This following post will be a quick introduction on this account and it will also be my main masterlist. If you're struggling to find a fic/chapter, just chill in this post and try to find what you're looking for<3.
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⋆｡‧˚ʚ🍓ɞ˚‧｡⋆ Hello! My name is Alice, I'm a university student who loves to write and it's basically my escape from the real world. I am here to write what I love and to share it to you guys :). Before we get to my main masterlist, I would like to thank you for those who enjoy my writings and posts. Every single like, comment, and reblog are deeply appreciated. In truth, I had a tumblr account last year but it got suspended (I have no idea why) and I couldn't interact with other creators. I would love to be mutuals with anyone and I want to support my fellow creators and writers, so don't hesitate to comment or hmu! (just pls be nice and respect everyone in the community).
⋆｡‧˚ʚ🍓ɞ˚‧｡⋆I mostly write about HOTD and Ewan Mitchell and I'm gonna stay in that fandom in terms of creating fanfiction and writings. If it's not your cup of tea you can kindly scroll away<3. Any negative comment will be automatically deleted and any type of negativity will be blocked from this blog.
Anyways, here's My Main Masterlist:
✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧ House of The Dragon
✩ Aemond Targaryen
- I was all over her
- Old Habits Die Hard [chapter 1] [chapter 2] [chapter 3] [chapter 4] [chapter 5] [chapter 6] [chapter 7] [chapter 8] [chapter 9] ongoing
- Haunted [chapter 1] [chapter 2] [chapter 3]
❀ Billy Washington
- till death do us apart
❀ Michael Gavey (TBA)
❀ Ettore (TBA)
- the experiment
If my fics go well and many of you enjoy it, I might open a request box! But for now if anyone would like to request a fic or have any fic ideas that you would like me to write, don't hesitate to hmu/comment(ෆ˙ᵕ˙ෆ)♡.
That's all for now! Have an amazing day everyone! ૮꒰ ˶• ༝ •˶꒱ა ♡
Series summary: When you are unexpectedly reaped in the 47th Annual Hunger Games, your only hope of survival is your mentor, Aemond Targaryen, who won his Games a decade ago. Aemond is very good at his job, and he's your only friend here in the luxurious and depraved Capitol. But this professional partnership might be turning into something personal...and forbidden...and dangerous.
there's nothing i love more than when a female character is completely selfish and does crazy things completely for her own profit/gain. like yes queen do that insane thing that'll make half the fandom turn on you! be a self-centered bitch! i love you!
Artwork done for Subterranean Press's limited edition of The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang. I really enjoyed working on this one, too. I love the ocean and bodies of water and stuff like that :)
Sketches and other bonus content are available on my Patreon.
The Keys Of Heaven [Chapter 8: And The Life Of The World To Come] [Series Finale]
Series summary: Three years ago, Father Aemond Targaryen performed a miracle. Now he is a cardinal, a media sensation, and a frontrunner to be elected pope. You are a nun who has been brought to Vatican City to assist with the papal conclave. But when your paths cross by happenstance, you must both reckon with your decision to join the Catholic Church…and what you want from the future.
Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), references to abuse and violence, volcanoes, bodily injury, death, peril, scheming, pining, some drugs/alcohol/smoking, Catholic trivia you never asked to learn, kangaroos!
Word count: 5.7k
🦘 A very special thanks to my Aussie slang consultant @bearwithegg and also her mum (any mistakes are mine) 🦘
💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜
Tagging: @mrs-starkgaryen @chattylurker @lauraneedstochill @ecstaticactus @neithriddle, more in comments! 🥰
🗝️ Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🗝️
Like all things here, it is a ritual. When a cardinal receives the two-thirds majority of votes required to win the papacy, amidst the applause of his peers, he is asked by the dean in Latin: Do you accept your canonical election as Supreme Pontiff? And he agrees and answers: Accepto. No one ever says Non accepto. No one ever refuses the waiting adoration of over one billion souls.
Next the dean asks what papal name he wishes to be known by—Quo nomine vis vocari?—and the pope-elect gives it, Thomas I, Nicholas VI, Innocent XIV, you get the idea. Then the stove is lit and the ballots burned, along with a mixture of potassium chlorate, lactose, and pine rosin that will ensure the smoke billows from the chimney white and jubilant. The cardinals file out of the Sistine Chapel, the bells of Saint Peter’s Basilica ring, and the crowds filling the square outside cheer; and the new Holy Father dons his white cassock and zucchetto and steps out onto the balcony to introduce himself to the flocks of the faithful, to the world, to the pages of history.
Some popes were prominent voices in the Church long before entering the conclave, like the erudite Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany who became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Others were relatively unknown, like Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland who became Pope John Paul II in 1978, elected as a consensus candidate when neither of the favorites—the conservative Giuseppe Siri and the liberal Giovanni Benelli, both of Italy—could amass a supermajority of votes. In the old days, some won the office through bribery and threats, shades of fraud that reveal a myriad of deadly sins: exorbitant pride, glittering greed, envy for acclaim they have not earned.
And yet no matter how it happens, once a man is a pope he never stops being one. Even if he resigns, even when he dies, the Church will never allow a Holy Father to be torn down or forgotten or disgraced, even if he deserves to be; and when the time comes he is entombed in Saint Peter’s Basilica or the Vatican Grottoes beneath it to become a relic like all the others, aged brittle yellowed bones of popes and nobles and royals and saints.
~~~~~~~~~~
“So you were the one killing them all along,” Rhaena says as you stand together by the koi pond. She grins at you, crooked and mischievous. She keeps flapping her arms around; she knows she doesn’t have much longer to enjoy her white wool habit and is making the most of it.
“Yeah,” you admit with a sigh. “I was.”
“You’re lucky Sister Augustina already carked it. Otherwise she would have terrorized you, she’d have been mad as a cut snake.”
“Righto.”
“We’ll need to read up on proper care for koi fish before we get our own. We can’t have you going all Ivan Milat on them, can we now?”
You look out into the horizon, trees and hedges and fountains that have turned to greyscale ghosts, the vast shadow of the wall that surrounds Vatican City. It’s been raining off and on, and the mist hangs low and heavy, opaque like the future. You can just barely hear that the crowds are singing in Saint Peter’s Square, reverberations too soft and distorted for you to decipher the song. Without realizing you’re doing it, you clasp your medallion of Saint Agatha, cold plain iron that turns warm in your hands. “Rhaena, I have to tell you something.”
“Okay,” she says, and then immediately bursts into tears.
“No, no, don’t cry, mate!” you plead, reaching out to touch her shoulder.
“I know you want to leave,” Rhaena sniffles, not angry or betrayed but only wounded, deeply and defenselessly. “I know you weren’t just saying those things because you got a concussion. I just don’t understand why. You were always so genuine and so happy. I’ve met sisters that do seem kind of miserable, but you weren’t like them!”
“My calling to be a nun was genuine,” you assure her gently. “And so is my conviction to leave now. I’ve felt it for a while. That’s why Mother Maureen sent us here, to either renew my devotion to my vows or help me hear that the Lord is leading me elsewhere.”
Rhaena paws a travel-sized package of Kleenex tissues from a pocket of her habit and noisily blows her nose, sniffles some more, peers miserably down into the dark water sparkling with flashes of scales, red and black and white and gold.
“Rhaena,” you say, and she reluctantly looks at you, her eyes swimming with tears. From her throat hangs a medallion depicting Saint Jerome, the patron saint of orphans. “I’m leaving the convent, but I’m not leaving Sydney. And I’m not leaving you either.”
“You’ll forget about me.”
“No, I won’t. I’ll get a flat in the city somewhere, but I’ll visit you and Mother Maureen all the time. I’ll still volunteer at the shelter and go to Mass every Sunday. I’ll still help you build the koi pond.”
“Really?” Rhaena whimpers, wanting very badly to believe you.
“Defo. I love you, mate. You’re my family. I don’t want to be anywhere else.” But if Aemond ever flew to visit Athens, I’d go with him, you think, a thought that seems to come from nowhere. To find his son that he’s never met. To find his grandchildren.
Rhaena dabs at her eyes with a fresh Kleenex, the tears slowing. “But I’m still so confused…I mean, renouncing your vows, that’s heaps drastic! Why do you have to go right now? What do you think you need that you can’t get as a nun?”
“Well…” You smirk, and when she realizes what you mean you both laugh.
“Seriously?” Rhaena asks.
“Yeah. I thought I was alright without it, but turns out I’m not.”
“You want a husband?”
You nod, smiling a little to yourself. “I can’t stop envisioning myself with a partner. Maybe kids too, I’m not sure. That part is still fuzzy.”
Rhaena sighs. “I can’t relate, but I guess that gives it some context.” Then a disturbing notion strikes her. “You and Cardinal Targaryen, you’re not…you’re not, like, interested in him or anything, right?”
“Oh no, of course not,” you lie very convincingly.
“Good, because I know you two get along and all but he’s deadset not available. And you can’t do anything to hurt his reputation once he’s the pope.”
“No wukkas.” You stare into the thick grey mist, breathe in the cool December air that tastes like metal. Soon you’ll be in Sydney, Australia, where the sand is golden and the air hot and dry and buzzing with the hymns of cicadas, and Aemond will still be here: moving into the Apostolic Palace, greeting multitudes of the exuberant faithful, holding audiences with world leaders. “He’s very committed to the role.”
“He’s going to do amazing things,” Rhaena says softly, dreamily.
“Too right,” you murmur in reply, faint like an echo ricocheting back through decades.
“Should we go help with brekkie so Sister Penny doesn’t have an aneurysm?”
“Yeah, we probably should.”
But you walk slowly, not wanting to see Aemond, not believing that you’ll be able to keep your eyes from drifting to him and getting ensnared there like the iron combs in Saint Blaise’s flesh, stained with crimson blood and torn ropes of muscle. But Aemond is not in the dining hall. Nobody else seems especially alarmed by this; they assume he is praying—or, if they are a cynic like Auclair, at least pretending to—in these final moments before he is given one of the greatest responsibilities in human history, something no good man would ever crave.
As you bring fette biscottate, coffee, and hot chocolate to Aemond’s usual table, Lucky decides to go check on him. He waves goodbye to his friends and gives you a deep nod before he leaves the dining hall, like he’s acknowledging a sacrifice you’ve made. You blink at Lucky, startled despite the fact that you shouldn’t be by now.
Is this really happening? Is this really over?
Cam, cleaning his round eyeglasses with a microfiber cloth, is asking Kazi: “When are you coming to visit me again?”
“Never, if you’re going to make me sleep in a yurt.”
Cam laughs. “They’re called gers. And the ger is a beloved and ancient fixture of Mongolian culture!”
“If I wanted no hot water or television, I could have stayed in the Eastern Bloc.”
“Gers are older than the Catholic Church.”
“So are caves, and I don’t want to sleep in one of those either.”
“We had fun in the ger last time.”
“You made me play Parcheesi until 4 a.m.”
“Yeah, like I said. We had fun.”
Kazi rolls his eyes and then turns to Lando, puffing on his vape. The vapor is sweet and fruity, maybe strawberry. “You must be very excited to get back to your orphans.”
“You would think so,” Lando replies. “But I woke up this morning and, much to my own surprise, found myself a little sad to be leaving. There is so much history here, and so many new people to meet always coming and going. It’s all very inspiring, you know? I’d like to return someday. Perhaps I could find a way to make myself useful.”
Kazi shrugs. “Well, there are orphans everywhere, I suppose.”
Now the dean Cardinal Seaborn is rushing over, his grey hair ruffled, his red zucchetto slightly askew. “Cardinal Nowak, I beg you, please stop smoking inside,” he says.
Kazi grins as he slides his white-and-red vape into a pocket of his scarlet cassock, thirty-three buttons fastened from his throat to his ankles. “I hope you are enjoying yourself, Brother. It is your last chance to scold me.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Lucky finds him outside in the mist, leaning against the sand-colored concrete exterior of the Domus Sanctae Marthae and smoking a Karelia cigarette. From Saint Peter’s Square, he can hear the crowds singing The First Noel.
“Pre-wedding jitters?” Lucky jokes, then he turns serious when he sees Aemond’s face, the unscarred right half shellshocked and full of dread. “Aemo, what’s wrong?”
