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At last, Aemond feels deserving of his great name. Targaryen, he thinks, as he soars through the storm, Vhagar gliding through the clouds. He has the name, the look, the dragon, the rage. The thrill of a chase, of a fight, lights his blood. Finally, he can prove himself as a worthy opponent – no longer the sensitive child teased by his peers.
But they are peers no longer: Aemond rides the greatest, oldest dragon in the world, the last living being to have known Aegon the Conqueror. He is leagues above them all, now.
Literally above Lucerys, Aemond thinks with relish. Below him, he can see the faint outline of little Luke Strong’s dragon desperately flapping against the gale of the storm.
He feels a laugh erupt from him, low and manic. Is Luke afraid? Can he feel Aemond following him, a hound caught by the scent of blood? Aemond hopes so. By the Seven, he hopes so. He wants to see Lucerys’ face pale, his dark eyes widen, little salty tears drip down his plain face. He wants everything Luke refused to give him in the hall of Storm’s End – his acknowledgement, his submission, his eye.
Below them, Arrax swerves suddenly onto a different course. Are you finally afraid, bastard? he shouts, but his words are lost to the wind. Have you wet yourself for me?
Boy! he bellows as Vhagar dives, playfully snapping at the air Arrax has vacated. Faintly he can hear Lucerys commanding Arrax to be calm, to fly for Dragonstone.
Vhagar climbs higher into the storm again. They are one, he and her, attuned to each other in a way no other can understand. They will chase Lucerys to Dragonstone – if Aemond is lucky, and Arrax cannot withstand the storm, his Lord Strong will land and Aemond will follow, knife ready and gleaming. His knife presses against his leg, eager and wet, if only with rain for now.
Get him, a coiling pressure in his chest demands, get him, gethimgethimgethim.
He laughs again as thunder rumbles, the sound echoing around his skull, making this thoughts hazy and unreal. Vhagar loops them around, roaring before descending, as silent as death, through a cloudbank. Lucerys is within their sights again, though only briefly – Vhagar smashes headlong towards Arrax’s side, clearly intending to stun the creature out of the sky. Yet the bastard boy yanks at Arrax’s handles, twisting to the side and spiralling out of Vhagar’s path. The little dragon spins in the sky like a tin-top toy.
Lightning illuminates their surroundings, rain lashing at his face like a whip. Fight me! Aemond shouts as Lucerys continues his damned evasive manoeuvres. Fucking coward bastard, too afraid to face him like a man and too afraid to face him like a Targaryen.
He flies towards his nephew again, playing at a battle. Vhagar opens her great maw, and Aemond hears a gratifying yelp from Luke before he swerves. They part in opposite directions easily, two branches from the same tree.
Lucerys disappears into the storm. Aemond feels a growl reverberate through him, though he cannot tell if it came from himself or Vhagar. Both, neither, it did not matter.
He urges Vhagar onwards, her size and strength propelling them easily ahead of little Luke. Lightning flashes again, and Aemond finally spots Arrax’s shape. Still valiantly fighting against the tempest, but Aemond will put a stop to that soon. He’ll forcefully ground them, then carry Lucerys off, his little reward for gaining House Baratheon’s support. He can see it now – Lucerys will be petrifyingly afraid, scared for his life, sequestered in Aemond’s rooms and trembling upon his bed. Losing only an eye would seem a mercy, then.
He must not get ahead of himself. First, Aemond must catch him.
Blazes of light play across the little dragon and his rider. When the bastard turns in his saddle, searching for Aemond, he meets his gaze and peels his lips back in a mockery of a smile. You owe a debt! he taunts. His nephew’s brief look is unimpressed, annoyed. A face carefully blank, wiped of all that binds them together. He turns again and commands Arrax to obey, to fly faster.
Wrath flares in Aemond. The fucking gall of this bastard boy to dismiss him so easily.
Vhagar, her solid body beneath him, reacts to his temper; his small, human anger seeps through her and blisters into something more monstrous. A burning grief-rage that unearths something in her, something belonging to people long dead. She veers too close. Arrax roars, a high-pitched thing like nails down a chalkboard, and aims a plume of fire at Vhagar’s eye. No! he hears Lucerys scream, obey! Serve me!
