took a shuddering breath and looked down, before straightening her shoulders and continuing, moving her eyes around the table as she spoke. Aemond looked away when she made her way to his side of the table. 

“He taught me much of what I know today, and I feel proud and truly honored to follow in his footsteps as his official successor.”  

At this, both Otto and Alicent visibly stiffened, shifting in their seats and looking at one another. Aemond tried to maintain his composure, readying himself once he noticed the anxiety on his mother’s face.  

“With his passing, my family and I will soon be moving here, to King’s Landing.” 

Alicent’s head turned then to look up at Rhaenyra, and her throat bobbed as she placed her fork down and leveled her with a shocked expression. “You mean to kick us out?” 

Aemond’s grip tightened on his thigh as he watched his mother and sister merely stare at each other, silent words exchanged as an array of emotions moved on both of their faces. 

“Of course not. But do you truly believe I can take my father’s place from Dragonstone?” 

Alicent was speechless, looking at Rhaenyra with wide eyes and an expression that resembled a question, perhaps begging for mercy or kindness.

Rhaenyra looked away as she cleared her throat. “You are welcome to stay.” Daemon’s head snapped up towards his wife, his eyebrows raised in question. “But I welcome you to view this as permission to finally leave, to live your own life. You have nothing else holding you here, and with your children all grown, I believe it is time for you all to…move on.” 

Silence took hold of the family for another moment, and Aemond even found himself considering her words. Without his father and his work holding Aemond and the rest of his family there, there truly was nothing else keeping them in King’s Landing. He would want to be near his mother and Helaena, of course, but there were certainly better options than the city in which he grew up. He didn’t necessarily hold the most positive memories of that place. Alicent was not satisfied, however.  

“And if Aegon contests this?”  

“Mother--”  

Aegon finally spoke up from where he sat, curled up in his seat with a glass in his hand. It was written clearly on his face: he didn’t want this.  

“Rhaenyra, with all due respect, it should not come as a shock to you that some believe my son to be more deserving of this position.”  

All previous warmth or goodwill appeared to vanish as Rhaenyra clenched her jaw and she continued staring at Alicent, her nostrils flaring.  

“It was my brother’s wish that his daughter take his place after his passing. This has been the case since she was but eighteen years old, your drunken son doesn’t change any of that.”  

Daemon’s voice rose as he leveled both Alicent and Otto with his searing gaze. Aegon, sitting only several seats away, cleared his throat and looked down, in an effort to conceal the red creeping onto his face. Truthfully, Aemond never cared for his brother very much. He could not fault the man for calling Aegon a drunk. But the rising tension and Aemond’s loyalty to his family urged him to his feet as his eye met Daemon’s full force.  

For several moments the rest of the room faded away as the two men silently battled, two eyes meeting one in a war of wills. Daemon remained sitting in a relaxed position and he cocked his head to the side slightly, amusement dancing in his eyes briefly until something else flashed in them, something that spoke of recognition. The same feeling flitted through Aemond, and all at once the urge to lunge across the table and eliminate Daemon from existence began gnawing at him. Aemond couldn’t figure out why, but he was overcome with the distinct realization that Daemon was a threat; to his family, to him, to even others, perhaps. His nose crinkled in disgust and his fists clenched almost instinctually.  

“Enough of this!”  

Alicent and Rhaenyra spoke simultaneously, both of them on their feet and addressing their family. 

“If Aegon chooses to contest this, he has the right to do so. But I feel I must remind you that my father’s will has been set in stone for nearly fifteen years, and that I have all the support, and precedent, to back my claim.” 

Rhaenyra took a deep breath and ran her hands over her dress, gathering herself. Alicent gave one small nod of her head before she sat back down, avoiding Rhaenyra’s eyes and pursing her lips in anger.  

“Until then, we have other matters to discuss. If anyone here feels like they are unable to control themselves,” a glance around the table, lingering on both Aemond and Daemon, “I must ask them to leave at once.” 

Rhaenyra slowly lowered herself back down into her seat, her hand on the swell of her stomach as she cleared her throat once more and grabbed the envelope containing Viserys’s will. Aemond heard none of it. He could hear the sound of his heart beating in his ears, and his jaw began to ache with how hard he was clenching his teeth. He had to leave, to be free of this situation, and the sickly-sweet smell of what he assumed to be the food mingling with the free-flowing wine and flower arrangements. Aemond took one more steadying breath before he slowly made his way over to his mother, resting his hand on her shoulder gently.  

