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mirrorwitches) wrote2023-03-23 11:11 am
mirrorwitches) wrote2023-03-23 11:11 am
"rūs riña" chapter 7 DVD commentary
Author's commetary for chapter 7 of rūs riña! CW for CSA, incest, typical HOTD stuff.
The girl is taller than Rhaenyra by several inches, and is not, Daemon thinks, of true Valyrian stock: few of them in King’s Landing actually are. But the Andals had brought their fair hair with them to Westeros and sometimes it could be this white-blonde that was close enough.
He nods at the proprietress of this pleasure house. She will do. The madam gives the girl a sharp look as she leaves them alone in the room that she does not see as she stares down at her slippered feet.
Daemon sits down on the couch and gazes at her. She seems to tremble before him as if in a haze of heat, as if all the silver-haired enough girls that preceded her overlay her uneasily, distort her edges—some taller, some shorter, some wider, some thinner—and under them, the bulge and seep of imagined forms.
Come here,” he says quietly.
She crosses the room to kneel before him. He unties the knot on the thin strap that loops around her neck and is the only thing holding her shift to her body. Her breasts are heavy, the nipples prominent, thick. He thinks she might have nursed a child, and recently.
His specifications are, after all, demanding. They cannot be too young nor too old. They must have hair of this rare shade. Though many have claimed their virginity, he thinks the real article must have similarly been rare. Although attempting to determine not only the usual, if the moans are the familiar flattering performance or real, but if they were the realest real, the real that is newness, prior to knowledge, contains its own interest, it doesn't really matter. The wine helps turn her outlines and those of the room around them soft as candle wax, but that too is not necessary. It is as natural as breathing to make this girl someone else, this room somewhere, sometime else. He strokes her hair, her cheek. One blue dart of her eye up at him and its gleam is not shy, not meek, but knowing, and that is why it’s cast down: she’s no actress and it would break the illusion—a look that knows things.
The request he made tonight is well-known in the Street of Silk, and perhaps an odd one: She must have silvery hair.
The girl does not ever get a name or a personality, and this is deliberate: she is just not a person to Daemon, not in a particularly cruel way, but still. This whole episode derives from Mysaria's offer to get him a silver-haired maiden in episode one and also from the book, where one rumor is he has a taste for deflowering virgins. Given the book's emphasis on the unknowability of historical fact, it's fun to take the outwardly known thing (taste for deflowering virgins) and shake it up to reveal something else (Daemon does have a fascination or fetishization of innocence, as do most Westerosi men, but for slightly different reasons.)
He sips his wine for a moment while she complies. He thinks of the other girls used rooms like this, girls like her, to conjure.
The first girl like her had been delighted. Her silver hair owed to a Lysene mother and it meant she had found a profitable niche in the capital: men who wanted to pretend to fuck their sisters and to do it needed to pretend they were Targaryens. Yes, he supposes it was amusing—Daemon had no qualms about fucking a sister to circumvent; it was merely the sister herself he lacked, and so the initial act of conjuring had been the most challenging: a girl who didn’t exist.
One of my favorite things: not only how does the incestuous marriage affect the sexual makeup of Targaryens, but how does it affect the sexual makeup of everyone else?? Incest is taboo for you, but your dragon riding monarchs marry their sisters. It has to have an effect! And hopefully one sufficiently blonde sex workers in King's Landing elsewhere can turn into a profitable niche.
Daemon stands up and walks over to the bed to stare down at her. The darling has done perfectly, just as he imagined. She lies on her back, coverlet to her chin, hands chastely clasped at her throat. Her eyes look at him with that knowingness, the knowingness that allows her to know he wants her not to know and has her looking away: it apes modesty nicely enough, even if it is only because she cannot fill them with an innocence that has been lost.
This is not how his real bedding with his real sister would have gone, how his parents’ had gone. The hands of the ladies plucking his clothes from him, the men freeing her from her outer garments until they were thrown together on the raft of the marriage bed, naked as they might once have been in the womb together, in the bath as children, before their paths diverged, he to the training yard and she to her Septa—at least until, like his mother, she escaped his clutches to dog his heels, bang him about the shins with her wooden sword until he noticed her, till like his father he decided he couldn’t wait till supper and he must dart into the girls’ schoolroom on his way to his history lesson with the maester to pull her hair, slip a secreted bug down her shirt so she ran after him shrieking, laughing.
I'm just fascinated with the erotics of incest marriage, where the exact thing that appeals is the one that makes the prospect nauseous to us: someone you have known since infancy. Daemon, with his very in love brother-sister parents, would obviously romanticize this.
One night when he was six-and-ten he had his own mock wedding in a brothel a few doors down from this one with that first girl that had said, low, thrilled, sweetly nervous, You’re my brother, oh, yes, sweet brother; right before his true wedding (I'm not your sister, I suppose that’s the problem), the whores placing crowns of flowers on their brows, grabbing them, tugging at them, passing them from hand to hand into a room and tearing their clothes from them, a noisy, raucous, joyous bedding, Daemon’s mouth so plum-red from the wine it left faint imprints on her breasts, her lips so plum-red they left marks on his cheek that, when he slipped into the Keep early that morning to wash and dress and depart for Runestone, had made his grandmother sigh with relief as she used a spit-damp thumb to rub them out.
I love this also unnamed girl, for whom fantasy brotherfucking was at least novel.
Traumatized teenage Daemon’s coping mechanisms make him the problem that must be removed. It’s hard to make sense of why Daemon was sent away to King’s Landing for me without this idea he is a scapegoat.
They had laughed under the blankets together, not all of the revelers trooping out to leave them alone, for there was money to be had, in making people pay to watch a Targaryen prince fuck his sister. But the uproar had faded to a hush there in their mingling breath, her warm and by then familiar body. Daemon had felt new with her. They would know nothing together.
Nice to think. Aemon and Baelon, best of brothers, close in age, had gone together to the city, picked up knowledge to please their brides and how well Alyssa had been pleased, how loudly she had let all know it, how smug she had been, how well-satisfied.
Also interesting is that there's this fantasy of equality in the brother-sister marriage - unlike other aristocratic girls, she won't have to leave home, and for example it seems that the early harmony in Jaehaerys and Alysanne's partnership is owed to the fact that she's his sister as much as his wife, but then of course - she is his wife, and despite the power he granted her as queen consort it is his to grant and deny. But there's still that divide of gendered experience.
Nude, although her eyes go to the blood of that Reachman cunt which still stains his knuckles, he peels back the sheet to reveal this girl’s body, known before knowing, known then unknown, made new. A revelation to caress her hip, shyly, shy himself, not wishing to frighten her, to slide his hand between her legs very softly—
I was going to show Daemon shutting down the child fighting pit as he flipped out about touching Rhaenyra's pussy for the first time but decided I didn't care, so his stained knuckles are all you get.
The fantasy Daemon indulges in here is one of control from superior knowledge, used well. I know more, I can responsibly use it with my sister/cousin/niece! Elsewhere, Daemon shows great suspicion of this impulse, even as it appeals - there’s a reason he facilitates Rhaenyra’s first positive sexual experience with someone who is not him, someone with more knowledge, but less power, and without this sort of insane emotional entanglement. In the end that responsibility cannot really be avoided. Although the fic and chapter makes it clear he sleeps with men too there are several reasons he only does this with women: it has more imaginative charge because of Westeros’ gender order, it’s too raw for him.
Of course to imagine marrying this sister Daemon has to commit the sin of vanishing his brother, for if his brother existed, he would have their sister, but that was better than the other sin, also indulged in, of dreaming up a sister just for Viserys.
Imagining a sister is a worse sin because it's imagining "if we had a sister, Viserys would abuse her instead"; this foreshadows his guilt about Aemma.
Tentative fingers between her delicate folds. His sister’s cunt, maybe his very first cunt. If he’d had a sister, what allure could the Street of Silk hold for him? Maybe as children they would have explored like this—he puts the girl’s hand on his cock, guides her in slowly stroking it to hardness, her first cock, that strange soft flesh absurd and alive in the palm, twitching as it thickens with blood—bolder, unashamed. That’s what he had imagined the wedding night before his wedding, with this endlessly adaptable illusory sister, who also sometimes maybe, curious, bold, hungry, kept ghostly pace beside him as he descended into the city, as they discovered everything together.
As in canon, an interesting thing about Daemon is he both is far less concerned with that gendered divide when it comes to Rhaenyra, and also wants to bridge it - taking her to the city in episode 4 is mixed up with many motivations, some really quite ugly, but I do think part of it is a genuine sadness at how trapped Rhaenyra feels and a desire to alleviate it.
