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simplynotcapable · 1 year ago

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Let’s have another AU- Visenya, another sister of The OG Baelon, son of Alysanne?

This got...so much longer than I meant for it to get.

If you do not want to read the giant thing that got so far away from me, the basic gist is this: it's not a super happy life. It has its moments, but there is just so much death. So many of Alysanne's kids die so young and/or tragically, and Visenya is a person who loves her siblings so much that it just would break her heart over and over again.

She'd end up married young, though I love her so I will grant her the grace that her husband dies not so very long after, and she would live a mostly content life (in between the very frequent bouts of extreme grief over the brutal deaths of her siblings, naturally) as a widow, raising whatever children she had with her husband before his death.

I do not think she would be married to any of her brothers, because Baelon is Alyssa's and I just can't see her meshing well with Aemon in that way--though she loves Aemon, and he loves her. She's closest to Alyssa and Daella, even though the two of them don't get along with each other, and she admires Saera almost as much as she wants to hit her in the face. She's never close to Vaegon or Maegelle, since Vaegon is kind of a cunt and Maegelle leaves so young. She respects Viserra, adores her with all her drive and ambition, and she never has much of a relationship with Gael because of the age gap and all the various other aspects of Targaryen life.

She takes up a lot of the responsibility of raising Aemma and Alyssa's boys after her sisters' deaths, as well as her own children, and she's one of Rhaenys's fiercest advocates every time the topic of succession comes up--not that anyone ever bothers to ask her, except for her mother.

She dies of a fever not very long before her father's death, though, and that's honestly for the best because, after all the people she's lost, I think the Dance probably would have driven her mad if she had to watch it.

Anyway, if that sounds interesting to you, there's a 6k pseudo one shot below the cut that I accidentally wrote because apparently this ask drove me absolutely feral. Idk how you managed to get me this deep on a Wednesday afternoon. I haven't blinked in hours and I no longer remember what the sun feels like.

Keep in mind that 1) I'm super bad at doing basic math in my head, so if their ages don't match up how they should just...pretend that they do, idk, sorry, and 2) I wrote this all in one manic sitting and did not proofread it

TW: general Targaryen-ness but also suicidal thoughts/ideation, suicide attempt (? sort of ?)

(We’re putting Visenya as born just after Alyssa)

Alysanne marries her off when she’s fifteen, and it’s…not as bad as she first feared, when she was told about it. Her kicking and screaming and wailing while her sisters clustered around her trying to comfort her seems very dramatic in hindsight.

She gets pregnant not long after the marriage, and it is terrifying and new and...wonderful, really, to think of, and she sees her daughter and thinks she did not know love before. Not like this. He wants to name her after his mother, but she names her for the sister who died before she was born—names her Daenerys. Lilac eyes and dark curls like her father’s, and Visenya loves her.

Her father does, too.

And then he dies.

Visenya isn’t upset, exactly. She didn’t love him. But he was kind to her. He never hurt her, was never cruel. He did not treat her as less, just for being a woman. He was a good man.

She thinks she could have loved him, if they’d had a little more time.

But, as it was, her husband had no son but he did have a younger brother. A younger brother with three sons, all smug little shits, and they treat her daughter as if she doesn’t exist. As if it is not all hers by right.

So, she goes home. She appeals to her parents. Should it not be Daenerys’s? Her husband’s trueborn child, should it not—

“Yes,” says her mother.

“No,” says her father.

She does not see a point in going back, after that, and so she stays in King’s Landing. She never stops dressing in black, always in her mourning clothes, and does her best impression of a widow so severely grieved that to ask her to remarry would be the cruelest of torments. Her mother cuts her looks, sometimes, and she knows Alysanne knows the trick of the game she is playing, but she has done her duty once. She married and bore him a child, the second granddaughter of the Wise King and the Good Queen. Her parents, whether for love or exhaustion, do not ask her to do it again. She keeps her head down and her mouth shut, for the most part, in case they change their minds.

She raises her daughter. She spends time with her parents, even with her anger at her father. She spends time with her siblings, who she missed so dearly.

And then, slowly, she loses them all.

The very year she comes back, Valerion dies. He had not even reached his first name-day, small and sickly. To look at him beside Daenerys is heartbreaking, so close in age and yet so different in size, her daughter so strong and the last of her brothers so weak...it hurts her, inside herself, but not so badly as the morning her mother tells her he is dead. She has not hurt like that since Gaemon died, not so very long before her wedding, small and sickly just like Valerion.