“I’ll see you back at home.” 

She grabbed his hand, still resting on her shoulder, her wide brown eyes looking up at him in worry. “Are you alright, my love?” 

Aemond took another deep breath, feeling the tightness in his chest, and nodded slightly. “Yes, mother. Just a headache.” 

Alicent nodded, but the wrinkle in between her brows persisted as she continued to stare at her son, the image of a man on the brink of madness. 

It took more strength than Aemond felt capable of in that moment, and he felt as if his teeth were seconds away from shattering as they ground together, but he nodded once more, attempting to assure his mother.  

“I’m okay, I promise.” 

Just as he was making his way to the exit, Aemond felt someone grab his right arm, tightly and roughly, with nails digging through his shirt and into his skin. Helaena stood beside Aemond, lavender eyes wide and shiny as she looked up at him. She had spent much of the night sitting quietly in her seat, rarely engaging with anyone or anything aside from the small trinket she often held in her hand. But in that moment, she appeared as if she had seen a ghost.  

“What is it, Hel?” 

Helaena continued to stare up at him, almost through him, her chin quivering and lips shaking, opening and closing only slightly, as if words were fighting to make their way out. Aemond clenched his fists at his side, finding his patience tested.  

Helaena began moving her head frantically back and forth, looking at Aemond and then back in the direction of the dining room in which the rest of the family remained.  

“Do you need to go home? Helaena if you need someth--” 

“What has been done cannot be undone. Do not let the rain hold you, brother.” She blurted out, voice shaking and barely audible over the noise of the restaurant.

Aemond started to shake his head, unable to comprehend her words in his frazzled state.  

“Do not allow the blood to turn your mind,” her grip tightened as she pleaded with him, “what has been lost can never be returned, no matter the sorrow.” 

The tears continued running down her face even as she loosened her grip and her shaking ceased, and the fog that had been present in her eyes dissipated. She gave him a small smile and embraced him in a hug, a quiet “goodbye” whispered in his ear before she turned and made her way back to the dining room, walking slowly with her flowy black dress, almost appearing as if she was floating. Aemond assumed, at the time, that she had one of her episodes again, the gathering triggering her as a reminder of the day he had removed his own eye. He was not unaware of the effect that his actions had on his family, his sister in particular. Aemond let out another heavy sigh, his shoulders sagging as the exhaustion and guilt weighed on his bones.  

Once Aemond left the restaurant and he stepped out into the cool night air and the soft drizzle of the beginning rain, he felt his nerves loosen only slightly. He needed to leave that place, but he knew he couldn’t go right back home, he was too restless for that. Aemond got into his car, his hair already wet and a light sheen of sweat on his brow, and he set on a path further into King’s Landing. Surely there would be some drunks out tonight, even with the rain. It wouldn’t be hard to find some kind of outlet after the day he’d had.  

The rain began to pick up, falling in thick sheets before him. Despite the blood pumping through his veins and the pure adrenaline he felt, Aemond’s hands gripped the wheel tightly as he slowed down and squinted his eye. Aemond had always prided himself on his cautious driving, as this was something he had to maintain if he was to prove to his mother he could drive himself around safely, something she was worried about with him only having one eye. When the rain became so heavy and thick that he grew worried about visibility, Aemond finally relented and decided to pull over for a moment, to catch his breath and try to calm himself down until the rain let up.

The car had been stalled for only five minutes or so when he spotted another car approaching through the rearview mirror, out of the corner of his eye. The car slowed as it approached, and Aemond prepared to wave them on, assuming they were slowing to check on him, until he noticed who was driving. He met Luke’s eyes for only a moment before he continued driving down the road, moving farther and farther from him with every second that passed. Any de-escalation of his emotions that Aemond had accomplished since pulling over vanished instantly, and he felt himself grow angry again, unexplainably so.  

Aemond watched as the small car continued down the road. He tried to reason with himself, to convince himself that the driver had only looked like Luke. Why would he be driving by himself? He had been back at the restaurant only minutes ago. Even with the rain pouring down and distorting the image in front of him he was able to make out the familiar bright blue, and then there was no mistaking who had been driving the car. Aemond began accelerating before he even realized what he was doing, and he had caught up in no time. And then the front of his car collided with the back of Luke’s, and Luke began swerving around on the road, fighting the slick pavement and the force from the collision.