He rolls them over so he’s on top of the girl, kissing her with his eyes closed. Hard and aching but patient, he’d prepare her, lovingly, worshipfully, just like this, slipping a finger inside her, nervous himself with responsibility, he’d done this before in his fumblings with his whores, but this was new, this was his sister, and then somewhere after his marriage with girls in the Vale, Aemma’s home she’d left and Daemon had been sent to in exchange, the girl beneath him had no longer been his sister but his cousin, no matter her coloring, with the smell of stone and pine everywhere in the mist, as he’d imagined that other sister existed, Viserys’ sister, he’d marry her and so Daemon could marry Aemma, the cousin a year younger than him and it would all be different, that night wouldn't have happened, the one where Daemon had been shaken awake and he’d been awake instantly, like always, body on alert, but it had just been Aemma with blood on her nightgown, crawling into bed with him, and he hadn’t known and hadn’t asked whether it was her first blood or whether it was the blood that would inevitably follow that one, that Viserys, with no ceremony and no warning because they’d already been wed two years by that time, would exact, but either way, whether it was anticipation or aftermath that left Aemma’s small face stricken, Daemon had lifted his sheet and she’d crawled in and they lay there in the dark, he and his good-sister who he could make laugh even then, even though he'd felt sick, with relief, because it would stop for him now, he knew it somehow, or jealousy, because it would stop for him, and this, the relief, the shame at the relief, the jealousy, the shame at the jealousy, had chased him as a few months later Viserys beamingly announced Daemon would soon have a nephew or niece, and when that nephew died in the cradle, when Rhaenyea was born and Daemon hadn't said it to his brother or his grandmother, he'd said it to her, Aemma, Betrothe her to me, I'll take good care of her, I promise, and it had been a promise regardless of the fact he was married to Rhea instead, he’s tried to keep it, he's tried, and the relief and jealousy and the shame had chased him to the Vale, where he’d left every single one of Aemma’s letters unanswered.
Aemma! She haunts this fic as she haunts the show. She makes me so sad. This is the first really explicit reference to the sexual abuse Daemon suffered. There's a recurring theme in this fic of people crawling into bed with other people and all the ways that can go - in chapter 2, a grieving Rhaenyra crawls into bed with Daemon - and his as-of-like-three-hours-ago-ex girlfriend who gave him a last pity fuck she is then regretting - and he recalls her doing it as a small child after a nightmare. It's an incredible sign of trust and vulnerability, that can either be honored with care or betrayed with violence.
A note on the timeline, which is hell: we never get Aemma's age in the show but in the book she is married to Viserys when she is 11 and he is 16, their marriage is consummated and her first child is born when she's 13, and Rhaenyra is born when she's 15. Since she is played by 42-year-old Sian Brook in the pilot, where Rhaenyra is supposed to be 14, I think the age difference with Viserys is supposed to be the same but she was not married off/having children at that heartrendingly young age, but for the themes of Viserys as a kind of Bluebeard with his string of child brides I kept the book ages. Since a 39-year-old Matt Smith is playing a 28-year-old Daemon in the pilot (although I made him 30 here like in the book...the timeline is HELL), whatever, I can do what I want.
Daemon holding Rhaenyra for the first time and being overwhelmed is such a recognizable experience to me: encountering a child and realizing how small and vulnerable they are and how incredibly fucked it is someone could hurt them, and thus how incredibly fucked it is someone hurt you. Of course, because he's a Targaryen and this is medieval patriarchal hellworld, the only way Daemon can really frame his desire to protect her is through marriage. He'd treat her right!!! Rhaenyra pushes back at this a little in the final chapter - marriage was a really raw deal for her mother, which Daemon knows on some level but with his own stuff can't quite articulate.
His thumb at her clit makes her sigh, her hips cant wider, the tightness at her cunt ease enough he can work a second finger into her. Rhaenyra, Rhaenyra. He didn’t think of her much then, in his first year in the Vale. He’d left King’s Landing before she was even a month old, for his brother had said to his plea only She will marry her own brother, she will marry my son, yes, Viserys had all he needed, wife, children, brother could be dispensed with, and it would be good, he’d been a bit embarrassed by his outburst because of course, Rhaenyra would have a little brother and she would marry him just as it ought to be. Daemon had come back home for her first name day even though he knew himself it would make everything worse, because he knew he would return to Runestone when ordered, but he showed up in time for her birthday—that morning he’d left for his wedding, Aemma had come to him with her daughter in her arms and told him it would be well, he was going to her home, the one she missed in this crowded hot stinking city, that high pure air as if the mountains themselves breathed and you walked in their chill exhalations, a sweet constant breath that made all colors sharper, deeper, the green of it, the blue of the air, and Caraxes would like it, there were elk to hunt and shadow cats to battle and Daemon, sullen, scuffing his boot in the dirt of the yard before he got on his horse to make his way to the Dragonpit, had just said, She won’t know me when we meet next, I’ll be a stranger, that’s what he would be, a strange man walking in, the uncle sent away, and Aemma said Oh cousin, she will know you, and she was a year younger than he, five-and-ten, and yet she made him feel like a boy, a silly churlish boy—and she had, he walked into the family chambers and everyone was shocked, dismayed, none of them had been at his fucking wedding but they’d heard all about it, dragged drunk in front of the Septon, they’d heard reports of he and his wife’s mutual hatred, they might not know the full extent of his failure to do as they wished and become a man, an adult, but he still felt they could smell it on him along with the scents of dragon and leather and the icy upper reaches of the air, and then the silence was broken by Rhaenyra crowing in delight and reaching out her fat little hands toward him.
Nothing to say really accept Daemon makes me so sad I want to throw up. "The full extent of his failure to do as they wished and become a man" - Daemon's extended, endless adolescence!
Speaking of Viserys’ child brides - it’s of course evocative and haunting he gets a bride from the Vale, and then sends Daemon, his reject, to the Vale. This is basically what I think of Viserys’ deal here: he’s just a guy who needs someone who exists to attend to his physical and emotional needs. First it was his kid brother, and when he had the socially normative, sanctioned figure of his wife, his brother is extraneous, and shameful.
Also: the paragraphs in this chapter, lol. People complain I guess for accessibility reasons about huge blocks of text in fic but for me a paragraph is just as long as it wants to be, and specifically when I'm writing about the overwhelming, tugging rush of memory, this is just the natural way that comes out, and emotionally effective for me.
Enchantment. His outburst on the day of her birth, perhaps that might be dismissed as merely some ancestral yearning. Here was a Targaryen girl, a Valyrian princess. Not a sister or a cousin but a niece. Now, at one, a beautiful baby, particular, specific, special. Rhaenyra. Her eyes lit up with delight when he parted his hands to reveal his momentarily hidden face. The stubborn grip of her little fingers around his thumb. Her wails and shrieks of displeasure, her tiny perfect face with its petal-soft cheeks and peony lips twisted up in a demented entitlement when she was denied anything—denied Daemon. Even when he simply left the room. You’re a novelty, Viserys said then. His brother sighed in exasperation when Daemon taught her the words to everything in the room, recast the everyday things in this language that came from some elsewhere. Qurdon. Jimy. What’s the word for mother in Valyrian, cousin? Muña, that’s your muña, Rhaenyra. Viserys protested, You don’t need to teach her that yet, she hasn’t even learned Common, she only babbles. Kepa, Daemon said, pointing to himself, naming himself to her. Kepa, Nyra. Her first word—uncle and father in one, plausible deniability, save for the fact she was in Daemon’s arms, she said it smiling into his face. Viserys had hated it. She’d taken her first steps toward him, her mother’s hands hovering anxiously at her back, laughing with self-satisfaction as she toddled in his direction, before falling forward on her knees catching herself on her own palms, but she’d only laughed harder, their brave, brave girl. And Viserys said for the first time, Past time to return to your wife, Daemon, and he’d gone.
Anyone writing Daemon/Rhaenyra has to face the facts which is that he was like "I'm in love with that baby." Also it is just fact in my heart that the fact Rhaenyra liked Daemon better than Viserys and that it drove Viserys crazy.
The girls remained Aemma for longer, as he returned to the Vale and fled the Vale, spent nearly a year just he and Caraxes wandering Essos. Endless silver-haired lilac-eyes beauties, courtesy of his forebears and their conquests. Even on that immense continent bursting with unknown wonders and the Freehold’s mighty echoes, he found himself drawn to the still hot Targaryen point, the living ghost.
Saera in Volantis. He had been very young when she went away, that’s how it was phrased, she went away, and his memories of her were unindividuated, one of a mass of aunts who one by one died. She was known to him through a silence that delineated intriguing edges, the princess who became a whore. Daemon, eight-and-ten on her doorstep. She was unashamed, scornful, but wryly curious, willing to entertain him for a while. She enjoyed his acid portraits of her parents as desiccated relics, of Viserys as her father’s heir, Daemon’s assessment of his unsuitability. She was not particularly impressed with him, and did not appear to experience any yearning, any loneliness, here so far from her family, her sons a few years younger than Daemon and although she was instantly known to him, in his bones, known to him as a Targaryen, and although her sons were very like her, little evidence of of their three different fathers in them, in some way in a formula he couldn’t figure they were not Targaryen.
