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mirrorwitches) wrote2023-07-20 02:48 pm
mirrorwitches) wrote2023-07-20 02:48 pm
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"rūs riña" chapter 1 DVD commentary
Since I can't write at the moment, I am going to try to remember what writing is like by slowly trying to do DVD commentaries for every chapter of my Daemon Targaryen CSA trauma manifesto/Daemyra age play epic, rūs riña. Here is chapter 1.
There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.
—Love’s Work, Gillian Rose
Importantly, this started out only as an ageplay epic, not a CSA trauma manifesto. Which is crazy to me now. What did I even think the story was about? But originally the spark was a Discord message like: Daemyra ageplay. This is interesting for them exactly for why it is insane, which is that he knew her as a literal baby. The layer of play in the kink for most people is very thin and permeable. And from the beginning - although it becomes textured by other things, with Daemon's past - what's appealing about it is as a form of responsibility, of acknowledging the problematic depths of the entanglement. He can never not have known her as a child, and neither of them would ever want that. Why pretend? They let their sexual relationship be haunted by what it's haunted by, they invite it in. The next layer was, going off the arc of the show, where although Rhaenyra is married to her uncle she is the one who holds political power, political authority he recognizes. But of course she is always his niece, "the girl child you bounced on your knee." At the most basic level, this is just very sexy to me, this fic is pure id, but it's also interesting as a vehicle to look at these competing forms of power, all these axes entangling - age, gender, family relation, political authority. So Rhaenyra is going to become the queen, and young, so around the time of episode 3. She holds immense temporal power, but is overwhelmed by it, still in many ways a child and one who has lost both of her parents. That tension. Baby queen! So that was where it began.
After their silent return to the Red Keep, they share a silent dinner. Daemon watches both Viserys and Rhaenyra fail to eat anything. He only drinks wine himself.
The first sound is a harsh scraping of wood against stone as Rhaenyra abruptly pushes back her chair and stands shakily. Her face is very pale, eyes red-rimmed. Hightower’s girl half-stands to follow her, before sinking back down into her seat when his niece chokes out, “Excuse me. I wish to be alone.”
Viserys, staring into the middle distance, does not even look over as his daughter stumbles away from the table, her footsteps echoing with a startling loudness in the oppressive hush as she hurries across the room. Daemon’s eyes follow her as she weaves her way unsteadily to the door.
“You should go to her,” he hears a voice say, and that’s when he realizes he’s half-risen from his seat himself.
Otto Hightower shoots an admonishing glare at his pretty, mousy little daughter for even daring to speak to Daemon, presumably. Just yesterday Daemon had asked for her favor at the tourney, enjoying the idea of Hightower’s pique, and enjoying too Rhaenyra’s flush of injured vanity, her jealous pout, the roll of her eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was up to and she thought him very absurd.
And all the while Aemma was dying.
Alicent looks back down at her plate, fiddles with her knife. But for once, she is not totally cowed. Focusing intensely on her own full plate, she murmurs, “Apologies for the impertinence, my prince. I believe the princess may desire the comfort of family.”
He’s never given much thought to Hightower’s daughter beyond her presence as Rhaenyra’s devoted little shadow. This raises her a bit in his estimation.
And shames him.
Daemon has not known what to say. He’d gone to Viserys and the bewildered rage and grief in his brother’s eyes had almost pushed him from the room even before Ser Steffon told him the king wished to be left alone. He’d not even gotten into Rhaenyra’s chamber, for little Elinda Massey told him at the door that the princess had also asked to not be disturbed. It was not his grief, not precisely, and Viserys and Rhaenyra did not seem to want him in theirs.
We don't get anything of Daemon and Aemma's relationship in the show. He's obviously devastated at her funeral, but it's mostly grounded in his clear grief for his brother and niece. He's at a weird remove. There's a sense of his exile from the family. Daemon says in episode 1 that we all grieve in our own ways, and he's being a shit, but the fact Daemon might feel personal grief is not really allowed. Viserys takes Daemon to task for not being there for him or Rhaenyra. But Aemma was his cousin and his sister-in-law for almost two decades.
He should have pressed. He should have told the good ser to get fucked, he should have shoved the Massey brat out of the way. The thought of his brother and Rhaenyra alone in their quarters, Aemma cooling on some stone slab with those shriveled old crones waving incense over her…but what succor could Daemon provide? The Hightower girl might soothe his niece better, do whatever girls did—stoke her hair, let her weep into her lap. Viserys’ models seemed to provide greater comfort than Daemon had managed in years. He’d fucked off to Flea Bottom instead.
Hightower is being Hightower, which is to say, a cunt: sanctimoniously telling his daughter off by finger-wagging that the princess had expressly asked to be alone, as if he gave a damn about Rhaenyra’s wishes. Should they all just sit here? Her mother was dead.
This chapter could slot very easily into the episode itself. In the script, there's a deleted scene where Alicent comforts Rhaenyra, and Rhaenyra breaks down in tears with her. I hadn't read it at the time I wrote this. I sort of worried people thought I would be stealing Alicent's thunder anyway, or that I was diminishing Rhaenyra and Alicent's clear closeness and emotional support for one another but I liked the idea of - yes, Alicent is there for her friend, but Alicent is a kid herself, with few tools to actually do that effectively. She's desperate for an adult! And then it's very funny that Daemon is the only adult available. This is present in the show - Viserys is checked out at the funeral, and Daemon is the only adult there for the motherless 14-year-old.
“Thank you, Lady Alicent,” Daemon says. Quietly, but it shuts Otto up. He pushes back his chair.
Setting up the Daemon-and-Alicent relationship that will be important to the denouement totally by accident. This writing shit is sometimes easy.
Viserys still doesn’t look over.
Rhaenyra is faster than she looks, and by the time Daemon catches up to her she’s in the hallway outside her chambers. “Rhaenyra,” he calls softly, absurdly almost frightened of her beating him to her destination and having the door barred to him again. But he knows when he’s being a coward. He can admit it. He has never been less eager to do pretty much anything than try and fail to find some words that could lessen Rhaenyra’s misery right now. What had he said on that hillside? Your father needs you now more than he ever has. They would need each other. Perhaps Viserys might accept comfort from Rhaenyra; perhaps Rhaenyra would be able to draw on some reservoir of sustaining strength to be there for him. The gods knew it would never be the other way around.