She does not put Daenerys down for entire days after, incapable of making her arms release her. Part of her fears she will lose her, too, if she does, and the babe is more than happy to settle for hours against her chest. Her mother chides her for it, says she should not spoil her so--that she will turn willful and stubborn and too used to getting her way, "like your little sisters".

Visenya keeps holding her anyway. Only rescinds her when Alyssa comes calling with baby Viserys, and they trade their children and curl together like they are little girls again.

"We always said we would be there for each other, when we went to the childbed," Alyssa mourned quietly, head lolled on Visenya's shoulder, one finger looped in 'Nerys's curls and her other hand playing with Viserys's chubby leg in Visenya's lap. "I raged something awful when the letters came that she had been born without me there."

“As did I, when you sent word of Viserys," she answers, and then presses her hand to her heart. "I shall be there for all the others, 'Lyssa. For you and the other girls, too. I swear it."

Vaegon left that same year, which was loss of a different kind. She had never been particularly close with him, the most severe of her brothers, the one with the sharpest tongue and cruelty that dripped from it even when he did not intend it. He'd been so often cruel to sweet Daella, driving all of his sisters against him with a single-minded force, and yet...when she learns he is to go to Oldtown, she goes running to his rooms, anyway.

He is packing, already. He looks up at her, awkward in his own skin, not beautiful like his brothers and sisters; strange, their Vaegon, and he narrows his eyes at her.

"Will you visit?"

He laughs around a scoff, tucks another book carefully into his bag. It is answer enough.

"Daenerys will miss you."

And she will, for her daughter is not nearly so taken with the rest of her aunts and uncles as she is with Vaegon. Vaegon, who refuses to hold her and looks at her like a strange creature of myth, who contorts his face when she coos towards him.

Visenya caught him smiling, once, though. Just the vaguest of curls at the corner of his mouth, the rest of his face expressionless, as 'Nerys reached stubbornly out to try and convince him to take her hand.

Vaegon looks up, scowling, eyes narrowed, and she softens more towards him than she ever has before when he grudgingly mutters, "I will write."

He does. Hardly ever more than once or twice a year, curt and cutting, often with vague insinuations that she is an idiot and never with any care for what her life is or has been. Not once, in the rest of their lives, does her brother ask how she is.

At the end of each letter, though, he asks after Daenerys, and so Visenya keeps writing him back.

She never sees him again. She would wish, later, that she had known it would be the last time she would ever look upon his face. But she dooes not know, and so she leaves him there, and that is the closest they come to a goodbye.

Daella writes (well, her stepdaughter writes for her) a few years later, a child growing so quickly in her womb, and so Visenya takes Daenerys by the hand and they go. They go to her little sister, scared and alone, Visenya in her black dress and Daenerys with her black curls, and Daella is all white light when she throws squealing arms open to welcome them.

They were so close as girls, she and Daella. Alyssa had always chafed when her younger sisters clung at her skirts and groveled about for her attention (she grew to love them well enough, eventually, in her own ferocious way, but, oh, the way she used to howl when Visenya went into her rooms without knocking), but Visenya had never much minded having Maegella and Daella as her shadows. And when Maegelle left, promised to the faith at only ten...Daella had seemed so lost without her, and so Visenya took her by the hand and went through life with her in tow.

Daella had wept herself into a fit when Visenya left. "You leave me alone," she cried, even with all their other brothers and sisters watching so balefully. She was a sensitive thing, Daella, soft-hearted and not so clever as her elder brothers and sisters. She feared Alyssa still from all her snapping when they were little girls, loathed Vaegon for all his tripping insults, and for Visenya to leave her behind had seemed the end of the world.

She'd not wept nearly so much at her own wedding, and Visenya had been glad of it. It had been a struggle to see her sister wed, according to her parents, and she'd nearly been sent off to the silent sisters. She thought her too young, in truth, as she thought that she herself had been too young, but she was pleased to see Daella mostly content with Lord Arryn and his brood of ready-made children.

Daella weeps herself wild, again, though at the sight of Visenya and 'Nerys, and the sisters hold each other so tightly that bones crack. "Nothing bad will happen now," she says, confidently, pulling back to wipe at wet cheeks. "Not when you are here with me."

