Chapter Text
But I must admit it, I would marry you in an instant
Damn your wife, I'd be your mistress just to have you around
***
There is a sanctity in repetition.
Alicent Hightower always believed this. She sought such sanctity with a fervor often chastised or teased — by her father, by Rhaenyra, by her husband.
But Alicent held faith in the rigor of her own routines. She followed them with a severity, held herself to chaste patterns each day. Alicent preferred safety and stability to anything else. She didn’t need excitement or seek thrills.
(Rhaenyra always questioned this, always prodded at the assumption that Alicent could truly enjoy this plodding predictability.
“Life was meant to be exciting,” Rhaenyra used to say, poking at Alicent’s side. “We were not built to live in cages.”
“You are my excitement,” Alicent would respond. “I need no other when I have you around.”)
The weirwood tree possessed its own kind of immutability. Surely the tree shed its leaves in the autumn chill and returned to its splendor with the blush of each spring, but this too was predictable. Perhaps this was the reason Alicent cherished its roots as the constant meeting place between herself and Rhaenyra, a stable expectation throughout their girlhoods as her friend became increasingly erratic with the buoyant enthusiasm of adolescence.
Alicent treasured the idea of something they shared, especially when they both possessed so little to just themselves. It often seemed they shared nothing private except secrets. And cakes. But the weirwood tree, at least, could be theirs. The place where they retreated, where the rest of the court knew they weren’t to be disturbed. A place where Alicent could quiet the fervor only Rhaenyra could provide.
Alicent had quietly ceded the weirwood tree after Viserys announced their engagement. It was the least she could do — or at least so she figured — in the wake of Rhaenyra’s rage. Besides, the burden of motherhood quickly stole Alicent from even the simplest joys of prior life.
Still, it felt like a sacrilege — to herself, if nothing else — when Alicent chose their cherished place to summon Rhaenyra in the early hours of her betrayal.
“What happened last night?” Alicent had hoped for a softer tone, for less of an interrogation, but she had felt the impossibility of that prospect the moment she entered the hollow.
Rhaenyra had turned with a softness, head tipped and smile already spreading in greeting when she heard Alicent’s footsteps. That smile fell like a hammer to an anvil at her opening words.
“What do you mean?” Rhaenyra asked, voice cracking.
Alicent didn’t want to do this. For a single afternoon, she had enjoyed a specter of the intimacy she once shared with Rhaenyra. It wasn’t the full force of Rhaenyra’s affection, but even a glimmer felt like the first day of sun at the end of a long winter. Alicent longed to bask in it forever, to keep prodding at Rhaenyra until the frost of her disgust thawed back into the heady rapture their friendship once held.
But the impossibility of that — her hands shook with it. Alicent wasn’t sure how to place it, if this was fury or betrayal or frustration. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
“My father has made some worrying allegations about you.” Alicent stalked closer, dipped her chin in an attempt to force Rhaenyra to meet her eyes. “Were you with your uncle?”
“I- I haven’t seen him in years,” Rhaenyra stuttered. “He took me into the city for some fun.”
Rhaenyra wasn’t one to stumble on her words. Alicent knew this, even if they hadn’t shared more than a handful of minutes together at a time in years.
“I swear to you, princess, don’t play me for a fool,” Alicent bit out, venom laced in each syllable. “Did you compromise yourself?”
That was enough to earn a flash of anger, a flash of that indecent, awful fury that Rhaenyra had unleashed upon Alicent and her father for the past two years.
“Are you asking if I fucked him?” Rhaenyra hissed. “Can’t you even bring yourself to say it?”
“I can’t even bring myself to think of it,” Alicent growled, dropping her gaze from Rhaenyra for the first time since she had entered the courtyard. “It’s uncouth. It’s senseless. It’s stupid, Rhaenyra.”
“Are you calling the heir to the throne stupid?” Rhaenyra bit out, lifting her chin in challenge.
It was a show. They both knew it was all show, but even if they didn’t — even if there wasn’t an intrinsic understanding strung tautly between the two of them over the course of a lifetime -- it would be obvious to any amateur courtier by the slight tremble of her lower lip.
Any other day, this smallest display of weakness might have been enough for Alicent to soften, to thaw even a fraction of the ice in her tone. But not today. Not when blood caked the deepest crevices of her cuticles, not when her stomach gnawed with a fear she had previously been successful in avoiding for the majority of her waking moments.