With the additional rain, the roads were slick, and no matter how Luke fought with the steering wheel, the car swerved directly into the grass, tearing through it until the front of his car crashed directly into a telephone pole, effectively totaling his car and stranding him on that empty road with Aemond.  

In a brief moment of clarity, Aemond felt guilty, and he realized his mistake, feeling worried about his nephew and knowing that he would never hear the end of it if something seriously bad had happened to him. Aemond pulled over on the side of the road next to Luke’s crashed car, and he jogged over to him, prepared to help him out of the car. Fortunately, Luke hadn’t been seriously harmed. He was still conscious, and his responsiveness seemed fine as he raised his head quickly when he saw someone approaching him. Unfortunately, a small cut on his forehead was bleeding, a line of blood dripping down his face. Some glass from the windshield had left behind cuts on his arms as well, staining his blue dress shirt and filling the air with the smell of his blood. The smell of something else, Aemond assumed his fear or sweat, mingled with the smell of blood and rain, thick in the air.  

Luke gasped when he realized it was Aemond that had approached him, and anger was clear on his face, “Aemond, what the fuck? You could have killed me!” 

The words sounded muffled to Aemond, a persistent buzzing in his ears and the soft sound of a jumping heartbeat.  

“W-why are you out?” Aemond asked flatly, the accumulating saliva in his mouth distracting him and causing his own words to come out sounding choked. He swallowed. Why are you here, in the exactly wrong place and wrong time? 

“What?” It soon became clear that Luke was injured beyond his superficial cuts, possibly with a concussion. He shook his head and then resumed talking, his words slow and stilted as if he was struggling to form his thoughts clearly. He started to rub his face, his hands catching the blood running down his face and smearing it. Aemond could only stare, the growing lump in his throat bobbing with every breath, with every heartbeat. 

“Joffrey needed his medicine, he forgot it back at the house and, um,” Luke let out a shuddering breath as his shaking hands continued to cradle his face, “I offered to grab it, since my mom was busy with--” 

He stopped to take a deep and shaking breath and then started trying to open his door, moving to get out of the car and stand. But he struggled to grab onto the door handle, and as soon as he began to rise out of his seat, he quickly fell back, his hand flying back to his head as he winced in pain.  

“Can you get my mom? Oh, I just got my license! She’s never gonna let me drive again--” 

It didn’t matter; none of it did. Aemond shook his head slowly, almost imperceptibly, as Luke continued talking and then he began to open the car door slowly, his eye on Luke, scanning and focused on the blood running down his face. And then he was overcome. He started by slamming Luke’s head back into the steering wheel, knocking him unconscious in one last show of mercy, before his frenzy officially began. 

To say that Aemond didn’t know what he was doing and what the consequences would be, as he tore through Luke’s body, would be a blatant lie. He knew, he just couldn’t bring himself to care. He thought of the obvious preference his father had always had for Rhaenyra and her children, when he had always treated his other children as burdens. He thought of how devastated he had been after Luke had insisted on playing that stupid game, leading his beloved dog onto the road. The pain of losing her, and the following pain of him clawing out his own eye at the sight. Aemond realized in that short moment, only minutes before, when he had decided to push down on the gas pedal that he blamed Luke for all of it, and he always had. All those years spent learning how to write and read and be with only one eye. All of those years spent in isolation, as his peers and even his own family looked at him as if he was a monster. Aemond had blamed himself, in the past. He had considered himself stupid and responsible for what he had done. It was Luke’s fault, after all. He was the cause of Aemond’s pain. And eating him felt like retribution. This act of violence had felt like everything he needed, in that moment. He felt satisfied, and like something that had been missing had finally been replaced. Justice had been served.  

It’s a wonder that no other cars passed during that time, as Aemond very publicly consumed his nephew on the side of the road, his own car headlights illuminating the scene. After an unknown amount of time, he finally slowed down, feeling sated and less frenzied. The sound of the rain as it hit the pavement and drummed on the car returned to his ears, clearer to him than it had been before. His eye became more attuned to his surroundings, and he noticed as the blood dripped down from the car and onto the grass, watching it disappear into the ground. With the reality of the situation growing clearer by the second, Aemond slowly lifted his head up to look at what used to be his nephew. He was now unrecognizable, a corpse slumped over in the front seat of the car. There would be no mistaking what had happened to him, for no ordinary car accident could have ever resulted in such mutilation. Aemond jumped up from the ground, trying in vain to brush off the blood and viscera on his clothes as he rushed back to his own car, strapping in and accelerating so quickly that the wheels squealed, and he headed back in the direction of the house.  