Daemon gave himself away eventually. The brittle mask cracked, one night up late before the hearth in her bedroom, the elegant sound of her orderly house, tinkling laughter of sophisticates and the strumming of lyres, murmuring up through the floor, when he asked why she never answered her mother’s letters, thinking of his grandmother’s frozen grief whenever Saera’s name was mentioned, the longing for the only daughter left to her, and his aunt said evenly: She thinks she wants me to respond, but if I sent her a letter, just a normal letter describing any normal day—she’d rather I were dead. I do her a kindness, not letting her realize she’d rather I were dead. If I hadn’t escaped the motherhouse, the beatings, the cold baths, the shit food, my pussy shriveling up and turning to dust from lack of use, I would have slit my wrists and she would have preferred that and this way she never has to know, and Daemon had nothing to say to that, because were not Alyssa’s spirit and Daella’s sweetness and Gael’s gentleness ever dwelled upon, and was not Saera’s childhood too a silence containing as it did the willful spoiled child who would become the girl who laughed in her father’s face and declared she’d have as many husbands as Maegor had wives, the girl who stood dry-eyed and unrepentant as her father slew her lover, the girl who spread her legs in a Lysense pleasure garden and offered up not only her own body but the body of a Targaryen princess, the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms’ defiled, defiant blood open to all, cobblers grown rich as princes off courtesans and their taste for fine leather sandals beggaring themselves and grizzled old Braavosi sailors with their life savings withdrawn from the Iron Bank and Dothraki horselords willing to pay the entire population of a Lazareen village in slaves for just a night, the girl who’d survived.
SAERA!!!!! Absolute best Targaryen girl. These are some of my favorite parts of the whole fic, and the above paragraph might be my favorite. There are always people who would rather you be dead than survive them, and you survive them.
She hadn’t been best pleased when he showed up unannounced. She’d known him instantly when he was shown into her receiving room. Not Daemon, individually, but known him for a Targaryen. Her face went very red, then very white. She’d grumbled about the audacity of him asking her to stay, snapped she should put him to work for his bread and board, but she’d let him, she was wealthy enough, money of her own, money she’d earned in a vault with her name on it, that feeding a wayward nephew posed no trouble at all and provided its own satisfaction—Saera Targaryen wasn’t dead in a gutter, no ser, here she is feeding Baelon’s boy delicacies in her garden. He had the run of her beautiful house, of the city, and he continued as he had in Lys and Myr and Braavos, all the metallic girls and burnished boys, but mostly he shadowed her like a pathetic puppy, that’s what she called him, Oh, puppy. She wondered if his family—not theirs—knew where he was, if they wanted him back, if they’d send someone after him. I’m quite extraneous, he said. They were irate with him, he could tell in their letters, but also seemed wearily resigned, it was no more than they’d expected. They were not frantic. They knew he’d return, as he knew it. The second son of a second son. It’s nothing to the fifth daughter of a second son, Saera had said dubiously, but didn’t ask again.
His aunt was not as he expected. She’d been preserved in his mind as that crafty, unlovable child and although it was true her tongue was still sharp and she never rose earlier than noon and she moved through the world with what would have been sheer headstrong will if she had not already had done with all that, if she had not arranged her world so it flowed around her like silk, she was a woman, knowledgeable, witty, contented; she knew everything that happened in the city and everyone, spoke lively, flawless Volatene—Daemon struggled with only his antiquated High Valyrian—haggled hard with tradesmen, firmly but humorously reprimanded one of her girls for borrowing another’s gown without asking and ruining it, talked to her sons’ tutor about their progress, saw her most recent lover into her room for the night and filled the hall with her cries:any normal day—she’d rather I were dead.
As a lover, he expected her to be assured, confident. That was what he craved, perhaps. To be the one who knew nothing. That came, eventually. Saera bestowed upon him an extremely thorough education indeed, in time. But first it was sweet, giggly, desperate. The practiced lover made new. She said after they fucked the second time that first night, You took the one virginity I had left to give, and the oddest, the most perverse: I’ve never fucked a Targaryen. She was fouled by her survival, the unclean—the whore—but somehow with Daemon it sloughed off her. The closest thing to a Targaryen wedding night they’d ever have: one night his cock refused to rise and she’d fucked him instead, on his back, his hair flowing in a maidenly shield over his chest, pinkening under her attention and none of it was new, all of it had been done before—he’d fucked and been fucked and fucked her specifically, and yet his eyes were wide, wet, he’d shuddered as she gentled him with her hands like you would breaking a colt to the bit, pulling his hair, she’d been fascinated with it, said, There, that’s it, as he opened to her and he wasn’t going to come, he wasn’t hard, and yet something similar to orgasm squirmed through him, something he resisted as too overwhelming, too much, until it tore from him, a great, blubbering, snotty sob, and yes, when he’d cradled his motherless girl in his arms four years ago he had known why she jerked and thrashed against it, why once it started she couldn’t stop, relieved, agonized, it scraped his insides so clean and raw it burned, Oh, puppy, and he’d hated it, adored it—how his aunt looked at him like she couldn’t remember ever being that fucking young, and he was crying too hard for words but his head shook as it came and came, he wanted to say no, you don’t understand, I’ve never been that young, the young that’s in your pitying eyes and soft hands, never, never.
She said You could stay, you know, start a mercenary company, hire yourself and your beast out to any of the Free Cities, and she knew it was never even a possibility, just as he knew it was never a possibility when he said Marry me, I’ll take you to the Dragonmont and get you a beast of your own for a dowry, and she would not even let Daemon convince her to let him take her for a flight on Caraxes, but he wouldn't let up, wouldn't leave her without it and finally she gave in, and she’d been nervous, her egg never hatched, she had never been around dragons, odd to think, perhaps she had been frightened even when she made her mad foiled dash to the Dragonpit to flee the trap they’d laid for her, but she gave a whoop of delight when the old wyrm thrust them aloft and Daemon had grinned the entire time, her arms tight around his middle, wind scouring his face, but when they landed again, his aunt was the one weeping.
Saera's story IS a triumph - she attains a true agency and control over her life that none of Jaehaerys' other daughters achieve, at great cost but with great courage. And yet she can never go home again, and that's a wound that can never actually be resolved.
Daemon thinks he's being kind here, but is actually unintentionally being quite cruel. That's how it goes sometimes.
Daemon returns. Not to the Vale, but home. Viserys seemed pleased, Aemma was pleased. He wasn’t where everyone would like him to be but he was home, he’d come back. And there was Rhaenyra, aged three, beloved terror, adored tyrant, Rhaenyra with her imperious demands and her volcanic tantrums. She was a biter and everyone despaired of it, she bit Hightower’s daughter black-and-blue when they fought. The first time she bit Daemon he responded without thinking; the slick little teeth marks throbbing on his shoulder, he’d leaned over and bit the chubby flesh of her arm and told her that was how it felt, how did she like it? She did not cry with betrayal at this revelation her uncle had been the one to deliver, that someone could deliberately hurt her. She did not run screaming to her parents at the lesson Daemon was the one to provide: the flesh of others feels. It can hurt. You can hurt it. And sometimes they’ll let you. She looked at him in wonderment and, unlessoned, bit down again in the same spot, harder, eyes glittering up at him evilly, until she drew blood. It was reported widely among those who obsessively monitored the little princess’ health and habits that she had stopped her biting, all of a sudden, just like that.
Viserys, You spoil her, you indulge her, you fill her head with fancies, of course she prefers you. Why be her father when he could be her uncle? Spoiled, yes. He spoiled her, would spoil her. He spoils this whore’s cunt with his fingers and it responds gratefully and it opens, as he would spoil Rhaenyra’s cunt until it accepts him, pines for him, until when he notches the head of his cock to her entrance she sighs apart for him as this girl does, because around the time Rhaenyra was seven, eight, the girls transformed again, his niece’s future husband began to be discussed. There would be a son, yes, Viserys still believed that, but his eldest daughter would not be his queen, it was not fair to ask her to wait for him to grow up to be a wife and mother. It drove Daemon mad. If only it was him. He did not trust a Lannister or a Tyrell or a Baratheon slavering at the mouth at the whiff of her first moonblood. If only he was allowed Rhaenyra. He would take care of her, love her as an uncle, and then, when the time came, as a husband. The girl is tight around him, and if she was really Rhaenyra, as he started to imagine then, a forecasted and denied future, his niece, his bride beneath him when it was time, when she was ready, she would be tighter than this, and yes, it would hurt—he’d never lie to Rhaenyra, he would say I know darling, I know it hurts, it always hurts at first, it had hurt the first time, horribly, pain, his flesh could feel, blood on his sheets, but you could bear it, and eventually it would hurt less, he’d make sure it hurt less. Eventually he would make it feel good, the body adjusts, reshapes itself for pleasure, yes, like that—a noise drops from this whore’s mouth at the steady pressure of Daemon’s thumb on her clit, easing her into accommodating him, even against her will, Daemon doesn't delude himself, it’s not him, he just knows how to attend to her body as an instrument to draw forth cries to flatter him, even if she'd maybe really rather prefer to have it done with, for him to fuck into her and come quickly so he would leave and she could be alone, sleep, dream, but he needs to know the sounds Rhaenyra would make as he banished the hurt he'd made, because it was he who hurt her, and wasn't that better, and it wouldn't be for long.
