Chapter Text
Rhaenyra was four when the lady of the Hightower, a freshly flowered, charming, child of three and ten, arrived in King’s Landing, but it seemed to her forever after that Alicent had always been there, as inherent an aspect of her life as her father or the Red Keep on Aegon’s High Hill, or the great city that sprawled beneath it. Hers.
And she treated Alicent as such. No matter where she tried to hide, Rhaenyra would find her soon or late, clumsily toddling about with a trail of septas and maids and Kingsguard knights following close behind until she discovered Alicent in whatever quiet corner she had cultivated and destroyed it utterly. Alicent soon learned to avoid the small septs scattered across the red keep, and the godswood, and court as well, and on most days she did her best to beg off accompanying her father to council, since she only ever sat lonely outside closed doors until Rhaenyra inevitably found her there. Lord Hightower soon took note of that. He asked her why and she was honest, like a fool.
“Princess Rhaenyra plagues me, father”, she confessed to him, one morning when they had both been woken by a call to council. “She is impolite and she talks too much, about things she ought not.”
“About what things?” Her father’s voice was low and even, revealing not an inch of the man beneath. His cold gray eyes would never leave her unless she revealed herself to him, so she crumbled beneath them, the way she always did.
“Inappropriate comments about her ladies, and cruel gossip. She acts far too familiar with me as well, clinging to my skirt and pulling at my bodice as if I were her wet maid. And -” And she sees me. “-and she asks me about mother. What it’s like not to have one. If I remember her.” His eyes had not left her, though Alicent’s had long since strayed to the ground where they found and followed a spidery crack in the cobbles between her feet. She picked at her fingers idly, blinking away tears before they could begin to form, and tried to imagine a version of Lord Hightower who would take her in his arms now. But he had never been that man.
“Do not play the fool, my child”, he said, not ungently. “We have come to a dangerous place. There will be times, many times, mayhaps, where we will have to do things we would rather not, to protect our family from those who might do us harm, and to ingratiate ourselves with those who might protect us. If it were to be spread about court that the hand’s daughter had taken a dislike to the heir’s, things would not go well for us. I do what I can, Alicent, but I cannot do everything.” And he seemed so tired. Severe, yes, but haggard and worn as well, and so sad ever since mother died, though he never said it, though no one else knew him well enough to see. Sitting up late at night and lonely, stifling sobs, she would find herself imagining him sleepless as well, mourning without her there to comfort him. He was so hard, all the time. Maybe, if she just did this thing, he would finally let her in. Finally love her for what she was, not what she should, but never could, be. Then they might both know peace.
“I understand now, I’m sorry, father.”
You needn’t be sorry, child”, Lord Hightower said, closing his eyes in a deep meditative calm she hadn’t seen from him since before. But he had been young then, and now, suddenly, he seemed so frail, so old, with the usually hard wrinkles around his eyes transformed into no more than loose, lovely skin. Alicent imagined that if she reached out and touched that skin, it would be softer than anything she had ever known. But then they opened again, the bags tightening back into severe crow's feet. “Wear that dress I had shipped from the west, the green one, with the fringe of dornish lace.”
She did. That’s how Rhaeynra always remembered Alicent, after. Not the real one, but the idyllic, ageless angel who only ever existed in her mind; a fantasy, a projection, that would only grow further detached from the real woman as the years went on. She remembered her in that dress, a soft, innocent green like leaves at the start of a long summer. She loved how clean it smelled. She loved running her fingers across its intricate adornments and lingering where Alicent’s soft skin was modestly revealed, reveling in the pure joy of sensation. She thought that this must be her mother, her true mother, like the ones in the stories who were so beautiful and gentle and kind, not the fake one that she hardly ever saw, who was always so stiff and distant, a husk who had been too hurt too many times by dead children and riven flesh to have any room left in her heart for the one that remained. The one that was all she could never be. Rhaenyra would bury her whole body in Alicent’s, a deep, contented sigh escaping with every breath, and Alicent would think, if only for a moment, that maybe this sweet, precocious child wasn’t a curse after all. That maybe, despite their differences, they were kin somehow, their relation revealed only in this quiet embrace. But then the princess would speak, and the illusion would melt away at once beneath her heat.
“Alsen?” That’s what Rhaenyra called her, in those early days when her mouth was still learning to form words, when she cared little for the correctness of something, as long as it served its purpose. “Alsen!”, she called again, and Alicent turned from the old window where she had been watching the harbor lit up with faraway life to find the girl watching with indelible eyes, though they still darted away when discovered, to a high ceiling painted a pale, cloudy blue, the color a relic of the queen’s arrival, years ago, before everyone knew her only as the king’s wife.
“Yes, my princess?”
“Alsen. What do you see out there?”, she asked absently, as if she did not much care, really, but was trying for once to be polite.
“Ships, my princess. Big ships. Have you looked at them before?” Rhaenyra approached quickly on uncertain feet, arresting her uncontrolled momentum with strong fingers that clutched at Alicent’s gown. She glanced at them, but only for a moment.
“I see them all the time! But they’re not big. They’re small. Like toys.”
“That’s only because they’re so far away. If they were closer, they’d be bigger.”
“Oh..” It did not sound like the girl believed it.
“But from here they do look small.” In those brief, rare moments when Alicent saw the lady Aemma, mostly in her daughter’s bedchamber, she was oft looking out of this window. A broad, thick one with uneven glass that set iridescent light shifting subtly upon her already divine countenance. She had purple eyes, but pale, as if burnt out by old, dead flames. There was something terribly real in her detachment, her aching sense of self, something Alicent wished desperately to run from and cling to both. And so she watched the docks as well, wondering all the while what Aemma Arryn saw there. Wondering if those ships were just toys, after all. “The window of my bed chamber faces west, towards Visenya’s Hill and the Great Sept, so I rarely get to-”
“Did you know that I’m gonna be queen some day, Alsen?” She said it haltingly, but with force, as if she had been mustering the courage. .
“Yes, my pri-”
“And did you know that when I am, I can make people do whatever I say?”, she continued unrelenting, grave, purple eyes resolutely upcast. “Like grandfather, and mother and father, and the septas as well, and everyone!” Her gaze remained fixed on some point far in the distance, her neck craned uncomfortably, like she was trying to make out a small bird flying against the sun. Alicent might have thought she was embarrassed by something, if she imagined the child capable of such an emotion.
“Even you, Alsen. Did you know?”
“Yes, I know.” Rhaenyra seemed to take heart from that, continuing,
“I could make you marry me, if I wanted to, and no one could say anything”, she said, still not looking up. “Not even the septa, or I would feed her to my dragon. And we would sleep in the same chamber the way mother and father sometimes do, and do everything together.” She finally averted her eyes from the sky blue above, just a little, just enough to expose irises of deep conviction and anxiety that discomforted Alicent more than she could face. “You could be queen with me, Alsen. We could ride together, on my dragon!. Do you want that?”
‘You have no dragon, my princess.” The words rose from somewhere deep within Alicent, from a place she knew nothing of except for her fear. Rhaenyra began to wail, and the nurses came, and Alicent left. She descended a spiral staircase and navigated a series of intersecting corridors to the small sept they kept in Maegor’s Holdfast, and she prayed there until her father found her hours later, hard-closed eyes still watering against the smoky air.