“I just, um…” Aemond takes a drag and exhales smoke while he searches for the words. His bandaged hand is shaking, Lucky notices. This shocks him; he has never seen Aemond rattled before, not when he visited sites of earthquakes and landslides and wildfires, not when he blessed people who had been pulled from the rubble, maimed like he was on Nea Kameni. “I guess I’m feeling a little…conflicted.”
Lucky tries to soothe him. “It’s an immense responsibility. It would give anyone pause.”
Aemond flicks ashes off the end of his cigarette, avoiding Lucky’s eyes, large and dark and sympathetic and wanting so sincerely to help.
“This isn’t about the nun, is it?”
“No,” Aemond says. Then he winces and confesses. “Yeah, it is.”
Lucky is exasperated. “You’ve wanted to be the pope for as long as I’ve known you, even longer than that, I’m sure, and I’ve always felt that there was no better candidate. Now suddenly you see her again after all these years and you become a different person? If you believe God is telling you to leave the Church and be with her, you can share that with me. You can unburden yourself, and we can discuss it. I cannot argue with God. If He has called you away—”
“God doesn’t speak to me,” Aemond says. “He never has.”
Lucky’s brow furrows. Never? he must be thinking. That can’t be right. Never?! “What is it that led you to the Church?”
Aemond admits in a whisper: “Pride.”
“But…you do have some faith, don’t you…?”
Aemond doesn’t reply; he just stares back at him miserably, his cigarette smoldering between his fingers.
“Aemo,” Lucky says slowly, trying to stay calm. “You are my brother. And you are my friend, and I love you, always, unconditionally. But I don’t know how to help you right now. I don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“I don’t know either.”
Lucky points at the building. “Those men in there are going to elect you in half an hour. It’s happening.”
“Right,” Aemond says, like he can’t quite comprehend it.
“I don’t think I could stop it even if I wanted to. People think you are a saint, Aemo. They think you’ve been chosen by God. I think you’ve been chosen by Him.”
Aemond nods and stares into the mist, silent, forlorn, his cassock a long gash of red like an open wound, like a stigmata.
“Who else?” Lucky asks softly. “Who else could we trust to lead the Church in the right direction? Who else could get enough votes to win? Give me a name and I will see what can be done. I’ll do it for you, even if I believe you are a miracle worker and a gift to this world. But I can’t think of anybody else. Can you?”
“No,” Aemond says.
The cardinals begin leaving the Domus Sanctae Marthae, pouring out into one of the narrow streets that wind through Vatican City like veins, and Lucky swiftly conjures a broad, blithe smile and greets them, then leads the procession towards the Sistine Chapel. It is the last time they will be ceremonially locked inside to vote, a symbolic holdover from the days when cardinals were not permitted to leave the chapel at all until a new pope was chosen, not even if it took weeks. After all, the word ‘conclave’ comes from Latin: cum clave, meaning ‘with a key.’
As the ballots are tallied, Aemond hears Cardinal Jahoda’s name called twice, Lando’s called a handful of times, and his own name called again and again and again. He gazes at the vast sky blue fresco painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, illustrating the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. He sees Saint Lawrence with the gridiron he was roasted alive on, and is reminded that Lawrence—the patron saint of cooks and comedians—is Kazi’s favorite, just as Lucky wears a medallion etched with the likeness of Saint Valentine and Cam has a ring depicting Saint Catherine of the breaking wheel. Aemond sees Saint Bartholomew clutching his own flayed skin, Saint Sebastian riddled with arrows, Saint Peter holding the Keys of Heaven. And Aemond does not believe in any of this, and he never has, not even in moments of weakness, not even as a metaphor; but she does, and he can’t stop thinking about her.
I left her once, and it was hell for both of us. How can I do it again?
Aemond glances over at Lando, who sits beside him, and sees that he is making absentminded sketches in red ink as he waits for the last of the ballots to be counted. Lando has drawn a menagerie of tiny animals: a gecko, a manatee, a stork, a shaggy-haired yak...and a kangaroo, bounding across the white paper. Aemond closes his eye and sees them again: hopping on the beach in the early morning hours, grazing on tufts of grass that grow out of the sand dunes, nibbling on tangles of seaweed that wash up onto the shore, leaving pawprints that he and a nine-year-old girl kneel down to trace reverently with their small fragile fingertips.
Through the veil—time and space woven together until they become impossible to separate—Aemond realizes that the cardinals are clapping and gathering around him. Kazi and Cam are competing to see who can cheer louder. Auclair is scowling at them as he performatively pats his palms together, not making a sound. Lucky is smiling, but he is watching Aemond with trepidation, perhaps even with fear.
“Aemo, are you alright?” Lando whispers with concern.
Cardinal Seaborn is asking: “Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem?”
When Aemond doesn’t instantly accept, panic crosses the dean’s face.
Seaborn says again, more urgently: “Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem?!”
~~~~~~~~~~
You hear applause coming from inside the Sistine Chapel, and you stare at the tall wooden doors, locked and flanked by two Swiss Guardsmen wielding their halberds.
“I reckon we should go tell Sister Penny, Sister Nuru, and Sister Helvi that it’s almost time to hear his first homily,” Rhaena says excitedly.
“Sure thing,” you reply. But then you sprint for the doors.
“What are you doing?!” Rhaena yelps as she follows you.
You rip through the Guardsmen when they try to block your path, drop to your knees on the grey marble steps, press yourself against the wood so you can hear what’s happening inside.
A Swiss Guardsman snaps: “Sister, no one is permitted near the doors.”
“Quiet.
“Sister—”
“Be quiet or I will pray for God to do horrible things to you!” you say, and the man appears shaken. The Guardsmen blink at each other, uncertain of how to proceed. After some hesitation, Rhaena apologizes meekly to them and then perches on the top with you.
“What’s going on?” she murmurs. And you listen, through the rush of blood in your arteries, through the pounding rhythm of your heart, until you hear his voice.
“Non accepto!” you shout from where you kneel just outside the Sistine Chapel. “He said non accepto!”
Rhaena gasps. “What?! Why?!”
“I don’t know!”
One of the Guardsmen seizes your arm and tries to drag you away. You don’t flinch at all, and you don’t move either. “Sister, forgive me, but you must not—”
“Shh!” you hiss fiercely at him, and he recoils, and again you lay your palms and ear flat against the door.
~~~~~~~~~~
The cardinals have erupted into chaos. People are yelling, protesting, interrogating, surely they could not have heard him correctly. Jahoda, Auclair, and Ferrari have huddled together and are chattering eagerly. Lucky is rubbing his forehead and staring vacantly at the floor. “What the fuck?” Kazi mutters to Cam, who shakes his head; he doesn’t understand either.
Aemond stands and walks down into the aisle, then addresses his audience. “Thank you, Brothers, for your great faith in me. But I believe I am being called to a different sort of life. And I…” He touches the gleaming gold cross that hangs from his neck, then takes it off and sets it on a table that’s been brought in for the conclave. There are sharp, scandalized intakes of breath. “I must confess that I am in love with a woman and I intend to live with her as a layperson, and therefore I am not fit for this office, nor even to cast a vote for the next man to hold it. So I’ll be leaving now.”
There are more outbursts of shock and despair; some men are weeping. Cardinal Seaborn collapses limply into a chair and clutches his chest.
“In my last act as a member of this conclave, and as a cardinal,” Aemond says. “I implore you to turn to someone who best embodies the qualities of Christ: humility, compassion, charity, faithfulness, forgiveness.” Then he looks at Lando, a long meaningful stare, until the other men start to notice. Lando gazes back at Aemond, speechless. What, me? the expression on his face reads.
Aemond bows his head, a hushed farewell, and strides towards the locked doors. In seconds, Lucky has grasped his plan and surged to the center of the roiling crowd, his voice booming, his gestures dramatic and rousing.
“Brothers, I invite anyone who has a single criticism against Cardinal Almazan to speak now! Who here can give voice to even one instance of pride, or wrath, or envy? No, we are all well-acquainted with his character...”
When he reaches the tall wooden doors of the Sistine Chapel, Aemond thumps his fist against them. “Unlock the doors!” he commands, and then when the Swiss Guardsmen outside are reluctant, Cardinal Seaborn joins him.
“Open up!” Seaborn orders. “This is the dean! We have one cardinal leaving. Do this quickly, so the conclave can resume!”
There is the metal scraping of a key in a lock, and then cool December daylight streams in through the space that appears like the vastness of the ocean. The nuns that had been kneeling on the marble step skitter out of the way, but Aemond only sees one of them. She staggers backwards and gapes at him, waiting for him to speak. After a moment, he does.
“What you said about us leaving together…is that still something you’re open to?”
She nods, thunderstruck but beginning to smile. “Yeah, defo.”
“Do you think we could get a driver to take us to the airport?”
“If you’re the one who asks, sure.”
And he offers her his bandaged palm, and she takes it, and he pulls her in like he did in the golden candlelit glow of the Clementine Chapel in the Vatican Grottoes and kisses her, not for the last time but for one of the very first, his hands now perfectly clean.
~~~~~~~~~~
They have placed a Christmas tree in Saint Peter’s Square, towering and covered with ornaments and lights, right in the center beside the ancient Egyptian obelisk that has stood there since the 1500s. Today, tourists who have flown in from all over the world take selfies in front of it, and when the holidays have passed the tree will not be simply discarded but repurposed into toys for children in need, and so it will be passed on and on and on again, like a cherished heirloom, like the Keys of Heaven.
As the Fiat Panda skirts around the piazza, you look out through the tinted window into the crowds, carrying their homemade signs and waving their miniature flags and waiting for white smoke to billow from the Sistine Chapel. There are reporters interviewing attendees in front of video cameras labelled CNN, BBC, ABC, the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, Mega TV. There has been an altar of sorts assembled at the spot where Aemond freed you from the burning car, a display of white candles and red poinsettias; and there are statues and banners of Saint Agatha too. Someone must have told the press that she is your favorite saint, perhaps Mother Maureen when they called the convent.
Beside you in the back seat, Aemond wears something inconspicuous so he won’t get mobbed at the airport, black trackies and a white crewneck. He has also procured a pair of black sunnies from the driver. You are dressed in Levi’s and a red turtleneck sweater with reindeer on it. Back in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, you and Rhaena folded up your habits and stowed them away in your luggage; but your rosary is still in the pocket of your jeans, white pearls, a silver chain. As you gaze out into the crowds, you clasp the small iron medallion you’ll wear for the rest of your life, Saint Agatha and the torture that broke her body but left her soul unscarred.
“Dear God, you’re both famous,” Rhaena says from the passenger’s seat as she scrolls through her phone, social media posts and news articles and YouTube videos that have circulated prolifically while the conclave was trapped in seclusion. “People are calling the two of you their Roman Empire. They say they ship it. And you’re a meme, look!”
She shows you and Aemond a viral photo of him cradling you in one of the fountains of Saint Peter’s Square, the white Fiat engulfed in flames and screaming pedestrians in the background, both of you drenched with water, your eyes closed and his blood cascading down your face as he smooths back your hair, like you’re being baptized with it. The text box superimposed over your body reads: Me contemplating driving off a bridge during my morning commute. And then in the box on top of Aemond: A $9 iced coffee.
“Hm,” Aemond says, tapping his chin in that way that he does when he’s thinking. “So I guess we’re not going to be able to disappear into anonymity quite so easily.”
“Yeah nah, not a chance.” Rhaena beams at him. She keeps accidentally calling him Cardinal Targaryen, but that’s not his name anymore. “I think you’ll be inspiring people for a long, long time.”
Aemond smiles and drapes his arm across the back of your seat. There is no medallion around his neck, no rosary in his pockets, and there won’t be until he truly believes, and perhaps he never will. You’ll love him even if he doesn’t. Aemond tells the driver to turn on the car radio, and then makes him change the station until he finds Christmas music: O Come, All Ye Faithful.
At the airport, the customer service agents are remarkable unhelpful—swamped with holiday traffic and wearing jingling felt reindeer antlers or oversized Santa hats—until Aemond takes off his sunnies and they recognize him, their mouths falling open, their eyes filling up their faces.
“Father, aren’t you supposed to be getting elected pope right now?” one of them asks in a thick Italian accent.
But Aemond just shakes his head and flashes a grin. “God has other plans for me.”
