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After the coronation, he finds Helaena in her old childhood room, by the window, looking out. Even from the door he stands at, he can see there is a strange strain in her neck, a curve that warns of a headache, her longtime companion since her early days. She had a habit shutting herself off completely when the pain became intolerable, gotten so good at it, in fact, that she mastered being mostly void to the happenings around her. It is a rarity, Aemond thinks, to be so consciously unaware in an environment where most people played chess with themselves and each other, ready to strive and strike at any given moment – ever aware what to do and what to pay to bring the other down. It is a trait he admires in Helaena. It is one of many.
„Aegon told me about your fight” she says suddenly, quietly, into the heart of the room, the silence. Aemond startles despite himself – he thought her in a trance. „Did he really spit on you?”
Helaena turns, her clothes rustling so softly, her body swaying so gently in the dim gold of the dusk. From any other, he would think an insult, but from his sister, this is a simple query. In the stern surrounding of the today and the now she is still someone soft, someone whose softness softens him as well, whenever he is near her.
This room is impossible in this city, in this castle; the air thick with unmitigated tenderness.
Prudently, he looks around, and up and down the corridor before he steps inside, uninvited, but then again, they need not invitation into each other’s lives, they neved did. They simply dwelled there, in each other. They have been, ever since he was born. He likes to think he knows her the most, the best of all. As much as one can truly know Helaena.
Her gaze is still fixed on him when he closes the space between them, slowly, surely – but before he can lift a finger to touch her (and burn, and burn, and burn), she evades him, stepping aside. In the middle of the room, and in between them lies a narrow refectory, dark and modest, where she used to keep all sorts of haberdashery: old coins, torn papers, drawings, buttons, butterfly wing collection from Braavos, sweets and a book on tales of old, worn and faded and so beloved.
It is empty now – stretching between the two of them, her on one side and him on the other – and when he steps to one side, she mirrors him, only it’s all inversed, the opposite.
Helaena’s eyes are always slightly more focused when there is only the two of them, alone. Now they are a shade darker too, dangerous, as if she was angry at him (as if she could be). Still, he stops dead in his track. Shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Waits. Prepares.
„He hid, didn’t he?” her voice is low as if she was telling a secret not preparing to accuse him. „He hid to flee and fled to hide – would have, could have.”
There is a pause. Length of a heartbeat. Aemond doesn’t deem to break it yet.
„The Stranger is in the house. It is wearing the crown.” she sniffs in the air. „It stinks of power. We will all reek of it soon.”
In the one, faithful moment the crown touched Aegon’s head, Helaena turned away, from it and to him, as if she could taste the sour outlines of bitter disappointment coming in waves off him. As if she could soothe the ache. As if she could see beyond what was happening. That is when she started to whisper, tilting her head towards his, her mouth hovering near the slope of his shoulders – like a willow to wind, like roots to water. It seems her monologue at the coronation didn’t reach its end with the ceremony.
Aemond takes a tentative step again but Helaena is alert, she is moving too.
„Hel” he says, not unkindly. He wishes there wasn’t an edge coloring his voice. „You think it didn’t cross my mind?”
„Cross?” she shakes her head, a waterfall of silvergold. „No, dance. Dancing till we gorge on it. Till it ends, and –”
She is hugging herself now, the night of her mind winning.
In the not so distant past, there were many times her head got so bad she writhed on the floor or heaved helplessly above her basin, temple feverish and body taut. No milk of the poppy would make the voices go away – and so often, ever since he knew himself, Helaena would pour out some half-said, all-meant, never-understood sea of words that didn’t quite fit, didn’t quite comfort – their depth both exceptional and haunting. More frightening still, was the moment of the after when a chronic sort of catatonia would possess her, and she fell into a silence one could only experience in the pinpoint seconds before Vhagar stood up and spread her wings.
