Chapter Text
“Get out of here if you don’t want your face rearranged,” he snarls, aware of the lack of teeth behind the threat, but fruitlessly trying to shield Rhaenyra. There’s more, much more, he itches to say and do, but the headline for whatever rag the fucker sells to will be far less interesting if it doesn’t include ‘Daemon Blackfyre Snaps and Assaults Photographer.’
Or a sequel to that exact headline from 4 years ago.
They exit together at as quick of a clip as they can manage without outright running, attached at the hand, and Rhaenyra takes over, pulling them into the underground and making a direct line for a security guard.
The paparazzo halts at the entrance, still watching but unwilling to pursue them in front of security.
Good instincts, this girl.
“Smart,” Daemon compliments, and she beams. Daemon drops her hand, ludicrously late, so late that it draws more attention to end the contact than to maintain it, resulting in a brief sticky moment.
“I think this is the part where I’m supposed to thank you for dinner and say this was fun, but it’s been…” the struggle to find a word for the level of strangeness that’s passed between them is obvious.
“Surreal?” he supplies.
“Surreal,” she agrees. “But thanks for dinner anyway.”
“Any time. Just get the steak first next time,” he teases her, so easy to do, because she’s so easy to get to and make her look at her Doc Martens and blush and it’s fun.
“Okay, Daemon.” See you tomorrow?”
“Suppose so. Gotta break Corlys’s heart.”
Her expression falls. “You’re still bowing out?”
“Of course.” It’s only sensible.
“Why?”
“Why ?” he repeats incredulously. “Rhaenyra, you’re my niece. Beren and Lúthien are starcrossed lovers. Do you not see an issue there?”
One Targaryens are intimately familiar with. He wonders if she knows that part of their history. Distant though it may seem on paper, it isn’t well hidden. But there’s a good chance Viserys hadn’t taught her much of anything like that. In this, Daemon can’t fault his brother.
Rhaenyra shrugs, fixing him with a patronizing look.
“So every time you’ve ever played a romantic interest to someone, you were into them in real life?”
“That’s different, Kid. They weren’t family, just other professionals.”
“I could be professional if you could.” The stubborn set of her mouth looks more like a pout. This does not help matters.
Daemon shakes his head. “What’s going on? You’ll be fine with Medrick. I’m replaceable.”
False modesty is not his strong suit, and he needn't employ it now - all of that is perfectly true. Even Corlys’s boy Laenor ran his set in his stead when his voice went out for a few days the month prior, and even he’d done the role a decent justice. Contrary to Corlys’s protests when he’d roped Daemon into this fever dream, they had indeed found a backup.
Medrick Manderly is an excellent general understudy, an unenviable role who must train and rehearse for multiple parts and perform them serviceably without expectation of performing on any given night. He’s not Daemon, but he’ll do. Or perhaps they’ll just recast the role entirely.
“But I just found you!” she protests, and he’s forcefully reminded of her using the same tone to get her way, a lifetime ago, this time sans toddler lisp and tears, but no less lethal for it. “I want to know you!”
“You do?”
“Don’t act so surprised,” she scolds him, her lips tilting in a half-smile, self-conscious and coy, “I can’t say it’s not a bit weird, but, I don’t have so much family. I don’t know anyone here,” his heart squeezes. She would be all alone here, a stranger in her home country. Just like him, but without the experience and advantages of age. “And what are the odds we both end up here, like are we just supposed to ignore that and say it’s not some kind of sign from the universe that we were supposed to meet again? And. You have so much experience. I want to learn from you.”
There’s so much he could show her.
“I want to know you too,” he responds quietly. “God knows I don’t deserve to, but. You’re what’s left of my family, too.” It feels shameful to admit, knowing now that he could have gone home and been forgiven.
What must be her train pulls in, a few late-night stragglers begin to stagger into the night.
“That’s me,” she confirms. “Don’t quit?”
“I’m not making any promises,” he says, feeling very much like he’s making a promise, “but I’ll talk to Corlys. See what I can do about this whole Beren and Lúthien thing.”
