𝔄𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔢 𝔫𝔬𝔴 𝔶𝔢 𝔗𝔞𝔯𝔫𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔢𝔡 𝔶𝔢 𝔡𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔴𝔥𝔬 𝔶𝔢𝔱 𝔩𝔦𝔳𝔢

[sapphyre]

—if you and i are both still alive and miserable,

i propose we begin to hunt each other for sport—

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[valzyrys]

There are no good options on where to stay, in this world. Motivations to keep tarnished warriors sequestered in a realm-between-realms are far from mere whimsy. Towns and castle keeps and palaces and churches dot the landscape, even in the portions utterly inhospitable to any conscious creature, but they are the strangest Daemon has ever seen.

Sometimes they remind him of Valyria. Not the Freehold in dreams, but the ruins. The edges of which he should never have touched (but was always going to).

What should he say? I don't want to settle here. It's admitting defeat to find a home.

As if there's any fucking way back. The dead, if they do not simply stay dead, do not return to where they left. They are never going back to Westeros, or any other place in that world. Daemon will never know which of his children survived, if any. Aemond will never know if his siblings can fill Vhagar's void with their dragons, crippled and untested.

Daemon scrapes his hands as clean as they're going to get, collects a bit more of the balm, and reaches out to attend to his nephews face. Cradling his jaw with one hand to stabilize him, poking around with the other. Magical injuries are still baffling, to him— but it must burn, especially since it's still squirming, and it makes sense enough that potions and such, supernatural in kind, can soothe them.

"It seems half-alive, still," he muses, and carefully slides fingers along it. Pauses, to see if it's actually helping. His skin feels overwarm, like a burn.

"Do you wish for a home, here?"

[sapphyre]

Aemond's body locks up again with a sharp inhale upon the first touch. He's docile, for now, in his uncle's hands— all too accustomed to this process. His eye falls downward to lock onto a place that's not Daemon, riding out the sting of first contact before soothe of the balm does its work.

Is it what he wants? Home doesn't feel like an appropriate word that can be applied to any corner of this place. Nothing here can replace what they've lost and it would be foolish to seek it. He can corner the feeling in his heart and press his thumb to its pulse to try and understand what it is, but he cannot begin to know how to describe it.

Free falling is one of the last things he remembers. It's a bit like that. Beyond the God's Eye in the Riverlands; houseless and desperately trying to find a means of carving around his fate. No matter what he'd done, Daemon was still waiting for him. He couldn't escape it. He couldn't get his wind back beneath him to spare them from hitting the water. Perhaps it's the lack of control and stability that disturbs him so. He has no order of purpose to cling to here and rejects the one he's been given. Perhaps in the end, he will be driven towards it.

A few beats of silence as he thinks. The tensing and relaxing of his jaw within his uncle's hand is the only indication of the pain as new territory is paved by medicine. He can't tell if it's cooling the mark or numbing it, but it's doing something.

"I wish to not live on the ground like a horselord or roam the country like a sellsword." There's a tinge of bitterness, knowing there is little to his circumstances that can be changed. No amount of ambition will raise him to what he thinks he deserves here. It doesn't exist.

"Does such a way of life content you?" It's not one meant for their kind, Aemond thinks. They are lords, they are dragons. "Don't you think you deserve better?"