At the sound of his voice, Rhaenyra collapses. Her legs give out from under her, and she's a miserable little pool of black fabric in the middle of the hall. Daemon reaches her in two long strides.
When Daemon is standing over her and she turns her face up to him, there are still no tears. Her face is bone-white, rigid as a death mask, the eyes almost frantic. The armored boots of Westerling following his charge ring out behind, and a maidservant makes her way toward them from the other direction. He’s struck with the sudden urge to sweep her in his arms and carry her off somewhere. He waves Ser Harrold back, glares at the girl who has stopped to gawk. He extends his hand to her and murmurs, “Come on.”
An act of love in making Rhaenyra stand and walk under her own power to greater privacy. Rhaenyra is caught exactly at that age where the tug-of-war between a desire for adulthood and autonomy and the desire to still receive the care owed a child, a care that leaving childhood makes it harder to access even as we still need or crave it, is keenest, and she gets a particularly sharp blow at that stage, in the way being the pampered, adored child is ripped from her with the one-two punch of her mother's death and being named heir. And in my experience those conflicting desires between dependence and independence never quite resolve, never can. This is the weird balance their whole relationship comes to rest on - he lets her have her dignity in public, and in private she can give it up.
Rhaenyra takes his hand and he pulls her to her feet. She staggers, leans against him as they make it the last few feet into her room.
She slides down his side and to the floor again once they are alone. “Uncle,” she whispers. Then she wails. The wordless cry of a wounded animal. She bends in half and buries her head in the skirt of her mourning dress.
He freezes, staring down at the silver fall of hair further obscuring her face, listening to her gasp in sick, wrenching heaves. He has never been called upon to do this. He remembers coming to his good-sister’s chambers after her first stillbirth—Rhaenyra hadn’t even reached her second name day—and Aemma, wan and lovely, smiling up at him from her couch and saying, “Daemon, perfect. Just the company I wanted. Come and make me laugh.” Daemon had even by then found not many people found him amusing, but Aemma seemed to appreciate his wit, such as it was. It was a week after her lying in. His brother and his wife had shed their tears, held each other in a sorrow Daemon knew better than to intrude upon. He came after the tears were done.
Daemon perpetually locked out of and somewhat estranged from the family but with none of his own. This keeps coming back up.
Rhaenyra’s tears—those he is familiar with. Or had been; he can’t recall the last time he saw her cry. But he had been witness to her tantrums, her effusions of childish despair over an unfair punishment or a treat denied. Daemon had known his role well. To tease her and tickle her until her giggles broke through. But it had been Aemma she turned to as she cried. Holding her little hands up so she might be lifted into her mother’s arms, so Aemma might pace the room with Rhaenyra’s arms twined about her neck and her legs wrapped around her waist, rocking and shushing her as Rhaenyra sobbed against her neck. And when she’d finally cried herself out she’d look over her mother’s shoulder, a queen waiting for her due: her uncle pulling faces at her until she shrieked with laughter and squirmed to be let down.
Aemma had the power to stop her tears. And Aemma is dead.
The gender of it all...the kinds of care Daemon, as a Westerosi warrior prince, is allowed to access are limited. But he knows what mothering looks like, and now Rhaenyra is motherless.
Daemon’s chest is tight as he kneels beside his niece. He reaches out and runs his palm over the back of her head. She jerks up. Her mouth is twisted around the howl that has just been cut short and her eyes are fever-bright, but still no tears.
“Oh, Rhaenyra,” he says. His brave, stubborn girl.
“Don’t say it,” Rhaenyra hisses.
“Say what?” He can do this much, push her hair back from her hot face. He had seen Aemma do such a thing, fussing, and Rhaenyra stilling.
“Alicent said it. You can cry, Rhaneyra,” she lisps in mimicry.
He feels oddly pleased about this, that Alicent hadn’t gotten her tears, her confessions. His subsequent thought is even stranger: they’re mine. They’re for me. I’ll get them from her.
LMAO. What a weirdo. Power, emotional power, is always here, and it's both heady and dangerous.
“You can, you know. Your mother is—” he cuts himself off.
“Dead,” Rhaenyra moans. “She’s dead. Dead. She’s fucking dead. What would crying help? It won’t make her less fucking dead.”
Rhaenyra is very prickly in grief at the funeral. This would take work!
Daemon doesn’t know what to do with this. He can’t say she’s wrong. He can’t say he believes crying would help.
You’re a big lad now, aren’t you Daemon? His grandmother’s hand had held his before the pyre. Her own voice unsteady. She hadn’t said it cruelly, but Daemon had forced himself to stop sniffling.
How old was Daemon when his mom died? In the book he's like, two. But from the way Viserys talks about Alyssa's preference for him based on his marital prowess, it seems like he would have to have been older. I went with six.
“Well, you can,” Daemon says stupidly. He would never ask Rhaenyra to deny herself anything and it seems like she is: her jaw rigid with tension, her eyes blinking furiously.
“I know that,” she snaps. “I’m not some stupid little girl.”
“You’re a baby,” Daemon responds unthinkingly, his heart aching with how true it is. In his head it had been bewildered, aggrieved. She is a baby, a fucking baby. He can’t imagine having ever been this atrociously young. It emerges from his mouth differently: cooing, coaxing.
This idea that Daemon doesn't feel young, has never felt young, comes up a lot, and through his intense awareness of and fascination with the fact that Rhaenyra is young in a way he wasn't, at least as he sees things.
Rhaenyra blinks wet inky lashes at him, her bottom lip stuck out stubbornly, her chin wobbling. “I’m not,” she says in a whisper.
There you go, he thinks. A bit closer now.
“You are. My baby niece.”
She’s shaking her head slowly, breathing heavy. “I’m not. I don’t want anyone to think—and especially not you.”
Daemon digs into that sore spot. “You always will be to me. I knew you when you were a baby. There’s no need for this, Rhaenyra.”