Rhaenyra stops her shift towards the train as people begin to board, and asks with a flash of uncertainty too quick for him to pick apart. “Did you pull strings?”
“What?”
“For me, to get the part…”
Guiltily thinking of how much he’d hoped she hadn’t been called back, he can hardly believe himself. He’d have missed this. Missed even more than he already has.
“No. Didn’t. Wouldn’t have done. You don’t need anyone to swing anything for you.” And she brightens again.
“Good. I don’t use my name because Targaryen still carries some weight. I don’t want to be anyone’s nepobaby.” She pauses. “Oh my god, if you’d put in a word for me I’d literally be a nepobaby.”
And they both laugh; a ridiculous, freeing thing to do over a sort-of bad joke, but they’ve both swallowed too much salt tonight to not take an offered sweet.
“Here,” she thrusts her phone in his hands, number on screen. “If you don’t want to work together, at least don’t be a stranger?”
He hands her his in turn, and then she really does have to go.
He’s left staring after her, watching the train pull away like he’s in an old movie. It gets smaller and smaller until he can no longer see its speeding silhouette in the night, but he stays a while longer before setting off for his own car, feeling bereft, ambivalent, strangely hopeful.
Finally home, Daemon lets Caraxes out at once. The dogwalker checked in at 4:00 and it’s near enough 11:30. Mysaria can’t handle him on her own, or so she says. Upon being freed, Caraxes bounds around wildly, knocking into furniture, before taking the stairs up to the roof.
“Good boy,” he says absently as the ridgeback sniffs madly around the rooftop, whose greenscapes and potted plants provide a hint of a yard. It’s not the rocky, xeriscaped hillside he had in LA, with endless lizards to chase and birds to snap at, but thankfully the dog has adjusted reasonably well to vertical life.
Daemon takes in the cool midnight air on his face, finally something of autumn detectable underneath the smog and faint rot of rubbish bags sat in the heat of the day. Reaching in his back pocket for a cigarette and lighter, he’s on the verge of lighting up when he remembers Viserys.
Told him not to smoke, but-
It’s as good a reason as any to quit.
Again.
He’d mostly quit 15 years ago. Old girlfriend in California didn’t like the smell, and he’d never picked it up seriously again, but he always has a cigarette on him anyway. A carcinogenic security blanket of sorts.
“Where the hell have you been?” Mysaria’s voice startles him, and he drops the cigarette off the railing, down some 30-floors to the street below.
Great. Littering.
“Work. Went out for supper.” He shrugs, unconcerned with her mood just now. She strides up to him, her inky black hair floating around her in a bare-minimum breeze that does little to stir the stagnant urban air. “How’d the audition go?”
“Who were you with?” Ah, not well, then.
“We cast Lúthien today, I took R- Nyra out to congratulate her and talk shop.”
“And that involved holding hands and looking super cozy with a mystery woman? ” She spits.
Goddamn, the vultures descend fast. Daemon’s eyes slide closed.
“If you want to take the Mail or the Telegraph or god forbid the Tower at their word, fine. We’ll turn that around next time they run some shite about you.”
“That’s not-”
He cuts her off, uncaring of his own rudeness, pushed past endurance by the weight of everything he’s learned. Everything he’s missed.
“We went out for supper, I walked her to her train because she’s all alone in this city and-”
Mysaria turns her phone around to show him a picture, him and Rhaenyra standing side to side on the platform, so close there’s hardly a centimeter between them, fingers entwined and held loosely at their sides. She looks at him beseechingly, and while a messy swoop of his dark hair obscures most of his expression, he looks like he’s about to lean down to her, like she’s waiting for him to…
It’s only because he knows how it had been in reality that he doesn’t come to the immediate conclusion his girlfriend - and most likely the rest of the Tower’s highly-educated and reasonable readership - did. In reality, it must have been the moment the news of Aemma’s fate fell on him.
“What the hell is going on with you? You act like a maniac all weekend, you’re late for work, you come home hours and hours late having been out with some girl who looks like she just got her driving license last week, and-”
“You want to know what’s going on?” he snaps, rounding on her, “she’s my niece, I just found out that my brother and sister-in-law are dead and I never got to say goodbye, and that I have a whole other family I know nothing about. Happy?”