For a split second, Aemond feels a joy so bright and vindictive – finally the boy is playing the game, finally he has taken up his part in the story. Aemond will frighten him. For once in his pathetic life, little Luke Strong will bear the consequences.
Aemond leans left in his saddle. Vhagar jerks to the right. Obey me, Aemond reminds her. Vhagar does not listen, instead swinging around and rapidly gaining speed. Unease swirls through Aemond like poison. Vhagar! He lays a hand on her warm scales. Calm, be calm!
His lady ignores him. Around, Aemond commands, turn around. No, Vhagar. Calm. Stop. No. No! He kicks at her, as useless as a fruit fly.
Aemond can no longer see Lucerys, though that is of little concern to him now. Why is Vhagar not listening to him? What kind of Targaryen cannot control their dragon? Suddenly Vhagar swoops down, even as Aemond chants no at her, tugging at her ropes while his stomach churns. Vhagar remains treacherously, fatally silent – she does not make a sound beneath him, quieter than a ghost. Like a dream, the clouds in his mind part and her intent becomes clear to Aemond.
No! Aemond rises up, leaning forward from his seat, his hands fumbling hopelessly at his saddle’s handles. No, no, no, no, nonononono.
For a moment, Aemond sees Lucerys, his dark eyes flicking towards the approaching dragon. His little mouth opens, he takes half a breath, and then Vhagar rips through him.
Aemond watches as the bloody mess falls through the air, a pearlescent wing drifting down slowly while Arrax’s head drops like a stone. He realises the hand stretched out in front of him is his own.
Luke? he calls out. His voice scratches and breaks in his throat.
There is no answer.
Vhagar allows herself to ride the breeze of the storm, content.
Rain has soaked through his doublet, Aemond thinks belatedly. It is not good for them to fly in a storm. Arrax is so little, Lucerys is probably cold. He always had cold fingers when they were young.
He guides Vhagar down to land. She listens easily to him now. Fucking bitch, Aemond thinks viciously, but instantly feels regretful, even as his mind is distant and detached. Feelings he’d rather not examine swirl in his chest. Luke’s wide eyes appear every time he blinks.
They fly over the churning sea. There is nothing floating on the surface, no dark head emerging from the depths, spluttering.
Lucerys? he calls quietly. The wind howls in answer.
-
He and Vhagar searched the sea for hours, circling like a vulture, before combing up and down the beaches near Shipbreaker Bay.
A new day is dawning, yet the coast remains cold and empty.
They land in a cove hidden enough by the high cliffs that Vhagar is not visible. Aemond throws out a half-hearted command for her to stay, unable to look at her as he dismounts and walks away. Part of Arrax is in her stomach – is his nephew there too? He imagines death would have been fast then, painless. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Lucerys slipped down her gullet, alive and whole, only to be scorched by her inner fires.
Or perhaps Luke survived, though Aemond is not holding much hope. Still, without a body, who would know what happened?
Aemond searches. He walks up and the down the beaches. He stands in the shallows and scans the horizon. He considers sitting, but he cannot allow himself to stop moving. He stalks back to Vhagar and eats his emergency rations. He searches some more.
The sun reaches its apex, a haze dimming its brightness and rendering the world a sickly, washed-out yellow.
Aemond is watching the waves lap at the shore. Bubbles fizz into life before being pulled back into the sea. The movement is hypnotic, emptying Aemond’s mind of its incessant buzzing. Panic does not fill him – cannot fill him. He is calm, and confident, and righteous. He is in the right; he was well within his rights. Luke’s face flickers behind his eyelids again.
Aemond forces himself to the present. He realises there are trails of blood in the water.
-
He finds the little dragon first.
Only parts of him have washed up. The beast’s torso is large, far taller than Aemond. Skin has been parted to show bloody sinew and dark, wet flesh glistening. Any organs must have been washed out by the current. Vhagar snapped most of Arrax’s ribcage – his ribs jut through his skin like the swords of the Iron Throne, disfigured and hideous. Aemond touches one. It is wet with seawater, but when he encircles the whole bone, his hand comes away bloody.
Arrax’s head has been separated from his neck, but Aemond can see it was not a clean cut. Scales have been torn away unevenly, and the skin underneath peels away as easily as skin from a grape. Aemond knows this because he takes a ribbon of flesh and pulls it off the body as a butcher would.