Such was the silence between them now. Heavy and foreign, like a new language. In this room, this light lit by the fire, her eyes are bright, her eyes are dark - an Essos-jewel. Even after their family dinner - where the king unmasked himself for all of them to see, and then he unmasked the others to make sure the ugliness would not stay hidden – he found her more pliable, able to speak their common tongue, not necessarily Valyrian, but the language only they could speak to one another, together.
„Mijegindita lēkia” she says kindly. His breath hitches – she isn’t angry. Poor brother. Helaena pities him. „Doesn’t know what he wants.”
An absolute truth should exist, but Helaena sees only a reflection, halved and hollowed as his eyes. There is a shadow clouding her mind and his now, hers from fright and his from jealousy.
"That is not true" he bites down on the bile coming up his throat. Rabid dog, that's what Aegon calls him of late, wanting it to hurt. But Aemond doesn’t care what Aegon thinks. The same isn’t true when it comes to Helaena.
„What we cannot have, we always crave” she says quietly.
"I said, it is not true."
"Isn't it?" she shots back, surprisingly quick. "What do you wish for?"
Wish... such a gentle word. No, Aemond doesn't wish for anything, nor does he want. It's not a simple craving, it is more like a need, a beast of its own.
„Is it not the throne you want then?” she tilts her head, examines her as if he was one of her beloved bugs, a species of its own. „The power, the adoration, the respect…”
Only the flames echo some whisper in the pause that follows. She is now waiting to land the killing blow, he knows this.
„The love?”
Her eyes are sad and worse, they are far, they look beyond again, through him, as if he was air and not here, as if she didn’t –
It is foolish to step sideways again, so Aemond decides to leap and jump over the refectory, right where she is. She is quick to recoil, like a spring-snake, but he catches her - he has always been there to catch her. On rare occasions, when they are away from court, far from King's Landing on some remote cliff, in a simple garden where everything smells like childhood and home - when the fury dries up in him, he imagines they are plain people with uncomplicated lives. One where he has both his eyes and she is not bound to another. But where is that life?
Helaena has the heart to laugh, but it is desperate and mocking, as he grabs her by the waist, and there is one hand on his neck and in his hair already, pulling, pulling, pulling.
That life is not here. It never was.
"Umbagon, mandia!" he snarls, commanding her to stay still, something feral entering his heart. A queen, the queen of the seven kingdoms, under him with eyes that outshine all, shine only for him. He was the first to be made to kneel when they placed the crown on her head and placed her above all. Little did their mother and their grandfather and even that idiot Aegon know that Aemond has long knelt before her, in the closed spaces of her room or his; in the places where they spoke only through moans and sighs, the telltale beatings of their hearts. The places where only bodies may speak.
Helaena is pulling his hair back now, her hand small and sure, and she makes a movement where it is unclear whether she wants to pull him in or push him out. The sensation of her fingers and the thought of this makes his tongue curl back in his mouth, his blood suddenly hot and heavy. Her face is so very close. Focused in its fight.
He manages to catch her other hand, the one that was crawling on his neck, stretches her palm, and with one, long lap, licks the slope of it.
She whimpers, returning to here and now. The need, the hunger. He can see it in the blackest pitch of her eyes, the sudden slacking slope of her brows.
"Hel" he murmurs gently now, looking down. She has tipped his head back with her hand, so he can see a slanted side of her, a mirage. He can see her eyes, darkened by desire; and her palm, wet from his spit. If he could, he would eat her up. "I need more. You know this. I need it."
There are mere inches between their faces. Up this close, he believes Helaena also wants, Helaena also needs -
"Aemond" she always says his name so uniquely, like a blooming secret. Shuddering, he realizes she knew him by his name before it was given to him. "Brother, how pale you are." She rubs her wet palm on his cheek, slowly, like she wants to memorize. "You look like nobody on this earth."
At last, a permission. And the kiss he gives her is searing, the kind that leaves a mark, that will hurt in the morning.
„Where is he?” he asks, meaning Aegon, meaning Otto, but he cannot quite care, not when he is already lowering her down, body spread, hair spilled – near the fire which they both like to dwell. His breath is laboured, he feels as if he is fighting for his life. Perhaps, in some way, he is.