The fever takes her, not a week after little Aemma is born, and Visenya goes home alongside her sister's corpse.

She brings her niece with her, little Aemma Arryn with her silver hair and her big purple eyes, so like Daella in her face. Lord Arryn had not wished for her to leave with Visenya, but she had raised the fiercest of fits ("I rivaled even Saera with the way I carried on," Visenya jests much later, to Alyssa's pealing laughter and Saera's cry of offense). Rodrik had four children to raise already, duties to attend to, and would it not do the babe better to grow up amongst her mother's kin?

She was to bring Aemma back for four months every other year, but he relented.

When Alyssa begins her labors with little Aegon, not so very many years later, Visenya goes to her, as she did for clever little Daemon. Sits beside her and holds her hand and croons to her as she screams and wails.

She dies not a full year afterwards, and Visenya is the one to catch Baelon when his knees give out, to hold him as he shakes and screams and tears at his own face with such ferocity that she thinks he will claw off his skin.

(It seemed there never was a boy named Baelon that did not get his pretty sister's fingers tangled up in his heartstrings.)

She does not realize until Aemon comes and finds them both, pulls them both into his chest, their big brother who always catches them on his shoulders, that she is screaming, too.

Because Alyssa, oh, Alyssa, her Alyssa that she followed like a goddess come to life, her Alyssa who had hated her with mindless singularity until Visenya was ten and finally got so sick of the snapping and snarling that she threw a plate of potatoes at her head, and then they were close as close could be in that strange way that sisters loved. Her Alyssa, wild and laughing and bold, bold, bold, as so many of her sisters were bold, bold, bold, who loved their brother so much that it bled from her skin, who left behind two young sons who worshipped the ground she walked on. Alyssa, 'Lyssa, gone, just like that? Stolen so soon after Daella was stolen?

"Mother," Daenerys whispers, when she comes to her and Aemma that night, and she opens her arms and holds her girls as close as she can get them.

She takes on Alyssa's boys, when Baelon cannot. 'Nerys and Aemma and Daemon and Viserys, all her parents' grandchildren but one drifting in her wake, holding onto her hands, tucking themselves against her skirts.

It is that same year when Saera and her band of merry delinquents are caught.

Saera's mischief had never bothered Visenya quite like it bothered everyone else, often enough driving her to incredulous laughter that she had to stifle into her hand. So, she was spirited and bold! No one would bat an eye, had she been born with a cock, and who was really hurt by the Kingsguard spending an afternoon with pink cloaks?

She alone noticed when her mischief and even cruel pranks turned to something more dangerous, because people oft forgot about the Widowed Princess, the one who collected children with dead mothers and roamed the palace like a ghost with her pale face and dark dress. Saera did, often enough, and so Visenya knew well before anyone else that her sister was careless about the boys she allowed into her bed and the girls who knew it. Ones with loose tongues. Ones with soft spines.

How many times had Visenya warned her? How many times had she grabbed her hand, said "have your fun, little sister, but be careful, be careful, you do not know what might await you should Father find out"? How many times had her little sister shrugged her off, imperious and haughty and clever and wicked, so sure she would never face consequences?

The same as when they were younger, when she would release cats into Daella's room and throw her wicked fits that left them all with ringing ears and anger in even the calmest of hearts. Visenya loved Saera well, admired her spiritedness and her refusal to be forced into the boxes that Visenya had allowed herself to be put into when she was even younger, but, every time she spoke to her, she understood well how people were driven to murder.

"Perhaps you are happy in your life as a celibate, as a widow with no one but children to turn to," her sister cried, spiteful in her anoyance as she always was, "but that is not the life I will have for myself!"

Were they closer, if she trusted her more, Visenya might have told her about the pretty serving girl with the golden hair and the birthmark on her belly the same shape as a paw, but as it was she always just shook her head and looked away. Saera could not even be trusted with her own secrets, much less Visenya's.

She hears it all secondhand, bits from her mother and her brothers and her father. About the boys who Saera brought to her bed, about her wild attempt to defend herself and how it turned so quickly to hot defiance. About her wicked tongue, getting her into even more trouble, when she dared look their father in the eyes and suggest she take all three to wed and make herself Aegon or Maegor come again. About the escape to the Pit, that night, and the way their father raged, and how Saera had been forced to watch from the window as her lover died at the Wise King's hand.