He holds the cut of flesh in his hands, feeling the weight. Dragons and dragonlords are kin, the thought rises into his mind unbidden. Nausea overtakes him. Aemond drops the little Arrax-piece and looks away, into an unseeing eye.
The head has washed up further along the beach. Although, upon inspection, Aemond discovers it is only a partial piece. The grey, gelatinous matter smeared along the sand is not seaweed, as Aemond assumed, but is leaking out of Arrax’s smashed skull.
Dragon brain, Aemond thinks as he kneels next to it. The skull caves inwards, and Aemond lifts up a bone fragment to peer into the emptying space. A strange, clear liquid coats his finger when he pulls away. He wipes it against Arrax’s scales.
He crawls over to the other side, where the face is mostly intact. The dragon’s eye is huge, it spans Aemond’s whole face. When he leans closer he can see his reflection in the dark glistening, clearer than any mirror. He looks at his own scar, tilting his head this way and that.
He pulls his eyepatch off. In his reflection, the gemstone is dull.
Aemond presses his hand against the large eye. It is still moist, and surprisingly firm. He digs his fingers in, his nails slicing shallow cuts into the sclera. He palms the bone of the socket, to see if it feel the same as his own. It does.
He looks into the dead pupil again. His one eye looks back at him. Eyes upon eyes upon eyes. Aemond does not know why he thought Arrax would have brown eyes, but he had, and Arrax does not. The iris is a dark green, the same shade as the scales at his snout. Fury blindsides Aemond – from where it came he does not know – and he takes up his knife and buries it in the middle of the dragon’s judging gaze.
He twists the knife, delighting in the wet squick it makes. He withdraws the blade, a spider’s web of gloop and congealed black blood following, before carving the iris out. It is a messy endeavour, like making a sculpture out of a peach, but Aemond manages it.
Specks and chunks of green litter the sand around them. Better, he thinks as he pants, his thighs tingling. The mutilated eye stares back at him.
Aemond stands, brushing sand from his knees. He washes his knife and hands in the water.
Finally clean, he glances down the beach. Some way away, there is a dark stain upon the pale sand, a small shadow.
-
He finds his little boy second.
He tries to remain casual, loath to seem affected even with no one around, but he finds himself running after an agonised half-minute of walking, heartbeat thudding in his ears. Now his heartbeat is indistinguishable from the thudding of his feet. Sand kicks up behind him.
Aemond closes the distance swiftly, and scrambles to the ground some feet from Lucerys, crawling to his side.
His hands hover in front of him again, useless and afraid. Lucerys is damp, curled up with his back to Aemond, doublet and tattered remains of his cloak weighed down by seawater. Some curls have sprung back into place, though the majority are matted against his skull. His arm is wrenched unnaturally in the opposite direction – the limb is only just about attached, a few strong strands of muscle the only thing keeping it with the rest of the body. The concave socket of his shoulder, the bone exposed, has moss stuck it in, the plant meshing unnaturally with Lucerys’ remaining ribbons of flesh.
Aemond carefully disentangles the moss and brushes away any remaining plant matter as best as he can.
He stares at the moss, soaked with water and blood. Why the fuck did he remove it? Did he think that it would somehow make this better? Rhaenyra, sister, I killed your son, but do not fret, I tended his body for you!
Little Lucerys, who he has not touched for six years.
Aemond rolls Luke onto his back, roughly and without care. What would the difference of tender hands make? The dead cannot feel.
The face looking up at him is pale, lips and eyelids tinting blue. Luke’s eyes are absent, no infuriating light behind them, no hint of the personality that always grated at Aemond, no matter how much he tried to ignore it.
Murky eyes look up at him. Aemond leans in. He gets closer than he was ever allowed to in life.
The bastard’s eyes are as dark as dragonglass, sometimes brown, sometimes black. Sometimes a very deep, very dark purple. Aemond straightens, slightly pleased – he knew he had not forgotten.
He tugs at a curl. A small smile appears on his lips, until Aemond looks Lucerys in the eyes again. Dead eyes for a dead boy. His smile drops like a dead dragon from the sky.