Almost immediately, the agents find three seats for you on an outbound flight to Sydney, ten thousand miles southeast, eight hours ahead of the time zone here in Rome, twenty-nine years in the past. You sprint through the airport to find the gate—yanking Rhaena along when she tries to stop at Starbucks for a cuppa—and arrive just minutes before boarding begins. You take this opportunity to call Mother Maureen while Rhaena races back to the Starbucks, promising she’ll be quick. You have thousands of texts and DMs to reply to from your time in seclusion. At least you’ll have something to keep you occupied on the twenty-two hour journey, including a layover in Dubai.
The phone rings only once; she must have been waiting for you. “Hello?”
“Hi, Mum.”
“Hi, darling!” Mother Maureen cries, and you can feel the warmth of the hug she’ll give you when you land, and you can see the crinkles at the corners of her eyes and the long silver braid down her back. “How’s it going, love? You’re done there, yeah? We saw the white smoke. We’re all gathered around the telly waiting to see who walks out onto that balcony.”
They voted again already? “Yeah, I’m on my way home. And Rhaena too, of course.”
And then there is a pause, like the lull between the tolls of a bell. “Are you coming to visit, or to stay?”
You look to Aemond, who is wearing his black sunnies again and trying very hard not to be noticed, clasping your left hand, skating his thumbprint over the bumps of your knuckles; now he is allowed to touch you, and he never wants to stop. “Just for a visit.”
Mother Maureen can hear the smile in your voice. “Rather chuffed with yourself, aren’t you?” she teases. “I’m happy because you’re happy.”
“And I’m bringing someone with me.”
Now you’ve surprised her. “Really? Who?”
“A friend from a long time ago.”
Mother Maureen is confounded. “What?”
“I’ll explain when I get there.”
“Oh, they’re about to announce the next pope!” she says, and you can hear the other sisters in the background, indistinct ambient squeals of excitement. “It has to be that Targaryen bloke, right?”
You glance over at Aemond again. “I doubt it, Mum.”
“Oh, it’s...it’s...” Mother Maureen gasps. A chorus of bewildered turmoil fills the lounge room at the convent. “It’s some Filipino man that no one has ever heard of!”
Lando?! “Okay, I have to go, Mum! We’re about to board.”
“Text me your flight number so I can track you!”
“Sure thing. Cheers.”
You hang up, and before you can say anything, you hear a crescendo of a roar, like a concert stadium, like ancient Romans filling up the Colosseum to watch Christian martyrs get fed to lions. You and Aemond twist around in your chairs to see that passengers are turning up the volume on a flatscreen television mounted on the wall, CNN, urgent red graphics, breaking news. Rhaena returns with three gingerbread chai lattes and gawks at the television.
There on the screen, Lando steps out onto the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica. And applauding all around him are the cardinals of the conclave, and the loudest among them are his friends, their faces beaming and their cheers triumphant, and perhaps even more than that, proud: Lucky, Kazi, Cam. Jahoda and his supporters are clapping politely; this is a compromise they can live with. The dean Cardinal Seaborn looks like he could cry with relief.
Lando, now Pope Nicholas VI and dressed in white, speaks into the microphone with a dazed, shy smile: “Brothers and Sisters, I did not expect to be here, and you surely did not expect to see me either.”
The crowds in Saint Peter’s Square laugh, so deafeningly you can hear them through the television. You catch glimpses of tourists waving miniature flags of the Philippines. The Holy Father pauses to collect his thoughts before he continues. Here in the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, more and more travelers are stopping to watch the small soft-spoken man on the luminous screen, their suitcases rolling to a halt, their expressions curious and then hopeful.
“In recent events, God has shown us the power of His miracles to heal, and to comfort, and to bring people together, and to revive faith that has been lost to us,” the new pope says. “It is my most sincere wish to define my pontificate with these same attributes. And it would not be right to address you here today without thanking one of my dearest friends, Cardinal Aemond Targaryen of Greece, for everything he has done for the Church and for the world. You will not see him here today. He has been called to a different vocation, just as noble, just as important, and I’m sure he will speak to you directly to share more about that when the time is right.”
A middle-aged man standing behind you whispers to his wife: “I knew he had something going on with that nun.”
“Would you save me from a burning car, babe?” the wife asks playfully.
“Oh yeah, totally,” the husband says, but he doesn’t sound entirely convinced.
The Holy Father continues: “Today, Brothers and Sisters, I ask for your patience and your prayers. To be entrusted with the Keys of Heaven is a sobering honor, and I am still at this moment very much in awe of their weight.” The people in Saint Peter’s Square cheer for him again: Bless you, Father! We love you, Father! “I am reminded of the Lord’s teachings that we are all God’s children, the beneficiaries of His boundless peace and mercy, the recipients of His promise of everlasting life, and as children we can never expect ourselves to be faultless, but rather to respond to inevitable missteps with compassion for both others and ourselves...”
But now your flight has begun boarding, and a life on the other side of the planet awaits you, something new but something old too, something mortal and yet divine, something resurrected.
Upon examination of the tickets, Aemond and Rhaena’s seats are together, while you are across the aisle. You tell Rhaena that you will switch with Aemond to sit with her, but she shakes her head. “No, you two should sit together,” she objects, and then when you try to decline, she insists. “I have to get used to giving you some space, don’t I?” she says, smiling warmly even if her eyes are still a bit sad. She is wearing a green velvet dress freckled with silver Christmas trees, and she looks so young. Was I really her age when I took my vows? I didn’t know anything yet. “It’s not like I’m going to move in when you get married. So go on, enjoy your flight. I have a lot of YouTube videos to catch up on anyway. We can meet up by the bathroom to have a yarn every hour or two. I’ll fetch you. Don’t think I’ll forget. Don’t get too distracted by your snogging or whatever.”
You chuckle and embrace her, only for a moment but very tightly. “I love you, mate.”
“I love you, sinner.”
And you both burst out laughing, and then you part ways, Rhaena to one row as you and Aemond take your seats in another.
The plane barrels down the runway, becomes weightless somehow and lifts into the sky, pitches and shudders until it is high above Rome and ascending rapidly, soft white clouds and an endless blue horizon. You gaze through the oval of clear glass, cold beneath your palm and fingerprints, thinking of froth on the ocean and the crumbling slopes of sand dunes. Beside you, Aemond types and retypes the same message over and over again in his Notes app, trying to figure out what to say to the son he’s never met. Then he opens Spotify and puts his AirPods in your ears, and his bandaged right hand lingers afterwards, cradling the curve of your jaw and stroking your cheek, threading his fingers through your unbound hair. And then he plays you a song. It’s Atlantic City, and it’s about the mafia, and escape, and love, and things that have died coming back to have a second chance at life.
You see yourself there again, a pizza place on the boardwalk when Sydney is hot and radiant with summer, and Aemond is not a twelve-year-old boy but a man, and instead of vanishing through the doorway into a labyrinth of night and stars and streetlights he is walking in to join you at the table, and he is smiling. Then Aemond’s son is there too, and his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren, and Sister Rhaena and Mother Maureen; and after twenty-nine years everything is right again, and everyone is home.
The Keys Of Heaven [Chapter 3: His Kingdom Will Have No End]
A/N: Hi besties, I'm sorry this chapter is being posted so late! I got an awful migraine but took some meds and prayed for strength and I was still able to get it out Sunday night, hallelujah 🙏 I hope you enjoy Chapter 3!!!
Series summary: Three years ago, Father Aemond Targaryen performed a miracle. Now he is a cardinal, a media sensation, and a frontrunner to be elected pope. You are a nun who has been brought to Vatican City to assist with the papal conclave. But when your paths cross by happenstance, you must both reckon with your decision to join the Catholic Church…and what you want from the future.
Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), references to abuse and violence, volcanoes, bodily injury, death, peril, scheming, pining, some drugs/alcohol/smoking, Catholic trivia you never asked to learn, kangaroos!
Word count: 6.2k
🦘 A very special thanks to my Aussie slang consultant @bearwithegg and also her mum (any mistakes are mine) 🦘
💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜
Tagging: @mrs-starkgaryen @chattylurker @lauraneedstochill @ecstaticactus @neithriddle, more in comments! 🥰
🗝️ Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🗝️
All night you can’t stop thinking about him, haunted by visions like the ones the Lord used to speak to Saint Catherine of the breaking wheel, or Saint Thomas Aquinas of his eight million written words, or Saint Joan of Arc of the sword and the flames. You see Aemond’s palms on your bare thighs, clear rivulets of shower water pouring down his scarred face, molten red candle wax dripping onto your skin and drying there like the wounds of a martyr. And paradoxically, this does not feel like sacrilege, not an obstacle to your faith but something that lives alongside it: yes, the teachings of the Lord are good for me and for the world, yes, I want Aemond in a way that is instinctive and lustful and overwhelming. Is it possible to have both? Is that temptation, or is that truth?
You roll over and readjust your pillow for what is approximately the twentieth time when Rhaena snaps from across the room: “Will you calm your farm, mate?”
You sit up in your single-sized bed. “Rhaena, do you know a song called Atlantic City?” You’re in seclusion, so you can’t just look it up on Spotify or YouTube like you normally would. You keep trying to figure out how it goes, but you can’t remember. When you think of that night when Aemond left Sydney with his family, all you can conjure are whispers, and streetlights, and the look on his unscarred face as he stole one final glimpse of you, his last for twenty-nine years.
“What?” Rhaena groans, yawning.
“It’s an old song. Maybe from the 80s.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard it.”
“It’s by Bruce Springsteen.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.” You lie back down and stare at the wall, where a plain wooden cross hangs and through the window you can see the immense shadow of the brick wall that separates the sovereign state of Vatican City from Rome, filling up with pilgrims from across the globe who have gathered to pray for the soul of the last Holy Father and the election of the next one. They wave flags from six continents and hold candles with white paper bobeches so the melting wax won’t burn their hands. They are singing O Holy Night.
In the morning, you find Sister Helvi and Sister Nuru cleaning the cardinals’ rooms; it’s time for the washing, and the baskets in the hallway are piled high with sheets stripped from mattresses and damp towels yanked from bathrooms. This is Aemond’s floor. He has a room all the way at the end, a little bigger than the others, perhaps a recognition of his elevated status by whichever nun gave him his room key when he arrived; how many miracle workers live here on earth instead of in the pages of myths? His neighbor is Cardinal Bogdi Marcu of Romania, an archaic relic like the bones in the tombs of the Vatican Grottoes beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica, or the Necropolis below that, an ancient Roman burial ground believed to be the site of Saint Peter’s grave. He was crucified during the reign of Nero, although upside down at his own request. He proclaimed himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Christ.
Being an apostle was a tough slog, you think randomly. Eleven out of twelve died in agony.
Sister Helvi, originally from Finland, is in her late-forties and has a round face, white-blonde hair that is turning grey, and wide-set blue eyes that are ever-twinkling. She took her vows after she and her husband divorced and her children left for college. She still calls them every day...or, at least, she does when she is not in seclusion. Sister Helvi waves when she sees you. “We’re getting the hang of this! Sister Nuru and I will be done today in record time.”
“Good on ya,” you say. “Sister Rhaena and I can finish this floor.”
Sister Helvi shrugs and tries to decline. “We’re already here.”
“No, no, I insist.”
She gives you a puzzled look, but relents, and she and Sister Nuru—young like Rhaena, early-twenties, but far more self-possessed—carry full baskets down to the basement as you and Rhaena glide soundlessly like thieves into Aemond’s room.
Rhaena is delighted, always leaping at any opportunity to gaze in reverent fascination at his most mundane belongings: a hairbrush, a pair of shoes, the books on his writing desk. You would never tell Rhaena that you’re battling the sin of lust, not for Aemond or for any man. There has always been something rather incorporeal about her; she doesn’t speak of men in a way that reveals any knowledge or desire of sex, she seems bewildered when others use words like longing or temptation or impulses. She is worshipful of some men, of course—the late Holy Father, and Aemond, and she went through a Harry Styles phase—but from a distance, and there’s no impropriety behind it. You don’t think she would understand.
While Rhaena is in the bathroom collecting Aemond’s towels and washcloths, you go to strip his sheets; but first you examine them. You run your palm along the soft white cotton until you find what you’re searching for, a small spot about halfway down the mattress that has dried stiff. And you smile, because now you know he’s been thinking about you too.