The theme of "hurt" - the inevitability of hurting people and the effort not to - is a repeated thing. I also liked writing someone's kind of fucked up processes around abuse and its effect on sexuality and guilt around pleasure experienced during abuse without having to like editorialize or have some authorial gesture calling it out.
His hips snap into the girl harder, faster. She whimpers. Daemon wraps her hair around his fist so her rippling throat is bared to him. “My prince—” she moans and he grunts, “No, no, lēkia, kepa,”;“Lēkia, kepa,” clumsy, grating on the ear, the sweetest thing, his sister, his niece, made for him, it wouldn’t matter, what would it have mattered, he could have fucked Rhaenyra any time, his girl, his darling, his dragon, his queen, and she would have let him, Brother, one day I will be your king, and if you were my sister…“Call me—call me my king, say it, yes, my king—” and with a muffled gasp of shock she so crowns him.
Making this girl commit treason, technically! Not cool!
-
He stumbles to the Red Keep shortly after, sky still dark as pitch. That early dawn coming back to the Keep after the only successful wedding night he’d ever have, Daemon had gone to Viserys room by the hidden passageways he’d spent hours mapping as a boy, all the secret arteries that let you enter rooms like an assassin, he’d entered by one of these—he’d had to, the Kingsguard on duty wouldn’t have let him in without asking the king’s permission like he had that first time, Daemon seven or eight, after mother died and the only stable thing in the world was his big brother, Westerling had let him in them, some sympathy for the sniveling little prince, it had been very late or very early and Viserys had just gone to bed and he’d reeked of wine and sex although Daemon didn’t know that quite yet, I’ve come back from the Street of Silk, do you know what that is, it’s where the whores are, I will be married someday soon but until then young men have appetites, it’s filthy there, I’ve been through every brothel, I’m sick of it, diseased women who take the cocks of ten men in a night, I wish I didn’t have to go there, night after night Daemon had returned, missing his mother and his father too, who had almost died with her, Rhaenyra was right, he’d felt it too then even if he hadn’t had the words, they were all dead, and Viserys had said eventually, If you were my sister we would be married someday, do you know what it is married people do?—and if you traced those shadowed veins and knew where to put your eye to a very small hole in the wall and did so on the morning he’d left for the Vale you would have seen Daemon Targaryen creeping to his brother’s bed like a beat dog, his brother alone in his bed, his wife allowed to rest so soon after the birth, you would see the King of the Seven Kingdoms startle awake, try to push his brother away with a noise of disgust, You smell like a winesink, you smell like your whores, and Daemon still drunk, weeping, had pressed his plum-red lips to his brother’s neck, his cheek, his mouth, sickened, desperate, and begged, If I was your sister we would be married, I would never be sent away, don’t send me away, and Viserys stiff and unable to dislodge him had been forced to permit Daemon for a moment to lay his head on his brother’s chest: yes, that’s when grandmother and Otto had come into the room, looking for him, and Viserys had said Go, you must get ready, and Alysanne had said Listen to your king now Daemon, tired, very very tired, and he’d followed her and in the hall hearing Otto say to Viserys behind him It’s for the best, past time, and that’s when she’d rubbed his cheek clean and raw and looked relieved as she said You are leaving, and I know you are bitter now, but it’s good, it is good to get away from this place, these memories, it’s why I prefer Dragonstone, there is too much here, one day you will thank me, you can get away from this, you can have a wife and family of your own, you can make better memories, and in that moment he’d realized that she knew everything, she had known all along, but that he was the one who must leave, for their peace, no more carousing with his filthy whores, no more being scraped off the streets by the City Watch and carted to the Keep, he would be married, he would have children, he would be fine.
More crawling into beds...of course Daemon as a child is the one that crawls into Viserys, and Viserys abuses that trust, but in his mind he's the one who went there. A couple things I wanted to do here: push back at the idea sexual abuse is inherently linked to sexual openness. Viserys is kind of a prude! (As shown by his disgust about Daemon's sex worker lover in the show.) He's a good, upstanding family man, and that's actually key to what he does and why and his justifications for what he does and why. I also wanted to explore what role being in the incest family would play in rationalizing abuse like this - well, if Daemon was my sister... - but as Otto and Alicent make it clear that it certainly still happens outside the incest family and it's just that, a rationalization, not a sufficient cause unto itself (which makes the discourse about Targaryens deeply troubling to me - you realize incestuous abuse happens here in cultures where it is deeply taboo, right??) And then what role being in the incest family would play in the victim's processing of the events: for Daemon, the chief wound has become not necessarily the abuse but that because he was not a girl and not married back in, he was disposable and sent away, although as Aemma shows, the alternative is not actually better.
Oh, Alysanne. Her story in the book is so sad to me. Here she's doing something awful: she knew the abuse was happening, and, worn down by her inability to save her daughters, dedicated to the prosperity of the house as the whole and Viserys as its probable heir, did nothing to stop it. Here she is doing what she thinks is a kindness, and it is an act of love, but it's really a cruelty - she thinks she's freeing Daemon by sending him from home and the site of horror. But why must he be sent away? Why must his home be lost to him? Viserys should be the one sent away. Which is why Rhaenyra's great act that makes her an adult and a worthy monarch is banishing Otto in chapter 10; Alicent does not have to leave the only home she’s ever known to be free of him.
The girl is taller than Rhaenyra by several inches, and is not, Daemon thinks, of true Valyrian stock: few of them in King’s Landing actually are. But the Andals had brought their fair hair with them to Westeros and sometimes it could be this white-blonde that was close enough.
He nods at the proprietress of this pleasure house. She will do. The madam gives the girl a sharp look as she leaves them alone in the room that she does not see as she stares down at her slippered feet.
Daemon sits down on the couch and gazes at her. She seems to tremble before him as if in a haze of heat, as if all the silver-haired enough girls that preceded her overlay her uneasily, distort her edges—some taller, some shorter, some wider, some thinner—and under them, the bulge and seep of imagined forms.
Come here,” he says quietly.
She crosses the room to kneel before him. He unties the knot on the thin strap that loops around her neck and is the only thing holding her shift to her body. Her breasts are heavy, the nipples prominent, thick. He thinks she might have nursed a child, and recently.
His specifications are, after all, demanding. They cannot be too young nor too old. They must have hair of this rare shade. Though many have claimed their virginity, he thinks the real article must have similarly been rare. Although attempting to determine not only the usual, if the moans are the familiar flattering performance or real, but if they were the realest real, the real that is newness, prior to knowledge, contains its own interest, it doesn't really matter. The wine helps turn her outlines and those of the room around them soft as candle wax, but that too is not necessary. It is as natural as breathing to make this girl someone else, this room somewhere, sometime else. He strokes her hair, her cheek. One blue dart of her eye up at him and its gleam is not shy, not meek, but knowing, and that is why it’s cast down: she’s no actress and it would break the illusion—a look that knows things.
The request he made tonight is well-known in the Street of Silk, and perhaps an odd one: She must have silvery hair.
The girl does not ever get a name or a personality, and this is deliberate: she is just not a person to Daemon, not in a particularly cruel way, but still. This whole episode derives from Mysaria's offer to get him a silver-haired maiden in episode one and also from the book, where one rumor is he has a taste for deflowering virgins. Given the book's emphasis on the unknowability of historical fact, it's fun to take the outwardly known thing (taste for deflowering virgins) and shake it up to reveal something else (Daemon does have a fascination or fetishization of innocence, as do most Westerosi men, but for slightly different reasons.)
He sips his wine for a moment while she complies. He thinks of the other girls used rooms like this, girls like her, to conjure.
The first girl like her had been delighted. Her silver hair owed to a Lysene mother and it meant she had found a profitable niche in the capital: men who wanted to pretend to fuck their sisters and to do it needed to pretend they were Targaryens. Yes, he supposes it was amusing—Daemon had no qualms about fucking a sister to circumvent; it was merely the sister herself he lacked, and so the initial act of conjuring had been the most challenging: a girl who didn’t exist.
One of my favorite things: not only how does the incestuous marriage affect the sexual makeup of Targaryens, but how does it affect the sexual makeup of everyone else?? Incest is taboo for you, but your dragon riding monarchs marry their sisters. It has to have an effect! And hopefully one sufficiently blonde sex workers in King's Landing elsewhere can turn into a profitable niche.
Daemon stands up and walks over to the bed to stare down at her. The darling has done perfectly, just as he imagined. She lies on her back, coverlet to her chin, hands chastely clasped at her throat. Her eyes look at him with that knowingness, the knowingness that allows her to know he wants her not to know and has her looking away: it apes modesty nicely enough, even if it is only because she cannot fill them with an innocence that has been lost.