Three seconds of one of the loudest silences he’s ever endured echoes between them. Then Mysaria rolls her eyes, 8 balls ricocheting around and sinking his honesty disguised as sarcasm.
“What have you been drinking? You know what, I don’t want to know. If you want to fuck some ratty little theatre kid, far be it from me to stop you. But if you’re not going to be exclusive, then I’m sure as hell not going to be either.”
This deal with Mysaria, it’s always been a good thing. A reliable thing, to have someone to call on for a reasonably good time if not for a long time, who won’t get too attached or demand more than he has to give. They’ll break up when one of them has something or someone better to do, or when schedules and projects conflict.
They fight. It’s sort of the bedrock of their almost-relationship. There’s no real bite to it, more a recreational activity they intersperse with other recreational activities. They’ll snap and snark and disrespect each other and then fall into bed. Most of the time.
For the first time, fighting with her isn’t fun. It’s cynical.
“Were you ever?” he fires back, more vicious than snarky, relieving some of the awful tension inside him, lashing out at someone who little deserves his affections but doesn’t deserve his ire either. It sounds like something he’d say to her normally. But it sounds mean this time.
“Go get your ball,” distracting himself with Caraxes, he points at the grubby, ridiculous light-up ball one of the writers on Enzo had gifted the set mascot.
“We’re not done talking about this!” Mysaria rants, the syllables and stresses uneven in her sometimes-awkward accent, but he just shrugs her off.
“I am.”
Ordinarily he might engage, usually as ready for a good fight as she was, but it’s just not in him. The jealousy is misplaced. But a part of him recognizes that there’s a logic to it. It’s twisted and based on a false premise, but he can’t deny that in the three years he’s known and dated Mysaria on and off, she has only known a man who cares little for others. He’ll flirt and charm and occasionally even fuck others, but going out for dinner or walking another woman to their train is an anomaly. Mysaria enjoys his attention being mostly hers by default, and is considerably more jealous with it than with his other parts.
Caraxes drops the ball at his feet, looking up expectantly, his whiplike tail hitting Mysaria’s legs before she dances out of range and stomps off, looking disgusted. A smirk pulls at the corner of his mouth.
He sits down, cross-legged on the asphalt covered in gentle clovers, and focuses resolutely on his dog, determined to not give her a hint of the reaction she’s looking for.
Green flashes bounce across the rooftop, over and over, until he’s sure his girlfriend is trying to sleep and the pounding of Caraxes’ lolloping gait above the bedroom must be quite annoying.
“Good boy,” he croaks, when the large, rusty-coloured dog flops onto him, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, after nearly an hour of play. The city’s almost quiet now.
Inexplicably, his mind wanders to Rhaenyra, and whether sleep eludes her too, after all he’s stirred up. If he was right or just selfish to shatter what she thought she knew. But she is a strange and magical thing, he decides. She had seemed so genuine in her desire to know him, even after all he’d told her. He wonders if she’ll be so inclined in the morning, once she’s got wind of that shite the Tower printed.
The bedroom is, to his surprise, empty, and Mysaria’s weekend bag gone. This doesn’t concern him as much as relieve him, and the feeling compounds when Caraxes jumps up and makes himself at home while Daemon washes before bed. He gives his owner a side-eye, as if expecting to be sent to his own bed, but there’s no reason to do so tonight. The devoted weight of a large head laid across his shins is a comfort during the long expanse of hours spent endlessly searching his mind for a third solution to a Hobson’s choice.
Sleep comes eventually, but doesn’t satisfy him. After a third waking and a hacked-off Caraxes glaring at him for getting up again, Daemon decides to call it quits and rely on caffeine and a hard workout at his building’s gym to get through the day.
His phone buzzes on his bedside table.