~~~~~~~~~~
Another koi is floating at the edge of the pond, still and sightless.
“Oh, fuck me dead,” you mutter, then look around to make sure you’re alone. You paw the corpse over to you and lift it out of the water, then hastily bury it where you and Aemond hid the other one. Then you feed the survivors and wash the death off your hands. Inside Saint Peter’s Basilica, the cardinals are gathering to await the Mass that will officially open the conclave. You hurry to join them.
As you walk down the paths of volcanic tuff pebbles and then the narrow paved streets that cut like arteries through the flesh of Vatican City—white Fiat Pandas occasionally zipping by you, somber-faced employees wearing sunnies behind the wheel—you think of what Mother Maureen and the other sisters of your convent are doing back in Sydney, festivities you are not a part of for the first time in fifteen years: hanging Christmas lights, baking cookies, singing songs, collecting donated goods to gift the guests staying in the shelter, clothes and books and electronics and of course toys for the children.
You remember the women with their downcast eyes and their ashamed confessions as they anticipate your judgment: You must think I’m mad for believing he was a good man at first. You must think I’m a coward for not leaving sooner. But you always answer honestly: No, I understand.
When you arrive in the heart of Saint Peter’s Basilica—beneath the golden dome, cool winter light falling in through the windows, the Papal Altar standing in the shape of a canopy bed—Rhaena in her habit is a white speck in a sea of red. She is standing with Aemond, Lucky, Kazi, Lando, and Cam. And, as you are alarmed to discover, she is telling them stories about you.
“They arrested a priest down in Woolooware,” Rhaena is saying. Aemond sees you, smiles, looks away almost bashfully. “And we didn’t even know the man, never met him, never went to Mass there. But the reporters are awful, just shameless, taking a family’s suffering and using it to knock the whole Church. So a bloke showed up with a tv camera at our convent, and the rest of us were all inside hiding from him. But she was out getting groceries, and when she pulled up in the car the reporter ran over, and as you can imagine he was having a whinge, even though we had nothing to do with that priest and hated him just as much as everyone else for what he’d done. The reporter shoved a microphone in her face as she was carrying all these bags and—you know, like he thought he was being clever—asked what she believed should be done with priests who abuse kids, and she replied: ‘Well, I’m tempted to say they should be taken out into the bush and shot, but the Lord instructs us to be merciful. So perhaps castration with something dull and rusty would be a good start.’ And she kept on walking.”
The cardinals laugh and give you nods of approval. Kazi is vaping, which you’re almost positive isn’t allowed inside the basilica. Stone statues of saints watch aloofly from the gilded walls: Saint Veronica who gave her veil to Christ so he could wipe the sweat from his brow as he carried the cross to Calvary, Saint Helen the mother of Emperor Constantine, Saint Longinus the Roman soldier who pierced Christ’s side with a lance at the end of the crucifixion, Saint Andrew who stands at the entranceway to the Vatican Grottoes below. The droning conversations of over a hundred cardinals drown out the sound of the congregants outside in Saint Peter’s Square; you think you can just barely hear that they are singing Angels We Have Heard On High.
“But the reporter wasn’t done yet,” Rhaena continues. “He was still badgering her, what about this scandal, what about that one, and by this point she was absolutely ropeable, and she spun around and shouted: ‘The Catholic Church is the most charitable institution on the face of the planet. We opposed slavery, we fought dictatorships, we saved hundreds of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. What have you done for anybody today? Exploiting tragedies is easy. Working to prevent them is much harder. Give it a go sometime.’ And that man stopped dead in his tracks and just watched her as she carried her groceries inside.”
Now the cardinals are clapping and Rhaena is beaming at you proudly, and you can feel blood scorching in your cheeks like Saint Lawrence was roasted on a gridiron. “I couldn’t help myself,” you say modestly.
“You are very blessed to have such a ferocious sister guarding your convent,” Lucky tells Rhaena. He is grinning, but his large dark eyes flick restlessly between you and Aemond. Aemond alternates between staring at you and at his red leather shoes, repeatedly touching the gold cross that hangs from his neck.
“Too right,” Rhaena says. “We hit the lottery. She could have gone anywhere.” Then she turns to you, curious. “Why did you choose Sydney? Brisbane would have been closer to your family in Toowoomba. And if you wanted to really get away, you could have gone to Melbourne or Adelaide, or even Perth in Western Australia.”
You’re a little startled. You’ve never considered this before. “I don’t know. Sydney was just always my plan.”
Not far away, the dean Cardinal Seaborn is weaving through the crowd, stopping to speak to a different attendee every thirty or sixty seconds. “Cardinal Saati, I just wanted to take a moment to commend you for your peace and reconciliation efforts in South Sudan. I vividly remember first learning of the particulars of your work when you hosted the Holy Father during his visit to your country in 2013, and I was so struck by your compassion and your gentleness in the face of such senseless cruelty...”
Now Lando is informing his friends what he has learned about Cardinal Jacob Green. “Jake seems very daunted by the responsibilities inherent in leading the Church. I wouldn’t say he aspires to be elected. But he definitely doesn’t want Jahoda to get it, and he has concerns about...” Lando gestures to Aemond. “That a pope so young could reign for forty or fifty years. It would be tantamount to having a king or an emperor. That makes people nervous.”
“The youngest pope was twenty,” Cam counters.
“And he was elected a thousand years ago.”
Cam sighs irritably. “This is ridiculous. They say Saati is too old because he’s in his mid-seventies, Aemond is too young, Jake is too friendly with the Muslims, do Carmo has that embezzlement thing, Jahoda is too fat and diabetic...there’s always something to complain about.”
“Aemo’s not a normal candidate,” Lucky insists. “He’s above this squabbling. No one else here has performed a miracle. Unless you count the immaculate conception of those children in Paris who so closely resemble Cardinal Auclair.”
All seven of you chuckle. Rhaena is gazing admiringly at Aemond, doubtlessly thinking of those fifty lives he saved on Nea Kameni.
“I would have liked to be a father, in a different sort of life,” Kazi muses.
“Children bring so much joy,” Lando agrees. Lucky nods, but doesn’t say anything. His expression is now a bit pensive, distant.
“That was the hardest part about becoming a priest for me,” Cam says, cleaning his eyeglasses with a microfiber cloth. “Giving up my chance to have a family.”
“Don’t worry, you didn’t miss out, no woman would have wanted you anyway,” Kazi says. “Did you ever think about having kids, Aemo?”
“No,” Aemond says immediately, frowning at the statue of Saint Veronica, the patron saint of laundry workers; and again you remember his bedsheets, your visions of him.
“How’s this going to work for Jake?” Kazi asks. “The voting today, I mean. Can he even write?”
Aemond looks at him incredulously. “What are you talking about? Of course he can write.”
“But...you know...the...?” Kazi holds up his right hand and curls in all four fingers, leaving only his thumb, mimicking Jake’s mutilation.
“He taught himself to use his left hand,” Aemond says.
Kazi raises his bushy eyebrows, impressed. “Perhaps Jake should be the pope.”
Cardinal Seaborn arrives, his grey hair ruffled and his zucchetto slightly askew on his head. He addresses Lando first. “Cardinal Almazan, you gave up the wealth and ease your family’s status afforded you and instead devoted yourself to rescuing the destitute from the streets. The orphanages you’ve founded in the Philippines have fed, housed, clothed, and educated countless children, and saved them from both physical and spiritual perils. I have also been personally inspired by your beliefs concerning the Eucharist, that it should be offered to all people—not only those in good standing with the Church—just as Christ ministered to even the most broken souls.”
Lando is embarrassed by the attention. “I appreciate all the guidance and support you have offered me throughout the years, Your Eminence.”
“Cardinal Louissaint,” Cardinal Seaborn continues, turning to Lucky. “You have almost entirely eschewed the material comforts the Church makes available to you, as well as doctrinal debates, to focus on disaster relief and anti-poverty initiatives in Haiti. You have helped to rebuild houses, schools, and hospitals with your own hands. You have converted many troubled youths to the Faith, redirecting them from a path of violence and misery. You were offered a permanent position here in Vatican City last year, and you declined it. Your motivations are pure and noble, and I am so heartened to see how you’ve taken to mentoring our youngest cardinals, as your influence is badly needed in the Church.”
“You were offered a job here?” Cam asks Lucky; everyone seems surprised to hear this except Aemond. Lucky smirks and shrugs, as if it is no great accomplishment.
Cardinal Seaborn’s next acknowledgment is for Cam. “Cardinal Campbell, you went to a corner of the world that has been underserved and undervalued by the Church, but there you created something truly extraordinary. By ‘whispering the Gospel,’ as you describe it, you built relationships with the Mongolian people and embraced their customs while also showing them the way to Christ through your own humble, patient example. You have mastered one of the most challenging languages by diligently immersing yourself in the culture for over a decade. You are a pillar of the modern approach to evangelization.”
“Thank you very much, Your Eminence,” Cam says. “I hope all of our brothers can one day recognize the beauty of Mongolia and its people.”
Now Cardinal Seaborn looks to Aemond. “Cardinal Targaryen, where do I begin? When we first met just three short years ago, I remember thinking that you were one of the most intelligent, articulate, academically-inclined individuals I’d ever crossed paths with. You study tirelessly, inspired by Saint Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest philosophers in the history of mankind. You are fascinated by the history of the Church. Yet despite your gifts, you still heed the counsel of your elders.” He signals to Lucky, Lando, Kazi, and Cam. “And God has seen fit to work a miracle through you. This is a very rare thing, and it cannot be ignored. You are divinely favored. Surely God has an exceptional path planned for you, wherever it might lead.”
What can Aemond say that won’t be arrogant, self-righteous, ambitious, hungry, attributes he’s not permitted to have if he is to be the next pope? He thanks the dean for his generous compliments and his ongoing efforts here to facilitate the conclave. Rhaena is radiant, gazing at Aemond as if he is something magnificent and yet untouchable, a constellation, a holy relic behind glass.
“And Cardinal Nowak...” Cardinal Seaborn rests a hand on Kazi’s shoulder, pauses, then flushes pink as he realizes he’s forgotten what to say. Aemond, Lucky, and Cam burst out laughing. Lando is smiling, but politely bows his head to try to hide it.
Kazi puffs on his vape. “Don’t worry, Brother. You’ll think of something.”
Cardinal Seaborn is mortified. “Forgive me, I’ve barely slept, and I’ve tried to prepare a few points for everyone, over a hundred cardinals...oh yes, of course, I wanted to praise your interreligious outreach, particularly with the Jewish community in Poland. You have a conviction to modernize one of the most traditional branches of our Church, and even if your methods are somewhat unorthodox...abandoning the Latin Mass, blessing gay and trans individuals...I cannot help but admire your tenacity.”
“You forgot the drug addicts and sex workers. I blessed them too.”
“Please abstain from smoking here, Cardinal Nowak. It’s bad for the artefacts.”
Kazi sighs but tucks his vape away in a pocket of his scarlet cassock. Now the cardinals are moving to take their places in the red-cushioned pews set up in front of the Altar of the Chair of Saint Peter, a symbol of the authority of the Church, a throne older than any almost any continuous monarchy on earth. The keys are passed again and again, but the office is never left vacant. Etched into the golden frieze above the altar is, in both Latin and Greek: O Shepherd of the Church, you feed all Christ’s lambs and sheep.
“Brothers, let us begin,” Cardinal Seaborn says, and strides towards the pews. Lucky, Kazi, Lando, and Cam accompany him. Rhaena takes her place in the last pew, where Sister Penny, Sister Helvi, and Sister Nuru are already sitting. The nuns are to stay out of the way, as always, eternally vanishing into trees and wallpaper and heaps of stained, wrinkled washing.
Lucky stops when he realizes Aemond isn’t following. “Aemo?”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Aemond replies.
“Aemo, come on.”
“In a minute,” Aemond snaps, and Lucky shoots him a disapproving glance before continuing on to the pews.
Aemond stands with his hands clasped behind his back, tense and silent like a bolt of red lightning. He wants to talk to you, but he doesn’t know what to say; you understand this because you feel the same way. Part of you is afraid he can see the forbidden visions strobing in your skull, can feel his bedsheets skating beneath your palm. Part of you wants him to know.