This is not how his real bedding with his real sister would have gone, how his parents’ had gone. The hands of the ladies plucking his clothes from him, the men freeing her from her outer garments until they were thrown together on the raft of the marriage bed, naked as they might once have been in the womb together, in the bath as children, before their paths diverged, he to the training yard and she to her Septa—at least until, like his mother, she escaped his clutches to dog his heels, bang him about the shins with her wooden sword until he noticed her, till like his father he decided he couldn’t wait till supper and he must dart into the girls’ schoolroom on his way to his history lesson with the maester to pull her hair, slip a secreted bug down her shirt so she ran after him shrieking, laughing.
I'm just fascinated with the erotics of incest marriage, where the exact thing that appeals is the one that makes the prospect nauseous to us: someone you have known since infancy. Daemon, with his very in love brother-sister parents, would obviously romanticize this.
One night when he was six-and-ten he had his own mock wedding in a brothel a few doors down from this one with that first girl that had said, low, thrilled, sweetly nervous, You’re my brother, oh, yes, sweet brother; right before his true wedding (I'm not your sister, I suppose that’s the problem), the whores placing crowns of flowers on their brows, grabbing them, tugging at them, passing them from hand to hand into a room and tearing their clothes from them, a noisy, raucous, joyous bedding, Daemon’s mouth so plum-red from the wine it left faint imprints on her breasts, her lips so plum-red they left marks on his cheek that, when he slipped into the Keep early that morning to wash and dress and depart for Runestone, had made his grandmother sigh with relief as she used a spit-damp thumb to rub them out.
I love this also unnamed girl, for whom fantasy brotherfucking was at least novel.
Traumatized teenage Daemon’s coping mechanisms make him the problem that must be removed. It’s hard to make sense of why Daemon was sent away to King’s Landing for me without this idea he is a scapegoat.
They had laughed under the blankets together, not all of the revelers trooping out to leave them alone, for there was money to be had, in making people pay to watch a Targaryen prince fuck his sister. But the uproar had faded to a hush there in their mingling breath, her warm and by then familiar body. Daemon had felt new with her. They would know nothing together.
Nice to think. Aemon and Baelon, best of brothers, close in age, had gone together to the city, picked up knowledge to please their brides and how well Alyssa had been pleased, how loudly she had let all know it, how smug she had been, how well-satisfied.
Also interesting is that there's this fantasy of equality in the brother-sister marriage - unlike other aristocratic girls, she won't have to leave home, and for example it seems that the early harmony in Jaehaerys and Alysanne's partnership is owed to the fact that she's his sister as much as his wife, but then of course - she is his wife, and despite the power he granted her as queen consort it is his to grant and deny. But there's still that divide of gendered experience.
Nude, although her eyes go to the blood of that Reachman cunt which still stains his knuckles, he peels back the sheet to reveal this girl’s body, known before knowing, known then unknown, made new. A revelation to caress her hip, shyly, shy himself, not wishing to frighten her, to slide his hand between her legs very softly—
I was going to show Daemon shutting down the child fighting pit as he flipped out about touching Rhaenyra's pussy for the first time but decided I didn't care, so his stained knuckles are all you get.
The fantasy Daemon indulges in here is one of control from superior knowledge, used well. I know more, I can responsibly use it with my sister/cousin/niece! Elsewhere, Daemon shows great suspicion of this impulse, even as it appeals - there’s a reason he facilitates Rhaenyra’s first positive sexual experience with someone who is not him, someone with more knowledge, but less power, and without this sort of insane emotional entanglement. In the end that responsibility cannot really be avoided. Although the fic and chapter makes it clear he sleeps with men too there are several reasons he only does this with women: it has more imaginative charge because of Westeros’ gender order, it’s too raw for him.
Of course to imagine marrying this sister Daemon has to commit the sin of vanishing his brother, for if his brother existed, he would have their sister, but that was better than the other sin, also indulged in, of dreaming up a sister just for Viserys.
Imagining a sister is a worse sin because it's imagining "if we had a sister, Viserys would abuse her instead"; this foreshadows his guilt about Aemma.
Tentative fingers between her delicate folds. His sister’s cunt, maybe his very first cunt. If he’d had a sister, what allure could the Street of Silk hold for him? Maybe as children they would have explored like this—he puts the girl’s hand on his cock, guides her in slowly stroking it to hardness, her first cock, that strange soft flesh absurd and alive in the palm, twitching as it thickens with blood—bolder, unashamed. That’s what he had imagined the wedding night before his wedding, with this endlessly adaptable illusory sister, who also sometimes maybe, curious, bold, hungry, kept ghostly pace beside him as he descended into the city, as they discovered everything together.
As in canon, an interesting thing about Daemon is he both is far less concerned with that gendered divide when it comes to Rhaenyra, and also wants to bridge it - taking her to the city in episode 4 is mixed up with many motivations, some really quite ugly, but I do think part of it is a genuine sadness at how trapped Rhaenyra feels and a desire to alleviate it.
He rolls them over so he’s on top of the girl, kissing her with his eyes closed. Hard and aching but patient, he’d prepare her, lovingly, worshipfully, just like this, slipping a finger inside her, nervous himself with responsibility, he’d done this before in his fumblings with his whores, but this was new, this was his sister, and then somewhere after his marriage with girls in the Vale, Aemma’s home she’d left and Daemon had been sent to in exchange, the girl beneath him had no longer been his sister but his cousin, no matter her coloring, with the smell of stone and pine everywhere in the mist, as he’d imagined that other sister existed, Viserys’ sister, he’d marry her and so Daemon could marry Aemma, the cousin a year younger than him and it would all be different, that night wouldn't have happened, the one where Daemon had been shaken awake and he’d been awake instantly, like always, body on alert, but it had just been Aemma with blood on her nightgown, crawling into bed with him, and he hadn’t known and hadn’t asked whether it was her first blood or whether it was the blood that would inevitably follow that one, that Viserys, with no ceremony and no warning because they’d already been wed two years by that time, would exact, but either way, whether it was anticipation or aftermath that left Aemma’s small face stricken, Daemon had lifted his sheet and she’d crawled in and they lay there in the dark, he and his good-sister who he could make laugh even then, even though he'd felt sick, with relief, because it would stop for him now, he knew it somehow, or jealousy, because it would stop for him, and this, the relief, the shame at the relief, the jealousy, the shame at the jealousy, had chased him as a few months later Viserys beamingly announced Daemon would soon have a nephew or niece, and when that nephew died in the cradle, when Rhaenyea was born and Daemon hadn't said it to his brother or his grandmother, he'd said it to her, Aemma, Betrothe her to me, I'll take good care of her, I promise, and it had been a promise regardless of the fact he was married to Rhea instead, he’s tried to keep it, he's tried, and the relief and jealousy and the shame had chased him to the Vale, where he’d left every single one of Aemma’s letters unanswered.
Aemma! She haunts this fic as she haunts the show. She makes me so sad. This is the first really explicit reference to the sexual abuse Daemon suffered. There's a recurring theme in this fic of people crawling into bed with other people and all the ways that can go - in chapter 2, a grieving Rhaenyra crawls into bed with Daemon - and his as-of-like-three-hours-ago-ex girlfriend who gave him a last pity fuck she is then regretting - and he recalls her doing it as a small child after a nightmare. It's an incredible sign of trust and vulnerability, that can either be honored with care or betrayed with violence.
A note on the timeline, which is hell: we never get Aemma's age in the show but in the book she is married to Viserys when she is 11 and he is 16, their marriage is consummated and her first child is born when she's 13, and Rhaenyra is born when she's 15. Since she is played by 42-year-old Sian Brook in the pilot, where Rhaenyra is supposed to be 14, I think the age difference with Viserys is supposed to be the same but she was not married off/having children at that heartrendingly young age, but for the themes of Viserys as a kind of Bluebeard with his string of child brides I kept the book ages. Since a 39-year-old Matt Smith is playing a 28-year-old Daemon in the pilot (although I made him 30 here like in the book...the timeline is HELL), whatever, I can do what I want.
Daemon holding Rhaenyra for the first time and being overwhelmed is such a recognizable experience to me: encountering a child and realizing how small and vulnerable they are and how incredibly fucked it is someone could hurt them, and thus how incredibly fucked it is someone hurt you. Of course, because he's a Targaryen and this is medieval patriarchal hellworld, the only way Daemon can really frame his desire to protect her is through marriage. He'd treat her right!!! Rhaenyra pushes back at this a little in the final chapter - marriage was a really raw deal for her mother, which Daemon knows on some level but with his own stuff can't quite articulate.