The end comes out stern, but Daemon shifts—he feels ancient, crouching on the balls of his feet like this is no longer something he can easily do—so he is sitting on the floor beside her. He rubs his hand up her arm. Just ancient: that’s one thing he feels as he recalls the day Aemma had placed this girl in his arms—Viserys worried he would drop her, but Daemon would have rather died, not a Dothraki horde bearing down could have made him drop her—ancient, and other things. A nearly physically painful tenderness. It almost hurts to breathe; he almost has to gasp for air like his niece.
A tear slides down Rhaenyra’s cheek and she rubs at it angrily with a knotted fist.
“A baby,” he tries again, watching closely how it makes her lips tremble before she clamps them tight.
She’d cried as a baby. He’d held her as a baby. Lifted her in his arms and whirled her around. Perched her on his lap at meals and fed her sweetmeats from his fingers.
The last few years, though—even this past year he’d become more conscious of how she was growing up, that the free and easy way they’d always touched each other was now something different. It hadn’t the first time, Rhaenyra two-and-ten, slung over Daemon’s shoulder after some tart remark so he could spin her around and then put her down so she staggered around, dizzy, when he’d looked up with Rhaenyra’s toes digging into his stomach to see Viserys watching disapprovingly from the doorway. After, he’d taken Daemon aside and spoken of how Rhaenyra was no longer a little girl but a lovely maid, her body developing into a woman’s—
Daemon had cut him off then, nauseated and angry. Stomped out, fucked off for a week or two. Rhaenyra had been a skinny scrap of a thing, freckled and horsey. Obscene to even think—but in the last year. Yes, she was lovely. Yes, he’d noticed. A hand on her shoulders when he gave her his gift, that was permissible. The hugs, the sitting in his lap, the stroking of her bright soft hair, the tickling—no.
Daemon really is in a position that's unique and not neatly translatable to any modern scenario. He has one set of great-grandparents. He's from the incest family. He's been raised to think of incest marriage as the ideal arrangement for romantic, sexual, and familial life. So obviously that affects every relationship with his family members, including his niece. Without any will necessary on his part, her entering puberty introduces a sexual element. This is why the incest is a bad idea, although this also happens all the time irl, and I write from painful personal experience, of the way entering sexual maturity as someone designated a girl turns you into meat, makes engaging with you in ways that were innocent as a child dangerous, makes you aware of some corrupting element that lives in your skin, that gets attributed to you as some explosive quality you possess despite your will. But it must be painful from the other side as well, when sweet familial affection becomes nauseatingly barbed in the eyes of others. It cuts off the paths human intimacy can take, might naturally take. And then you add being from the incest family to it!
But when she was a baby, his tiny darling, hadn’t he—just like this, hands under her arms—dragged her into his lap, just so?
She comes, stiff in his arms, prickly, puffed up in indignation like a frightened kitten. What would Aemma do with this stubborn child? Rhaenyra would thrash in her embrace sometimes, furious, unwilling to be placated. A stern word, a gentle hand.
“There’s no need for all this,” Daemon says firmly, no-nonsense. “Not with me, Rhaenyra.”
“No,” she whimpers. “No.”
Another shake of her head, as he pushes it towards his chest, hand cupping the delicate eggshell of her skull. He can feel it in her frame—something titanic, unstoppable, moving up through her body.
“It’s me, Rhaenyra. Nyra,” he says softly, the Valyrian diminutive he hasn’t used in years coming easy here. “Sweetling. Darling girl. My baby.” The names that spilled from Aemma’s mouth, in the Common Tongue that was the only one that orphan of the Vale spoke.
He models himself not on her father - but on her mother. Aemma haunts it as much as Viserys.
His niece chokes. The cries that rip out of her sound like they hurt, like they are screaming their way through her insides and taking something essential with them. One small hand scrabbles at his arm as she keens, rolling her face against his jacket, heedless of the buckles that scrape at it.
But there is something kind of violent in this coaxed release, and that’s sort of the appeal. Some recognition that you don’t want to express the feeling because you don’t want to be feeling the feeling, and someone to make you feel it. An inversion of parenthood or care or an ideal of it, as below when Daemon thinks of Viserys wanting to banish bad feeling for his own comfort. And of course you want to comfort a child. But that is not always selfless. Something about having the child’s misery recognized, how that misery is so unbearable you might have to be manipulated into it once you pass the point where you “should” have left it behind.
He rests his chin on top of her head. She’s very small in his arms. She fits perfectly, naturally, no matter that she is on the cusp of being a woman-grown. She is still so small, like she was in her mother’s lap. His body envelops her. He feels himself start to rock back-and-forth. It is not conscious. He does not think of imitating Aemma, now—it is just what the body wants to do, when it cradles a small, hurting thing. He knew so well what his body could do by instinct alone, but he hadn’t known this. How could he have known?
The seed here was just that Daemon has been raised from birth to wield violence and kill people and he does it well. But, in intimate life, he is often quite tender on the show. Which, obviously. Obviously both things exist. But not according to this fandom. I think this is both a natural and obvious instinct he doesn't feel much hesitation to indulge, and also sort of novel at this stage in his life, and reaches a new level with the imperative to imitate Aemma to provide comfort to Rhaenyra in his moment. And they both experience the relief of getting to touch each other again, in this way that has been barred by puberty, by a reversion to Rhaenyra as a child.
Daemon’s eyes sting. Oh, Aemma. It floods in, holding her only girl. He’d been half in love with her, once, the silver bride his brother brought back from her mountain fastness, this long-lost cousin.
Viserys gets a Targaryen wife!!! It's basically a fixed, firm headcanon for me that Daemon was more than a little in love with Aemma.
It’s a lance aimed at the heart he tries unsuccessfully to parry. He hadn’t seen her in months. The last time, the last time he’d been at the Red Keep prior to bringing Rhaenyra her gift before the tourney, had been at the beginning of her pregnancy. Rhaenyra had been with her in the godswood when Daemon sent a page to find her, and so Aemma had snared him, called him to her with his niece nowhere to be seen. Her eyes glittered with wry amusement as he cast his around the garden. She’d asked him to sit with her a while, and he’d insisted on standing. She was clearly already ill.