She goes to see her, the night before she leaves for Oldtown. Looks at her standing there, looking faded and numb and not like Saera at all, and she grabs her by the face and presses their brows together. "You are everything," she says, the ghost of words a different Baelon than the one she knows once whispered to her, the ghost of words another her once whispered to boys who would die in a war she'd never wanted. "You are everything. So do not let them break you, you foul little bitch."

Saera blinks at her, so quiet for once, and then she smiles.

A little over a year after they sent her to the Faith, she disappears. Gone, just like that. A blip. A ghost, until word comes that she's taken up at a pleasurehouse. Alysanne weeps, but Visenya tucks her face into her hand and she laughs. Laughs that laugh that only Saera has ever truly managed to draw out of her, the one that comes only when you know you should not be laughing, because she knows well as any that Saera went prowling into that place of her own volition and would have already torn down the walls to make it her own.

Her mother writes. Saera never answers.

Visenya writes, as well, to make sure she is alright where she is. Saera answers only once and never again after, and the letter has only seven words scrawled huge across the parchment. It sends Visenya bursting into that same vicious laughter to see it.

I am everything, you foul little bitch.

She laughs that wild laugh for the third time since Saera left and the final time in her life when the Council is called. When three bastard boys with Jaehaerys's face and Saera's eyes come swaggering through the door with all their mother's audacity and every bit of her fire.

Three years later, death comes for their family again.

For Viserra this time--Viserra, who is smart and gorgeous and ambitious and knows she is everything. Who wants things from life, who wants power and purpose and everything she would have had, anyway, had she only been born a prince, and she is full to bursting with it. It almost hurts Visenya's eyes to look at her, so bright with all the things she wants, with all the longing. With all the wishing.

"If I'd been only a few years older," she says once, darkly, hands clenched. "They'd have given me to Aemon, then. I'd be a queen, then. I could change it all, I could make it--I could be more than this, more than some man's broodmare, more than just a footnote in history. Viserra Targaryen. Nothing more than some man's wife."

Visenya, who had nearly been married to Aemon herself until she and her eldest brother rallied in their horror at the idea, attempts to look sympathetic. It is actually not so difficult, when she sees the stricken look on her face, her pretty little sister caught in an invisible trap that only women ever seem to find themselves locked in.

"You might always become a widow," Visenya comforts. "It is not so bad a life, really."

Viserra laughs, long and loud, and then drops her head to her shoulder. They are close now, despite the decade between them, though Viserra is a maid of five and ten and Visenya a widow with a brood of four children mostly not her own. She is not sure how it happened, but she is grateful for it. She has missed being close to a sister, these fast few years.

"Vi and Vi," Aemon jests, sometimes, when he sees them walking about with heads bent together, and then he tugs at Visenya's braid and is off again. Baelon ever in his wake, off to do whatever princes do, and they all pretend Viserra's gaze does not fix hungrily on their backs.

"Baelon might save me, still," she says, and Visenya is quick to shoot the idea before it catches wings.

She thinks she does, anyway, but it is not a week later when Viserra is pulled drunk from their exhausted brother's bed as he waits at the door with his eyes squeezed shut in phantom pain.

It is not very long after that when Viserra bids her good night, grinning a little, swearing she means to have one more night of fun before she is married to an old man and has "nothing more to look forward to than joining you as a widow, sister." Visenya laughs her off, kisses at her cheeks and watches her leave. Thinks she means to steal a bottle of wine and cause some chaos about the palace.

They bring her sister's corpse back to the Keep with a broken neck.

She and her brothers get drunk that night, a rare lapse in their usual propriety when it comes to their sisters. She needs it, though, and they love her well enough to let themselves bend. They sit in a row on a window ledge, passing a bottle of wine back and forth between them, and they whisper stories that they all usually pretend are not real anymore. Alyssa and her quick rages and her hot heart and her wild way of living, Daella and her softness and the way she sang in the mornings, Viserra's wicked sharp tongue and how she always seemed to have an answer for everything. Valerion and Gaemon and Aegon, babes dead before they ever got a real chance to live, and what would it have been like to have three more brothers? Three more boys running through the Keep, on their tails, shouting and shaking. Daenerys, the first one, Aemon's few scattered memories of her doled out to them like precious stones. Saera, then, as they giggle behind their hands until they are gasping, and she and Baelon attempt to mimic Vaegon's few attempts at learning the sword as Aemon pretends to be much more mature than them both, and they offer a toast and a prayer to Maegelle, whatever she is doing now.