Aemond was speeding, all caution thrown out the window. Adrenaline pumped through his veins, sharp and almost painfully. There was no coming back from this. No redemption to be found or groveled for. Luke was doomed from the moment he left the restaurant, and Aemond was doomed from the moment he saw him on the road. Or perhaps he had always been doomed, from the moment he was born.  

Pieces of the boy threatened to make their way back up and out of his mouth, and Aemond felt dizzy and lightheaded at the reality of his situation as he finally pulled into the driveway in front of his home. He threw himself out of the car, kneeling down on the ground and bracing himself on the open door. He started pushing lightly on his stomach in a futile attempt to comfort himself, to ease the strange feeling in his gut. But it was no use. 

“Oh...” his voice shook, and he breathed out repeatedly, trying to take deep breaths and remembering the breathing exercises he had learned in one of his many therapy sessions over the years. He started to shake his head, the exercises not doing much of anything for him aside from making the smell of Luke on his hands, clothes, and in his mouth more apparent.  

“No, no, no...” 

Aemond’s knees hit the rough surface of the driveway, and he leaned over and nearly collapsed, moving to press his forehead onto the ground, the cold and moist surface soothing him but only so much. He started by beating the ground beside him, his own fresh blood mixing with the old and sticky blood from Luke. And then his fist found his own head, and fists turned into pulling and grasping hands, yanking at his scalp.  

“You fucking...you stupid...I hate you I hate you I hate you!” 

Aemond’s fists beat on his own head with every declaration of self-hatred and disgust. Tears began running down his face and falling onto the driveway, mixing with the blood and rain as the rain washed him of the evidence from his crime. Gasping for breath, Aemond lay there punishing himself, his own self-hatred manifesting itself in the blood on his hands, tears on his cheeks and the vomit threatening to rise out of his throat.  

He remained on the driveway, laying there and picking at his skin or his scalp until the rain came to a complete stop, and he was left in silence. The faint sounds of police sirens could be heard, growing in volume with every moment. They found the car. They found what remained of Luke’s body. Aemond struggled to stand at first, his legs shaking and his head swimming as he grew to his full height. He had to leave, he had to get out of this city, this country, away from Rhaenyra, Daemon, his mother...Aemond held back more tears as he thought of leaving her forever. But he couldn’t allow himself to get caught up in that sentimentality, or that would surely be the thing that led to his capture. 

With a shaking breath, Aemond crashed into the house, heading straight for his bedroom to strip off his soiled clothing and grab what he could. He went to the library next, grabbing a couple of books off of his desk, books he had been reading before this mess. And then he went to Viserys’s old bedroom, his eye on the large wardrobe on the other side of the room. Bloodied hands pulled each and every drawer out frantically until they landed on his father’s stashed cash, pulling out wads of cash and stuffing them into the pockets of his coat. 

He fought against images of what could happen to him if he was found before he could escape. He could fight off the police, or even try to pay them off to look the other way as he made his way out of King’s Landing. However, if Rhaenyra found him first, she would know what he had done the moment she laid eyes on him. She and Daemon could never be as forgiving or easy to bribe as a police officer. They would make Aemond suffer. Daemon would make Aemond suffer, he was sure of it. He tried to banish the thoughts from his mind as he made his way through the house with another rough fist to his head. He needed to focus.  

Aemond was back out of the house in minutes, throwing his bag into the back seat of the car and taking one last look at his childhood home, the home in which he would never return. He couldn’t; not anymore. If Aemond had any hope of surviving Daemon’s ire, he needed to leave this place, and fast. He would need to head back in the direction that he came from, to get to the airport.  

Aemond passed the scene on his way there, slowing down to make his way around all of the police cars and an ambulance, the flashing of the lights causing little sparks of light to float around in his eye, making it harder for him to see. Despite this, the car behind him, slowing down and stopping as close as it could to Luke’s destroyed car, was unmistakable as belonging to his half-sister. He recognized it from all of the times that he had seen it pull into the driveway, the way the sight would often make his stomach hurt. He wondered if she recognized his car, if she noticed that he was in front of her and that her son’s murderer was so close. Watching her through his rear mirror as he continued his retreat, it became clear that she didn’t care, that nothing else mattered or was visible to her in pursuit of her son. He saw as she ran out of her car, followed by Daemon, towards the scene of the crime. The image of her collapsing on the road at the sight of the covered stretcher, stained with splotches of red, was the last thing he saw as he made his way towards the airport and out of King’s Landing. There was no going back now.  

