the halls are quieter at night, after the torches have burned low and the servants have learned to walk softer, as if the castle itself is sleeping and she is not meant to wake it. daenerys sits on the edge of the window seat with her feet tucked beneath her, small hands wrapped around nothing at all, the stone cold even through her sleeves. she has been here a while, long enough for the shadows to start looking like things. there is a constant awareness of him beside her, rhaegar, taller than the doorway, taller than her fear, leaning against the wall like he has always belonged there, as if the world has never surprised him once. ❛❛ i, rhaegar . . . ❜❜ her voice comes out thin, caught somewhere between a whisper and a question she already knows she shouldn’t ask. he turns anyway, he always has. the night presses in closer, the kind of quiet that makes her chest feel too small for her lungs. she remembers very little herself, only pieces, the smell of smoke, the way the sky looked wrong, the screaming that didn’t sound human once it started. ❛❛ the night the lannisters came? ❜❜
words spoken from the small, unsteady place behind her ribs, from a girl’s voice that does not yet know how to be loud without breaking. daenerys stands too close to her brother, as if proximity might keep the past from finding her again, as if rhaegar’s shadow is a thing that can be worn like armor. she is young, young enough that memory comes in fragments, in colors — in sounds that arrive before sense does. the lannisters, the name itself feels sharp in her mouth, a lion daring to bare its teeth at the dragon while it slept, men who came with smiles and promises and left her with smoke in her lungs. a child watching adults pretend the world was not ending. [ how can i tell you that i was small? that i hid? that i did not scream like a dragon but whimpered like a child? ] ❝ they were loud, ❞ she says finally, as if that is the worst of it. ❝ and the walls shook. ❞ @rheagr