"We're all that's still here now, except for little Gael," Aemon says, with a tilt of his chin towards the stars. "How strange that is, when there were so many of us once."

Baelon asks them if they think Viserra would still be alive, if he let her stay in his bed that night.

Visenya and Aemon both drop their heads to his shoulders instead of answering.

They wake hungover the next morning, all three of them, which Jocelyn teases them mercilessly for--Visenya is usually quite fond of her sister-by-law, but she tells Aemon rather hotly that she means to poison his wife. He only laughs at her, tugs her braid as he always does, and his daughter grins at her across the breakfast table.

Alysanne begs Jaehaerys to bring Saera home after that, a ghost of herself after losing three daughters in such rapid succession, but Jaehaerys refuses her.

Maegelle comes home, instead. Visenya shies from her. She cannot help it. All of her other sisters are dead or gone, except little Gael that is younger than her daughter--she feels sorry for her, more than anything, with all of her siblings so much older and so many of them dead before she ever truly knew them. She is a soft child, much like Daella was, and her nieces and nephews tend to leave her behind in their games. To see Maegelle again, quiet and pious and so much older than the little child who left...how strange it is.

"You act as if you fear her," Jocelyn says, absently, and Visenya scowls at her.

Maybe she does. Perhaps...perhaps she does, a little. To love her seems a risk she cannot take, when all her other sisters have left her. Better to hide amongst her brothers, to grow closer to them than she was before. Her brothers who had lived so long and so carelessly. She had never lost a brother. It seemed safer.

She leaves again, and they are hardly any closer than they were before from the rare letters they sent to each other.

Maegelle is the one who convinces their father home, though, during the Quarrel when he visits her in Oldtown, and even in time for Rhaenys's wedding. She knows that chafes at Aemon, who tried his own hand at it, and she teases him for it, perhaps more than she should. She stops when he threatens to marry her off again, once he's king; he seems to realize that the jest didn't land well, that he has struck some deep fear within her that she has never acknowledged to another soul--that either her father or her brother will tire of her freedom and aimlessness, her simple widowed life, and force her to do her duty again.

"I will not," he says, grabbing at her hand. "I will not, Visenya. Not unless you ask me to."

"I will not ask."

"Then I will not," he says again, fiercely. "I will not. The Widowed Princess, you shall remain."

Rhaenys arrives to her wedding on dragonback, and Visenya calls her a queen beneath her breath. Her father shoots her a warning look. Her mother grins.

Two years later, they send Aemon to war with the news that he is to be a grandfather when he returns. She has not seen him so happy since Rhaenys's birth, his face radiant with his smile, his laugh so bright it breaks through even the dark that has kept their family shadowed so long.

When word comes that he is dead, Visenya does not believe it.

Aemon is not capable of death. Not Aemon, their eldest, who chased them all about through the palace, who balanced them on his shoulders and fished them out of every spot of trouble they managed to find themselves in. Not clever Aemon, always asking questions, dutiful Aemon with his honorable heart, wonderful Aemon with his love for his wife and his daughter. Aemon, who they'd wanted her to marry once, except he had wailed and she had cried and they had united in all their terrible fury at the very idea and then split an entire stolen cake between them when their goal was achieved. Aemon, who was to be a grandfather soon, who was to be a king. Aemon was meant to be king of the seven kingdoms, their father's successor, and, more than that, Aemon was their heart. Their family's heart, the thing that kept them beating, who kept them moving, who held them together with the force of his bare hands, and so Aemon could not be dead.

If Aemon is dead, who will hold them?

It is not until Baelon comes home, dead behind the eyes, that she knows it as truth. It is not until he cries to their mother, "I slew a thousand of them, but it will not bring them back" that she knows.

Because more than he was their family's heart, he was Baelon's soul. He was all that kept Baelon sane, after Alyssa. If Baelon says Aemon is dead, then it is true, and Visenya tears whole handfuls of hair from her head when she wails.

Baelon's head turns and he sees her, and they hold each other up as best as they can. Just like when Alyssa died, except Aemon isn't coming to keep them both from falling totally apart. Aemon isn't there when they get drunk again, far more destructively than before, that sobbing and choking sort of drunk that left them both near comatose the next day, and she thinks the world could end and it wouldn't even matter anymore.