He lays his knuckles against Lucerys’ cheek. Lucerys is comely, although Aemond knew that already, had realised it begrudgingly during that ruinous dinner. His features are Valyrian, ignoring the vulgarity of his upturned First Men nose. Aemond can admit that even that is slightly charming, this one small flaw, now that there is nobody to witness them together except the birds and the gods. He can admit it to himself.
The apple of his cheek, the swell of his mouth. Aemond shuts his eye, but he can still see. Lucerys’ eyes widening, an aborted breath, and then nothing. No screams. Aemond wishes he had screamed.
Aemond presses his forehead to Lucerys’, and ignores the saltwater dripping down his face.
One, two seconds of grief. That is all Aemond will allow himself. The bastard deserved it, after all. An eye for a dragon. A life for an eye. Something in his brain cracks.
The line of Lucerys’ throat. The ocean currents have worn away at the neck clasps, so the dips of his collarbones are visible. There are scratches on him there, blood oozing in pearl-like beads, like Lucerys was dragged over ragged rocks.
Aemond’s gaze lands on Lucerys’ rings. A Velaryon ring, a Targaryen ring. Others he cannot distinguish. He tries to tug them off, but Luke’s fingers are already stiff and swollen with death.
He raises his nephew’s arm to eye level – the movement finally breaks the last strings of sinew keeping Lucerys’ arm attached to his body. Liquid splatters lightly onto the sand beside them.
Aemond directs the hand close to his face. The skin is wrinkled and puckered from so long in the water. Sluggishly Aemond tilts his head forward to rest against the curve of Luke’s palm. No one is here, he assures himself, no one is here. He nuzzles into the cold flesh, mouths at the juncture of Lucerys’ wrist. It tastes like tears.
He puts the arm down, and finally faces what he has been ignoring since he collapsed into the sand beside his Lord Strong.
The bottom half of Lucerys is nothing but mangled skin and a bloody spill of organs. His pelvis and legs have been torn away – pieces of him are likely stuck in Vhagar’s teeth. Red has been steadily seeping into the sand.
The mess of Luke’s insides are smeared across the ground in a track from the sea to the shore. Intestines are unravelled, trailing behind him like a bridal veil, while small, undifferentiated globs of blood-muscle-fat fleck the sand like rubies.
If Aemond were a better man, he would be sick. If Aemond were a better man, he would not have chased his young nephew into a storm and slayed him.
As it stands, the only thing Aemond feels is annoyance at Lucerys’ arrogant splay. So entitled even in death, spreading himself across the beach so anyone can look upon him, can gorge themselves on his insides. His body is Aemond’s to look at.
Aemond gathers the tendrils of Lucerys’ innards, carefully looping them into the cradle of his arms before feeding them back into Lucerys’ torso. He presses his fingers in, slipping and sliding in blood and silkiness, forcing the boy’s organs into the collapsed space they once inhabited.
He collects the lumps of tissue, washes the sand off, and squashes them inside Luke with all the attentiveness of a maester inscribing scrolls.
Lucerys’ guts still spill out, the image unsightly. A rotten offering to long-forgotten gods.
There is a blockage inside, Aemond thinks, his mind descending further and further into a haze.
Aemond kneels at Luke’s gaping wound. The angle is uncomfortable – Aemond’s side twinges as he lowers himself to glimpse inside. The hole is dark, but Aemond thinks he sees something squirming in the shadows. Luke’s flesh seems to quiver, undulating in the cave of his hollowness. Aemond grips the remainder of Lucerys’ waist to keep him still.
His hand is still wet with bastard blood. Aemond forces his hand inside, shifting through intestinal curls to brush his fingertips against another organ – his stomach perhaps? Aemond cannot see, but he imagines so, anatomical diagrams lingering in his mind. Intestines, kidneys, stomach, liver. Rib, Aemond thinks as he rubs the pads of his fingers fixatedly over a bone.
His Lord Strong really is small, Aemond marvels, only his hand is inside yet he can feel the lower ribcage. His hand must span the length of his stomach. The thought makes Aemond’s hips twitch.
Aemond pulls his hand out and quickly removes his outer jerkin so he can roll up his sleeve. He slides back inside Lucerys, forcing his arm further and further until Lucerys’ innards part obscenely around his forearm. Wet squelches fill the quiet air like a curse.
