❝ There was a feeling of inevitability when I met you. And our lives were fated to converge like some cosmic dance. And I think I had to break your heart and you had to break mine. ❞
As Cressida Black's lungs ceased to draw breath, Aurelia Martell's...
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June 110 AC
She hurts; they'd stitched her up neatly enough, Aunt Rosamund had promised, and according to everyone the birth had been very straightforward, but her body hurts. She should be grateful, she supposes. The babe was born living. The babe survived its first night. The babe is healthy and thriving, by all accounts. It has all its limbs and fingers and toes. It is not crippled or deformed in any manner. It can see and hear and breathe and eat. A very healthy boy, everyone said. But Alicent is not blind to the fact that every hour someone comes into her rooms to check on both the babe and her, feeling at their foreheads for signs of fever, checking the rags between her legs for any hint of infected blood.
She hurts quite a lot. It aches awfully between her legs, it hurt even worse when she got up to relieve herself, and the skin of her stomach feels stretched and wrong. Her head hurts as well, all stuffed up and throbbing, and her throat is still raw and hoarse from shouting and screaming in pain. She bathed herself a bit with a washcloth earlier, around her armpits and under her heavy breasts and along the back of her neck, scrubbed her face as red and raw as she could stand, but she already feels filthy again. Her hair is matted and coarse in the braid one of her ladies carefully put it in, and she feels sweat trickle down her back, underneath the clean shift.
The babe keeps feeding, and Alicent stares blankly at the window, listening to the distant sounds of the castle. When she first woke, they'd been ringing the bell above the sept in honor of the successful birth. She imagines they all know by now, anyways, know that both mother and child lived, and that she gave the king his longed-for son. But she doesn't feel triumphant.
She would feel far, far worse had the babe died, she knows this.
Yet, she cannot say she is happy, either. She looks down at the infant at her breast and feels no flood of warmth or affection or anything beyond vague curiosity and weary acceptance. It as if it were someone else's child bestowed on her, as if it were one of her cousins, as if she were bound by familial bonds to care for it, but not love it. Well, she is. She doesn't know if she would feel differently were it'd been a girl, the little Visenya Rhaenyra longed for, if she'd have loved her instantly then.
The babe stops feeding and starts to mewl. Alicent glances down at it, then adjusts her grip behind its heavy head. "Shh," she says, voice cracking from strain. "Shh. It's alright." What do people say to their children? She forgets. It hurts behind her eyes, too. She rubs at her mouth roughly, then murmurs to the babe, "I'm here, it's alright. Don't cry." Thankfully, the mewling does not rise into full-fledged wails. Alicent hates the screaming most of all. It makes her want to throw something. The babe quiets some, and Alicent watches the tiny eyelashes flutter as it fights against sleep.
She thinks she should hum something, so she hums the Maiden's Song, although it's never been a lullaby.
She can't remember anything but the chorus, so she hums a little more until the babe seems to sleep. Then she lays him down in the cradle carved with flying dragons beside the bed, the same one that served the Targaryens for years and rocks it with a grimace when the babe starts to whine again, until finally there is blessed silence.