“Very well, Daemon,” she’d said with a sigh. “I know you are always prepared for a lecture and sometimes I provide, but I just wanted to say your new role seems to suit you.”
“At long last,” he’d tried to sneer. But with her, it came out relieved.
“Mm,” Aemma said. “You’re growing up. That’s all I wished to say. You seem steadier. They say your Gold Cloaks are formidable."
“That’s a pretty way to say that paying the lads to carouse in every stinking den in Flea Bottom is a good method for buying their loyalty,” he muttered. He still felt the shamefaced boy with her, in a different way than he did with Viserys. It was mostly more pleasant.
At this point I hadn't thought through Aemma's age. I eventually went with her as a year younger than Daemon like in the book for thematic reasons, but this still works - Daemon's extended adolescence. He feels ancient, and he is also eternally a child. This is a central paradox of the CSA survivor that I managed to work in before I decided to go ham and say fuck it and commit to explicitly writing out my molestation headcanon. Aemma, as Viserys' child literally bride, in this socially validated institutionalized relationship, has a different relationship to age and the life cycle that Daemon is sort of stuck in (and his situation is kind of unique, as the next chapter gets into). But also perhaps not, as Alicent too, in canon, comes across as both ancient and eternally young, via casting - Olivia Cooke is only a year older than the actor who plays her eldest son, and her second son is supposed to be 16 and looks like he has three kids and a mortgage. This is goofy visually but I am kind of fond of it for this reason!
“Rhaenyra is in the gallery,” his goodsister said, sighing again.
He’d looked at her dubiously.
“Yes, go do your whispering,” she said fondly.
“Viserys doesn’t much care for it.”
“He thinks you’re too alike. It worries him.”
“I’m a bad influence.”
“Mhm. She is young. I despair of her myself at times. But she will learn to channel it. As you seem to have done.”
“Are you suggesting I might be a good influence?” he’d said, amazed, turning his face towards her for the first time instead of staring up into the red leaves latticing the sky. Gods, she’d looked exhausted.
“I’m saying she loves you.” She’d given him one of her searching gazes then. “And she nearly collapsed in joy when your message arrived. And I might fuss, but I have never been able to refuse her anything. So go—and maybe stay for dinner instead of running off again, hm?”
He hadn’t stayed for dinner.
Daemon sort of fails Aemma in a bunch of ways. And maybe she fails him too. Viserys' child brides. She looms over the whole fic but it doesn't get much direct treatment, that relationship of co-victims. It sort of his working itself out through Rhaenyra, through the promise Daemon made to Aemma when she was born that he would take care of her.
His eyes sting. Some inexorable grief of his own moves through his body, making him shudder with it, tighten his arms around Rhaenyra. He rubs his cheek against the top of her head.
He will not make her happy now, he knows. No smiles will break through these tears to reward him, to flatter him. He thinks of Viserys’ relief on the far side of Rhaenyra’s tantrums, whenever he’s given her what she wanted to make it stop, or bought her off with an alternative she could pretend sufficed: now that’s better, isn’t it?
Yes, that’s what his brother always wanted. Everyone smiling. But sometimes it wasn’t better.
Dads......
Where the fuck is his brother while his daughter cries? And cries, and cries, and cries, not stopping, until Daemon starts to worry that in starting this he’s broken something.
He pulls back so he’s looking down into her face. Red, slick with tears, with snot. There’s desperation in her eyes as she continues to sob. Daemon strokes his thumb over her burning, sticky cheek. Wipes away saliva and tears from the corners of her open mouth.
The appeal of total humiliating embodiment, as one experiences as a child. Tears! Snot! Only the first of the truly bewildering amounts of bodily fluids that will come into play in this series.
It rests for a moment on her snotty lip, and that’s enough.
Rhaenyra licks it into her mouth, cutting off her cries as she sucks, hard—she’d sucked her thumb as a baby. They’d tried everything to get her to stop. Daemon remembers.
Her eyes go glassy, pacified, dreamy, the inside of her mouth hot and wet around him as her cheeks pulsate with the force of her self-soothing. Then a panicked jerk of her head as she realizes what she’s doing as she spits it out, her sounds of grief louder and more wrenching than before.
Daemon doesn’t think about it. He puts his first two fingers on her tongue. His other hand cradles her head. Her eyes flutter shut and with a small moan closes her lips around them, sucking hard. Her head lolls against his shoulder, body going limp. He presses a kiss to her hair, to her forehead. Her sobs break off into sniffles.
This is just enormously sexy to me. That's why it exists. That queasy combo of different kinds of care and affection is the source of the appeal. Is she a baby? Or is it sexy? Well, both.
I am using the word "appeal" a lot. That is because this fic is fantasy, an enormously appealing one to me. I'm sure that - the way I'm mixing what I think is psychological realism and difficult topics with fantasy - will come up more if I keep doing these.
They sit there for a long time, until the room is pink and gold with the setting sun.
I wish she were my daughter, he thinks, an unspoken, unspeakable wish that has lived with him for years. Here was another thing Viserys was unworthy of, so consumed by his own ambitions and vanity and delusions and self-absorbed grief that he left this one perfect thing he’d been gifted to mourn alone, that he spurned it so obviously that she knew it. The rage simmers in him as Rhaenyra falls asleep in his arms with her head tucked into his neck, as he lifts her up and carries her to bed, as he listens to a midnight council meeting where Otto declares him a second Maegor in the making and they bandy about the idea of placing a crown on Rhaenyra’s head as tears continue to leak from her eyes even in her sleep, as his steps turn towards the pleasure house he will buy another little bit of loyalty with should his family ever need it.
But thank the gods I’m not her father, he thinks. For what a useless one Viserys was. Yes, that was all.
Another originating spark for this fic is "Daemon wishes he was Rhaenyra's dad soooo bad, Daemon is like "wow I would be a better dad to Rhaenyra" daily." And this remains true. Both that I think he does wish that and he WOULD be a better dad than Viserys. But then I complicate that some as the fic goes on. It remains embedded or promised here, Daemon's salvation for me as a character, for the gift of his relation to Rhaenyra: that he knows enough to be grateful he's not. And not for the reasons you might think.