(6:38AM): by the way u have a grand-niece
(6:38AM): my perfect child says hi
Grand-niece? Rhaenyra’s got a kid? She’s just a kid herself, when did she have tim-
A photo follows, cutting his thought spiral short, and he throws his head back and laughs instead at a photo of a golden-coloured, extremely fluffy dog with a vulpine face and small, triangular ears.
(6:40AM): There’s a bit of a genealogical issue here but-
(6:40AM): Guess that makes this one your cousin?
He fires off a photo of Caraxes. It’s not hard to find one. He’s become one of those people whose camera roll is populated mostly with pictures of his dog.
(6:45AM): he’s gorgeous! Name???
Pain spreads across Daemon’s shin, slightly overlong dog nails scraping down his leg, and he realizes he’s been standing next to his bed for the last 5 minutes, staring at his phone. Like an idiot.
But Caraxes’ patience is as thin as his owner’s when it comes to breakfast.
“Alright, alright,” he grumbles. “I’m getting it.”
(6:46AM): Caraxes.
(6:46AM): no fucking way
It’s terrible manners but he doesn’t even make the dog sit and wait for his food, too preoccupied. Caraxes launches no complaints at this, and neither does he protest the addition of a hunk of chicken Daemon charitably drops in his bowl, token of his sudden good mood.
(6:48AM): ?
(6:48AM): Mine’s Syrax
(6:48AM): Dad suggested her name
And a second photo comes through and stops his heart, and when it picks up again, it’s off-kilter, dropping out on him as he stares. He stares and stares and stares, as if he’ll never be able to look enough.
Viserys kept his hair short too, a far cry from the long manes of their youth, subject of both awe and ridicule among their respective age-peers. The years had been fairly kind to his brother. Perhaps more lines than one might expect, but he had suffered more than his share too, between illness and divorce and losing so many, so young. (Was he also a loss, etched into his brothers’ lines?)
Apart from a slight softening in his belly, he looked the picture of fitness in this and it looks recent-ish, and given the late-teens Rhaenyra posed next to him, holding a puppy Syrax and brimming over with tears of happiness, surrounded by her equally-ecstatic siblings. It cannot have been taken more than a year or two past.
(6:50AM): Sorry
(6:50AM): I wasn’t thinking
The missed opportunities colour themselves in, a shade more vivid now. He could have known this Viserys. This Viserys could have known Daemon away from the television. The light of day brings with it an acceptance that the full blame does not lay on Daemon’s shoulders alone, but also the knowledge that he alone must experience it now.
(6:53AM): It’s alright. I’m glad you sent it. Talk later?
(6:55AM): OK
He finds he is glad. It doesn’t ease the confusion that still catches him at odd moments, nor the hollowed-out place in his chest where he’d been keeping the hope for better times between them, now forever vacant. But being able to see his brother again, to know that he had some happiness in his children at least, and that his children got the best of him it seems, undoes a knot inside him by fractions, a knot so deep and ingrained in him that he’d forgotten it weighed on him at all until it began to ease.
Changing his mind on the gym, Daemon leashes up Caraxes and runs him in the park. A few people take pictures, but he doesn’t care. If any are paparazzi, they’ll have a very boring story to sell if they’re hoping for a piece to follow last night’s. ‘Man runs with dog’ isn’t exactly headline material, not even for the Telegraph on a slow day. Surely a Kardashian has been caught shopping at Walmart, or something equally scandalous that they can fill in the day with.
The bite of morning cold stinging his cheeks is welcome, a freshness absent the night before on the air he sucks between his teeth. He feels cleansed too, by the burn in his lungs and the old ache in his knee. Together they succeed where sleep failed in driving away his thoughts, dulling his feelings to a manageable level. By the time they return home, Daemon’s mood has mostly evened out, and Caraxes gulps half a bowl of water and flops on the cool of the kitchen floor.
A shower, as showers often do, conjures latent brilliance from the oft-neglected parts of his mind, and so he departs for work shockingly on-time and feeling like the day may not be a total loss after all.
“Dairon,” he says firmly, having accosted Corlys first thing on entering the theatre.
“Sorry?” the older man says, a silvery eyebrow raised.
“Dairon. Switch me to Dairon. I have the range required, I know the lines.”