“Is it true?” Alicent’s lip curled into the accusation. “Is it true that you fucked Daemon in a pleasure house?”
Rhaenyra reeled back as if slapped. Her mouth stuttered into denial, eyes widened in betrayal, but she said nothing.
Alicent begged the silence to cease. She begged Rhaenyra to make a joke, to scream obscenities, to defend her own honor. She longed for her anger, her spite, her fury.
Rhaenyra clenched her fists. She said nothing.
“You have sullied the throne. And our family.” Alicent’s heartbeat thundered in her chest, crushing against her ribcage. “You have humiliated us and ruined yourself and you very well could—”
“Don’t you feel it?” Rhaenyra didn’t sound angry. She felt lost, confused, helpless in a way that only served to enrage Alicent even further. “Haven’t you felt it just once?”
Alicent dug her nails into her palm. She had promised herself she wouldn’t pick at the bloody skin hanging off her right ring finger, wouldn’t give Rhaenyra the satisfaction of seeing that weakness.
“Felt what?” Alicent’s head jerked to the side, voice low and poisonous. “The urge to destroy everything that’s been built on my behalf? The urge to rip apart the very seams of the life that was handed—“
“Desire,” Rhaenyra spat out. “Don’t tell me you’ve never desired for anything indecent.”
“Rhaenyra.” Alicent hated the familiarity of those three syllables. She had pronounced Rhaenyra’s name more than her mother’s, more than her own, more than any other word in their language. Alicent wished to forget it entirely.
“Say it,” Rhaenyra snapped. “We both know it’s a lie no matter how sweetly you say it.”
Alicent knew what she was playing at, or at least she thought she did. Rhaenyra had done her best to become a mystery over these years and yet this — well, she knew this. Knew the unspoken parts of what lay between them, even though she rarely allowed herself to give them appropriate consideration on her own.
“Desire does not belong in either of our lives,” Alicent said quietly. If she repeated it enough, she might just believe it herself. “It is not something we can afford.”
“Maybe it doesn’t belong in your life,” Rhaenyra bit out. “Maybe you can’t afford it. But we are not the same. We never have been.”
Alicent recognized this type of seething, this type of blind rage that often threw Rhaenyra head-on into the dangers of real life. This was the version of Rhaenyra that drew the ire of the realm, that lit a fire under the whispers constantly rattling about court.
It was a version of Rhaenyra that Alicent absolutely wanted to strangle.
“You think I don’t know that?” Alicent hissed. “You think that has not been vividly apparent for every moment of my life?”
Because this was the thing that laid between them, that had always laid between them. That Rhaenyra had and Alicent had not. That two girls, no matter how close, would always walk in two different worlds if only one wore a crown.
When they were 11, Rhaenyra developed a habit of stealing from the kitchen. Cakes, fruits, the occasional meat pasty. Alicent followed like always, doting and dutiful at her heels. They were caught, over and over, because Rhaenyra didn’t care to hide the treats in her pockets and because she scattered crumbs and lumps of sugar all across her rooms.
The punishment for Rhaenyra was the same glowering, toothless warning — mostly from the septa, once from her father — but Otto Hightower was a more exacting tutor. Rhaenyra stopped, eventually, when she noticed the bruises on her best friend’s arms. But that came three punishments too late.
“Every day I have spent next to you, in your shadow, has been spent in agony over the absolute luxury that you insist on loathing,” Alicent snarled. “The freedom you so recklessly toss aside, the good favor you squander just for a few seconds of selfishness.”
“I know you, Rhaenyra. You are delicate and you are brutal and you are everything in between. But you are a slave to your own whims and a tyrant to those who deny them.”
“Alicent.” There might be a twinge of regret in Rhaenyra’s tone, if Alicent chose to listen closely. She did not choose to do so.
“Don’t.” Alicent was already turning, already making her way back toward her rooms. Her words were tossed over her shoulder, scattering like embers on the ground between them. “You may mock my care for decency. That is your right. But I refuse to spend another day tossed in the wake of your rashness.”
“I didn’t fuck him.” Rhaenyra half-shouted the words, letting them echo against the pillars of the nearest wall in a way that lacked decency.