There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.
—Love’s Work, Gillian Rose
Importantly, this started out only as an ageplay epic, not a CSA trauma manifesto. Which is crazy to me now. What did I even think the story was about? But originally the spark was a Discord message like: Daemyra ageplay. This is interesting for them exactly for why it is insane, which is that he knew her as a literal baby. The layer of play in the kink for most people is very thin and permeable. And from the beginning - although it becomes textured by other things, with Daemon's past - what's appealing about it is as a form of responsibility, of acknowledging the problematic depths of the entanglement. He can never not have known her as a child, and neither of them would ever want that. Why pretend? They let their sexual relationship be haunted by what it's haunted by, they invite it in. The next layer was, going off the arc of the show, where although Rhaenyra is married to her uncle she is the one who holds political power, political authority he recognizes. But of course she is always his niece, "the girl child you bounced on your knee." At the most basic level, this is just very sexy to me, this fic is pure id, but it's also interesting as a vehicle to look at these competing forms of power, all these axes entangling - age, gender, family relation, political authority. So Rhaenyra is going to become the queen, and young, so around the time of episode 3. She holds immense temporal power, but is overwhelmed by it, still in many ways a child and one who has lost both of her parents. That tension. Baby queen! So that was where it began.
After their silent return to the Red Keep, they share a silent dinner. Daemon watches both Viserys and Rhaenyra fail to eat anything. He only drinks wine himself.
The first sound is a harsh scraping of wood against stone as Rhaenyra abruptly pushes back her chair and stands shakily. Her face is very pale, eyes red-rimmed. Hightower’s girl half-stands to follow her, before sinking back down into her seat when his niece chokes out, “Excuse me. I wish to be alone.”
Viserys, staring into the middle distance, does not even look over as his daughter stumbles away from the table, her footsteps echoing with a startling loudness in the oppressive hush as she hurries across the room. Daemon’s eyes follow her as she weaves her way unsteadily to the door.
“You should go to her,” he hears a voice say, and that’s when he realizes he’s half-risen from his seat himself.
Otto Hightower shoots an admonishing glare at his pretty, mousy little daughter for even daring to speak to Daemon, presumably. Just yesterday Daemon had asked for her favor at the tourney, enjoying the idea of Hightower’s pique, and enjoying too Rhaenyra’s flush of injured vanity, her jealous pout, the roll of her eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was up to and she thought him very absurd.
And all the while Aemma was dying.
Alicent looks back down at her plate, fiddles with her knife. But for once, she is not totally cowed. Focusing intensely on her own full plate, she murmurs, “Apologies for the impertinence, my prince. I believe the princess may desire the comfort of family.”
He’s never given much thought to Hightower’s daughter beyond her presence as Rhaenyra’s devoted little shadow. This raises her a bit in his estimation.
And shames him.
Daemon has not known what to say. He’d gone to Viserys and the bewildered rage and grief in his brother’s eyes had almost pushed him from the room even before Ser Steffon told him the king wished to be left alone. He’d not even gotten into Rhaenyra’s chamber, for little Elinda Massey told him at the door that the princess had also asked to not be disturbed. It was not his grief, not precisely, and Viserys and Rhaenyra did not seem to want him in theirs.
We don't get anything of Daemon and Aemma's relationship in the show. He's obviously devastated at her funeral, but it's mostly grounded in his clear grief for his brother and niece. He's at a weird remove. There's a sense of his exile from the family. Daemon says in episode 1 that we all grieve in our own ways, and he's being a shit, but the fact Daemon might feel personal grief is not really allowed. Viserys takes Daemon to task for not being there for him or Rhaenyra. But Aemma was his cousin and his sister-in-law for almost two decades.
He should have pressed. He should have told the good ser to get fucked, he should have shoved the Massey brat out of the way. The thought of his brother and Rhaenyra alone in their quarters, Aemma cooling on some stone slab with those shriveled old crones waving incense over her…but what succor could Daemon provide? The Hightower girl might soothe his niece better, do whatever girls did—stoke her hair, let her weep into her lap. Viserys’ models seemed to provide greater comfort than Daemon had managed in years. He’d fucked off to Flea Bottom instead.
Hightower is being Hightower, which is to say, a cunt: sanctimoniously telling his daughter off by finger-wagging that the princess had expressly asked to be alone, as if he gave a damn about Rhaenyra’s wishes. Should they all just sit here? Her mother was dead.
This chapter could slot very easily into the episode itself. In the script, there's a deleted scene where Alicent comforts Rhaenyra, and Rhaenyra breaks down in tears with her. I hadn't read it at the time I wrote this. I sort of worried people thought I would be stealing Alicent's thunder anyway, or that I was diminishing Rhaenyra and Alicent's clear closeness and emotional support for one another but I liked the idea of - yes, Alicent is there for her friend, but Alicent is a kid herself, with few tools to actually do that effectively. She's desperate for an adult! And then it's very funny that Daemon is the only adult available. This is present in the show - Viserys is checked out at the funeral, and Daemon is the only adult there for the motherless 14-year-old.
“Thank you, Lady Alicent,” Daemon says. Quietly, but it shuts Otto up. He pushes back his chair.
Setting up the Daemon-and-Alicent relationship that will be important to the denouement totally by accident. This writing shit is sometimes easy.
Viserys still doesn’t look over.
Rhaenyra is faster than she looks, and by the time Daemon catches up to her she’s in the hallway outside her chambers. “Rhaenyra,” he calls softly, absurdly almost frightened of her beating him to her destination and having the door barred to him again. But he knows when he’s being a coward. He can admit it. He has never been less eager to do pretty much anything than try and fail to find some words that could lessen Rhaenyra’s misery right now. What had he said on that hillside? Your father needs you now more than he ever has. They would need each other. Perhaps Viserys might accept comfort from Rhaenyra; perhaps Rhaenyra would be able to draw on some reservoir of sustaining strength to be there for him. The gods knew it would never be the other way around.
