Chapter Text
It was a fluke - meeting Helaena Targaryen.
A coin-toss turn of fate.
Mid-summer; a conservatory; the air bright and still and a confusion of fluttering wings; butterflies that clung to drooping leaves and whispered at your ear, that murmured in the eaves and hung against the blue of the sky. Her twins had been with her - small, then - and there had been a clamor as they’d run about, feet scuffing against rough stone, a slip and a fall and scraped-up skin against the bend of a knee.
“Thank you,” Helaena had said, softly, as you’d bent over Jaehaera with a paper-thin tissue and a band-aid.
It had been the beginning of everything.
****
You weren’t sure how, exactly, you’d become friends - over a cut knee and a smattering of quiet words - but you had.
Helaena was sweet and thoughtful and funny in a way that often caught you off-guard, swept your knees out from under you and left you breathless from laughter. She sent you captioned pictures of cats and taught you how to bake increasingly complex French pastries and always leant you a wired earbud when you took early morning walks with the twins - the stroller large and cumbersome beneath Helaena’s hands, your heartbeats pulsing in time to whatever music she’d elected to play - Mazzy Star or The Velvet Underground, SOPHIE or any number of electronic artists that you didn’t know the name of, whose music spiraled dizzily through your ears as your arm brushed against Hel’s.
You hadn’t known who she was, at first.
There had been the blonde hair and the purple eyes, a flutter of recognition, but it wasn’t until she’d said her name - her last name - that you’d realized.
It was the first time you heard her laugh - a lilting sound that slipped away from her and echoed throughout the room, that caught light and refracted it in rainbow-bursts of color.
“You didn’t know?” She asked, cheeks stained a pleasant pink.
You shook your head.
“Well,” she’d said, glancing down and away from you, “I suppose it’s nice to have a friend who likes me without that.”
****
You began to nanny for the twins late that summer.
Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. They were a precocious pair of five year olds - who, in flummoxing turns, would come to you with clothes stained with markers or hair tangled with gum, who would sit in your lap while you read to them and drift to sleep against your chest. They were at once troublesome and endearing, kept you both preoccupied and amused.
Helaena had had them alarmingly young - a marriage at twenty that had all but been arranged, “for the good of the company,” her father had said. She’d had the twins a tidy year later, and Maegor - a fretful, pink-cheeked infant - four years after that.
You spent the better part of a summer watching after them with her, becoming her friend: stolen, shushed giggles as you wrangled one of the twins’ shirts over their heads, sunburns and sipping mimosas during swim lessons, finger paintings fluttering from the walls and a certain sort of warmth that effused it all, that carved out a space for itself in your chest.
You saw Helaena’s husband, sometimes. And while he didn’t seem to dislike her or the children, nor did he give any indication that he cared for them in any substantial way.
He was a dark cloud that loomed over your bright, sunny days together. And the days that he came home early from work, or spent the weekend at home rather than on a business trip, the sunniness of the home would give way to a quieter, more somber mood.
It was the dissolution of Helaena’s marriage - quietly contemptuous and devoid of any sort of deep feeling - that had precipitated Helaena’s move.
She’d met a girl, one state over.
There wasn’t anything left for her here - nothing to tether her to the city besides her family and you.
And so you’d helped her box up the sprawling apartment, had promised to call and write and visit as often as you could, had bid them all teary goodbyes and watched their faces recede through a smog-stained car window.
You’d thought it would be the end of your nannying days.
****
“You know my brother, don’t you -?” Helaena asks, peering at you over the rim of her sunglasses.
“Aegon?” You ask, the name drawn out of you in a near-laugh; the umbrella in the middle of your table snaps and rattles above you. “I suppose I do.”
You’d had the misfortune of making his acquaintance twice - the first time he’d made a poor attempt at flirting, and the second he’d looked surreptitiously down your shirt. Beyond that, you knew him only from the bright white pages of gossip blogs and over-long twitter threads - none of them flattering, nor forgiving.
“No -“ Hel shakes her head, mouth turned in hazy displeasure. “Certainly not him. Aemond.”
Aemond. The name drifted through your mind, a slow gust of fall wind that rattled distant memories like rust-hued leaves. She’d told you about him, you were sure. Vague stories always colored by something else.
“Maybe. Is he -?” You tapped your finger beneath your eye, grasped for any firm memories of what she might’ve told you about him beyond that.