Thanks for reading!

Thoughts and comments are always appreciated :)

[corviids]

What were Aemond's thoughts the moment when he first saw Aenys and Saera? We see Luke and Rhaenyra's pov and how he was nervous but I really would like to see his first thought process at becoming a parent for the first time like, it finally becomes real to him now that the babies are there and not just knowing that he will have them, but actual tiny humans who are half him and half lucerys.

aemond’s first thought is basically “holy shit what the fuck”

his second thought is “they are so small”.

aemond’s feelings/thoughts when and after the twins were born is something i want to explore in a future chapter because giving insight into aemond is both fun to write and something i don’t do enough lol.

what i like about aemond is that, for all his tough exterior he tries to portray, he’s just as scared and immature as luke is but in a different way. aemond is used to responsibility but this is completely different than babysitting aegon when he’s drunk or doing whatever otto or his mom tells him. aemond basically perceived himself as doing a lot more than he actually was prior to his kids being born. their birth is the first time he’s hit with real responsibility — the realization that he is now responsible for the life and protection of two little people hits him like a ton of bricks. aemond loves his kids from the moment he first holds them, but he doesn’t really know how to process that love. he can yap about duty and honor all he wants but he didn’t understand the gravity of his new life until that moment.

aemond is basically an adultified child while luke is a child forced into an adults role and now they’ve got two little ones to look after.

[maedhrus]

*pesters you like a cat prodding at a glass of water bc i luv u* 2, 7, 15, 25 & 31 for the fic writer ask game 😘

similar to a cat i am batting at this ask with love and affection! 💕

2. do you plan each chapter ahead or write as you go?

in my early fic-writing days of 2017/2018 i had concepts which i felt were best suited to multi-chapter works but, once i got writing, i either lost momentum/enthusiasm/didn’t have a solid plan or structure, so i’ve kept to oneshots and, as part of this, i tend more to write as i go. however, sometimes for a particular concept i have a strong idea of a couple of key scenes so will write them out briefly first before i return and deal with them sequentially

7. how do you choose which pov to write from?

it’s usually sometimes i either feel a particular pov is the one best suited to a particular fic or the fic exists because i want to get in a particular character’s headspace. like, in maternal instincts, i wanted to look at a genderqueer thomas specifically so had to do it from his pov (which was fun!), then in he has stood the test, jirv’s dead when the fic starts, so it similarly had to be from malcolm’s pov. though, i have noticed that, despite my love for him, i haven’t published a fic that centres on ned’s pov so i’m making a direct effort to rectify that!

15. how do you write smut scenes? do you get visual or detailed? how important is it to be realistic?

for me it comes down to what i like reading in smut! i think it’s hot when specifics like body sweat/hair/muscle aches are described so i always try and include at least some of that. generally, i think as a writer i tend to prioritise dialogue so i always include some sort of dirty talk. in terms of realism, i think it can be hot to get into the specifics of stretches/aches, especially when writing about penetrative sex; i’m also a convert to the inherent sexiness of bad/mid sex so in terms of that (i.e. moments of discomfort, first times, being sore afterwards) i like writing in. but on the whole i don’t really get bogged down with realism in regard to, like, good bdsm practice or the use of condoms/other contraceptives. also i write a good bit of breeding kink so don’t usually highlight birth control there! also i don’t pay that much mind to types of lube in smut fic. is spit ideal? no. is it sexy? very!

25. what fic do you wish you got more of a response on?

all of them. i’m gagging for validation and praise. but seriously, probably scenes from a marriage i think? i put a lot of work into the whole maternal instincts series and sfam has the misfortunate of being written a good bit later on the other two, but it’s also Way more substantive, i think, than hunger pains which is more popular. i also have a couple of really new terror fics, shoulder to tender shoulder and he has stood the test, but they’re only a week old so it’s probably not fair to compare them with stuff i’ve had out for longer. there’s a couple of other fics i’ve written for the silmarillion fandom but i think my terror fics are better written? probably because they’re newer. oh! also borne through the clouds, for any hotd enjoyers. i wanted to do a bit of an introspective piece for helaena and her grief, focusing on her bond with dreamfyre but, especially considering my other two hotd works, the girlies did Not like it as much! possibly because it focused on helaena and not aemond but what can you do