Helaena, on the other hand, is calmness personified. Absentmindedly, she touches his hair, brings strands of it to her mouth and kisses them.
„They will never come back the same way” she answers between the brushes. „Would you care if Aegon saw us?”
„Please, don’t say his name here.”
She stops.
„Would you care?” her eyes are so clear now, so sharp. He can almost see himself in them.
Aemond has been half-erect since he stepped in her room, and his state has only gotten worse since she got her hands on him. It is such a surprise, he thinks as he lowers onto her body, into its soft form, its heat - kissing Helaena feels like the most natural thing in his life, and yet even after years of melting into her heat is not enough, never enough.
„Hm” he cups her left breast through her sapphire dress, while working his other arm through the layers of her skirt. He prepares to answer her something clever and coherent, just to make her laugh, but his breath hitches when he his fingers finally find her core.
She is soaking wet.
„Gods” he says, but maybe it is her, or he is just thinking it, because he is already inside, three of his fingers sliding so easily his mouth waters. Helaena’s spine goes rigid, as if she was in her trance, as if she was taken, her breath hitching.
„You haven’t answered me” she says in between two sighs, reaching for his breeches, an instict.
„What?” his mind feels empty, his body light. He wouldn’t care if their mother turned up from behind the fireplace with the high septon at her heels.
He’s so hard it aches.
„Would you care?”
She has taken him into her hands and his vision falters a bit at the sensation – he thinks she hears her giggle, a heavenly sound.
„Gods” he hisses again, closing his one remaining eye. She is working him already, and he is impatient, always been, but that doesn’t mean –
„Aemond” her voice is everywhere. He likes to imagine her as some sort of winged animal, her body folding like ten-thousand wings around him. „Answer me.” He hums, but cannot speak, his body numb. Far off, as if from another world, he feels her hand driving into his hair, and his own hips bucking against her palm, powerless.
"Stop” he groans. Forces his eye to open and tears his eyepatch with the other, sapphire on sapphire. From the sheer force of his grip, her dress has twisted up in what seem like smaller knots. „Not like this.”
„Do you need something else?”
And her mouth actually twitches, (oh, she might be about to smirk now, he thinks, equally proud and shocked at her bravado) but there is no time or room to answer, not for real. He turns her around, pushing her down hard against the wooden floor as he sinks inside of her. She is moaning, smile gone, and her muscles flutter around him, and he is moaning too as a reply, burying his face into her silver hair and her golden smell.
She gasps as he settles all of himself, mewling softly.
"I should have done this at the coronation" he says, drawing himself out slowly. It’s a miracle he is sentient enough to talk, but suddenly the words spill out – a confession. "While they burnt father and Aegon kneeled. I wanted to take you then and there, right after the dragon breathed at us and we could see fate so close. Did that cross your mind, my love?”
She whimpers when he speeds his pace. Helaena feels feverish wrapped against him, inside and out, and she is so tight that he grits his teeth to keep from coming before he finishes talking.
But instead, she talks, voice low, voice hoarse.
"You always cross my mind. You are always inside.”
As a reward, his hips slam hard against hers, and she weeps, pain mixed with pleasure.
She turns to speak again but he winds his hand in her hair, mirroring her actions before, pulling it back as he fucks her. Their movements are messy now, uncoordinated as they near release. He wants to say her name, but thinks it only – before leaning down completely and biting her shoulder hard – and she whines, and she tightens and she clenches; and he is gone. He comes with a shout on his lips and his hands on her plum hips.
In the aftermath of coupling, it’s always so vulnerable, so clear. Aemond even lets his eye close in these moments, and he knows Helaena will sleep soon, her mind at peace when his head rests on her chest. Between them, there is no childhood room to hide your face or cover the strange, unsavory part of the truth.
No absolute truth exists.
Some separate, unknown ones live on though, hidden in the cavities of such moments, rearing their hollow, hushed heads.
A truth: who Helaena lies with at night.
Another: whose children – so dear to some - she bore to a brand new, raw daylight.