His thumb at her clit makes her sigh, her hips cant wider, the tightness at her cunt ease enough he can work a second finger into her. Rhaenyra, Rhaenyra. He didn’t think of her much then, in his first year in the Vale. He’d left King’s Landing before she was even a month old, for his brother had said to his plea only She will marry her own brother, she will marry my son, yes, Viserys had all he needed, wife, children, brother could be dispensed with, and it would be good, he’d been a bit embarrassed by his outburst because of course, Rhaenyra would have a little brother and she would marry him just as it ought to be. Daemon had come back home for her first name day even though he knew himself it would make everything worse, because he knew he would return to Runestone when ordered, but he showed up in time for her birthday—that morning he’d left for his wedding, Aemma had come to him with her daughter in her arms and told him it would be well, he was going to her home, the one she missed in this crowded hot stinking city, that high pure air as if the mountains themselves breathed and you walked in their chill exhalations, a sweet constant breath that made all colors sharper, deeper, the green of it, the blue of the air, and Caraxes would like it, there were elk to hunt and shadow cats to battle and Daemon, sullen, scuffing his boot in the dirt of the yard before he got on his horse to make his way to the Dragonpit, had just said, She won’t know me when we meet next, I’ll be a stranger, that’s what he would be, a strange man walking in, the uncle sent away, and Aemma said Oh cousin, she will know you, and she was a year younger than he, five-and-ten, and yet she made him feel like a boy, a silly churlish boy—and she had, he walked into the family chambers and everyone was shocked, dismayed, none of them had been at his fucking wedding but they’d heard all about it, dragged drunk in front of the Septon, they’d heard reports of he and his wife’s mutual hatred, they might not know the full extent of his failure to do as they wished and become a man, an adult, but he still felt they could smell it on him along with the scents of dragon and leather and the icy upper reaches of the air, and then the silence was broken by Rhaenyra crowing in delight and reaching out her fat little hands toward him.
Nothing to say really accept Daemon makes me so sad I want to throw up. "The full extent of his failure to do as they wished and become a man" - Daemon's extended, endless adolescence!
Speaking of Viserys’ child brides - it’s of course evocative and haunting he gets a bride from the Vale, and then sends Daemon, his reject, to the Vale. This is basically what I think of Viserys’ deal here: he’s just a guy who needs someone who exists to attend to his physical and emotional needs. First it was his kid brother, and when he had the socially normative, sanctioned figure of his wife, his brother is extraneous, and shameful.
Also: the paragraphs in this chapter, lol. People complain I guess for accessibility reasons about huge blocks of text in fic but for me a paragraph is just as long as it wants to be, and specifically when I'm writing about the overwhelming, tugging rush of memory, this is just the natural way that comes out, and emotionally effective for me.
Enchantment. His outburst on the day of her birth, perhaps that might be dismissed as merely some ancestral yearning. Here was a Targaryen girl, a Valyrian princess. Not a sister or a cousin but a niece. Now, at one, a beautiful baby, particular, specific, special. Rhaenyra. Her eyes lit up with delight when he parted his hands to reveal his momentarily hidden face. The stubborn grip of her little fingers around his thumb. Her wails and shrieks of displeasure, her tiny perfect face with its petal-soft cheeks and peony lips twisted up in a demented entitlement when she was denied anything—denied Daemon. Even when he simply left the room. You’re a novelty, Viserys said then. His brother sighed in exasperation when Daemon taught her the words to everything in the room, recast the everyday things in this language that came from some elsewhere. Qurdon. Jimy. What’s the word for mother in Valyrian, cousin? Muña, that’s your muña, Rhaenyra. Viserys protested, You don’t need to teach her that yet, she hasn’t even learned Common, she only babbles. Kepa, Daemon said, pointing to himself, naming himself to her. Kepa, Nyra. Her first word—uncle and father in one, plausible deniability, save for the fact she was in Daemon’s arms, she said it smiling into his face. Viserys had hated it. She’d taken her first steps toward him, her mother’s hands hovering anxiously at her back, laughing with self-satisfaction as she toddled in his direction, before falling forward on her knees catching herself on her own palms, but she’d only laughed harder, their brave, brave girl. And Viserys said for the first time, Past time to return to your wife, Daemon, and he’d gone.
Anyone writing Daemon/Rhaenyra has to face the facts which is that he was like "I'm in love with that baby." Also it is just fact in my heart that the fact Rhaenyra liked Daemon better than Viserys and that it drove Viserys crazy.
The girls remained Aemma for longer, as he returned to the Vale and fled the Vale, spent nearly a year just he and Caraxes wandering Essos. Endless silver-haired lilac-eyes beauties, courtesy of his forebears and their conquests. Even on that immense continent bursting with unknown wonders and the Freehold’s mighty echoes, he found himself drawn to the still hot Targaryen point, the living ghost.
Saera in Volantis. He had been very young when she went away, that’s how it was phrased, she went away, and his memories of her were unindividuated, one of a mass of aunts who one by one died. She was known to him through a silence that delineated intriguing edges, the princess who became a whore. Daemon, eight-and-ten on her doorstep. She was unashamed, scornful, but wryly curious, willing to entertain him for a while. She enjoyed his acid portraits of her parents as desiccated relics, of Viserys as her father’s heir, Daemon’s assessment of his unsuitability. She was not particularly impressed with him, and did not appear to experience any yearning, any loneliness, here so far from her family, her sons a few years younger than Daemon and although she was instantly known to him, in his bones, known to him as a Targaryen, and although her sons were very like her, little evidence of of their three different fathers in them, in some way in a formula he couldn’t figure they were not Targaryen.
Daemon gave himself away eventually. The brittle mask cracked, one night up late before the hearth in her bedroom, the elegant sound of her orderly house, tinkling laughter of sophisticates and the strumming of lyres, murmuring up through the floor, when he asked why she never answered her mother’s letters, thinking of his grandmother’s frozen grief whenever Saera’s name was mentioned, the longing for the only daughter left to her, and his aunt said evenly: She thinks she wants me to respond, but if I sent her a letter, just a normal letter describing any normal day—she’d rather I were dead. I do her a kindness, not letting her realize she’d rather I were dead. If I hadn’t escaped the motherhouse, the beatings, the cold baths, the shit food, my pussy shriveling up and turning to dust from lack of use, I would have slit my wrists and she would have preferred that and this way she never has to know, and Daemon had nothing to say to that, because were not Alyssa’s spirit and Daella’s sweetness and Gael’s gentleness ever dwelled upon, and was not Saera’s childhood too a silence containing as it did the willful spoiled child who would become the girl who laughed in her father’s face and declared she’d have as many husbands as Maegor had wives, the girl who stood dry-eyed and unrepentant as her father slew her lover, the girl who spread her legs in a Lysense pleasure garden and offered up not only her own body but the body of a Targaryen princess, the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms’ defiled, defiant blood open to all, cobblers grown rich as princes off courtesans and their taste for fine leather sandals beggaring themselves and grizzled old Braavosi sailors with their life savings withdrawn from the Iron Bank and Dothraki horselords willing to pay the entire population of a Lazareen village in slaves for just a night, the girl who’d survived.
SAERA!!!!! Absolute best Targaryen girl. These are some of my favorite parts of the whole fic, and the above paragraph might be my favorite. There are always people who would rather you be dead than survive them, and you survive them.
She hadn’t been best pleased when he showed up unannounced. She’d known him instantly when he was shown into her receiving room. Not Daemon, individually, but known him for a Targaryen. Her face went very red, then very white. She’d grumbled about the audacity of him asking her to stay, snapped she should put him to work for his bread and board, but she’d let him, she was wealthy enough, money of her own, money she’d earned in a vault with her name on it, that feeding a wayward nephew posed no trouble at all and provided its own satisfaction—Saera Targaryen wasn’t dead in a gutter, no ser, here she is feeding Baelon’s boy delicacies in her garden. He had the run of her beautiful house, of the city, and he continued as he had in Lys and Myr and Braavos, all the metallic girls and burnished boys, but mostly he shadowed her like a pathetic puppy, that’s what she called him, Oh, puppy. She wondered if his family—not theirs—knew where he was, if they wanted him back, if they’d send someone after him. I’m quite extraneous, he said. They were irate with him, he could tell in their letters, but also seemed wearily resigned, it was no more than they’d expected. They were not frantic. They knew he’d return, as he knew it. The second son of a second son. It’s nothing to the fifth daughter of a second son, Saera had said dubiously, but didn’t ask again.
His aunt was not as he expected. She’d been preserved in his mind as that crafty, unlovable child and although it was true her tongue was still sharp and she never rose earlier than noon and she moved through the world with what would have been sheer headstrong will if she had not already had done with all that, if she had not arranged her world so it flowed around her like silk, she was a woman, knowledgeable, witty, contented; she knew everything that happened in the city and everyone, spoke lively, flawless Volatene—Daemon struggled with only his antiquated High Valyrian—haggled hard with tradesmen, firmly but humorously reprimanded one of her girls for borrowing another’s gown without asking and ruining it, talked to her sons’ tutor about their progress, saw her most recent lover into her room for the night and filled the hall with her cries:any normal day—she’d rather I were dead.