31. do you start with the characters or the plot when writing

probably the characters i think? i usually have a scene or an exchange i see very vividly that i write down and go from there and, while it usually revolves around a particular au/plot/conflict, i think i tend to prioritise the characters in fic because i enjoy writing dialogue and examining dynamics/relationship

[exitpursuedbyavulcan]

“When her breathing finally settled, and she drifted off to sleep, Aemond closed his eyes, tucked his face into her hair, and prayed he dreamt of a world where he had slain Alys the moment he first saw her.” And of course Alys is a villain who Aemond hates once again and the evil, antagonist who gets in the way of him and his angelic, kind sister-wife….not judging anyone’s tastes but wow is this trope popular 😭 This fandom really hates Alys Rivers as his love interest lmao.

Just to clarify, this portion of the chapter is from Aemond's POV - my preferred writing style is third person limited omnicient. So this particular line is Aemond projecting all of his rage and shame and guilt onto Alys to help make himself feel better, like the stupid idiot he is.

This isn't me stating my own opinions or bashing Alys in any way. I have nothing against Alysmond, as I've said many times before. She's just a great character to play with to make situations like this, and we all know the fun thing about fanfiction is putting characters in situations!

[lemonhemlock]

That anon does have a point when saying that lots of Aemond x OC fics (especially where the OC is a daughter of Rhaenyra) use some of the same plot points for their made up character. For example they will have their OC, instead of Luke (sometimes he will not exist at all in the fics and she takes his place), be the one who takes Aemond's eye which is even more startling when, as an adult, he will hopelessly fall in love with OC, is ready to sacrifice everything, abandon his family and switch sides just to marry her something that will almost never happen in the opposite case. While yes, Aemond developing an obsession with the person who took his eye is very normal, falling in love is a totally different thing and seems forced and just…unrealistic? And it's very weird when you see team black stans complaining from time to time about the amount of Aemond fics on AO3 paired with a daughter of Rhaenyra's falling in love with him and betraying her side when 99% of the same fics are written by other team black fans and have Aemond doing the switching sides thing lmao.

Of course people are free to write whatever they want about fictional characters, but after a while these type of fics are quite tiring since they're following the same plot points and tropes, more or less: she takes his eye or defends her brother doing the same without even trying to understand Aemond's POV, is either a Strong or Daemon's bastard masquerading as a trueborn Velaryon, rides Vermithor or Cannibal and knows how to control them unlike Aemond, behaves and sounds like a modern day feminist or is a girlboss who, unlike all the other ladies, knows how to fight using a sword and so on while Aemond behaves like a dumb simp all the time and is constantly villainized by the narrative (as well as most of the commentators) for being a misogynist who hates seeing women in power because why is he not swearing allegiance to his half-sister in two seconds????!!! Not to mention that in most of those fics the greens are villainized to the point where they seem like cartoon characters, especially Alicent who is always characterized as the worst mother ever who doesn't love her children at all or as a religious extremist. I've had to quit reading some precisely because of reasons like these despite them being popular and amongst the fics that were very well written otherwise. Nowadays if I really want to read an Aemond/OC fic (or an Aegon one) I'd probably search and choose one in which the OC is a lady from some random house…at least with these ones you have a lesser chance of being disappointed down the road if you're a green fan.

oh definitely the aemond x oc fics really started to get very derivative after a couple of months and the template you provided is really spot-on. but those traitor!aemond fics (where luke is replaced by another black-aligned OC) were never really written by greens anyway, so it's funny that anon thought to complain about that in the askbox of a green account :)) i also noped out of quite a few fics when they started with the alicent-bashing, i just don't have the patience for that & it was rarely even nuanced criticism anyway, at least not in my travels

i don't really know what the state of the nation is nowadays, if lucemonds really discovered body horrror, but at the time i was complaining about it, their dead doves were, at most, ridiculous dungeon sex slave fics that would be on par, comedic-wise, with Unhinged by Vera Valentine or Stuffed by the Were-Turkey by Tate McKirk. and, like, good for you if you enjoy the silliness of it, bc it's never really that serious, but, equally, be aware that people are going to poke some lighthearted fun at you for it