“Princess.” Alicent couldn’t look back. If she looked back, Rhaenyra would see the tears threatening to fill her eyes, already half-spilling down her face.
***
Exhaustion flooded Alicent’s limbs the moment she entered her own chambers. The loneliness of her position was hardly accompanied by time truly spent alone — there was always a child or a handmaiden or a husband. On the worst nights, all three.
Alicent had just achieved a modicum of relaxation, reclined on the seat closest to her bed, when the most dreaded knock of her handmaiden came at the door.
“Not tonight,” Alicent barked out, hand already rubbing at her eyes. “Tell the King I’m sleeping.”
“It’s not the King.” Aianna’s voice grew thin with an already apparent apology. “The Princess insists.”
“I do,” Rhaenyra said, striding past the handmaiden and into the room with the type of bravado that typically left Alicent just a touch breathless.
Tonight it only served to reignite the fury that Alicent had just calmed to a low boil in the pit of her stomach. Rhaenyra seemed to sense this change, stuttering to a stop just steps inside Alicent’s door.
Aianna’s eyes flitted between the two women, momentarily frozen. Alicent nodded after a long moment, dismissing the handmaiden with a slight jerk of her chin toward the door. The silence that accompanied their solitude hung in the air with a palpable weight.
“Please.” Rhaenyra’s hands fluttered with a momentary offer. “Allow me.”
Alicent narrowed her eyes, watching the hesitant shuffle of Rhaenyra’s feet as they carried her across the room.
“Allow you what?” she asked cautiously, peering up at Rhaenyra from her seat on the cushion.
For a moment, it seemed Rhaenyra meant to move behind Alicent, assuming her normal position to unlace her dress in preparation for bed. Alicent almost stood, but she paused, awaiting Rhaenyra’s next move.
Rhaenyra and Alicent spent much of their youth dressing and undressing one another. It was a duty of custom for ladies in waiting to perform for a princess, but Rhaenyra had relished returning the practice all the same — especially the final moments of affixing her necklaces and brooches, sliding delicate rings over the knuckles of her fingers.
They fell out of the practice when they fell out of — well, when they fell out of everything else. But Viserys had still requested Rhaenyra perform the duty on Alicent’s wedding day. The princess, in a rare moment of well-natured complacency, had conceded.
It had been a quiet, gentle, awful affair. After their previous bout of screaming in the garden, Alicent had half-expected her friend — former friend — to choke her with the corset. Maybe break a rib at best. But Rhaenyra’s fingers were delicate as she laced the back of the gown. The princess had hesitated for a moment once she was fully dressed, hands hovering over the crown, fingertips brushing Alicent’s cheekbones just long enough to make her shudder. The memory of it still left Alicent feeling cratered, hollowed from the inside out.
“Princess?” Alicent hesitated, Rhaenyra’s name suddenly too heavy to fit on her tongue.
Rhaenyra hadn’t made a move to slip behind Alicent. Instead, she stood just inches in front of Alicent’s seated position, hands twisting in a surprisingly meek posture.
“Allow me to apologize,” Rhaenyra murmured, voice dropping to a breath.
A flicker of that smirk — the one that had accompanied all the best of Alicent’s memory, the one that still warmed her chest with something deeper than adoration — dappled Rhaenyra’s features. Alicent couldn’t obscure the smile threatening to tug her mouth out of its scowl, hating herself for every second of it.
“Rhaenyra.” Alicent hated her own powerlessness, the way her voice took on a teasing tone even as her own self-righteous indignation lingered. “I’ve never known you to apologize.”
“I have never been in a position where I deemed it necessary,” Rhaenyra said, folding her hands together in what Alicent couldn’t help but observe as a particularly pious motion. It was, once again, for show — Rhaenyra didn’t pray, hardly had time for religion or faith or the gods.
“Which you do now?” Alicent asked, head tipped to the side in what she hoped to resemble a stony front.
For a moment, Rhaenyra hesitated. For a moment, Alicent thought it was all about to go wrong. That Rhaenyra would remember that she no longer cared for Alicent, that their aspirations were always at odds, that their girlhood love had evaporated.
And then Rhaenyra knelt.
It was a practiced measure, so sudden and assured that Alicent wondered haphazardly if Rhaenyra had practiced before arriving in her chambers. Her slender frame folded in on itself, inverting their dynamic so suddenly that Alicent almost lost her breath.