At the sound of his voice, Rhaenyra collapses. Her legs give out from under her, and she's a miserable little pool of black fabric in the middle of the hall. Daemon reaches her in two long strides.
When Daemon is standing over her and she turns her face up to him, there are still no tears. Her face is bone-white, rigid as a death mask, the eyes almost frantic. The armored boots of Westerling following his charge ring out behind, and a maidservant makes her way toward them from the other direction. He’s struck with the sudden urge to sweep her in his arms and carry her off somewhere. He waves Ser Harrold back, glares at the girl who has stopped to gawk. He extends his hand to her and murmurs, “Come on.”
An act of love in making Rhaenyra stand and walk under her own power to greater privacy. Rhaenyra is caught exactly at that age where the tug-of-war between a desire for adulthood and autonomy and the desire to still receive the care owed a child, a care that leaving childhood makes it harder to access even as we still need or crave it, is keenest, and she gets a particularly sharp blow at that stage, in the way being the pampered, adored child is ripped from her with the one-two punch of her mother's death and being named heir. And in my experience those conflicting desires between dependence and independence never quite resolve, never can. This is the weird balance their whole relationship comes to rest on - he lets her have her dignity in public, and in private she can give it up.
Rhaenyra takes his hand and he pulls her to her feet. She staggers, leans against him as they make it the last few feet into her room.
She slides down his side and to the floor again once they are alone. “Uncle,” she whispers. Then she wails. The wordless cry of a wounded animal. She bends in half and buries her head in the skirt of her mourning dress.
He freezes, staring down at the silver fall of hair further obscuring her face, listening to her gasp in sick, wrenching heaves. He has never been called upon to do this. He remembers coming to his good-sister’s chambers after her first stillbirth—Rhaenyra hadn’t even reached her second name day—and Aemma, wan and lovely, smiling up at him from her couch and saying, “Daemon, perfect. Just the company I wanted. Come and make me laugh.” Daemon had even by then found not many people found him amusing, but Aemma seemed to appreciate his wit, such as it was. It was a week after her lying in. His brother and his wife had shed their tears, held each other in a sorrow Daemon knew better than to intrude upon. He came after the tears were done.
Daemon perpetually locked out of and somewhat estranged from the family but with none of his own. This keeps coming back up.
Rhaenyra’s tears—those he is familiar with. Or had been; he can’t recall the last time he saw her cry. But he had been witness to her tantrums, her effusions of childish despair over an unfair punishment or a treat denied. Daemon had known his role well. To tease her and tickle her until her giggles broke through. But it had been Aemma she turned to as she cried. Holding her little hands up so she might be lifted into her mother’s arms, so Aemma might pace the room with Rhaenyra’s arms twined about her neck and her legs wrapped around her waist, rocking and shushing her as Rhaenyra sobbed against her neck. And when she’d finally cried herself out she’d look over her mother’s shoulder, a queen waiting for her due: her uncle pulling faces at her until she shrieked with laughter and squirmed to be let down.
Aemma had the power to stop her tears. And Aemma is dead.
The gender of it all...the kinds of care Daemon, as a Westerosi warrior prince, is allowed to access are limited. But he knows what mothering looks like, and now Rhaenyra is motherless.
Daemon’s chest is tight as he kneels beside his niece. He reaches out and runs his palm over the back of her head. She jerks up. Her mouth is twisted around the howl that has just been cut short and her eyes are fever-bright, but still no tears.
“Oh, Rhaenyra,” he says. His brave, stubborn girl.
“Don’t say it,” Rhaenyra hisses.
“Say what?” He can do this much, push her hair back from her hot face. He had seen Aemma do such a thing, fussing, and Rhaenyra stilling.
“Alicent said it. You can cry, Rhaneyra,” she lisps in mimicry.
He feels oddly pleased about this, that Alicent hadn’t gotten her tears, her confessions. His subsequent thought is even stranger: they’re mine. They’re for me. I’ll get them from her.
LMAO. What a weirdo. Power, emotional power, is always here, and it's both heady and dangerous.
“You can, you know. Your mother is—” he cuts himself off.
“Dead,” Rhaenyra moans. “She’s dead. Dead. She’s fucking dead. What would crying help? It won’t make her less fucking dead.”
Rhaenyra is very prickly in grief at the funeral. This would take work!
Daemon doesn’t know what to do with this. He can’t say she’s wrong. He can’t say he believes crying would help.
You’re a big lad now, aren’t you Daemon? His grandmother’s hand had held his before the pyre. Her own voice unsteady. She hadn’t said it cruelly, but Daemon had forced himself to stop sniffling.
How old was Daemon when his mom died? In the book he's like, two. But from the way Viserys talks about Alyssa's preference for him based on his marital prowess, it seems like he would have to have been older. I went with six.
“Well, you can,” Daemon says stupidly. He would never ask Rhaenyra to deny herself anything and it seems like she is: her jaw rigid with tension, her eyes blinking furiously.
“I know that,” she snaps. “I’m not some stupid little girl.”
“You’re a baby,” Daemon responds unthinkingly, his heart aching with how true it is. In his head it had been bewildered, aggrieved. She is a baby, a fucking baby. He can’t imagine having ever been this atrociously young. It emerges from his mouth differently: cooing, coaxing.
This idea that Daemon doesn't feel young, has never felt young, comes up a lot, and through his intense awareness of and fascination with the fact that Rhaenyra is young in a way he wasn't, at least as he sees things.
Rhaenyra blinks wet inky lashes at him, her bottom lip stuck out stubbornly, her chin wobbling. “I’m not,” she says in a whisper.
There you go, he thinks. A bit closer now.
“You are. My baby niece.”
She’s shaking her head slowly, breathing heavy. “I’m not. I don’t want anyone to think—and especially not you.”
Daemon digs into that sore spot. “You always will be to me. I knew you when you were a baby. There’s no need for this, Rhaenyra.”