the thing about lucemond is that, while there is definitely basis in the enemies-to-lovers trope or the idea of obsessing over your tormentor, at the end of the day they have to be honest with themselves and admit that they started shipping it after they watched hotd. it's an entirely show thing, no one shipped those two when only Fire & Blood existed. and, say what you will, but there is no shipping subtext in the show about this either, PLUS the visual discrepancy between the actors' ages makes it really not secksual at all. like, that is clearly a grown man and a barely pubescent teenager, there is no "story chemistry" to speak of :)) and i'm not even talking about the squeamish implications of that taboo topic, but there is 0 such <chemistry> or buildup in the text of FB and there is 0 in the media text of the two hotd episodes where both of them appear. not from the part of the actors and not from the part of the technical crew that filmed and edited it. i would love for someone to point out at least 1 such frame that indicated lust or longing or some kind of repressed romantic feeling. so it's only natural people are treating it as some kind of crackship.

anyway it's funny people are still in the grips of lucemond more than one year on. by all means do what you want, but, man, you gotta make some allowances for the goofiness of it all :))

[my-owl-baby]

Hello! Welcome. I only write here for fun nothing more I enjoy writing a lot, especially my favorite characters I'm head over heels for.

(You can follow me on @my-owl-babyfic as well for update on stories if you like)

I do write 18+ (don't read them if you are a minor!!) writing and fluff as well.

Request are; open

Requests rules

I will write about any character you desire to be

I do write fluff and smut if either of those you want do request it or non then it will be fine.

I only write in female prospective (2nd and 3rd povs)

I won't do underage of 17 or lower any character 18 or order will be accepted.

I will try to get to any requests of course! But I also have some stories I would like to release as well.

Please don't give full details on what you want (only ask for prompt or idea as such)

Don't rush me when I try to write it takes time for me to process a whole shot/stories to write.

No harassment at all you will be block if so.

Stories I published so far;

Aemond Targaryen

Embarrassment (Aemond x f!reader)(one-shot)

Summer love (Aemond x f!reader) (one-shot)

Micheal Gavey

Smarter Then You (Michael Gavey x f!reader)

Smarter Then You(part two) (Michael Gavey x f!reader)

Osferth

The Lady From Nowhere (osferth x modern f!reader)(series)

An Act Of Love (modern actorAemond x actor f!reader)

[presidenthades]

Some ago you have us an amazing ice cream analogy about the Targbros can you give us one about the Velargirls. I miss your writing soo much Im craving any crumb you give. Pretty , please :)

Thank you for the Ask! And good news: I recently finished the first draft of Chapter 10 of Compromise (Aemond’s POV of their last days in the Stepstones). I’m currently working on a draft of Chapter 11 (Luce’s POV the day the Targbros return to Westeros and visit Dragonstone). I will probably be able to revise and post Chapter 10 (currently 7k words) after I attend a convention this weekend.

That ice cream analogy was very fun, so I’m happy to do a girls’ version. :3

Jace is a scoop of homemade rose ice cream, presented in a nice crystal cup and garnished with petals and maybe even gold leaf. She is, after all, very concerned about appearances. And the presentation is so pretty that some people are afraid to touch/eat it, lest they ruin it. Rose—in addition to being her favorite flower—is, in my opinion, a not-too-sweet and delicate flavor that can be tricky to get just right. I specified homemade because it tends to melt faster than store-bought ice cream, and our poster girl for anxiety is often on the verge of a meltdown.

Luce is like cookies and cream, with a few sprinkles for appearance’s sake, though the main appeal is the actual ice cream. It’s a popular flavor, and most people have no objections to it at first glance. But then you take a bite and WHOOPS it turns out the sprinkles are secretly pop rocks. Surprise little explosion in your mouth, just like how Luce’s temper can go off. But some people are really into pop rocks, so some asshole stuck his finger into the ice cream container to try to deter other people from eating it. 👁️👄💎

For Joff, I googled “most controversial ice cream flavors” and went from there. I decided to go with tiger tail ice cream, which is orange ice cream with black licorice swirl. I have never had it before, but it’s described as an acquired taste. Joff is a bit of an acquired taste to the people around her, and the name “tiger tail” evokes a sense of fierceness that suits her. Also, because the flavor is so unpopular at this imaginary ice cream parlor, the one customer who really likes it has to custom order a batch and then he’s stuck eating that same gallon of ice cream for a year. Not that he’s complaining. 🦮