Chapter Text
Boys will always be boys. Your mother repeated the phrase so often, using it as a simple explanation for all Aegon's and Aemond's behavior, that you remembered it like a mantra. Like a commandment that cannot be broken or challenged. What seemed like a mere excuse for a child began to make sense as you grew older. You float somewhere between worlds all the time, lost in the boundaries of dreams and reality, but still manage to notice the important things around.
People say that everyone's personality traits form in childhood and are also determined by the upbringing and the environment you grew up in. Hardly any of of you had even the slightest chance of becoming someone normal. Usual. You know that this is what Aegon asks of the seven gods on those nights when even alchohol doesn't save him from the bitter realization of his plight. Things would have been so much simpler if all of you had been born into the family of some merchant. But you were destined for something else - something far greater.
Viserys often mentions his dreams. He wants to believe that he has some kind of power that will give him support and way to believe in what is right and what is wrong. Helaena doubts that your father is really capable of seeing anything, but she doesn't question that both of you really have some power to make prophecies. Sometimes the words come to her on their own. They roll around on the tip of her tongue, waiting to slip out at the most inappropriate moment and become the property of a public that will never be able to recognize anything meaningful in them.
But it's quite different with you. More often your visions have a picture and a sound, they are like dreams - so real that you cannot always tell whether you are observing the past or the future or just dreaming something that is never destined to come true. The line is so thin that every time you wake up, you feel a ghostly frustration mixed with hope. Like a flock of goosebumps along your spine, settling in your chest with an unpleasant heavy lump. Sometimes you see things that make you want to clamp your mouth shut to keep you from screaming in genuine horror.
Someone else's memories appear in front of you like an open book, and someone else's sorrows and joys are experienced so acutely and vividly that you feel every death and every birth as your own. On rare nights you actually scream. You crumple the sheets with your thin, icy fingers and scream, staring into the pitch black of the canopy. When your emotions begin to run high, creating a kind of vacuum that squeezes your in space, seeking to crush you completely, you know you must wake up. Your body gives you the command, reminding you that you have a power over this cursed gift.
But trying to get out of the nightmare is like trying to swim out of a swamp. The sticky, murky mire pulls you deeper with every effort. And then you raise your voice some more in a presumptuous attempt to reach out to someone. To get help. To not be alone. To not be caught in the snare of fear for good. Your cry goes through the stone walls of the castle so freely, as if a flimsy piece of wood were a barrier - and Aemond hears your first, since your rooms are the only ones in this wing. He always comes, justifying himself that there is a real reason.
Aemond is attentive to everything and remembers every detail with the pedantry of a bloodhound - Otto jokes that in the future he will have a seat in the Little Council. He responds to his grandfather's offer with the arrogance inherent as every true Targaryen, demanding in advance a position for himself that has not even been offered to him yet. Aemond could compile an impressive dossier on everyone in this castle, but the folder with his oldest sister's name would still be the most voluminous.
He knows every detail about you better than anyone else. You like everything to be on certain places in your room. You like watching the sunset near your dragon. You like being the only one who can say a word and make Aegon listen, at least for a while. Amond thinks there is a certain form of control that you adore, but when he tries to talk to you about it, you only shrugs with words about how everything in life is tied up with control. Somewhere you get it, somewhere you give it away. There's only a few of years difference between you two, but Aemond looks at his sister with pure awe, utterly fascinated by you to the core and so lets any words about your madness pass him by.
When he comes to you at night to cautiously lie down beside you and take your hand unbeknownst to him, muttering aloud who he is and where you are to calm you down, he does not think at all that your mind is at the mercy of some disease, as your mother thinks. He likes to be near you, to see the real you - without that fake, empty smile, that always sticks to your lips as soon as you leave your chamber. He appreciates every moment spent together immensely.
He also likes to listen. To catch the shimmering intonations in your voice as he asks about your dreams. As a child, he marveled at how much you and Helaena can make things up, but later he accepted that some of your visions do have a connection to reality, as Viserys keeps saying. Sometimes, when the weather changes make his scars especially aching and sensitive, Aemond thinks about how he should have listened to you sooner. Maybe then he wouldn't have lost his eye so stupidly.
When he shares his regrets with Heleina, all he gets in return is a soft smile and a light kiss very close to the edge of the lumpy scar. You add to this some wise words to comfort him a bit. "Some things are irreversible. No matter how you run from them, they still happen. You got the dragon, isn't that enough? Other times you wouldn't have had even that." Aemond wants to ask a host of new questions, about the other times, for example, but his skills of observation are enough to catch the mute warning in your eyes.
He twitches the corners of his lips in agreement and doesn't argue, only holds out his hand, waiting for you to touch him first. Alicent sometimes reproaches him for being cold and distant, but it is always different with you, so every tactile contact becomes especially important and can replace hours of heated discussion. Aemond appreciates the boundaries you sets for him - they are much closer than the ones you has for everyone else. It makes him feel truly special.
A warm feeling dances somewhere beneath his ribs, causing him to instinctively smile proudly every time he notices you flinch and seek to escape the unexpected touch of his mother or Aegon. There is never any such thing with him. You doesn't question it but you recognize as well that the bond with him is far stronger than with the others at court. Aegon is your twin, for example, but most of the time both of you can barely be in one room without starting a fight within a few minutes.
Your visions make it difficult for you to keep your boundaries and trace back to when your story with Aemond began. Did you grow attached to him since childhood and fall in love more after he lost an eye in that fight? Or did you have feelings for that grown-up Aemond you'd seen in your dreams since you were twelve so you absorbed his affection and warmth, and then all you had to do was to wait for him to grow into who he was meant to be with your help?
You take this course of events as a natural progression. The attachment grows stronger day by day, and you are increasingly drawn to the fact that Aemond himself reaches out to you and stays close to you even when he has already learned to wear his armor as second skin When he keeps his distance from everyone around him, he becomes increasingly cold and withdrawn. You think that the black hole of the castle consumes him as well, but rejoice when you see that your brother is still capable of affectionate smiles and sincere interest.
It is enough for you to see what Aegon is turning into. You were never close, not even as children. He always preferred to hang around mother or find company among the children of the other lords at court. Aegon liked other people's attention, he was quite easygoing, but even as a child he felt something special about you. He had once said that you had grown-up eyes. Alicent brushed it off with a chuckle, but Aegon remembered and still holds that opinion. Your eyes are empty. Dead. As if you are always somewhere else, remaining around only as a physical shell.
Aegon sees your emptiness even now, when your mother solemnly announces the date of your imminent engagement in the middle of breakfast. He doesn't like it at all. He knows the Targaryens' long tradition of marrying their own sisters, but he is disgusted by the very thought of it. He doesn't see you as a normal girl, so he feels sorry for himself in advance in this planned marriage and goes so deep into these thoughts that he doesn't feel Aemond's sharp, piercing gaze, full of envy that only he alone can understand. Nor does he miss you leaning toward his ear, interjecting your into your mother's idle dreams of a lavish wedding.
— I will love you if you try to do the same for me.
Your whisper pulls Aegon back to reality and acts like ice water, so he blinks twice because he finally sees you. Looking straight at him, not through, as usual. Burning with such determination, as if the fate of all humanity depended on it. Or at least the fate of some Targaryens.