And then...then, they name him heir. Baelon. Not Rhaenys, Aemon's daughter, the eldest grandchild, who should be queen. Not Rhaenys, who clenches her jaw when Jaehaerys announces it, whose fists clench up. Not Rhaenys, who Alysanne and Visenya both beseech Jaehaerys to see not as a woman but as who she is, as competent and capable and every bit Aemon's daughter.

But it is Baelon, in the end. As it always was going to be, no matter how the Old King might have pretended.

Maegelle ends the Second Quarrel, too, and she and Baelon toast to it and her and a kinghood that will be his one day.

"Swear to me you'll never make me marry," she says, prodding at his ribs, and he snorts.

"What man in his right mind would marry you?"

And, like it always does, eventually the sun forces its way through darkness.

Rhaenys's daughter is born, pretty little Laena with her soft brown skin and her wild silver curls, and then Laenor to match two years later.

Viserys and Aemma are married; she is pleased about the match, actually, at first. It is not until years later, watching Aemma wilting, that she mourns the mistake of it.

Daenerys asks for Alleras Martell exactly fifteen minutes after he asks for her, the pretty Dornish prince with his dancing eyes and his crooked smile. Visenya likes him, though she won't admit it. Gripes he is not good enough for her daughter, and he bows down low and asks her "who could be?"

"Let them," she tells her mother and father. "Let them wed, let them be happy, use it to build faith with the Dornish."

Her daughter is wed, her husband besotted with her and the way her curls fall and the sound of her laugh. He clothes her in silk and drapes her in jewels, and Visenya never again sees her daughter alone without cheeks still rosy from too ardent goodbye kisses.

Daenerys comes home when she is pregnant, wishes to be with her mother and Aemma (her heart-sister) and Gael (a friend, now, at the least), and Alleras follows obediently in her wake.

Her first grandchild is born the same day the letter arrives telling them Maegelle is dead of greyscale. Visenya weeps but only a little, cannot find it in herself to grieve anymore, especially for a sister she knew so little--and especially when, suddenly, there is an olive-skinned little boy with amethyst eyes and a head of dark curls being placed in her arms.

"Aemon," Daenerys says, soft and gentle, her darling girl with her beautiful heart. "I wrote to Rhaenys to ask, and she says she would be proud if we called him Aemon."

He had been the favorite of her uncles, once the infatuation with Vaegon faded into nothing--she had not even a memory of him now. Aemon had always been the one to sneak her sweets and ruffle her hair and let her ride with him on dragonback even when Visenya fretted that she was far too young for such things.

Visenya wept again, for a whole new reason, and she kissed her grandson's head and her daughter's face and even the cheek of her son-by-law--how smug he looked about it, the little shit.

(Daenerys does not come home for the birth of the next three children, but she visits every other year for a few weeks, at the least. Alleras at her side. Aemon and Larra and Ashara and Naerys cluttering up her skirts, spilling out around her, full of laughter and giggles and a golden childhood that had not yet held any pain.)

Whatever was left of the light in her mother's eyes goes out when Gael dies. "Dies" everyone says, as if she sickened, but Visenya knew the truth about the water and the bastard babe who died so soon. Heartbreak killed Gael, not a fever, and she and Baelon don't even remember how to grieve anymore.

"I hardly knew her," he says, at their now near monthly tradition of getting drunk and speaking of all the dead that lay behind them. "She is our sister, and I do not think I ever even spoke to her, really. Not of anything real."

"She is younger than our children," Visenya counters. "Could we be expected to?"

"We're the last now," he whispers, and his hands cover his face. "You and me. The last ones standing. Would you have guessed that?"

"No," she admits. "I thought you'd kill yourself after Alyssa."

He looks at her, and, with years and wine to numb the pain, he bursts out laughing.

Their mother is dead not very long after, and Visenya does something she and Daella used to do, when they were very young. Drapes blankets over the sides of the bed so nothing can be seen beneath and then crawls under. Lays there, cocooned in the darkness, and she closes her eyes and thinks of her mother's laugh. Over and over and over again, until she has memorized it. Until she won't forget it.

You tried, she thinks to her ghost. You tried, and I know that you tried to make things better. To make us more than just wives and daughters, to make us something on our own. That is enough. I will let that be enough. Tell them I love them. Tell them hello.