He grips an organ, the supple flesh easily yielding when he squeezes it. It feels strange, slippery like the inside of a clam. What part of you is this? thinks Aemond as he stares at Lucerys’ unmoving face, I hold you now and you cannot discount me.
Inside Lucerys is still warm, somehow, and he smells like sea salt instead of the sickening sweetness of death. It will set in soon, Aemond knows, and Lucerys will truly start to fall apart, left to the beasts and the elements. But for now he is only for Aemond.
He releases Lucerys’ heart, letting his arm rest inside his body like a child possessively clinging to a toy. He flexes his wrist and feels the uncanny sensation of pushing at Lucerys’ skin from the inside. When he presses hard Lucerys’ doublet raises slightly.
Saliva pools in Aemond’s mouth – he needs to see it. He needs to see the outline of his hand through the soft tissue of Lucerys’ skin.
His other arm comes up to rip away the clasps holding the doublet together. He pushes it open and uses his knife to slice the undershirt apart.
The skin of Lucerys’ chest is pale, a valley of milky flesh. Aemond caresses his side, grips at the slight layer of fat on his stomach. His fingers involuntarily flex amidst Lucerys’ lungs. Aemond runs his fingertips along Lucerys’ sternum, tickling the ridges of the bone, pulling out slightly so his hand is in his nephew’s upper torso. He presses upwards, the distending flesh captivating.
The shape of his hand through Lucerys’ stomach reminds Aemond of Helaena’s pregnancy, when the twins would stretch inside her and their little limbs would press against her stretched skin. Aemond is the only one, will be the only one, who has ever been inside Lucerys – no children nor torturer nor lover will experience this closeness.
Below the boy’s bellybutton is a scant trail of dark hair. It lasts for only a few inches before the flesh meets a bloody, jagged end. Human skin is quite thick, Aemond observes as he regards the cut, which is in some parts clean and efficient, and in others serrated and raw.
Aemond finds his eye returning to the hair dusting Lucerys’ stomach. Proof of bastardy. He crowds closer, intent on finding further evidence of sin, and so he cannot be blamed for the way his nose presses against the trail or for how, when his tongue flickers out to wet his lips, he licks lightly at it.
He feels unmoored, restless. Every time he moves, his arm inside Lucerys creates a wet, sucking noise, so similar to another sound that it zings down Aemond’s spine and straight to his cock.
The realisation is enough to stun him back to reality. He wrenches his arm out, and glares at his hardening cock. Then, slowly, his eye strays back to Lucerys like a vulture descending on a carcass. It was warm inside him. Warm, and wet, and surprisingly compact… Tight, one could even say. Which Aemond would not, for obvious reasons. Such as his dead nephew… his dead nephew, incapable of speech. His dead nephew, the bane of his life. The root of his monstrosity.
Lying in the sand, torn asunder, Lucerys resembles an angel more than the fiend Aemond knows him to be. His hair halos his head, and this time there is no infernal laughter. Gore still drips from the ragged edges of Lucerys’ gash.
Aemond leans over his Lord Strong, bracketing the corpse with his body. It is easy since there are no legs for Aemond to pin down with his own. His eye traces Lucerys’ face, memorising its slopes and the swell of his mouth. The rise and fall of his cupid’s bow.
The colour is wrong. It jars Aemond, then, the deadness of Lucerys’ face – he’s a reactive boy, and Aemond deserves his attentions as much as the others. More so, even.
Aemond pinches at Lucerys’ mouth, to force red, human warmth into it. He swipes his thumb against the lower lip before squeezing harshly at the boy’s cheeks. He digs his nails in, tugs at the slack mouth. It doesn’t work.
Do not ignore me, Aemond thinks. Or perhaps he says it, as in the next second Lucerys’ mouth is pressed against his. Luke tries to remain stiller than a statue, but Aemond grasps his chin and forces his nephew’s lips apart. Aemond licks inside.
Lucerys tastes like bile.
Aemond laps at his teeth, strokes his tongue soothingly against the other boy’s. Lucerys’ mouth is dry, so Aemond pulls back and spits into him. He bites at Luke, kisses him badly. Still, his little lord has no complaints, so Aemond supposes it is fine. He presses closed-mouth kisses all over Lucerys’ chin, who accepts them eagerly.