“Aemo,” you say after a while, meaning the moniker. “Where did that come from?” You think you might have called him that on the beach, but you can’t recall for sure. It was so long ago, another hemisphere, another time zone, another lifetime so distant it could be a dream or a myth, the story of a saint no one can prove ever lived.
“From you,” Aemond replies, smiling softly. “When I met my friends here, they already had nicknames, and they were trying to pick one for me. But it was giving them trouble...Aemond isn’t so common outside of Greece. So before Kazi could decide to use Aemy or Mondo or something equally horrific, I told them I knew somebody once who called me Aemo.”
“Did I really?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Not many of the details.” It’s so much like your experience with the Faith: the soul of it is greater than all its parts, components that could be entirely real or not, a truth that transcends mortal complications.
Now Aemond is reluctant. He has to confess something he’s afraid will offend you. “I’m sorry I lost your rosary.”
This doesn’t make any sense; your rosary—beads of white pearl, a gift from Mother Maureen—is safely stowed in a pocket of your white habit. “What?” Then you realize he means the one you gave him on the beach, red glass beads roped together by a thin sterling silver chain.
“Well, I had it with me that day,” Aemond says. “On Nea Kameni.”
Your voice drops low, clandestine, enraptured. “Aemond, how did you stop the lava? The tourists said you held up your hands and the river flowing towards them stopped. How is that possible? How did you do that?”
His gaze falls to your medallion, then down to the marble floor. He is standing on a blood drop of porphyry, a red volcanic stone with large glittering crystals. “I don’t know. I just did.”
Most of the cardinals are in their seats, and Cardinal Seaborn has begun the opening prayer. “We should join them.”
“I’ll see you later.”
“Defo,” you say, and Aemond laughs. He goes one way, and you go the other; you sit in the back row of pews, he sits at the very front, and all through the Mass you are searching for glimpses of him, hair that is still blonde, the scar tissue of a miracle that nearly killed him.
Afterwards, you and Rhaena walk with the procession of cardinals as they are led to the Sistine Chapel and ceremonially locked inside. On the first day of voting, there will be only one ballot; thereafter, there will be two cast each morning and two each afternoon. Hundreds of years ago, the elderly cardinals were expected to remain inside until a new pope was chosen, spending days or weeks or even months entombed in a holy prison, men dying of heat stroke and pestilence and exhaustion. Now, they get to return to the Domus Sanctae Marthae each night, and seek the guidance of God amongst the sacred treasures of Vatican City.
As the heavy wooden doors are closed, you see Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment painted on the far wall, the Second Coming and the resurrection of the dead, Christ surrounded by his apostles, Saint Lawrence with the gridiron he was roasted on, Saint Bartholomew holding his own flayed skin. And then you and Rhaena kneel outside the Sistine Chapel with your palms and ears pressed to the doors until soldiers of the Swiss Guard order you to leave.
~~~~~~~~~~
There are 106 voting cardinals. In order to achieve a two-thirds majority and thus be elected pope, a candidate must receive at least 72 votes. Here are the results of the first ballot:
Cardinal Matej Jahoda of the Czech Republic receives 33 votes.
Cardinal Aemond Targaryen of Greece receives 27 votes.
Cardinal Jacob Green of Iran receives 22 votes.
Cardinal Gideon Saati of South Sudan receives 11 votes.
Cardinal Leopoldo do Carmo of Portugal receives 8 votes.
Cardinal Valentino Parmigiano of Italy receives 3 votes.
Cardinal Orlando Almazan of the Philippines receives 2 votes.
Now dinner is being served, and the dining hall is raucous after a day of hushed rituals and contemplation, the brand new landscape being analyzed. Pope John XXIII once described how contenders bob up and down during the ballots ‘like peas in a pot of boiling water’: they rise until they can’t anymore, their reservoir of votes exhausted, and then they are cast aside in favor of cardinals who still stand a chance, or a cardinal who can serve as a consensus candidate like Pope John Paul II was plucked out of obscurity in 1978 when none of the favorites could reach the requisite majority.
There are archaic rules that are still observed here, relics of the more lawless conclaves of past centuries; there are no pies or whole chickens for example, no food in which a note could be stored and passed to another cardinal, a bribe or a threat, vote for me and I will give you fifty giornatas of land, vote for me or I will kill you. You and the other nuns are ferrying plates of spaghetti to the tables, red tomato sauce and chunks of Italian sausage and leaves of fresh basil. Sister Penny is so flustered, you wouldn’t dare stop to sit down in the empty chair beside Aemond; she wouldn’t yell at you—and she would never claw or slap like Sister Augustina—but she would worry, and she is overtaxed enough already. Still, you linger near Aemond when you serve his table.
Lando seems genuinely disturbed. “Who is voting for me?”
“First day glitch, ignore it,” Lucky says. He has more pressing concerns on his mind. “If most of do Carmo’s votes go to Jahoda, and Saati’s go to Jake, we might have a problem.”
“Where did Parmigiano come from?” Cam asks, baffled.
“No conclave is complete without an Italian,” Aemond says.
Kazi is ripping up pieces of bread to dip in his spaghetti sauce. “Parmigiano isn’t a name, it’s a chicken.”
“He’ll be gone in the next ballot,” Lucky says confidently. Then he peers across the room at Cardinal Jahoda, who somehow appears even larger than he was this morning, swollen with his impressive showing in the Sistine Chapel, his eyes sparkling and his smile broad. At his table he is joined by his ever-present companions, Auclair and Ferrari, as well as by two new devotees: Cardinal Arto Koppel of Estonia, Cardinal Viorel Nemerenco of Moldova.
“Fat pope, thin pope,” Cam murmurs ominously. This is a longstanding adage within the Church. The ideological factions tend to trade off, the balance maintained, a conservative pope following a liberal pope and vice versa; and since the Holy Father was a progressive, many will feel that a traditionalist like Jahoda should succeed him.
“The world needs proof of miracles,” Lucky says, looking at Aemond. “They strengthen the Church. They give people hope. It is only natural to drift away from God when we see no evidence of him.”
“Even Mother Teresa had doubts,” Kazi concurs, and then he quotes her: “Where is my faith? Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be God – please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.”
To your amazement, Aemond, Lucky, and Cam all seem to agree with this, nodding as if the Faith is something they pick up and put down again, become periodically estranged from, rediscover and reembrace until their next lapse. Then they notice you watching them with your hands empty and your face bewildered.
“I’ve never felt that way,” you confess.
Lando says, looking up at you: “I haven’t either.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica are the Vatican Grottoes, a stone web of corridors and chapels and the tombs of ninety-one popes, as well as a handful of cardinals, nobles, and monarchs including three queens. The arched pathways—like walking beneath the arbors in the gardens—of the labyrinth are adorned with mosaics, paintings, and inscriptions, punctuated by alcoves where marble statues stare out at you with cold ancient eyes, and if they could speak perhaps they would say: Do you know what miracles I performed? Do you know how I was martyred?
You are down here because someone has to be, and you begged Sister Penny to let it be you, because you know Aemond is roaming these tunnels and you’re hoping to find him. So you flit between the tiny, pigeonhole chapels, each able to accommodate only five or ten guests at a time, small wooden pews provided so the cardinals can pray in their chosen location. You light candles on altars and replace the ones that have burned down to pools of wax, you help to guide old men who have gotten turned around and are lost in the maze. You spy Kazi in the Polish Chapel of Our Lady of Czestochowa, and he gives you a brief smile but then returns to his prayers, his forehead resting on his interlaced hands; even he is solemn here, and it’s so quiet except for soft, echoing footsteps and occasional whispers, the cardinals listening for divine wisdom or willing their chosen result into existence, the fate of the Church that has survived for two millennia hanging precariously in the balance.
You spot Cardinal Kelly in the Irish Chapel of Saint Columbanus, Cardinal Barraza in the Mexican Chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Cardinal Jahoda in the Chapel of the Patron Saints of Europe. You move almost silently so as not to distract him, and when you enter the chamber his eyes are closed; but once you’ve replaced several of the candles on the altar, you turn to see that he is glaring at you, a conspirator with his enemies, a usurper of the natural order. You bow your head and flee mutely from Jahoda’s cold, iron wrath, not something that burns anymore but that has cooled over the years until it is metallic and cutting and inflexible.
What if Aemond wins? you find yourself thinking as you follow the corridors to one diminutive chapel after another. If he becomes the next pope, what happens to us? Anything? Nothing?
You slip into the Clementine Chapel, directly beneath the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica where you stood this morning. It is the gem of the Vatican Grottoes, closest to the tomb of Saint Peter in the Necropolis below: gold covering the walls, low ceiling, low light, red and white candles flickering on the altar...but several have burned out. You go to light them, taking a book of matches from the pocket of your habit.
There is a narrow aisle and five single pews on each side where worshipers can sit or kneel to speak to God. Cardinal Auclair is kneeling in the frontmost pew on the left side, his eyes closed, deep in thought or prayer. Cardinal Ferrari is near the back, but he’s getting restless; you have the impression his knees are paining him. You take weightless, hushed steps as you pass by Cardinal Ferrari. Then you hear someone else enter the chapel. You look back to see Aemond standing at the beginning of the aisle; but you aren’t alone. He glances at Cardinal Ferrari, then Cardinal Auclair, then drops to kneel in one of the pews near the entrance of the chapel, either waiting for them to leave or planning to follow when you do.
You return your attention to the altar; but your heartbeat is thunderous and blood burns under your skin like veins of magma beneath volcanic earth. You can’t act like you care that he’s here. You can’t reveal what you feel for him. It’s not safe yet; you and Aemond aren’t alone.
The altar rests on two porphyry columns, red like bricks or lust or bone marrow. Behind it is a bronze cage covered with gold, through which you can glimpse the marble structure Emperor Constantine built over the site of Saint Peter’s burial. Down the aisle, Cardinal Ferrari stands, stretches, groans, and plods out of the chapel. Now it is only you, Aemond, and Auclair, seemingly unaware of your presence here, his icy blue eyes still closed.
You finish lighting the candles, then replace a red one that has burned down to the nub. You turn to leave, still clasping the piece of red candle to be discarded, warm and filled with a tiny maroon lake of melted wax. And because you are thinking of Aemond—his hands, his bedsheets, his wrath, his pride, his lust—as you traverse the narrow aisle, you accidentally bump into Cardinal Auclair’s shoulder, and the remnants of the red candle fly out of your grasp, and a streak of molten wax spills down the front of his cassock. He strikes out before you can begin to apologize, his long fingers catching on your wrist, and because you don’t see it coming you yelp and flinch away, dire muscle memories bubbling up to the surface, lava that ruptures through split stone and burns, burns, burns.
Auclair hisses: “Watch what you’re doing, girl—”
And then Aemond is here ripping him out of his pew, one hand on Auclair’s throat, another twisted into the front of his cassock, throwing him against the altar and pinning him there, a man who is two decades older than Aemond, a man who suddenly seems so thin and frail and petrified. And you know just by looking at him: Auclair has never been hit, Auclair did not believe such a thing was possible. He is sputtering and swearing in French, trying to writhe out of Aemond’s grip. The candles on the altar have been knocked over, red and white wax bleeding everywhere. And on Aemond’s face is a blind, mindless fury, numb to the consequences, feeling only a fire that consumes until nothing is left.
“Aemond,” you plead, panicked, reaching for him, your palm colliding with his chest. “Aemond, you can’t!”
Then the realization floods back into him—a pope cannot be wrathful, a pope cannot sin so gravely—and Aemond releases Auclair, who collapses against the altar and gasps for breath. He stares up at Aemond, still stunned, still furious.
“You are a monster,” Auclair whispers hoarsely. “You are more beast than man, Cyclops.”
“No one will believe you,” Aemond says, his voice dark like a storm. And that might be true, given Auclair’s well-known moral deficits; no one except his closest allies, Jahoda, Ferrari, Koppel, Nemerenco.
Auclair stands, staggers as he tries to find his footing, then stumbles out of the chapel.
“Aemond,” you say softly. Your palm is still on his chest, you realize, and this is dangerous; each time you touch him, the visons grow brighter, more inexorable, more real. “You didn’t have to...you shouldn’t have...you can’t do that.”
He looks at you, fear in his remaining eye, but not regret. He clutches for the altar as if he thinks he will fall without it, his right hand settling in a pool of spilled red wax. “I couldn’t stop.”