Saera is frozen for readers and to Westerosi history as that defiant teenager, so it's interesting to try to imagine what she is like once she gets to grow up a bit. I would read whole novels about her, I love her so much. I DO want the fic where Daemon and Rhaenyra, disinherited, do show up on Aunt Saera's doorstep and she does put them to work because she does not accept family freeloaders!
Of course he kissed her. Despite the almost absent-minded condescension of Saera’s attitude toward him—she did not seem to spare him much thought, and when she did it was laced through with scornful amusement—there was also an odd nervousness. She left rooms he entered too quickly. She would visibly start when rounding a corner and coming upon him. Sometimes he would look up and catch her watching him, baffled, irritated, ravenous. Of course the only way it could happen was Daemon creeping into her chamber very late at night and crawling into her bed like the cringing puppy he was, scaring her half to death for a moment before she cursed him in annoyance. Surging forward, clumsy lips on hers. He expected her scathing laughter, for her to efficiently put him in his place and send him on his way chastised for his presumption. Instead she gasped, pressed herself to him, and then their hands on each other were frantic, fumbling at their garments until he could inelegantly breach her, rut into her with his head buried in her breasts, shivering, her hands wound in his long hair and high keening noises in the back of her throat that could have nothing to do with his brutal, ineffective thrusts. After, she pushed him off roughly, stroked his hair off his face with a harsh hand, his cheeks slick with what he hoped she assumed was sweat, and said cruelly, Oh, puppy, what have they done to you?As a lover, he expected her to be assured, confident. That was what he craved, perhaps. To be the one who knew nothing. That came, eventually. Saera bestowed upon him an extremely thorough education indeed, in time. But first it was sweet, giggly, desperate. The practiced lover made new. She said after they fucked the second time that first night, You took the one virginity I had left to give, and the oddest, the most perverse: I’ve never fucked a Targaryen. She was fouled by her survival, the unclean—the whore—but somehow with Daemon it sloughed off her. The closest thing to a Targaryen wedding night they’d ever have: one night his cock refused to rise and she’d fucked him instead, on his back, his hair flowing in a maidenly shield over his chest, pinkening under her attention and none of it was new, all of it had been done before—he’d fucked and been fucked and fucked her specifically, and yet his eyes were wide, wet, he’d shuddered as she gentled him with her hands like you would breaking a colt to the bit, pulling his hair, she’d been fascinated with it, said, There, that’s it, as he opened to her and he wasn’t going to come, he wasn’t hard, and yet something similar to orgasm squirmed through him, something he resisted as too overwhelming, too much, until it tore from him, a great, blubbering, snotty sob, and yes, when he’d cradled his motherless girl in his arms four years ago he had known why she jerked and thrashed against it, why once it started she couldn’t stop, relieved, agonized, it scraped his insides so clean and raw it burned, Oh, puppy, and he’d hated it, adored it—how his aunt looked at him like she couldn’t remember ever being that fucking young, and he was crying too hard for words but his head shook as it came and came, he wanted to say no, you don’t understand, I’ve never been that young, the young that’s in your pitying eyes and soft hands, never, never.
“His motherless girl” the fact that Rhaenyra is Aemma’s daughter holds just as much or even more weight for Daemon as that she’s his brother’s daughter - him making that plea to marry and protect her to Aemma - is deliberate. In general all his relationships in this fic are with women - Rhaenyra, Aemma, Mysaria, Saera, Alicent. This is because he’s the only man that I care about and also that he’s a lesbian to me.
She said You could stay, you know, start a mercenary company, hire yourself and your beast out to any of the Free Cities, and she knew it was never even a possibility, just as he knew it was never a possibility when he said Marry me, I’ll take you to the Dragonmont and get you a beast of your own for a dowry, and she would not even let Daemon convince her to let him take her for a flight on Caraxes, but he wouldn't let up, wouldn't leave her without it and finally she gave in, and she’d been nervous, her egg never hatched, she had never been around dragons, odd to think, perhaps she had been frightened even when she made her mad foiled dash to the Dragonpit to flee the trap they’d laid for her, but she gave a whoop of delight when the old wyrm thrust them aloft and Daemon had grinned the entire time, her arms tight around his middle, wind scouring his face, but when they landed again, his aunt was the one weeping.
A Targaryen alone in the world is a terrible thing :( Saera trying to escape her punishment and fleeing to the Dragonpit and being stopped is such a sad and telling moment in Fire & Blood, and is one of those moments that show that what Martin is doing with the dragons is wayyyy more complicated than certain strains of Tumblr meta give credit for. They are destructive machines of war, but they also represent for Targaryen women freedom, although an imperfect and slowly diminishing freedom. If Saera had a dragon perhaps she could have escaped before being sent to the motherhouse; Alyssa had a dragon and loved to fly and she's just as dead in childbed as Daella.
Saera's story IS a triumph - she attains a true agency and control over her life that none of Jaehaerys' other daughters achieve, at great cost but with great courage. And yet she can never go home again, and that's a wound that can never actually be resolved.
Daemon thinks he's being kind here, but is actually unintentionally being quite cruel. That's how it goes sometimes.
Daemon returns. Not to the Vale, but home. Viserys seemed pleased, Aemma was pleased. He wasn’t where everyone would like him to be but he was home, he’d come back. And there was Rhaenyra, aged three, beloved terror, adored tyrant, Rhaenyra with her imperious demands and her volcanic tantrums. She was a biter and everyone despaired of it, she bit Hightower’s daughter black-and-blue when they fought. The first time she bit Daemon he responded without thinking; the slick little teeth marks throbbing on his shoulder, he’d leaned over and bit the chubby flesh of her arm and told her that was how it felt, how did she like it? She did not cry with betrayal at this revelation her uncle had been the one to deliver, that someone could deliberately hurt her. She did not run screaming to her parents at the lesson Daemon was the one to provide: the flesh of others feels. It can hurt. You can hurt it. And sometimes they’ll let you. She looked at him in wonderment and, unlessoned, bit down again in the same spot, harder, eyes glittering up at him evilly, until she drew blood. It was reported widely among those who obsessively monitored the little princess’ health and habits that she had stopped her biting, all of a sudden, just like that.
LOL OK I have a ton of headcanons about Rhaenyra's childhood that show up in multiple fics - the fact that she's a biter and that Daemon got her to stop biting shows up here as well. This is the method my shit dad used me to stop biting but I find this story very funny and totally non-traumatic actually, compared to a lot of other stuff. Like I don't recommend it or anything else he ever did as a parenting tactic but well...it did work...
A darling, a pet, a demonic little imp by turns. Her parents doted and despaired. They loved her and so she must be guided, she must be shaped, made to turn out right. His grandparents died and yet the Red Keep was haunted still by their failure to master their daughters. Rhaenyra might transform one day before their eyes into the monster of Saera, that fearfully untutored creature. Rhaenyra was spanked for ruining her dresses and interrupting adults at dinner. Aemma delivered the punishments: she couldn’t bear to have anyone else touch her girl and she cried afterwards. It was what Viserys wanted, even if he did not deal it out himself and gave way easily to tears and pleas, and so did Aemma, even if it fell by the wayside for long stretches because Viserys simply did not attend, until Rhaenyra seemed almost to crave it as a mark of attention. This petted, charmed, overlooked child. Daemon had no role in restraint or comfort. His only task, fulfilled by simply breathing, was to delight.He gave her a dagger when she was five and taught her the basics of using it, told her to keep it under her pillow and stab anyone who disturbed her sleep—Assassins, she whispered with relish and he’d just agreed, Yes, assassins—anyone at all, don’t worry about who it is, stab first and ask questions later, because that was simply how Daemon felt about it at twenty-one and how he feels about it at thirty-four and at any age: fuck her nurse or her little friend or her parents or her uncle as long as she was preserved, safe. What if it’s you? Rhaenyra giggled and Daemon replied, too intensely, Even if it’s me, and her eyes filled with tears, she became extremely upset at even the thought: I don’t want to stab you! she wailed and that was exactly the issue, wasn’t it, as a prince he’d always had a knife and never even thought about using it either, but before he could say fine, don’t stab me, die if you want, she’d worked herself up, nearly hyperventilating, But what if I come to YOUR room at night, will you stab ME, uncle, stab me to DEATH, because you think I’m an ASSASSIN, me your NIECE, and Daemon had said No, I’ll know it’s you, even asleep, even with my eyes closed I’d know and that calmed her right down, I will too, she said, soothed, I’d know, I’d know IMMEDIATELY, uncle, and so it proved useless for protection and anyway her Septa found it and Viserys had it taken away lest she hurt herself.
I love writing kids and I think I'm solid at it! I love baby Rhaenyra. Again the theme of crawling into beds. Daemon giving Rhaenyra a dagger and teaching her how to use it is another of those headcanons and shows up first here. As I've said elsewhere, I find this fantasy of lifelong love enormously appealing and romantic, fictionally.