“...Why?”
“I can’t keep up with the dancing,” he invents. “I can’t mess up when I’m front and centre.”
“Daemon, man… Dairon is in the background most of the time, but that means you’d have to dance more. And Marq’s having a hard enough time getting you to stop looking at your feet as is.”
Well, fuck.
“Please,” the word tastes vile on his tongue. Begging doesn’t become him, but, desperate times. “I’ll work on the dancing more, then. Or, give me Thingol - I know you're looking for a bass, but-”
Corlys leans forward slightly, looking in his protege’s eyes scrutinizingly as if checking for signs of altered consciousness. Absent that, he shakes his head, opening his massive hands in front of him in frustration.
“No.”
“No?”
“NO. What’s wrong with you? We’re five weeks from opening and you’re having some kind of crisis over this? I admit I was worried about your suitability for a while - don’t look at me like that, the fifty rejected Lúthiens will back me up - but the last few run-throughs have been your best yet.”
This is true, and damning. Even on Monday with his nerves firing on all cylinders and his mind in absolute disarray from all he’d found out and all he dreaded having to say, he performed better with Rhaenyra than anyone else.
How can he tell his old friend that the reason for his drastically improved performance is the very reason he shouldn’t perform?
As if on cue, Rhaenyra passes by the alcove they’re standing in, nodding modestly to Corlys but giving Daemon an apprehensive sort of quirk of her lips, a ghost of worry over the photo sent that morning. Like that stupid Tower article, the real context of this simple gesture would be lost on any but them, and this might be interpreted rather differently–
“Oh.”
“What?” Daemon questions aggressively.
“No need for that tone,” Corlys leers knowingly, his slow voice alight with mischief, “we all saw the Tower’s article.”
We all? If Corlys means his family, Laenor’s the biggest gossip in the company, so at the very least that means everyone he will see today has had a good look at an intensely private moment between him and Rhaenyra, overlaid with tawdry tabloid speculation.
“Well we all know how entirely balanced and committed to journalistic integrity the Tower is, so, must be true,” he responds acidly. “And who the fuck is passing around tabloid shite about me?”
“I’ve had a Google alert for you for years, mate. I hope I don’t need it, but if I do, I’d rather get ahead of it next time you punch a photographer or go rogue in an interview.”
“I don’t give interviews.” He chooses to ignore the barb about the photographer. It happened once. Or twice. Years ago. And almost happened last night again. But if anything the fact that the fucker got away unscathed is a testament to his relative control of late.
“Oh yes you do, and soon,” Corlys counters, final and resolute, “Meredyth will fill you and Nyra in on the details later. You’re our big name, you’re not bagging this off onto her just because you don’t like smalltalk, Blackfyre.”
For a day that started so oddly right, it’s going typically sideways in a hell of a hurry.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” he gripes.
“And speaking of…” Corlys lowers his voice, sharp and resolute turning softer, and Daemon unaccountably tenses. “I know you have your rule, and I might be overstepping but–”
Daemon cuts across him. “My rule is wholly intact.” And not applicable to blood relatives. Christ.
His rules - plural - #1 and #2: don’t date costars; don’t date fans.
“You say that now, but someone better tell her that, and it’d better be you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Good god, you used to be sharp, son. There might be people on the ISS who can’t see it, but everyone in this theatre certainly can. You two crackle like a livewire out there. The way she looks at you every time you pay the slightest attention to her, you’d think it was Christmas morning - and you! You paying anybody attention at all is new, let alone hanging on her every word.” He grins, so very pleased with himself.
“You don’t know what you’re on about,” Daemon says gruffly.
“Daem, when was the last time you spent time with a colleague outside work?”
“I had dinner with your family last Wednesday,” he grumps.
“That’s because I wrote it into your contract,” the older man dismisses with a wave of his hand, and amends: “when was the last time you voluntarily spent time with a colleague outside work?”
He played Madden with a few of his castmates from Enzo the past summer. Once or twice. All the time spent in the States has given him no understanding of their national obsession, though, and it was mostly an exercise in futility trying to learn how to work a controller and learn the rules of American Football at the same time.