And when Aemond’s left hand clasps yours, you don’t resist him, you don’t even hesitate, you let him draw you in until he is kissing you and his right hand, wet with candle wax, cradles your face, staining you, burning you, drying there like a second skin, and the visions were true: it is a perfect and calamitous hunger, it is a gravity you can’t fight, and as your lips and tongue follow his you taste smoke, wine, heat, something inexplicably familiar like somewhere you’ve always belonged.
There are heavy, pounding footsteps coming down the corridor, and you and Aemond reel away from each other, disbelief stark on your faces in the golden glow of the chapel: How could we have done that? How could we stop?
Kazi appears at the beginning of the aisle. “I heard Auclair shouting, what...?”
He trails off as he notices you, candle wax on your face to match the red on Aemond’s palm. Kazi’s eyes dart uncertainly between you and Aemond. You escape before he can see anything else: the desire in your flesh, the revelations in your bones.
Kazi watches you leave, confounded, afraid. Then he goes to Aemond and asks quietly, not like a chastisement, but so he will know how to help: “Aemo, what did you do?”
You bolt from the Vatican Grottoes, up the staircase into Saint Peter’s Basilica and emerging by the statue of Saint Andrew, out into the starlight where you can hear the thousands of Catholics in the square beyond the wall singing Silent Night. You run to the Domus Sanctae Marthae before anyone can spot you, unlock your room which is mercifully unoccupied, careen into the bathroom and look at yourself in the mirror, crimson wax dried on your cheek and jaw in the shape of Aemond’s hand. Then you dig your fingernails beneath the edges so you can peel it off your skin.
I have to get rid of this before Rhaena comes back. She wouldn’t understand, she wouldn’t forgive me.
But even when you wash the remnants of the wax away, you’ll still be marked by him: a redness that fills veins and arteries and the chambers of your heart, a fire that burns down to the bones.
Series summary: In the midst of the zombie apocalypse, both you and Aemond (and your respective travel companions) find yourselves headed for the West Coast. It’s the 2024 version of the Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more undead antagonists. Watch out for snakes! 😉🐍
Chapter 1: Welcome To A New Kind Of Tension
Chapter 2: I'm The Son Of Rage And Love
Chapter 3: The Ones Who Died Without A Name
Chapter 4: Read Between The Lines
Chapter 5: Heads Or Tails, Fairy Tales In My Mind
Chapter 6: I'm The Resident Leader Of The Lost And Found
Chapter 7: Tell Me That I Won't Feel A Thing
Chapter 8: She's The Salt Of The Earth And She’s Dangerous
Chapter 9: Some Days He Feels Like Dying
Chapter 10: Nobody Likes You, Everyone Left You
Chapter 11: The Innocent Can Never Last
Chapter 12: Please Call Me Only If You Are Coming Home
Finished this series in one night (cuz I can- I stayed up until 3 am) and hey I’m also destroyed rn by this fic🥲BUT ANYWAYS This is such a great series if you want to read a sappy kind version of aemond set in an apocalyptic romance with aegon being…aegon🍷He deserves a hug🫂
Series Summary: Aemond is a prince of England. You are married to his brother. The Wars of the Roses are about to begin, and you have failed to fulfill your one crucial responsibility: to give the Greens a line of legitimate heirs. Will you survive the demands of your family back in Navarre, the schemes of the Duke of Hightower, the scandals of your dissolute husband, the growing animosity of Daemon Targaryen…and your own realization of a forbidden love?
The Lucky Ones Are Dead [Chapter 10: Glorieux] [Series Finale]
Series summary: You are an impoverished widow who has at last achieved relative security for yourself and your children by becoming the Marquis de Targaryen’s mistress. But your relationship with Aemond is tenuous, France is on the eve of a bloody revolution, and a self-righteous young military officer is getting too close for comfort…
Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), references to abuse, dubious consent, insane dom Aemond, sweet sinnamon roll Jace, murder, war, horses, blood and violence, parenthood, bodily injury, character deaths, lots of drinking, crème brûlée!
He stands on the cliffside and looks out over the Mediterranean Sea, and he remembers everything she’s ever told him about the Îles des Saintes. The water isn’t so clear here, or as shallow, or as warm; there are no iguanas or fruit bats. But it is a frontier nonetheless, the end of one world and the doorway to another. Due south of Toulon is the coast of Africa, to the west are the Americas, to the east are the places Alexander once stood, the Balkans, Persia, India. Now he is Colonel Velaryon, but he doesn’t intend to stop there. He’s building a ladder to the sun, to the stars.
“I thought you’d look more pleased after your victory, my lord,” a lieutenant says, walking up beside him and smiling as the wind blows in off the ocean, salt and chronology, smoke from the ships that have burned and sank into the depths, wooden beams dissolving, bones turning to silt. The sky is clear, very bright and with no clouds. Soon it will be Christmas and the New Year, and the world will start over again.
“Citoyen,” Jace corrects him distractedly. “There are no noblemen here.”
“Something bothering you?”
Again, he watches the sunlight on the waves, glittering like gemstones on silk-gloved hands, colorless icy diamonds, blood drops of rubies, amethysts the shade of royalty. “I have a woman back in Paris.”
“A mistress?”
“A wife someday soon, I hope,” Jace says. “She hasn’t written to me. She always writes to me.”
The lieutenant raises his eyebrows. He gulps wine out of a plain metal cup, dark red Nielluccio from Corsica, drained from barrels found in the cellars of the conquered city. “Paris is very far from Toulon. Letters can get lost.”
“Before I left, she told me to forget about her. If she meant it, I have to change her mind.”
The lieutenant is incredulous. “You can’t leave now, the National Convention is making you a general! They’re sending you to take Sardinia next!”
“They can wait until I return,” Jace says, and turns his back to the sea so he can go to the stables and find Vermax.
~~~~~~~~~~
You fall back through the past like someone pushed from a window.
You are snapping your fingernails as Aemond drags you down the grand staircase of the Hôtel de Targaryen. You are entangled with Jace on the ravaged floor of the Château de Dragons, painted with dark soot and radiant moonlight. You are on the bed touching yourself as Aemond sits in his chair and watches, sipping his wine, firelight on his face. You are smiling as you read the letters Jace writes to you, small words with vast spaces between them, vacant oceans, weightless skies. You are gazing dizzily up at him as he lays a palm on your forehead and says: I want to know what it feels like. You are drawing loops and lines into damp earth as his hand guides yours. You are smirking at him from across the table on the night you met. You are at Versailles: the Hall of Mirrors, the Royal Opera, the emerald labyrinth of gardens, and bewildered people keep asking you why you’ve brought your children. You are climbing up onto a dining room table as people glowing with candlelight laugh and applaud, letting plates and silverware clatter to the parquet floor, crawling to where Aemond waits for you. You are covering bruises with Venetian ceruse and red rouge. You and Marcel are on your hands and knees adorning a plain cotton gown with parsley-juice leaves and orchids made from the blood of crushed blueberries. You are watching French ships burn off the Îles des Saintes.
Lumineux.
The cell door shrieks open, rain-wet rusted metal and the pounding of boots. You look up to see five guards and the same lawyer who was with Aemond when they took him away, to the tribunal, to the guillotine. The lawyer glances at you and then returns his attention to the mountain of papers in his arms. One of the guards throws a pair of shoes at you: white leather slippers, no ribbons, no jewels. They’ve been worn already. They’re stained with smears of dried blood.
“Get up, La Sainte,” the guard says, grinning. “Put them on. Time for church.”
What else can you do? With shaking hands, you fumble the slippers onto your feet and stand, swaying, clutching the craggy grey stones of the wall so you won’t stagger as you make your way to the doorway. You won’t let yourself scream or fight the inevitable. You don’t want to frighten the children. Their cell doesn’t overlook the courtyard where the guillotine casts a long shadow and leaks endless tears of red, but they know Aemond left and never came back. There is no mystery as to what happened to him, just like everyone knows the fate that befell the king, the queen, their courtiers, their friends like you.
You intend to enter the nearest stairwell, but one of the guards snatches your arm and wrenches you the other way, marching you down the corridor and past the other cells. Another guard jabs you in the ribs with the butt of his musket; another keeps trying to reach under your thin, tattered chemise and cackles when you smack him away. The lawyer ignores all of this.
You whisper to the guard who threw you the shoes: “Might we go down the other steps—?”
“No,” he snaps. They know what they’re doing.
Please let Marcel and Noella be asleep, you pray as you approach their cell, but of course God has never been listening to you. They see you passing by with the lawyer and rush to the bars, screaming, clawing for you, trying to keep you here. Marcel catches one of your wrists; now you can see that he’s missing two of his teeth. Noella is kneeling in a puddle of rainwater, her arms locked around your ankles.
“I’m coming back,” you tell them, soft and impassive so you won’t break down, your fingers skimming through Noella’s hair, kissing Marcel’s cheek that’s still mottled with bruises. They’re both sobbing, but you aren’t. You can’t let them see you upset. You don’t want their last memories of you to be someone insane with fury and fear, which you very nearly are. As the guards watch, smirking and snickering, you pry your children’s hands off of you and keep walking.
“I hate you!” Marcel roars at the guards, slamming his palms against the bars.
“Take care of your sister,” you say.
“Maman, you can’t go!”
“When this is over, find Jace.”
“Maman!”
“Find Jace, do you hear me?” you say again, looking back at him as the guards hurry you away, prodding you with their muskets and shoving you with their monstrous hands.
“I hear you,” Marcel answers, and then sinks down to the floor and weeps into his palms as Noella yanks at the iron bars, still shrieking. You keep stealing glimpses of them until they disappear as you are led to the far end of the passageway and down a narrow, spiraling staircase.
You remember Marcel sparring with Aemond in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Targaryen. You remember Jace once asking you as you practiced your letters with him: Why did you name her Noella if she was born in the spring? And you had told him that you gave birth on a ship midway between the Caribbean Sea and the west coast of France, and you couldn’t even begin to imagine what your new life would look like, a penniless widow dragging two children from doorstep to doorstep, but that it made you feel better to think of Christmas—that wherever you’d end up, the three of you would be together when nativity scenes appeared in town squares and mistletoe was hung from doorways—and Jace had smiled and rested his hand on top of yours, and then left it there for just a moment too long.
You only allow yourself to cry once you’ve been hauled outside, where cold December rain pools on the ground and fresh flurries whirl through metallic-tasting grey air. Across the courtyard, the blade of the guillotine falls and the mob howls with triumph, and then they begin ripping the clothes off the headless, bloodied corpse that is still convulsing.
Will they strip me afterwards? you think, dismayed although it’s not as if you’d know, and you remember the way Aemond sometimes undressed you at dinner—pulling up the hem of your gown, tugging down your bodice—and how Jace, so that he would not have to watch, had gazed up at the painting on the wall behind you instead, a map of Alexander the Great’s sprawling empire.
Lumineux, you hear Marcel say, just two years old and reaching for the infernos of ships on the waves. You shake your head, casting the memory away. You left home and never found it again.
But even now you cannot properly grieve your own life, because the lawyer is asking as if he’s already said it to a thousand other people, and maybe he has: “Do you have any witnesses who can speak to your loyalty to the revolution?”
You swipe the tears off your face. “Capitaine Jacaerys Velaryon.”
The lawyer snorts. “Yes, you and half the others I’ve represented. Who else? Anybody who could testify that you do in fact know Velaryon well and have his regard?”
Who indeed. Lafayette and Adrienne are still imprisoned elsewhere, Haxo is dead, Ramadier is dead, Suzette is dead, Ersilia and Maryvonne Laforest are dead. “Maeva Casoli.”
“The mistress of the Comte de Ramadier?”
“Yes, her.”
“Missing since September and presumed dead,” the lawyer says. “Anyone else?”
No, you think but do not say, unwilling to admit defeat just yet.
“You know, the peasants ate her pugs,” the lawyer notes as he scrutinizes his papers.
The guards pull you into an adjacent courthouse, and you are immediately engulfed by the vitriol hemorrhaging from the peasants in the gallery, bared teeth and screeches and insults: traitor, whore, murderess, wealth hoarder, blasphemer. You are terrified to see that they are wearing red ribbons knotted around their throats. They remember you.
