Work Text:
is it the odour of blood,
or the scent of my beloved's lips?
—FAIZ AHMED FAIZ; FEEL & LISTEN.
It ends how it began: in blood.
The blood does not belong to her, or to him (the black, spreading pool; the used-money smell of it) but it covers her as it covers him. He wears a collar of it, gloves and cuffs spun from rust. A jagged streak melding with the braid in his hair.
She is dressed in it: her brow, her feet. It makes her gown glisten. Her mantle shimmers dully like something set alight. The slick metal of her breastplate; even her crown is copper-dipped. She is dressed in it, made numb by it.
His fingers find her elbow, her nape. Hold soft, fleetingly.
‘I will send for water,’ he says. ‘I will have them put oil in it.’
She does not speak. She moves inside the bleak belly of the throne room, passes beneath the scalloped bones of the roof. She wants it to cave in—the beams, the leaded tiles, the stone. She wants to be showered in the ruin of it. (Let her be buried beneath it; let her lungs fill with fragments. Dust and ash and powder, the grasping fickleness of air crushed like a globe of soft fruit inside her fist.)
‘Peppermint,’ he says when she does not speak. ‘Orange blossom. Everything sweet and good, my love.’
Rhaenyra thinks of the boar. How it stank, how it screamed. She touches the smooth stone of the wall, and leaves it red.
Above the city she cut her teeth on war.
Her stomach soon learned the sting of it. By battle’s end she moved less like a soldier, more a spectre weathered by wrath and wraiths. Behind her eyes she kept a mirror held to the memory of her boy, the wrecked bones of his dragon on the beach. (She could not bury him. She could not burn him. Others melted in his image, in his name. Melted, screamed.)
Syrax flew in a shadow carved from red and black. That high, sinuous shriek; that long, terrible throat. Against Caraxes, towers fell like toothpicks, age-old parapets turned to sand beneath his talons. On his back, a black-armoured dread that kept a home inside her heart. (Kept; keeps.)
‘Come,’ he says, and like a lamb she follows.
Her breastplate falls to pieces inside his hands. Her gown catches at her hips.
Everywhere, that copper scent. It clings, it rises. She thinks of her lonely (red, terrible, red) handprint on the throne room wall, and looks down to see the width of his pressed flat against her stomach. His gnarled knuckles, all the tarred divots and scars bisecting the jewels and rings. His palm, the beloved heat of it.
‘This one,’ he whispers, and she lifts her left foot. ‘Now the other.’
Around her ankles, the dark damask of her gown clots and pools. His fingers find the column of her spine, the curved lines of her ribs. She pulls the laces of her shift apart, hears the thin fabric tear. Her shoulder bared in haste to feel his lips sing against the shape of it. Land there like a brand.
He murmurs her name into her skin, and she closes her eyes. ‘I will never be clean.’
‘You are clean,’ he says. ‘As you are mine, Rhaenyra.’
‘The blood—’
He moves his lips to her lobe, to the slope of her cheek. ‘The blood will wash away,’ he whispers. ‘I will make it go away.’
She turns her face to find his lips. To feel them land like the candlelight that plays its shadows across her skin. He tastes of salt, and she of rust. She opens her mouth; she drinks it.
‘Make me clean,’ she says. ‘Daemon, as I am yours, make me clean. Make me bloodless.’
The ragged lilt of her voice catches in her throat. The barb there: the impossibility of what she asks, what she seeks. (She has cut her teeth. Her teeth are cut. She has opened veins whilst her own stay whole, pulsing.) She knows it, knows that absolution is impossible. And yet—
‘Please,’ she whispers. ‘Do it. I command it. Please.’
He says nothing. His fingers dip into the hollow of her back, bed down till she bends at the waist. Her muscles pull along her bones; her body is a bruise, a battle-sting. The ribbons of her shift fall in silken slivers till she is naked inside his hands. Naked, and fixed.
Beneath his palms, her hips ebb and drift. She closes her eyes, and says his name as a prayer to feel his mouth land like an arrow between her shoulder-blades.
Before the battle she plotted at the Painted Table. She said that she would send her brother-king to some pitch-dark cell. She said that she would let the widow go mad in a windowless tower. She said that she would take her father’s legacy between her teeth, and tear it down to shreds.
The appetite burned away in the heat, the fury. She went inside the throne room with a belly full of blood. (Like a leech. Cast her into the flame. Cast her.)
In the sky she felt the shadows of a storm. She banked before the clouds could break, but there was no monster in their depths. Only her, only him. The red dragon, and the yellow; the promise of fire and blood that cradled the two of them like a cloak.
Rhaenyra never wanted to wear it: cloak, breastplate. Crown. Each was placed on her body, her brow. Each proffered, decreed. (Here, this belongs to you. Now it doesn’t. Now it does. It always has; it never will.)
She carried cups into her father’s council and learned the laws of the land, the spokes of a wheel won by fire and blood. (Blood—is that not how this all began? Her mother’s blood; she was bathed in it long before her tender body knew the touch of water.) She poured wine. She listened.