She nods. “That’s the one. Anyways - I saw him this week, a quick visit while we’re still in town, and he mentioned something about needing help. He has a son - just a little younger than the twins.”
“Hel-“
“I know, I know, you’ve retired, but -“ She reaches across the table, grips your hands in hers. “You were always so good with the kids, with me. I needed you for them, of course, but I think, also -“
Her sentence trails away from her as she glances away from you, fingers tightening.
“I think I needed you, too. To be my friend, to help me. I think Aemond could use that, too.”
Fleetingly, you think of the summer days that had passed you with Helaena and her children, the memories colored with a distant, drowsy happiness that you can’t recall feeling before or since.
“Maybe,” you say.
Helaena draws away, clasps her hands quickly together. “Oh, thank goodness! You’re going to love his little boy! And I think you’ll like him too - the two of you have quite a bit in common.”
****
It’s a decision - meeting Aemond Targaryen.
A butterfly-effect ramification.
Early fall; storm clouds biting at the sky; outdoor patio of a chic restaurant, umbrellas fluttering and wind gusting and something - something - stirring in the air.
You see Aemond Targaryen before he sees you.
Distantly, his head bent low over his phone - even so, he’s beautiful. An echo of his sister resounds in his own features - pale and striking - in the blunt jut of nose, the long, near-white hair. But the softened, serene face of Helaena is sharpened, here: a cutting jaw, mouth thin and etched into a frown, devoid of any gentleness that she might exude.
The sight of him tears your breath from your lungs.
And it’s then that he looks up, his good eye wandering and then settling upon you.
You’d been told only vaguely of the incident that had cost him his left an. “An accident,” Helaena had murmured, something to do with their nephew.
“He was never the same after that,” she’d said.
His gaze is a weighty thing, pins you down like butterflies against a cork board, their wings and heartbeats still.
His eye does not leave you as you approach him, flitting searchingly across your features.
“You’re the girl, yes? Helaena’s friend?” He stands from his seat, pulls out the chair opposite of him.
Unwillingly, you flush. “Yes,” you reply, unsure and uncertain and - “You’re Aemond?”
He nods, answers with a simple hum. “She sang high praises of you.”
“Well -“ Slightly flustered, you grip the hem of your skirt beneath the table, twist it about your finger. “The twins are wonderful.”
His stare is unrelenting.
“My son certainly has less,” he casts about for a word, hand caught mid-air. “Exuberance, than they do, to be sure. But he’s sensitive. We’ve had troubles, in the past, with nannies being too impersonal with him.”
With the conversation directed away from you, you feel infinitely more at east. You lean forward, arms folded across the cool tabletop.
“Impersonal?”
“He’s quiet, reserved. He requires someone that can draw him out of his shell, interact with him on a level that suits him. With the last girl, he wasted away in his room all day, would hardly speak much less engage with her.”
That guarded look that had seemed so affixed to his features before slips and steals away as he speaks about his son. Again, you’re struck by his peculiar brand of beauty.
“Helaena said she thought you would be a good fit.”
You’d had no troubles of those sorts with the twins. They’d run to you with open arms, had received you and regarded you as some long-lost friend they’d once again stumbled upon. You wondered what it was, precisely, that had made Helaena so insistent on your helping her brother and his son, whether or not it was one of her quiet intimations - that knowing glance, furtive, hidden smile.
“Ordinarily, I would have a trial period, but my sister seemed adamant about you, and I’m inclined to trust her.”
You allowed yourself a small, stowed-away smile.
“She does usually seem to know what she’s talking about with these sorts of things,” you admit.
Aemond’s gaze flits to yours, once more. A moment passes between you as he nods, slowly, as though you’ve gathered closely to him, murmured some secret or confidence in his ear.
With a sudden clearing of his throat he drags his eye from yours, head tilted slightly down as he continues on, stare focused on his darkened phone screen.
“I must warn you now, this would be something of a permanent position. I’d ask you only to accept if you’re certain this is something you’re capable of. My son, he doesn’t do well with change. The therapist said what he needs at the moment is permanence, stability.”
When he looks at you again it’s a look laid bare, something stripped and vulnerable in his gaze. You think of Helaena, of her words earlier. I think Aemond could use that too.
Slowly, unsteadily, you nod.
It is the beginning and end of everything.