There is a jury of twelve seated by the wall, already glowering forebodingly. One of the judges reads your name aloud and commences the trial, and a prosecutor steps forward.
“Madame Arceneaux, you were the mistress of the Marquis de Targaryen, recently convicted of treason and sentenced to death by this same tribunal.”
“Whore!” the men and women in the gallery yell again.
Your eyes dart skittishly to them and then back to the prosecutor. Beside you, your lawyer yawns. “Yes.”
“And you are commonly known as La Sainte.”
“Yes,” you admit.
“You were a companion to the Austrian spy Marie Antoinette, you were a guest at Versailles—”
“The marquis took me there,” you say. “I only followed him, I did not know the king or queen prior to that. I was a person of no consequence.”
“We have numerous testimonies that you attended feasts and balls, dressed extravagantly, purchased lavish items for your household—”
“I had no household!” you interrupt, frantic. “I owned nothing, I resided with the Marquis de Targaryen but I had no knowledge of his financial dealings or any control over them. In fact on many occasions I risked his displeasure to smuggle food outside to the commoners, knowing that they were suffering.”
One of the peasant men sneers: “She would bring us crusts of bread while wearing silk gloves and jewels the size of ripe cherries!” He holds up his hand and forms a circle to demonstrate the dimension of the gemstones, and the other commoners boo. The jury shake their heads, revolted.
You turn to your lawyer, who says nothing. You plead helplessly: “I sought a better life for my children.”
“While our children starved!” a woman from the gallery cries out, and a chorus of wrath like the squawks of crows accompanies her. “While our children died of the cold, or smallpox, or overwork, or violence, or pneumonia, or diphtheria!”
“I am not your enemy!” you shout over their thunder, sobbing. “I know what it is to be destitute and at the mercy of others. I became a courtesan out of necessity—”
“And you chose to join the aristocrats rather than tear them down,” the prosecutor says, circling, stalking you like a wolf. “You did not desire liberty. You desired to become one of the few who enjoyed the fruits of others’ servitude.”
The commoners in the gallery are applauding. The jury is nodding. The lawyer is peering down at his shoes. “I have known Capitaine Jacaerys Velaryon for years,” you say, your last card to play. “He will speak for me. Send a messenger south to Toulon, and he will tell you that I am not a traitor. He will wish for my life to be spared.”
“Capitaine Velaryon is a war hero and a man of legendary morality. He takes no mistresses, he lives austerely. He would have no love for the whore of a nobleman.”
“Send a messenger,” you beg again, looking at the judge.
Instead he asks the jury: “Are my fellow citizens prepared to render a verdict?”
You can barely hear their words over the rumble of the peasants in the gallery, like the sea in a storm, like the firing of cannons. The judge is checking his list for the name of the next defendant. The lawyer departs to meet his new client.
Now the guards have seized you again and are dragging you outside to the courtyard of the Tower of the Temple, where the mob has turned its eyes to you, the just-condemned, the freshest meat. They hurl things at you, rotten vegetables and stones and fistfuls of ice. Your borrowed slippers skate over the dusting of snow on the cobblestones. When you stumble, peasants rip off your bloodstained shoes and tear at your chemise and your hair as well. The guards push them back and haul you forward; the guillotine will not be deprived of your life. They can have what’s left afterwards.
I won’t scream, I won’t scream, I won’t scream.
You don’t want to give your murderers the satisfaction, and you don’t want Marcel and Noella to hear you from their prison cell. And you almost keep quiet, even as the soaring wooden frame of the guillotine rises before you, so much larger than it ever appeared from your window or as you walked the perimeter of the courtyard, even as its shadow falls over you and the air grows colder, snowflakes on your eyelashes, an ache in your lungs.
Then as you are forced up onto the scaffold, your bare feet slip in the river of blood there, and it’s still warm, coating your skin as the guards grab you roughly beneath your arms to keep you upright.
I’ll never get to wash it off, you think.
And then you feel something shatter in you and you scream, horrified and hysterical, fighting the guards, trying to brace your feet against the scaffold so they can’t drag you to the guillotine, but you keep sliding in the blood. The peasants are grinning up at you, their eyes glowing, their faces already speckled with traitors’ gore. A guard is trying to cut your hair off so it won’t get in the way of the blade. You’re shrieking that you can’t die, not here, not yet, you have children.
You remember Jace telling you: I can’t be killed. I won’t allow it. I have too much left to do.
The mob doesn’t ignore your cries. It’s worse than that. They mock you, they laugh at you. They already have a pike to place your severed head on, and a ribbon embroidered with La Sainte to tie around the stump of its neck. They are salivating for your death. The drums are beating out a furious rhythm.
But now, from the back of the crowd and rippling forward towards the scaffold like lapping waves, there comes a new chant that at first you cannot decipher over the hammering of the drums, but then it grows so loud it’s all you can hear: “Velaryon, Velaryon, Velaryon!”
He is splitting through the mob on Vermax, galloping as peasants scatter to make way for him, cheering for his victory at Toulon, reaching out to touch his black leather boots or the legs of his horse so they can say they’ve done it for the rest of their lives. The guards, still grappling with you, pause their advancement towards the guillotine to gape at him. Then they bolt when instead of reining up at the edge of the scaffold, Jace rides up the wooden steps and onto the platform, and when he dismounts—the crowd rapturous, their applause deafening—you stumble through the blood to him and he catches you, holds you, and you cannot hear anything he’s saying over the frenzy of the mob, but as you clutch at him, bloodied and shaking, he takes off his dark blue coat and drapes it across your shoulders, and he keeps one arm around you even as he turns to address the commoners panting in the courtyard like rabid dogs.
Jace raises a hand, and to your amazement, the murderers go still and they listen. “She is no traitor to the French Republic!” he says, and they do not dispute this, though they still scowl up at you with suspicion. “She was instrumental to my rise, she is a believer in meritocracy. She is pardoned, and so are all those associated with her.”
The crowd is murmuring as they mull this over, and Jace does not wait for them to decide whether they agree or not. He draws his sabre, and as snowflakes catch in his curls, he touches his lips to your temple and then he whispers: “Where are they?”
“In the Tower.”
You go there together; but first, Jace finds a woman in the crowd who is about your size and orders her to give you her shoes.
~~~~~~~~~~
He commandeers a carriage and escorts you and Marcel and Noella west to Concarneau, where nearby he has a cottage he once bought hoping he would share it with you, a kind quiet life, honorable and warm. But he brings two other people along too.
Jace doesn’t have confidence that the National Convention won’t kill the surviving children of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, or worse, lose them to the coalition who would use them as figureheads to embolden royalists. So he tells the guards in the Tower of the Temple that he’s been authorized by the government to move Marie-Thérèse Charlotte and Louis-Charles to a more secure location, and instead he entrusts them to your care and plans to hide them in the countryside, to keep them so close they can never be sharpened into weapons to gouge out eyes and slit throats. And no one you meet along the road suspects anything when you introduce the former dauphine and dauphin—pale, scrawny, their hair falling out in clumps, bruised and miserable—as orphans who lost their parents to the Reign of Terror, which they did.
At an anonymous chapel in the northwest corner of France, you and Jace exchange vows with only the priest and children in attendance. Marcel is just old enough to serve as the witness. It’s over in mere minutes, and you have no rings to wear. Jace promises he will give you a proper ceremony one day, when you have more time and the armies of the coalition are not battering down the doors. You smile as you kiss him, and say you don’t need anything more. But Jace insists you shall have it anyway, and as usual, something about the knowing glint in his dark eyes makes you believe him.
You arrive at the cottage and meet Jace’s younger brothers, and you and Noella get settled inside, and she bustles around cheerfully as she arranges the bedroom that she’s chosen to share with the once-royal children. They’ll be afraid if they’re left alone, just like I always was, she says. But when Jace prepares to return to the war and stands in the doorway, Marcel does too.
“Mon trésor?” you say uncertainly.
“I want to go south with Jace,” he admits. “I want to learn how to protect us, how to be a real soldier. And Aemond would want me to learn too. I’m old enough now. I’m fourteen.”
It has been ten years since he looked up at you with glassy, shivering fear in his eyes: Maman, where will we sleep tonight?
You are startled, and you turn to Jace, and he says as if he’s been waiting for you to consider this for a long time: “I could take him on as an orderly.”
“It’s dangerous,” you say weakly, knowing that almost everywhere is.
“I would not endanger him. He is my son now too.”
All these years you have put roofs over his head and floors beneath his feet, but now the world calls for him, and like any brave man he must answer, and Marcel leaves but not before embracing you so tightly it feels like he might crack your ribs. You lose a son—not forever, just for a little while—and in turn you gain four brothers, and two sisters as well, since Luke and Joffrey already have wives; and you and Noella know you will never be alone again.
You help to tend to the small farm, chickens and ducks and milk cows, and you learn to sew and cook, and at night around the fire you take turns reading aloud. Jace’s brothers have a substantial collection of books and are all excellent readers, thanks to his lessons. After a while, the once-royal children begin to smile, and one day they even start to laugh. Louis-Charles and Noella, in particular, become fond of each other. She amuses him, she chats with him about art and geography, subjects he would have studied as a prince; and she knows some of what he must be feeling. She’s also lost a father to the guillotine.
The townsfolk of nearby Concarneau are always dropping by the cottage to see if you need anything, eggs or flour or sugar or sewing needles. To befriend General Jacaerys Velaryon’s family would be a great honor. The women invite you for tea and gossip, and once again you find yourself entertaining, something you must have a talent for. You tell them stories of the Îles des Saintes, of Versailles, of your captivity and near-execution. It is very much in fashion to have just barely survived the Terror. You wear unluxurious cotton or velvet, as everyone does now; but you cinch your gowns just beneath the bust as you once did to your chemise while you were imprisoned, and soon enough all the other women are doing it too.
You receive letters from Jace every few days, and you answer each one religiously, asking about Marcel, telling Jace how the rest of the family is doing here. He wins in Sardinia, and people are beginning to say that he has never lost a battle and never will. In the summer of 1794, the Reign of Terror ends when the men responsible go to the guillotine themselves. Jace arranges for Lafayette and Adrienne to be released from their respective prisons and reunited. Across the Atlantic Ocean, George Washington has won his second term as president of the United States. But democracy has not bloomed so promisingly in France. The National Convention is weak, and aimless, and defiled with the blood of tens of thousands of its own people. But the monarchy has been disgraced and abolished, so who else can the French turn to?
When you were a girl on the Îles des Saintes, you dreamed of a life like this: a simple cottage, an ordinary love. And in a different world, that would be enough. But now you know how perilous it is to live without power, and you fear what will happen if Jace ever loses the favor of the National Convention, which murdered Aemond and brutalized your children and was once so eager to see your head hacked from your shoulders.
Jace returns at the end of summer, and when he entwines with you on the bed you share he is always gentle, and close, and slow, and warm in a way that reminds you of the sun on sand, immortal and shadowless. You confess afterwards, your head resting on his chest: “I don’t trust the French Republic to keep us safe.”
“I don’t either,” he says, catching his breath in the firelight, sweating out your rose perfume and his ether of bitter orange trees. “So I’m going to do it instead.”
You look up at him, and you remember telling Aemond late one night as you sat in the salon together and wood smoldered and split in the hearth: I think you were right. He has potential.
“I can get the Îles des Saintes back,” Jace says, smiling softly, often teasing but always kind. “But you’ll have to live somewhere grander than a cottage.”
You remember what he told you before he left for Toulon: I endeavor to keep climbing, and I will take you with me.
Jace asks: “Will you come with me?”
If you say no, he’ll smother it, this blaze that’s burning up inside him, this golden light that could spill across borders like dawn. But you don’t. “I will.”
~~~~~~~~~~
It is the summer of 1815, and a lifetime has passed, and in Paris the air is hot and humid, roses blossoming and bumblebees humming. Over two decades ago, and in a very different sort of tribunal, you were condemned to the guillotine. Now a council of noblemen from the ever-expanding coalition—Britain, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, Russia, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Papal States, Sardinia, Malta, Genoa, Tuscany, Sicily, Bavaria, Württemberg, Hanover, and Mecklenburg-Schwerin—and politicians from the French parliament as well have gathered to decide what to do with the man with too much potential.