The end comes out stern, but Daemon shifts—he feels ancient, crouching on the balls of his feet like this is no longer something he can easily do—so he is sitting on the floor beside her. He rubs his hand up her arm. Just ancient: that’s one thing he feels as he recalls the day Aemma had placed this girl in his arms—Viserys worried he would drop her, but Daemon would have rather died, not a Dothraki horde bearing down could have made him drop her—ancient, and other things. A nearly physically painful tenderness. It almost hurts to breathe; he almost has to gasp for air like his niece.
A tear slides down Rhaenyra’s cheek and she rubs at it angrily with a knotted fist.
“A baby,” he tries again, watching closely how it makes her lips tremble before she clamps them tight.
She’d cried as a baby. He’d held her as a baby. Lifted her in his arms and whirled her around. Perched her on his lap at meals and fed her sweetmeats from his fingers.
The last few years, though—even this past year he’d become more conscious of how she was growing up, that the free and easy way they’d always touched each other was now something different. It hadn’t the first time, Rhaenyra two-and-ten, slung over Daemon’s shoulder after some tart remark so he could spin her around and then put her down so she staggered around, dizzy, when he’d looked up with Rhaenyra’s toes digging into his stomach to see Viserys watching disapprovingly from the doorway. After, he’d taken Daemon aside and spoken of how Rhaenyra was no longer a little girl but a lovely maid, her body developing into a woman’s—
Daemon had cut him off then, nauseated and angry. Stomped out, fucked off for a week or two. Rhaenyra had been a skinny scrap of a thing, freckled and horsey. Obscene to even think—but in the last year. Yes, she was lovely. Yes, he’d noticed. A hand on her shoulders when he gave her his gift, that was permissible. The hugs, the sitting in his lap, the stroking of her bright soft hair, the tickling—no.
Daemon really is in a position that's unique and not neatly translatable to any modern scenario. He has one set of great-grandparents. He's from the incest family. He's been raised to think of incest marriage as the ideal arrangement for romantic, sexual, and familial life. So obviously that affects every relationship with his family members, including his niece. Without any will necessary on his part, her entering puberty introduces a sexual element. This is why the incest is a bad idea, although this also happens all the time irl, and I write from painful personal experience, of the way entering sexual maturity as someone designated a girl turns you into meat, makes engaging with you in ways that were innocent as a child dangerous, makes you aware of some corrupting element that lives in your skin, that gets attributed to you as some explosive quality you possess despite your will. But it must be painful from the other side as well, when sweet familial affection becomes nauseatingly barbed in the eyes of others. It cuts off the paths human intimacy can take, might naturally take. And then you add being from the incest family to it!
But when she was a baby, his tiny darling, hadn’t he—just like this, hands under her arms—dragged her into his lap, just so?
She comes, stiff in his arms, prickly, puffed up in indignation like a frightened kitten. What would Aemma do with this stubborn child? Rhaenyra would thrash in her embrace sometimes, furious, unwilling to be placated. A stern word, a gentle hand.
“There’s no need for all this,” Daemon says firmly, no-nonsense. “Not with me, Rhaenyra.”
“No,” she whimpers. “No.”
Another shake of her head, as he pushes it towards his chest, hand cupping the delicate eggshell of her skull. He can feel it in her frame—something titanic, unstoppable, moving up through her body.
“It’s me, Rhaenyra. Nyra,” he says softly, the Valyrian diminutive he hasn’t used in years coming easy here. “Sweetling. Darling girl. My baby.” The names that spilled from Aemma’s mouth, in the Common Tongue that was the only one that orphan of the Vale spoke.
He models himself not on her father - but on her mother. Aemma haunts it as much as Viserys.
His niece chokes. The cries that rip out of her sound like they hurt, like they are screaming their way through her insides and taking something essential with them. One small hand scrabbles at his arm as she keens, rolling her face against his jacket, heedless of the buckles that scrape at it.
But there is something kind of violent in this coaxed release, and that’s sort of the appeal. Some recognition that you don’t want to express the feeling because you don’t want to be feeling the feeling, and someone to make you feel it. An inversion of parenthood or care or an ideal of it, as below when Daemon thinks of Viserys wanting to banish bad feeling for his own comfort. And of course you want to comfort a child. But that is not always selfless. Something about having the child’s misery recognized, how that misery is so unbearable you might have to be manipulated into it once you pass the point where you “should” have left it behind.
He rests his chin on top of her head. She’s very small in his arms. She fits perfectly, naturally, no matter that she is on the cusp of being a woman-grown. She is still so small, like she was in her mother’s lap. His body envelops her. He feels himself start to rock back-and-forth. It is not conscious. He does not think of imitating Aemma, now—it is just what the body wants to do, when it cradles a small, hurting thing. He knew so well what his body could do by instinct alone, but he hadn’t known this. How could he have known?
The seed here was just that Daemon has been raised from birth to wield violence and kill people and he does it well. But, in intimate life, he is often quite tender on the show. Which, obviously. Obviously both things exist. But not according to this fandom. I think this is both a natural and obvious instinct he doesn't feel much hesitation to indulge, and also sort of novel at this stage in his life, and reaches a new level with the imperative to imitate Aemma to provide comfort to Rhaenyra in his moment. And they both experience the relief of getting to touch each other again, in this way that has been barred by puberty, by a reversion to Rhaenyra as a child.
Daemon’s eyes sting. Oh, Aemma. It floods in, holding her only girl. He’d been half in love with her, once, the silver bride his brother brought back from her mountain fastness, this long-lost cousin.
Viserys gets a Targaryen wife!!! It's basically a fixed, firm headcanon for me that Daemon was more than a little in love with Aemma.
It’s a lance aimed at the heart he tries unsuccessfully to parry. He hadn’t seen her in months. The last time, the last time he’d been at the Red Keep prior to bringing Rhaenyra her gift before the tourney, had been at the beginning of her pregnancy. Rhaenyra had been with her in the godswood when Daemon sent a page to find her, and so Aemma had snared him, called him to her with his niece nowhere to be seen. Her eyes glittered with wry amusement as he cast his around the garden. She’d asked him to sit with her a while, and he’d insisted on standing. She was clearly already ill.