The vile taste coating his tongue remains.
Aemond shoves a hand down the front of his breeches, eye caught on Luke’s lips shiny with his spit. His cock is so hard, already straining against his pelvis.
Aemond rubs his thumb over his cockhead, rakes his nail against his slit. He stares at the slight swell of Lucerys’ chest, the peaks of his brown nipples.
He tightens his fist over his cock, twisting on the upstroke just as he likes it. The sound of slapping skin quickens as Aemond rakes his eye over the discolouration on his nephew’s torso.
The raw, red scrapes across his chest. The collapsed left side of his chest (broken ribs, Aemond had felt earlier), black blood spread under his skin. The stomach-churning, grisly mutilation.
All things Aemond had caused. Their relationship made material.
As he shuffles closer, he fishes his cock out of his breeches. It juts out, damning and unashamed. The tip kisses a swell of Lucerys’ intestine. The clear liquid beading at his slit tinges pink.
Aemond slaps his cock against Lucerys’ wound, the negative space where his virgin hole used to be. Blood splatters onto Aemond’s groin. Shivers race through him with each hit of his cock.
Quickly he forces all Lucerys’ organs inside, squeezes him tight and compact, and shoves his cock between the folds. Silver hair tickles Lucerys’ skin as Aemond drops his head, a groan leaving him.
He palms at his boy’s waist, before pulling him off his cock entirely, length exposed, just to force him back down. Lucerys’ cunt-space squelches as Aemond rocks his cock into his guts. Inside is wet and textured, the creases of his nephew’s organs enveloping him in a welcome embrace.
Aemond fucks his hips in and out. Luke clings to his length as though he were made for it, a slick, smooth glide. Too smooth, Aemond realises, the tension loose – he gropes blindly on the ground, and stuffs Lucerys’ innards that had been leaking out back inside.
Lucerys constricts again, and Aemond gratefully kisses his lips. You know how to make it good, don’t you, bastard boy? Aemond pants against the body’s mouth. The sloppy sound of fucking accelerates.
Aemond licks at Lucerys’ nipple. It tastes of salt and not much else. What would he have tasted of when he was alive? Lucerys would have been warm, for one. The thought makes Aemond’s hips stutter, hyperaware of the coldness of his skin, the coldness of his insides. The lifelessness of his face.
Aemond should pull out. He truly should. This is sick, depraved behaviour – even Aegon would not dare dream of an act so heinous. To chase and murder and fuck their nephew’s bloating corpse; no Valyrian in all of history has done such a thing.
His cock twitches. Aemond Targaryen, the first in history.
This is his recompense. He only mourns that Lucerys is not alive to experience the violation. Little Luke who taunted him during their youth, from his safe haven on Dragonstone, at the final dinner. Candlelit and devilish.
The cold feels good on his cock; it tempers his pleasure. It is better, he realises as he stares at Lucerys’ face, than a living woman, than any whore Aegon had shoved at him. Even when dead, the bastard can unlock new parts of him. Aemond doesn’t know how to feel about it.
Instead of thinking on the matter, he thrusts his hips in and out of Lucerys’ wound again. He tilts Lucerys’ waist up, gravity keeping his organs bundled inside and around Aemond’s cock.
The boy’s guts stir up unnaturally, a slight bulge appearing when Aemond fucks back inside.
Lucerys, he pants, moving a hand to tug at brown hair. Lucerys, Luke, Luke. He buries his face in Lucerys’ cold neck, licks at the sweat– at the saltwater there.
He feels himself shudder, his need growing stronger. He slams the remains of Lucerys back and forth on his cock, a messy and violent action. Blood congeals at the base of him, stains the skin around his crotch.
A heaviness coils at the base of Aemond’s spine, then rips through him like lightning parting a storm. Pleasure like no other clouds his mind as he gives his seed to a corpse.
As his cock softens the cold inside Lucerys becomes unbearable. He tucks himself back into his breeches, eye fixed on the dark clouds looming in the sky above them.