“Yes, my Queen.” Rhaenyra dropped her chin and her gaze toward the floor, a portrait of compliance. “Alicent.”
“And what places you in such a position?” Alicent asked, her voice breaking with a slight croak.
She hated herself, in that moment, for the way her throat dried out against her will. Hated Rhaenyra, as well, for the way she smirked just so slightly, even with her chin tucked to her chest, hands folded modestly in her lap.
“My devotion to the crown,” Rhaenyra said, voice soaked in mirth. “Of course.”
It was too much. Too jovial, too Rhaenyra. Alicent felt the shift, felt a pit drop out in her stomach — that maybe this was it, maybe this was the most she would ever get, the most she could ever expect from the princess. All levity and lemon cake. Nothing real.
It wouldn’t be enough. Rhaenyra must know this, must sense that Alicent — for all her adoration, for all the love she harbored — was still broken just slightly by the transgressions of the night before. The smile faded, replaced by the kind of severity that had begun to sharpen Rhaenyra’s features in the last year.
Rhaenyra’s hands shifted against each other, worry betraying itself in the motion as she reached for Alicent’s hands. Alicent accepted the measure on impulse, allowed her hands to be cradled in Rhaenyra’s touch.
“I do not apologize for my desire,” Rhaenyra murmured. “But I know that I put my family at risk. Our family. And I know that I hurt you. For that I will always apologize.”
Rhaenyra studied Alicent’s hands, fingers tracing every groove, every inlet that used to be familiar. It had been years since they had touched like this, for longer than a few nostalgic moments. Alicent couldn’t remember the last time she’d been touched without motive. Maybe even this wasn’t that motive — maybe all this was just a ploy for Rhaenyra to smooth over their fight and delay their politicking.
It didn’t matter. Alicent relished every second of watching Rhaenyra watch her. It was enough, for now.
“I have never wished to hurt you.” Rhaenyra’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Not for a day in my life. Not even when I thought I despised you.”
There was a flash of surprise across Rhaenyra’s face when Alicent extracted her hands from her grip, followed by a bolt of fear. That soothed into contentment a half-second later, Alicent’s touch gentle as she tucked a strand of hair behind Rhaenyra’s ear, then splayed her hand out against Rhaenyra’s cheek.
Rhaenyra tipped her head into Alicent’s palm, following the touch with visible desperation. Alicent used the angle to her advantage, watching Rhaenyra as her eyes fluttered shut.
“You despised me?” Alicent could feel Rhaenyra’s smile against her palm, small and certain. “I thought it was more of a latent distaste.”
“Oh no, it was a deep hatred,” Rhaenyra said, voice still soft and lilting. Color flushed in Alicent’s cheeks, even at the tiniest hint of teasing. “Deeper than the Shivering Sea.”
Alicent was sure a comeback sat right on the tip of her tongue, eager and waiting for their next bout of sparring. But Rhaenyra took the ensuing half-second of silence to press a kiss to Alicent's palm. Her lips were soft despite being chapped from hours on dragon back, stilling Alicent’s voice and mind all at once.
Rhaenyra pressed another to the base of Alicent’s hand, let her breath ghost over the gossamer skin of her wrist, touched her mouth again to delicate veins where they overlapped.
“So how was it?” Rhaenyra posed the question softly to the interior of Alicent’s arm. “My apology.”
Alicent had the wherewithal to notice that it was sweet — as sweet as Rhaenyra could ever be — to see this desperation to be accepted, to be soothed.
“Your lack of experience certainly showed,” Alicent said, her voice lilting just enough to make her teasing tone clear. “But that may be forgiven.”
“That truly is the root of all evil here, isn’t it?” Rhaenyra’s voice had softened to velvet, a smile tender on her lips as she allowed herself to be prodded ever closer to Alicent. “My lack of experience?”
“And what exactly does that mean?” Alicent murmured, tracing a thumb across Rhaenyra’s cheekbone.
Rhaenyra’s grin was so full, so absolute. Suddenly, Alicent was a child again, watching her best friend peel a candied lemon off the top of her favorite cake, forcing her to try a taste, laughing openly at her disgusted reaction.