“Jacaerys Velaryon,” says a British duke and field marshal. “You have at last been defeated on the battlefield, declared an outlaw and an enemy of the peace, made to abdicate your crown and your throne on pain of execution, and exiled to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. Yet you escaped with one thousand men you convinced to enable your treason, and when you landed here on French soil you furthermore ensnared the parliament’s soldiers into your schemes—”
“I offered them the chance to kill me when I met them on the road,” Jace replies cavalierly. He is forty-five now, lightning bolts of white in his dark curls, still boyish somehow, still quick and always overreaching, those creases of determination often etching into his brow. “The soldiers chose to join their emperor instead. Should I have denied them? Perhaps they did not feel so inspired by your visions for Europe.”
“You raised an army of hundreds of thousands, and you were defeated again,” the duke continues. “And still you proclaim yourself Emperor of the French!”
“Well, my demands have not yet been met. So I had to return to see to them.”
In the gallery, the peasants and soldiers roar with laughter and applaud. Jace grins at them; they are the reason why the coalition cannot execute him, as much as they desire and threaten to do so. The nobility have tired of his enlightened reforms, and the parliament is itching to write their own laws again and to be free from the financial millstone of his wars; but the commoners love him. The commoners would rise up again for him. Jace cannot keep his throne with the full force of the coalition as his adversary, but he can make things much more difficult for them. He could start another revolution. He has no intention to, you know, but the coalition can’t be sure of this. They didn’t dare to close the proceedings to the public. They feared the building would be stormed like the Bastille.
“Your demands?” the duke echoes flatly.
“I have four conditions, and if they are met I shall willingly and wholeheartedly accept this council’s judgement and never again return to disturb the peace of the continent.”
Before the duke can protest, a Russian count interrupts wearily: “Name your conditions, Velaryon.”
The bastard, born with nothing except ambition, begins. “My adopted son will retain his position in the French army.”
Immediately, the gallery erupts into cheers. The British duke motions impatiently for them to hush. “General Marcel Velaryon is well-regarded among the soldiers here, and we have received complimentary recommendations from his time serving as a diplomat to Italy and Russia, including one from Tsar Alexander I himself. He has also taken an oath to never again support your cause as emperor, or he forfeits his life. He may remain where he is.”
There are fresh applause, and as the representatives of the coalition and their hired guards struggle to regain order, Jace turns to where you are standing in the gallery among his people, safer here than anywhere else on earth. He smiles: We did it, just three more to go.
You smile back. You haven’t been permitted to see him since he was sent away to Elba, which is part of the reason why he had to fight his way back. He won’t be separated from you. You wear a ribbon around your throat, as you are well known to. It is made of violet silk trimmed with white lace, and instead of La Sainte, it reads L’Impératrice: The Empress.
“Your next condition?” prompts an Austrian prince.
“I have heard disturbing rumors,” Jace says severely, and the gallery falls grave-silent and leans in to catch his every word, to glare menacingly at the council. “That since the restoration of the monarchy—albeit subject to the new constitution and the authority of parliament—certain French statesmen have been urging King Louis XVII to divorce his lawful wife in order to marry a princess of one of the many kingdoms represented here today. Not only would this be an affront to God and the Catholic Church, as two people who have been properly wed cannot be forced apart by outside parties, but Queen Noella is much loved by the people and has given France healthy, capable heirs. Any further attempts to disparage her or to coerce her devoted husband must cease indefinitely.”
Jeers and hisses emanate from the gallery. The members of the council pretend to be equally scandalized, as if they have never heard of these plans to unshackle Marie Antoinette’s only surviving son from his wife so he would be free to marry one of their own: a royal, a blue blood, someone whose lineage is unmarred by an undistinguished drunk of a naval officer and a once-destitute courtesan. But the world is changing, and those things aren’t so important anymore.
The French prime minister says, a hand pressed solemnly to his heart: “The parliament would never interfere with His Majesty’s most cherished and holy marriage. The king and queen’s affection for each other and service to the realm is renowned. They should be an example to every family here in France.”
“Your third condition,” the British duke urges, looking uneasily at the commoners in the gallery. This proceeding is best hurried along.
“It concerns the place where I am to be exiled for the remainder of my life,” Jace says. The peasants and soldiers burst into fierce protests, but they quiet down when he raises a hand.
The duke seems grateful. “Yes, there have been several locations proposed. Saint Helena in the Atlantic, the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean.”
“I ask to serve out my exile on the Îles des Saintes.”
The duke exchanges puzzled glances with his fellow councilmembers. “Where?”
“An archipelago in the Caribbean Sea, very small and of little strategic significance. I won them back during my reign, but if I have been informed correctly, the British have taken possession of them again. I wish to spend the rest of my days there.”
“Why? So you can easily escape to some nearby colony to raise an army, Martinique or French Guiana?”
“No,” Jace says, squaring his shoulders, his head high and proud. “As all true Frenchmen are aware, the Îles des Saintes is the birthplace of my wife, the empress for these past eleven years.” The people who have filled the gallery until there is not one footstep’s worth of vacant space roar with acclaim. They know you have suffered; they know you have survived. Jace crowned you himself during his coronation. And then he offered you his hand, and when you rose from your knees he whispered to you, smiling, his curls brushing your cheek: Look how far we’ve climbed together.
“And this is supposed to be a justification?” a Prussian baron grumbles.
“Regrettably, I’ve never seen her homeland with my own eyes, though she’s told me so much about it,” Jace says, and the commoners sigh at the lonely romance of it: a far-flung colony, a couple doomed to be cut apart like a head from a spine. “This will be my last chance to walk the cliffs where she climbed as a child, to swim in the clear water that washed over her ankles as she stood in the sand holding my adopted son when he was a baby.”
“Let’s assume that’s possible,” the duke says. He is very eager now; he can almost taste the resolution, the end of a decades-long nightmare. “Although the council will need time to fully consider this request. What is your final condition?”
“My wife will spend half of each year on the Îles des Saintes with me. The rest of her time will be allocated here in France, where she will be permitted to visit her children and grandchildren.”
The gallery explodes into whistles and applause, but the council is appalled, chattering chaotically amongst themselves.
“Is exile supposed to be prison or paradise?!” a British earl snaps.
“This is an entirely unreasonable request!” a Swedish count is saying.
“Who does he think himself to be?!” the Prussian baron shouts. “To give us orders after all the blood and gold he’s cost our kingdoms—?!”
And Jace thunders back, as the commoners in the gallery thump their fists on the benches and the walls: “I am the man who stitched the flesh of this nation back together after the Reign of Terror, who built schools and roads and shelters for the impoverished, who established law and order, who implemented fair taxation and an economy that uplifts rather than crushes, who made France the most meritocratic society on this continent and perhaps even throughout the world, who reconciled with the Catholic Church, who abolished slavery in our colonies! And my wife, the Empress of the French not because she was born into it or selfishly desired it but because our broken country cried out for gentle hands to piece it back together, she is the one who patronized orphanages and championed the property rights of women and called for new laws to protect child workers—”
“Enough!” the British duke bellows, then slumps in his chair and rubs his forehead resignedly. “Velaryon, you shall have your four conditions. Now will you leave Europe behind forever as you have sworn to, and board a ship to the Îles des Saintes as soon as the council can arrange for one?”
And this is the very best he can hope for, so Jace agrees.
Two months later, almost exactly twenty-four years from the day you met in the dining room of the Hôtel de Targaryen, you and Jace disembark from a ship that docks on the Îles des Saintes, accompanied by a battery of British soldiers stationed here to prevent his escape. Coalition vessels will patrol the islands ceaselessly. But the soldiers are already starting to admire him, asking about his battles and his reforms, tentatively at first and then with awe blooming on their young faces. What Jace carries inside him is catching, you see.
Still wearing his uniform and his sabre, Jace walks with you and smiles as you show him the iguanas sunning themselves on the rocks, the sea turtles gliding through the warm crystalline surf, the emerald cacti, the amethyst orchids, the dilapidated remains of the cottage you lived in when Marcel was born. You tell him that when the sun sets, the fruit bats will venture out from their dens and take flight.
At dusk, you lead Jace up to the cliffside where you once watched horrorstruck as French ships burned and sank after the Battle of the Saintes, believing that your life was over. Jace takes your left hand, bare and adorned only with your wedding ring. He kisses your knuckles and then says, grinning through his windswept curls, gazing at you: “Lumineux.”
You look out over the sea as the last rays of the sun vanish, and the only sounds are the breeze in the palm trees and the lapping of calm waves against the shore, and the only lights are the stars.
Series summary: You are an impoverished widow who has at last achieved relative security for yourself and your children by becoming the Marquis de Targaryen's mistress. But your relationship with Aemond is tenuous, France is on the eve of a bloody revolution, and a self-righteous young military officer is getting too close for comfort...
Summary: Reader opens up a bakery after running away from her three year relationship with Sukuna, effectively ghosting him and hiding away in the middle of the countryside. Unknown to Sukuna, reader also had a baby, and now is living peacefully until an unfateful meeting starts to pull her back into the life she so desperately escaped from.
Tw: none for now except that Reader is a mother, called mumma/momma, Hana is five years old, reader freezes up at the sight of Toji but just because she’s in shock, Toji being a warning of his own,
Word count: 0.6k
An: Literally my second work I’m posting on tumblr so please again be kind!!! Likes and reblogs and comments all greatly appreciated!!!
Theres something serene about the way you flit around the bakery, apron speckled with little dots of flour, tied snugly around your waist. Placing the fresh goods in the glass display might just has to be your favourite step ever, that or placing the fresh flowers into the flower vase that the florist across you always sponsored for a free cream bun.
The door chime rings as you turn around, wiping off the small beads of sweat that formed on your upper lip with your sleeve, pulling back the clear mask back on, a customer service smile immediately placed on your face,
“Glad I got to you before lunch rush!”
You smiled at the frequent guest, bending at the knees and catching the pink haired girl that ran straight at you,
“Momma! The teacher said my drawings have real uh-,”
Hana turns around to look at her friends mother, her friend still holding onto Aoi’s pants, shyly hiding even after knowing you for six months now,
“Potential, she said you have great potential Hana,”
Aoi smiled, patting Hana’s head and scooping up her son into her arms not soon after,
“Well if that’s it,me and the little one are going to get going now, Kenji’s cooking dinner for us,”
Aoi starts walking back to the doors as Hana wraps her arms around you, making you pick her up and rest her on your arm as you walk towards the door,
“I’ll see you tomorrow Aoi!”
You wave at the mother-son duo as they walk down the street, a warm smile on your face as Hana copies your gesture,
“Ok big girl! I want you to go get changed and mumma will get you some lunch hmm?”
Hana runs into the back room of the shop- connected to your house as soon as you set her down. A fresh set of gloves is pulled over your hands as you move back to the counter and await your lunch rush, already dreading the influx of customers.
The first man to come in makes you stop dead in your tracks, fingers frozen mid air as you almost greet the man. A scar runs down the left side of his lip, red and rough,
“Well ain’t it good to see you again,”
He grins, matching your half assed wave with his own as he walks to the counter whistling as he turns his head around and looks at your homely decorated bakery,
“Toji,”
You breathe out, barely short of a whisper. He cocks his head at you and smirks,
“Yep, that’s my name. Never thought I’d see you on an errand for Sukuna heh,”
A shiver runs down your spine at the mention of his name and you scrunch your eyes, willing yourself back to the woman who owned the bakery and not the woman who ran away six years ago,
“It’s good to see you again too Toji, is there anything I can get you?”
Your palms have moon shaped Red Crescents in them from how hard you’ve dug your finger nails, steeling your gaze at the cash register, pulling out a new order,
“Why the cold shoulder doll? We go way back don’t we?”
All Toji gets in reply is an eye roll and a scoff followed by you moving away from the counter to stand in front of Fushiguro with your arms crossed,
“I dated your boss for a few years, that’s hardly going ‘way back-,”
You further validate your point with finger quotes in the air,
“Now either order something or get the hell out Fushiguro,”
Tojis smirk falters for a second before he holds in hands up in mock surrender,
“Still fiesty heh doll, no worries I’ll be out of your way,”
He’s turned his back on you and finally is almost out of the door-
“Momma! I can’t find my hello kitty pouch!”
Your daughter comes storming out from the back door, red eyes squinted in fury as she holds out her bag for you,