Whatever had possessed him has fled. The rotten scent of a decomposing body now permeates the air. How had he not smelt it before? Aemond tries to glance at his nephew, but the dark blood sinking into the sand makes his stomach rebel. It is no different to a dead animal, he rationalises as he forces himself to look, the same blood and guts and gristle. Then he catches sight of a white, milky liquid dripping out of Lucerys.
He vomits violently onto the beach next to them.
There can be no proof, Aemond thinks, delirious as he spits. He claws at some sand, dumping it unceremoniously over his bile. He is shaking – sand and sick and blood freckle his hands.
He looks back to Lucerys. Dead. Unseeing eyes. He blinks, and sees Luke’s eyes widen again, his mouth parts, Vhagar barrels towards him. He blinks, and sees Luke’s teasing eyes smile at him from over a cup. Again. Lucerys taking in the new décor of the Keep. Again. A littler Lucerys scowling at their maester. Again. Lucerys’ face irritatingly unreadable in the hall of Storm’s End.
There can be no proof.
Bear the consequences, Aemond orders himself, as uncompromising as death, as absolute as the loss of an eye. Still, he cannot move, cannot look upon the evidence of his sin. Sins, he supposes with sick humour. I did this; bear the consequences. Bear the consequences.
He turns to Lucerys, the ragged, horrifying open wound almost making him heave again, but he swallows it down. His nephew lies like a broken doll upon the sand, used and discarded. Bear the consequences.
Aemond’s seed dribbles out of the gash, slow and unyielding.
Aemond lifts his hand and– oh Gods, he realises, there’s blood reaching to his bicep, he had shoved his arm inside Lucerys, hadn’t he, had stroked his bones and lungs and heart like the darkest of villains, like a beast from beyond the Wall. The Gods must hate him now.
Kinslayers, a gleeful, nasty voice in his head reminds, are damned by the Seven anyway. What are a few more sins?
The voice sounds like his brother, and descends into laughter.
Aemond lifts his hand and slides his fingers back inside the body. He scoops out his seed, fingers probing in vain to collect it all. He ignores the spongy wetness surrounding him like a siren’s call.
How would Rhaenyra and Daemon react, upon finding their murdered son’s body with Aemond’s release splattered inside? Who else could’ve caught him, could’ve killed him but Aemond? There must be no proof.
He has made it worse. Instead of removing his profanity with the exact ability of a maester, Aemond has spread it around, somehow worked it into Lucerys’ pores. He massages and pinches, but to no avail. The bloodied flesh is marked.
An idea strikes him. A cruel one. Especially cruel to Rhaenyra, who his hatred for has died with Lucerys. To deprive a mother of her child’s corpse… But Aemond is the one alive, therefore he takes precedence.
Whether he deserves to take precedence is not a question he lingers on.
Vhagar, he shouts at her distant figure, come here. She lumbers slowly over, clearly displeased with him. In that they are equal then, Aemond thinks as he scowls at her approach, her actions have surely started the war in earnest.
War. His head aches, full of wasps. His Lord Strong remains crumpled on the ground. Ruined twice over. Aemond discovers there is nothing more in his stomach to bring up.
Vhagar’s warm breaths huff behind him.
He has a difficult time of it, hoisting Lucerys up to Vhagar’s saddle. First he loops his arms under the body’s armpits and pulls, which of course moves the body but leaves the loose organs trailing behind. His vision blurs as he hastily stuffs Lucerys full of his own insides. Then, he tries to cradle the body as one would a child, but finds Lucerys is too grown to do so one-handed (as he needs to climb Vhagar’s ropes with the other).
Finally, he holds Lucerys by the waist, upside down so his entrails stay in. He ascends Vhagar, places Lucerys tenderly in the saddle as though he still had legs.
Fly, Aemond murmurs, distracted by the curls tickling his nose. Over the sea. Vhagar obeys.
They fly until Aemond can see no land nor ships. He lets go of the body and tilts Vhagar to the side, further and further, until it slips from the saddle and hurls towards the waters below. Aemond could not push him, even wrecked as they are.
He watches the waves until Vhagar grows bored and flies back to land. This time he makes no attempt to control her behaviour. He feels wet, and dirty, and a slow, mounting horror builds behind him. He cannot turn around.
Aemond returns to King’s Landing with Prince Lucerys Velaryon’s viscera still smeared over his saddle and over his cock.