Viserys chucked her beneath her chin. Viserys assembled his children like bone-chips on a board. Rhaenyra wondered if when he looked at them he saw not love but loss: of a queen, of the pulse behind his breastbone. She did not have to wonder what he saw when he looked at her. (A wraith; ruin.) Her hand faltered. The glass tumbled from her grip. Wine painted the floor like blood.
In bed with her uncle’s hand around her throat (his fingers; the steel links of the necklace he had given her; cool, tightening) she told him he was not allowed to die. Her father might fade, but his brother must not rot. He would stay like porcelain, like ivory; she would gloss the fractures of wound and age with her tongue, fill them with her thumbs.
‘That would not stop death,’ he said. ‘Only slow it.’
She showed him her teeth. She said, ‘Let it come. I’ll eat its heart.’
The arrow lands. He pulls it out clean, then lowers it to land again. Between the small, knitting bones of her lower back. Her fingers curl into the stone of the wall, her nails grate into its grain. From her flesh, the point is plucked. It trails down, down until it finds her, until heat meets heat: her cunt, his mouth.
He makes a noise of admonishment when she moves. When she folds so much he has to hold the weight of her with his fingers, his face. The noise changes, then. Its tone and timbre dark with want, sharp from it. He pinches the inside of her thigh with his nails, then moves to mop the sting of it with his mouth. His tongue rolls (slow, feather-like) and she thinks of him in the sky, the saddle. (How he can be like lightning, or the loaming clouds that gather before it.)
Into his hair, she threads her fingers. Bound up in its battle-braids, rumpled and silver and damp with the same mess that mires her skin. She pulls hard enough to make him grunt, to make him turn his tongue loose like an arrow again.
‘Tell me,’ she says. ‘Daemon, you—’
He silences her by making her voice bleed to a moan, to a sob. ‘Shh. You are mine,’ he says. ‘You are everything sweet and good, my love.’ His lips linger, then lift. ‘Sweet,’ he whispers. ‘Good.’ Open-mouthed, his tongue glancing as he strangles her sob softly, softly. ‘And mine.’
He leaves her shaking. Naked and boneless. His face as slick with her as her skin is with day-old blood. She aches to kiss him.
Above the city she thought of their wedding.
His hands, the sting of a cut. Ash and blood and soot. The sense of him everywhere; the safety of him. He belonged in every wingbeat, in every fire-blast that leapt as an order from her lips.
The towers fell, the parapets crumbled. At her side, on dragonback, a black-armoured dread: her husband, her heart. Terrible, and raked raw inside her ribs. (Whole, pulsing. Hers.)
She knew his body before it belonged to her. She knew it before war wrote itself across his skin, worked its way beneath it to twine around his bones. She knew it as it used to be: bloodless, clean.
Under his armour, a kaleidoscope of scars. Her mouth learned every line. Her lips found his burns, kissed them smooth. She kept her word. With her tongue, with her thumbs, she kept her word.
When he slept she stared into the dying fire until her gaze swam white and spattered. She looked at death; she showed it her teeth. The fire spat against the grate. She put her head on Daemon’s chest. She listened to his heart rise like a wave against his ribs.
The fire sank. She slept.
The water is cool when he leads her to it. Their limbs tangle as they lower themselves beneath the glass of it.
His fingers shadow her skull, slot the shape of it into a curved palm. She leans back against his hold. Tendrils of her hair float like shreds of smoke, curling up and away as if from a pyre, a ruin. His fingers scrape gently across her scalp, then find a notch at her nape. He holds her in that easy way that makes his hands so terrible, so tender. Holds her, and opens his mouth against the point of her cheek where tears cling and glitter.
She turns into him.
They will sing songs of it. How the Greens fell. The red dragon, and the yellow; the sky of fire that cradled them like a cloak.
They will sing of it. How Vhagar, vast like the sea, sank like a stone into the lake. How an age-old beast was swallowed whole. Her rider blind and blue as the sapphire lodged into his socket.
They will sing songs of it. Of blood and fire, of dragons dancing to the death.
They will sing of it, but they will not sing of this: the blood in her bathwater, the taste of it gathered like oil on her tongue. (Peppermint. Orange blossom. Everything sweet and good. Sweet, and—)
‘Mine,’ he says, as her lips shape the sound. ‘You are mine.’
They sleep in the great bed her father once shared with her mother. The hangings are green now; the tapestries spool scenes she half-remembers. They shift like dreams.
Beneath her, Daemon stirs. He hums in his sleep. She touches the smooth skin of his chest, and leaves it red. She blinks. His skin is clean, bloodless. She looks at her hand, pale and guileless in the fading firelight. (Impossible; of course he has done it.) He hums, his teeth scutter softly around the silhouette of her name. Under the press of her palm, a wave rising. Rising.
She lays her head against his heart. She sleeps.
# the holy quartet: naked clean bloodless mine // find me on TUMBLR: @charmtion. ✨