Daemon insists that Rhaenyra should even stab him were he to transgress - not because he thinks it's a real risk - he thinks of doing to Rhaenyra what Viserys did to him and only feels horror - but because it feels like a possibility, because there is actually no one inherently incapable of abuse, and there's another path, just as realistic - although I don't think as textually justified, considering his clear guilt about episode 4 - where Daemon has come to view sexual contact between adults and children as normal. When I say Daemon, in the show, is not canonically a child abuser it's making a claim about textual evidence, not about the ontological moral state of this fictional character.
The pearled maidens remained Aemma as he indulged in fancies that he was Rhaenyra’s father. He would not be allowed to marry her, he knew. He was marked, tainted. But if he were her father—if, yes, he thought it—if Viserys died and he became king, well, then he could do whatever he liked but when Rhaenyra was that small mostly he dreamed of marrying his brother’s widow—those hours in Aemma’s chambers, watching with rapt fascination as Rhaenyra’s Valyrian vocabulary became sentences, as she showed off the cartwheels she had learned from a troupe of gymnasts at a feast, Brother we need to get you some business to attend to, too much time with women—for then Rhaenyra’s life would be his to direct, it wouldn’t be any good for her, he’d never lay a hand on her, she’d be allowed to become just like him, and Aemma would be free, in his mind discarded everything but the fact that she would know pleasure in his bed if she wished to share it, Saera had ensured that much. He fucked these girls and they were Aemma but the sweet clench of their cunts were the molten afternoons, Aemma’s laughter as Rhaenyra whirled before them in a crown he’d made for her from paper, pronouncing, I'm Visenya!
Viserys, You spoil her, you indulge her, you fill her head with fancies, of course she prefers you. Why be her father when he could be her uncle? Spoiled, yes. He spoiled her, would spoil her. He spoils this whore’s cunt with his fingers and it responds gratefully and it opens, as he would spoil Rhaenyra’s cunt until it accepts him, pines for him, until when he notches the head of his cock to her entrance she sighs apart for him as this girl does, because around the time Rhaenyra was seven, eight, the girls transformed again, his niece’s future husband began to be discussed. There would be a son, yes, Viserys still believed that, but his eldest daughter would not be his queen, it was not fair to ask her to wait for him to grow up to be a wife and mother. It drove Daemon mad. If only it was him. He did not trust a Lannister or a Tyrell or a Baratheon slavering at the mouth at the whiff of her first moonblood. If only he was allowed Rhaenyra. He would take care of her, love her as an uncle, and then, when the time came, as a husband. The girl is tight around him, and if she was really Rhaenyra, as he started to imagine then, a forecasted and denied future, his niece, his bride beneath him when it was time, when she was ready, she would be tighter than this, and yes, it would hurt—he’d never lie to Rhaenyra, he would say I know darling, I know it hurts, it always hurts at first, it had hurt the first time, horribly, pain, his flesh could feel, blood on his sheets, but you could bear it, and eventually it would hurt less, he’d make sure it hurt less. Eventually he would make it feel good, the body adjusts, reshapes itself for pleasure, yes, like that—a noise drops from this whore’s mouth at the steady pressure of Daemon’s thumb on her clit, easing her into accommodating him, even against her will, Daemon doesn't delude himself, it’s not him, he just knows how to attend to her body as an instrument to draw forth cries to flatter him, even if she'd maybe really rather prefer to have it done with, for him to fuck into her and come quickly so he would leave and she could be alone, sleep, dream, but he needs to know the sounds Rhaenyra would make as he banished the hurt he'd made, because it was he who hurt her, and wasn't that better, and it wouldn't be for long.
The theme of "hurt" - the inevitability of hurting people and the effort not to - is a repeated thing. I also liked writing someone's kind of fucked up processes around abuse and its effect on sexuality and guilt around pleasure experienced during abuse without having to like editorialize or have some authorial gesture calling it out.
His hips snap into the girl harder, faster. She whimpers. Daemon wraps her hair around his fist so her rippling throat is bared to him. “My prince—” she moans and he grunts, “No, no, lēkia, kepa,”;“Lēkia, kepa,” clumsy, grating on the ear, the sweetest thing, his sister, his niece, made for him, it wouldn’t matter, what would it have mattered, he could have fucked Rhaenyra any time, his girl, his darling, his dragon, his queen, and she would have let him, Brother, one day I will be your king, and if you were my sister…“Call me—call me my king, say it, yes, my king—” and with a muffled gasp of shock she so crowns him.
Making this girl commit treason, technically! Not cool!
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He stumbles to the Red Keep shortly after, sky still dark as pitch. That early dawn coming back to the Keep after the only successful wedding night he’d ever have, Daemon had gone to Viserys room by the hidden passageways he’d spent hours mapping as a boy, all the secret arteries that let you enter rooms like an assassin, he’d entered by one of these—he’d had to, the Kingsguard on duty wouldn’t have let him in without asking the king’s permission like he had that first time, Daemon seven or eight, after mother died and the only stable thing in the world was his big brother, Westerling had let him in them, some sympathy for the sniveling little prince, it had been very late or very early and Viserys had just gone to bed and he’d reeked of wine and sex although Daemon didn’t know that quite yet, I’ve come back from the Street of Silk, do you know what that is, it’s where the whores are, I will be married someday soon but until then young men have appetites, it’s filthy there, I’ve been through every brothel, I’m sick of it, diseased women who take the cocks of ten men in a night, I wish I didn’t have to go there, night after night Daemon had returned, missing his mother and his father too, who had almost died with her, Rhaenyra was right, he’d felt it too then even if he hadn’t had the words, they were all dead, and Viserys had said eventually, If you were my sister we would be married someday, do you know what it is married people do?—and if you traced those shadowed veins and knew where to put your eye to a very small hole in the wall and did so on the morning he’d left for the Vale you would have seen Daemon Targaryen creeping to his brother’s bed like a beat dog, his brother alone in his bed, his wife allowed to rest so soon after the birth, you would see the King of the Seven Kingdoms startle awake, try to push his brother away with a noise of disgust, You smell like a winesink, you smell like your whores, and Daemon still drunk, weeping, had pressed his plum-red lips to his brother’s neck, his cheek, his mouth, sickened, desperate, and begged, If I was your sister we would be married, I would never be sent away, don’t send me away, and Viserys stiff and unable to dislodge him had been forced to permit Daemon for a moment to lay his head on his brother’s chest: yes, that’s when grandmother and Otto had come into the room, looking for him, and Viserys had said Go, you must get ready, and Alysanne had said Listen to your king now Daemon, tired, very very tired, and he’d followed her and in the hall hearing Otto say to Viserys behind him It’s for the best, past time, and that’s when she’d rubbed his cheek clean and raw and looked relieved as she said You are leaving, and I know you are bitter now, but it’s good, it is good to get away from this place, these memories, it’s why I prefer Dragonstone, there is too much here, one day you will thank me, you can get away from this, you can have a wife and family of your own, you can make better memories, and in that moment he’d realized that she knew everything, she had known all along, but that he was the one who must leave, for their peace, no more carousing with his filthy whores, no more being scraped off the streets by the City Watch and carted to the Keep, he would be married, he would have children, he would be fine.
More crawling into beds...of course Daemon as a child is the one that crawls into Viserys, and Viserys abuses that trust, but in his mind he's the one who went there. A couple things I wanted to do here: push back at the idea sexual abuse is inherently linked to sexual openness. Viserys is kind of a prude! (As shown by his disgust about Daemon's sex worker lover in the show.) He's a good, upstanding family man, and that's actually key to what he does and why and his justifications for what he does and why. I also wanted to explore what role being in the incest family would play in rationalizing abuse like this - well, if Daemon was my sister... - but as Otto and Alicent make it clear that it certainly still happens outside the incest family and it's just that, a rationalization, not a sufficient cause unto itself (which makes the discourse about Targaryens deeply troubling to me - you realize incestuous abuse happens here in cultures where it is deeply taboo, right??) And then what role being in the incest family would play in the victim's processing of the events: for Daemon, the chief wound has become not necessarily the abuse but that because he was not a girl and not married back in, he was disposable and sent away, although as Aemma shows, the alternative is not actually better.
Oh, Alysanne. Her story in the book is so sad to me. Here she's doing something awful: she knew the abuse was happening, and, worn down by her inability to save her daughters, dedicated to the prosperity of the house as the whole and Viserys as its probable heir, did nothing to stop it. Here she is doing what she thinks is a kindness, and it is an act of love, but it's really a cruelty - she thinks she's freeing Daemon by sending him from home and the site of horror. But why must he be sent away? Why must his home be lost to him? Viserys should be the one sent away. Which is why Rhaenyra's great act that makes her an adult and a worthy monarch is banishing Otto in chapter 10; Alicent does not have to leave the only home she’s ever known to be free of him.