They meet Baelon's granddaughter that year, too, a darling little thing with huge eyes. She looks like Alyssa. Visenya doesn't mention it.

"Rhaenyra," Baelon croons to her, laughing. "Rhaenyra, Rhaenyra, Rhaenyra, darling little girl, little love, little beauty."

"Baelon the Besotted," she lilts, winking at Aemma, and her niece grins back. Exhausted. Tired from miscarriages and the stillborn babe, tired, tired, tired, and Visenya did not know which of the married couple were not letting her rest. If it was Viserys or Aemma herself. She had suspicions.

She pokes Rhaenyra's cheek, gently, looks down at her. "You are everything," she says, warmly.

The next year, Baelon's belly bursts. He's sick for a few days before, and she worries but thinks nothing of it. He is strong and healthy and so very Baelon, her older brother she loves so dearly, and there is no reason he should not recover. He ate something bad, perhaps, or...something. Something easy. Something fixable.

When they tell her he's dead, she thinks about killing herself.

Not because Baelon is dead, specifically, though knowing he is feels like swallowing hot coals. She thinks she would have thought about it regardless of who it had been, if it were Alyssa or Aemon or even Vaegon that had been here with her for so long and then left her alone.

It is the being alone that makes her think she is ready to die.

The children are raised, now. The children are having children. Her sisters are dead, except for the one lost to her, and her brothers, except for the one who left them all. Her mother gone. Her father near gone, she has no doubt. How much can one person take, before they break for good? How much? And how hard would it be, to just shove herself off the edge and let the already fragile whole of herself shatter into fragments?

She walks into the Pit, because it feels poetic to die by fire. The other sister who died by her own hand died by water. They could be two halves of a coin, she and Gael, though they had never been two halves of anything before. Her apology for the distance between them all their lives.

She chooses Dreamfyre to do it.

And when she walks right in, unafraid and waiting, for the flame and the fury and the rage that comes with a dragon's territory being invades, she is given none of it. She is given silence, as she stands there with closed eyes, waiting for the flames.

When she opens them, the dragon looks back at her and blinks. Just once. Slowly. And then she dips her great head.

Visenya...laughs. She stands there laughing, mad with it, hiccuping, tears streaming down her face, and she reaches out with both hands. Dreamfyre's neck snakes out, allowing her to put them on her, to run them along her face and her neck, and it...

It is Baelon, she knows. It is Baelon and Aemon and Daella and Alyssa and Viserra and Alysanne and, maybe, even Maegelle and Gael and Valerion and Gaemon and Daenerys and Aegon, telling her to stop. Telling her to quiet. Telling her to stop being such a dramatic little fool, to take what was left of this life in her hands and let it be hers.

"Hello," she whispers to the dragon.

She croons back.

Jaehaerys had not wanted his daughters to be dragonriders, except for Alyssa. They would be wed to noble houses, spread out amongst the land, and to give too many lords access to dragons and their riders was a danger. Visenya had never had a dragon egg. She had never thought she'd ride a dragon, except the few times she went with Alyssa or Baelon or Aemon.

Dreamfyre croons again, and Visenya presses their brows together and keeps right on laughing.

They take Rhaenys's rights away from her, yet again, another Council passing it off to another man who is no more competent or deserving than she. Vaegon comes home, she hears, and their father offers him the crown; he rejects it, of course. She does not see him before he is gone again.

But Visenya lives. She does her best. For the first time in years, she dares to wear color.

The fever that takes her almost shocks her with its suddenness, and she is not aware of much after that first initial surprise. She sees things she knows cannot be real, like her mother sitting beside her and her long dead husband's hand reaching out to pet her hair, and she hears things that she could not possible be hearing, and she knows she is dying three days before she finally does it.

It's her sisters who come to fetch her, when it finally happens. Alyssa grabbing at her arm to haul her up, Daella peeping over her shoulder--closer now, it seemed, than they had been at life--and Viserra reaching out to grab her other arm. Maegelle and Gael watching, so quietly, smiling so softly.

"Do you want to hear something funny?" Viserra chirps, all shark sharp teeth as Visenya reaches out with a cry to grab at them, their faces and their hair and everything, trying to convince herself they are solid. "Visenya? Do you?"

"What?" she cries. "What could possibly be so important?"

"Father still outlived you."

#silverandmoonstone #dragonglassandgold #ao3 works #simplynotcapable #hotd #house of the dragon

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