Chapter Text
She scoots back on her bed, her hand groping the wall behind her for the light switch, and by some lightning strike of common idiocy bonks her head against the headboard hard as her finger clicks off the light. Sparks fly and her eyes squeeze shut instinctively; fucking ow.
“Bitch,” she mutters to herself, and when she opens her eyes she’s not in her room. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, and another moment for her heart to fucking drop to the pits below, but it’s evidentially clear that she’s not where she was a moment ago. There’s a man beneath her.
She’s sitting on a man. The bed is large and wide and she is sitting on a man, a familiar-looking man, and she lurches back, legs slung around his torso, and his eyes snap open.
She screams. He lets out a hoarse shout, and they’re just yelling at each other for a solid moment, and then he pushes her off him with a flurry of limbs and she topples in a great big arc all the way down to the floor. If it were as if everything was happening in slow motion, a fog of disorientation blurring her vision, things crystallise into harsh focus when she falls on her arm, and feels the distinct crack of bone.
Tears spring to her eyes. She’s broken arms before, swinging wildly around the monkey bars in her youth, but the immediate pain is intense, and sharp, and—
A hand grips her hair and wrenches her up; it’s the man, angry and bewildered in equal measure, and they meet eyes for just a second before he shoves her back, tearing the hair off her scalp. Pain blossoms again. He’s barking out lines, but her ears are ringing, and she’s quite sure she’s having the worst fucking nightmare ever or some sort of epileptic episode. The man steps closer, menacingly, and she tries to crawl back reflexively, but finds herself against the bedpost. It’s a tall fucking bed, she thinks, numb, and the man snarls: “Who the fuck thought sending you would be a good idea?”
“What?” It’s a mental effort to concentrate her eyes on the man above her; middle-aged white guy, white hair, white beard, white blouse that billowed like a girl’s. She can’t shake the sense of familiarity, even with her heart roaring in her ears with fear. “What the fuck,” she says, jagged pain still twinging from her arm, and he seizes the front of her t-shirt and presses roughly into her.
“Who sent you? How did you get past the guards?”
“What?” She’s lost all capacity for speech. “What?”
“Don’t fucking play dumb,” the man snaps. He lets her go, and she breathes out a shaky gasp, watching him stalk to the corner of the spacious room with the heavy wooden desk. He searches for something, frantic, items clattering and crashing to the ground. Her vision expands to encompass the room, draped in shadows from medieval-looking lamps lodged onto the wall, but then it narrows the fuck down again to the sight of him marching forward with a sharp stick in his hand. A knife. No, a dagger.
She scrambles up. “Wait—”
He lunges and she shrieks, tumbling across the floor to evade him. By some miracle she keeps her weight off her arm, and finds her footing again, near the foot of the bed. The man glares at her and she realises she’s still shrieking her head off. It takes a moment of conscious thought to stop.
“You imbecile child,” he froths, and prowls forward, the dagger pointed towards her. “What deluded you into thinking you could possibly assassinate me?”
“...What?” She says, dumbly, and he hisses, leaps forward again, surprisingly agile for an old guy. She runs the very short pace of three steps to the other corner of the room, and things are registering quickfire in her mind, like the way the ceiling is too high for the house to be any kind of modern architecture, and the way the door has a weird fucking knob that’s not actually a knob, and the way the tapestries decorating the wall are reminiscent of the ancient ones she’s seen in the Great King’s Landing Museum, and, most pressingly, the fact that she’s met a dead end, that the dagger, imaginary or not, is going to plunge into her very soon, like within three-seconds soon, and then the door clatters open.
The man stops, the sharp edge a hair’s breadth from her neck.
“Your Grace!” A younger man, dressed in ridiculous middle ages knight cosplay, says breathily from the door. “I-I heard—” He freezes, at the sight of them, at the man holding the dagger to her throat, her trembling against the wall.
The man laughs, a harsh bark. He grabs her shoulder and twists so that he has her in a headlock, ever-steady in his smooth movements, crushing her windpipes efficiently. “Ser Wally, you are fortunate I have survived this encounter. You’ve preserved your head, at least.”
She chokes, and she’d never thought the process of choking would produce such terrible sounds from one’s throat, but it does, she does. The man is still yapping, the rough baritone echoing in her ears, close enough she can feel her hair strands shifting from his breath.
“Or perhaps you were complicit in this murderous plot. In which case, you are fortunate still—your beloved and children will follow you to the land of the Stranger.”
“My prince!” The Ren Faire freak stammers. Her vision darkens, like a Tetris screen fading out with the words GAME OVER. “I do not know what you speak of!”
“Oh?” The grip against her neck slackens, and before she can even suck in a full lung's worth of breath, he shoves her to the floor. The force of the fall rattles her left arm, the broken arm, but she doesn’t have the spare air to cry out. She curls into herself. “Then how did the intruder enter the closed room with no windows, if not through the only fucking door, which you were responsible for keeping guard?”
The knight-cosplayer stammers some more, except now the absence of oxygen must be vibrating through her brain, because the fiber of the carpet pressing into her cheek is suspiciously soft and she doesn’t know where she is and she doesn’t know if she even knows when she is. “What the fuck,” she mutters into the rug, but she didn’t read History in university for nothing, she knows why this guy is so fucking familiar—her fucking college has his portrait hung on the fucking entrance hall. Her dad was named after this guy.
She raises her head weakly and the Ren freak, no, the knight, is pale, looking at the man, the prince, from a thousand years ago, soon-to-be king and soon-to-be dead and long-to-be her father’s namesake, and speaks, quiet but sure: “What intruder, your Grace?”
“Are you fucking blind?” Maekar Targaryen growls, and the knight flinches back in fear, but the prince’s anger manifests, tragically enough, against her, hurling her up by the scruff of her neck until she’s jerked onto her knees. Pain blooms everywhere, follows each touch of his. “Would you like to lose your eyes before your head?”
But there’s a strange essence in the way the knight’s gaze, fear-struck as it is, passes through her. He clutches at the sword at his hip, and his eyes slide around the room, wildly, as if looking for a ghost, not the solid being three metres from him. “Where, your Grace? Where is the intruder?”
She would’ve thought her mind would have reached the limits of her imagination. She twists to look back at the historical figure, the surprise numbing the various aches and throbs in her body, and even the terror she feels about the man who’s brutalised her for the past five minutes. The Targ’s eyes are widened, as well, but it’s not even a second before the hue of uncertainty turns to apoplexy.
“You wish to make a fool of me?” His voice is low, deadly so.
The knight opens his mouth, and she has a moment for concise prayer to the Seven that he shuts the fuck up, for his own sake—but the Targ has other fucking plans, which he promptly executes, which involves grabbing her and throwing her bodily at the knight. It’s a blur of movement where she’s stumbling forward, forward, forward, one sound arm flailing in front of her to catch herself, and her eyes jam shut before the inevitable crash into chainmail and leather and—and—
It’s cold, like a steel fork raking across her skin, like plunging into icy muddy waters, unpleasant in extremes, cool fingers twisting her insides. The inertia keeps her moving, even when she should have been stopped, but there’s a viscosity that buffers her, cushions her fall. She goes to the ground for the fourth fucking time in the night, but she goes slowly, softly. She flows with the river of the biting cold.
And mid-current, her eyes slip open, and she sees the red of blood and intestines and skin on the inside of bodies and she sees Maekar’s face, stricken in horror, and she sees her limbs burrowing out of the knight, overlapping materiality and reality and—
She flops onto her bed, screaming.