“Very well, Daemon,” she’d said with a sigh. “I know you are always prepared for a lecture and sometimes I provide, but I just wanted to say your new role seems to suit you.”
“At long last,” he’d tried to sneer. But with her, it came out relieved.
“Mm,” Aemma said. “You’re growing up. That’s all I wished to say. You seem steadier. They say your Gold Cloaks are formidable."
“That’s a pretty way to say that paying the lads to carouse in every stinking den in Flea Bottom is a good method for buying their loyalty,” he muttered. He still felt the shamefaced boy with her, in a different way than he did with Viserys. It was mostly more pleasant.
At this point I hadn't thought through Aemma's age. I eventually went with her as a year younger than Daemon like in the book for thematic reasons, but this still works - Daemon's extended adolescence. He feels ancient, and he is also eternally a child. This is a central paradox of the CSA survivor that I managed to work in before I decided to go ham and say fuck it and commit to explicitly writing out my molestation headcanon. Aemma, as Viserys' child literally bride, in this socially validated institutionalized relationship, has a different relationship to age and the life cycle that Daemon is sort of stuck in (and his situation is kind of unique, as the next chapter gets into). But also perhaps not, as Alicent too, in canon, comes across as both ancient and eternally young, via casting - Olivia Cooke is only a year older than the actor who plays her eldest son, and her second son is supposed to be 16 and looks like he has three kids and a mortgage. This is goofy visually but I am kind of fond of it for this reason!
“Rhaenyra is in the gallery,” his goodsister said, sighing again.
He’d looked at her dubiously.
“Yes, go do your whispering,” she said fondly.
“Viserys doesn’t much care for it.”
“He thinks you’re too alike. It worries him.”
“I’m a bad influence.”
“Mhm. She is young. I despair of her myself at times. But she will learn to channel it. As you seem to have done.”
“Are you suggesting I might be a good influence?” he’d said, amazed, turning his face towards her for the first time instead of staring up into the red leaves latticing the sky. Gods, she’d looked exhausted.
“I’m saying she loves you.” She’d given him one of her searching gazes then. “And she nearly collapsed in joy when your message arrived. And I might fuss, but I have never been able to refuse her anything. So go—and maybe stay for dinner instead of running off again, hm?”
He hadn’t stayed for dinner.
Daemon sort of fails Aemma in a bunch of ways. And maybe she fails him too. Viserys' child brides. She looms over the whole fic but it doesn't get much direct treatment, that relationship of co-victims. It sort of his working itself out through Rhaenyra, through the promise Daemon made to Aemma when she was born that he would take care of her.
His eyes sting. Some inexorable grief of his own moves through his body, making him shudder with it, tighten his arms around Rhaenyra. He rubs his cheek against the top of her head.
He will not make her happy now, he knows. No smiles will break through these tears to reward him, to flatter him. He thinks of Viserys’ relief on the far side of Rhaenyra’s tantrums, whenever he’s given her what she wanted to make it stop, or bought her off with an alternative she could pretend sufficed: now that’s better, isn’t it?
Yes, that’s what his brother always wanted. Everyone smiling. But sometimes it wasn’t better.
Dads......
Where the fuck is his brother while his daughter cries? And cries, and cries, and cries, not stopping, until Daemon starts to worry that in starting this he’s broken something.
He pulls back so he’s looking down into her face. Red, slick with tears, with snot. There’s desperation in her eyes as she continues to sob. Daemon strokes his thumb over her burning, sticky cheek. Wipes away saliva and tears from the corners of her open mouth.
The appeal of total humiliating embodiment, as one experiences as a child. Tears! Snot! Only the first of the truly bewildering amounts of bodily fluids that will come into play in this series.
It rests for a moment on her snotty lip, and that’s enough.
Rhaenyra licks it into her mouth, cutting off her cries as she sucks, hard—she’d sucked her thumb as a baby. They’d tried everything to get her to stop. Daemon remembers.
Her eyes go glassy, pacified, dreamy, the inside of her mouth hot and wet around him as her cheeks pulsate with the force of her self-soothing. Then a panicked jerk of her head as she realizes what she’s doing as she spits it out, her sounds of grief louder and more wrenching than before.
Daemon doesn’t think about it. He puts his first two fingers on her tongue. His other hand cradles her head. Her eyes flutter shut and with a small moan closes her lips around them, sucking hard. Her head lolls against his shoulder, body going limp. He presses a kiss to her hair, to her forehead. Her sobs break off into sniffles.
This is just enormously sexy to me. That's why it exists. That queasy combo of different kinds of care and affection is the source of the appeal. Is she a baby? Or is it sexy? Well, both.
I am using the word "appeal" a lot. That is because this fic is fantasy, an enormously appealing one to me. I'm sure that - the way I'm mixing what I think is psychological realism and difficult topics with fantasy - will come up more if I keep doing these.
They sit there for a long time, until the room is pink and gold with the setting sun.
I wish she were my daughter, he thinks, an unspoken, unspeakable wish that has lived with him for years. Here was another thing Viserys was unworthy of, so consumed by his own ambitions and vanity and delusions and self-absorbed grief that he left this one perfect thing he’d been gifted to mourn alone, that he spurned it so obviously that she knew it. The rage simmers in him as Rhaenyra falls asleep in his arms with her head tucked into his neck, as he lifts her up and carries her to bed, as he listens to a midnight council meeting where Otto declares him a second Maegor in the making and they bandy about the idea of placing a crown on Rhaenyra’s head as tears continue to leak from her eyes even in her sleep, as his steps turn towards the pleasure house he will buy another little bit of loyalty with should his family ever need it.
But thank the gods I’m not her father, he thinks. For what a useless one Viserys was. Yes, that was all.
Another originating spark for this fic is "Daemon wishes he was Rhaenyra's dad soooo bad, Daemon is like "wow I would be a better dad to Rhaenyra" daily." And this remains true. Both that I think he does wish that and he WOULD be a better dad than Viserys. But then I complicate that some as the fic goes on. It remains embedded or promised here, Daemon's salvation for me as a character, for the gift of his relation to Rhaenyra: that he knows enough to be grateful he's not. And not for the reasons you might think.