the thing about dragons

prologue (I)

in which Daemon has a daughter with Rhea.

part I

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warnings: mentions of violent death, non-graphic childbirth, child neglect, Daemon Targaryen as a POV character, blood

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It hurt—it had, before. Now it's only cold, the warmth pooling underneath her yet so far out of reach. She tries to move, but her body won't obey. She tries to breathe, a wheezing kind of futility.

She's drowning, she thinks. In her own blood. There's a knife sticking out of her chest, or was when she fell down, but she can't feel it anymore. She can't feel much of anything, anymore. Just the cold and the encroaching nothing.

It's a pathetic way to go, the way she goes, but she finds it hard to care enough to feel bitter about it.

She closes her eyes as the cold seeps into her bones, the quiet static around her.

Then, nothing.

○

Rhea knew that she shouldn't have laid with Daemon, even for appearance's sake, on their first wedding night. She didn't really like him; he didn't really like her. Their marriage was only because his grandmother commanded them wed. Neither of them held any illusion that it was the only possible way they became tied together.

It was a fine match. A rich match. A prince of the realm and an heiress of Runestone.

But Rhea had little fondness of men, of anyone, in general, and Daemon might have been a pretty face but his tongue was sharp and quicker than he, and his observations cruel and snide and crude. He thought her dull, he thought her ugly. For a while there she thought he wouldn't even be able to perform his duty with her, with how displeased he was with the match.

It was only after she insinuated that he couldn't when he did, only to prove her the contrary.

They managed, somehow, and it wasn't even unpleasant in all honesty, though Rhea saw no point in the act, and now understood people's obsession with sex even less. But they had to legitimize that marriage they didn't want, because the Good Queen ordered it so, and they did. And now here she was, nine moons almost to the day after that wedding night, pacing around her bedroom with one hand on her swollen belly as contractions rippled through her body time and time again, and she wished she had taken that damned tea when it was offered to her.

She didn't think one half-assed night would be enough for her to get with child, and yet, here she was. To her displeasure, Daemon was there too. Outside, because he didn't really want to see her any more than she wanted to see him, but he was here, despite the moons of his increasing hostility and dislike of both her and the realm, he was playing the part of a doting husband and a soon-to-be loving father. It was pissing Rhea off.

"My Lady, it's best you lay down," the Maester fretted and she sent him a stink eye. The elderly midwife, broom still in hand, did too. Rhea didn't feel like laying down, and right now no amount of pleading would make her. It was the pregnancy moods, she supposed, but the fretting Maester was making no sense and only pissing her off.

"Her ladyship will do whatever she pleases," the old woman told him and whacked him with the broom for a good measure. "Her body will tell her what to do."

"But the books—"

"Fuck your books," Rhea hisses, bending forward as a particularly strong cramp makes her legs buckle. She leans forward, hands braced on a table as she moves from foot to foot.