“All of this talk of decency and I’m the one still left a maiden,” Rhaenyra murmured.
Alicent’s laugh came sharp and clear, like the ringing of a bell.
“Yet the realm whispers no idle gossip of my nights spent in brothels,” Alicent teased back, tipping her head back and forth in jest.
Rhaenyra puffed up her chest in mock disgust. Alicent soothed her immediately with a light pat to her cheek.
“It was an educational visit,” Rhaenyra muttered. “I learned quite a lot.”
Experimentally, Alicent pushed the pad of her thumb against Rhaenyra’s lower lip. Her touch was light, but Rhaenyra’s mouth stuttered open anyways, a soft rush of air billowing against her thumb and warming her palm. Alicent pressed again, this time a touch firmer.
Rhaenyra’s gaze flitted upward, a question clear in the slight twitch of her brow. Alicent repeated the gesture in answer, pressing her thumb down until Rhaenyra’s mouth opened fully. For the first time that night, Rhaenyra didn’t hesitate to take the next step, enveloping Alicent’s thumb slowly into her mouth. Alicent swallowed her own gasp as Rhaenyra swirled her tongue around her knuckle, a smile tugging up the corners of her mouth as she sucked lightly at Alicent’s skin.
Alicent hooked her fingers under Rhaenyra’s jaw, digging her nails in too sharply until she was greeted by a hiss. Rhaenyra always resembled her dragon, especially in the proud way that Syrax would arch and preen at any ministration under her rider’s hand. Alicent couldn’t help but notice the similitude in this moment, the way Rhaenyra tucked her feet underneath herself as she lifted her chin to deepen the touch.
“Show me.” Alicent rarely utilized her Queen’s voice within her own chambers, even to her handmaiden. When it slipped out, it was often a mistake, brought on by exhaustion or annoyance with her ever-crying children. But now, she affected the sharp tone with purpose, commanding Rhaenyra with something verging on pleasure.
Rhaenyra, for her part, responded with immediacy, sucking hard just once on Alicent’s thumb before letting it loose with an almost violent pop.
“What do you want to see, my Queen?” Rhaenyra dropped her voice a half octave, her tone mocking and pleading all at once.
“Rhaenyra.” Alicent dragged her thumb across Rhaenyra’s chin, gripping Rhaenyra’s jaw in another uncharacteristically assertive motion. “Show me what you learned.”
Rhaenyra rarely took well to a provocation.
When they were children, it landed her in so much trouble that the king had to issue an almost-formal warning to the court to not allow any person to issue any sort of challenge to the young princess. There was nothing at which Rhaenyra would allow herself to be bested: races on foot and horseback and dragonback, bouts of fighting with sword and joust, elaborate contests to juggle fruit in the kitchen.
Alicent had always used this fault to her own advantage, spurring Rhaenyra to be more studious or pious simply through muttered assertions that the princess couldn’t keep up with her far more intelligent friend.
So it wasn’t a surprise when Rhaenyra rocked up onto her knees, greedily swallowing the first kiss Alicent bestowed on her, and the second, and the third.
The real surprise was — well, everything else. The way Rhaenyra cradled her own hands before her, docile and compliant as Alicent dragged her into the embrace. The way she waited for Alicent to reach for her, guiding Rhaenyra’s hands to her own waist. The way she let Alicent slip her grip down to her throat, tipping Rhaenyra’s chin back to create a path for her mouth and her teeth to follow.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” Alicent questioned, voice muffled as she pressed her mouth behind Rhaenyra’s ear.
Rhaenyra hummed under her breath, chin tipped back, eyes closed and then opened and then closed again. Alicent nipped at her earlobe when she didn’t respond further, grinning when Rhaenyra let out a light yelp.
“I always want to be nice to you.” Rhaenyra’s syllables were slurred, half-drunken under Alicent’s touch. “That’s all I ever wanted.”
It was sweet and romantic and absolutely nothing that Alicent wanted at that moment. Later, she would return this version of Rhaenyra — tender and pliant and adoring under her hands. But just now, she wanted to be held too hard, to be bruised, to be pushed to the point of breaking.
“Don’t.” Alicent tugged at Rhaenyra again, sliding her hand around the back of her neck and pulling her closer. “Don’t be nice.”
Rhaenyra clove to her command like a zealot at the altar.