“Exactly,” Corlys fills in his answer for him.
Why, precisely, he does not simply tell Corlys what the situation is, he can’t account for, except that doing so would necessitate outing both their identities, and raising awkward questions about his own origins that he’s not discussed even with Rhaenyra. Divulging the simple misunderstanding part of the equation might well get him what he wants - the role of Dairon, to stay on-site but be relieved of the burden of playing out on stage something too close to home in more ways than one. But at what cost?
One last not-so-valiant effort. “There’s no other role you’d consider giving me?”
“Enough!” he’s finally tried Corlys’s patience too long. “You’re going to perform as Beren, you’re going to do the interview, you’re going to pull yourself the fuck together, and we’re going to forget that this panicky teenager with a crush episode ever happened. Clear?”
For a moment, Daemon thinks of arguing, telling him out of spite just how wrong he’s got his take on this situation. He’s a half-starved brat of nineteen again, bristling about taking direction from someone he was paying good money to take direction from. But it’s some fifteen years on from that now, and Corlys is paying him good money to take direction. The more things change…
“Clear,” he mutters mutinously.
Corlys gives Daemon a quirky, sideways smirk at this predictable answer and his predictable attitude. “Be careful with her, yeah? I can’t lecture anyone about age differences-” he casts a softer glance to where Rhaenys ‘Take-No-Prisoners’ Baratheon hovers off-stage, coordinating something with Elanna, “-but she’s young-young, Daem. She’s more naive than most who’ve walked these halls, and she already thinks you hung the moon.”
“You’ve no need to worry about that.”
Corlys still appears unconvinced, but lets the subject go, lets Daemon go at last, sends him off to get his schedule and face his niece/co-star/Lúthien. He doubles down on separating them out: Nyra/Lúthien at work. Rhaenyra/Niece elsewhere.
He can be professional, despite the strangeness. He can.
Marq drives them hard all morning, most everyone thus far cast must participate. It’s a departure from solo work and much like his university days, Daemon finds himself just trying not to be the worst dancer in the group. In most things he tries to be the best, but reality has pulled his standards down a notch or two, and he’ll settle for not utterly humiliating himself.
For added challenge and/or physical comedy, Marq’s also introduced set pieces for them to navigate and potentially knock into. Daemon does so, immediately. Stubbing his toe on a table, he releases a long string of mingled oaths while the rest of the cast sniggers at his expense, but he’s far from the only one or the last. A dancer gets sidelined not ten minutes later with a shot ankle. Laenor ends up with a fat lip, and even Nyra looks a bit raggedy by the end of the session, sweaty like the rest of them, punky hair sticking up in the back.
Too fucking familiar.
He hasn’t had a chance to talk to her one-on-one, but his continued presence has her self-satisfied smirking the whole rehearsal through.
Just before they break for lunch, the blasted table gets her too, and Daemon and Laenor both manage to grab an arm and keep her from going all the way down, and he gets an awkward face full of her sweaty hair. Laenor pulls her into a twirl, a swing dance she can’t keep up with but lets him lead more than happily, cutting the tempers and tension of the session with easy laughter.
Thank you , she mouths at him, upside down when Laenor dips her, her back arced almost gracefully and her hair whipping around when she’s pulled back up and steps into her new friend’s arms, beaming. And just as soon, her hand is casually shoved into his when Corlys calls his son off for assistance with distributing the rations. He doesn’t know this dance either, but she spins toward him on her own, like a ribbon rolling itself, and he bows her once before quickly letting go.
“I’m glad you’re sticking around,” Nyra says, sotto voce, so only he can hear, as they begin to trail after the crowd eagerly anticipating lunch. “Beren wouldn’t be the same without you.”
Black tea and citrus and honeysuckle still tingle in his nose, and the stage lights wreak havoc on the colour of her eyes, projecting a tiny galaxy onto each one. Lúthien’s starry twilight in lavender moonlit glade. And it’s moments like this that it’s painfully obvious that he’s no Beren.