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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 22 hours

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1968 [Chapter 12: Aphrodite, Goddess Of Love] [Series Finale]

A/N: Surprise!!! A new chapter from Maggie?? On a Thursday?? I was just too excited to wait! Please enjoy the final installment of 1968 🥰💜

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 6k

💜 All of my writing can be found HERE! 💜

The sun is rising, and all the guests have dissipated like morning stars. You and Aegon are sitting across from each other at the table in the kitchenette of your suite, cool grey morning light slanting into the silence, confetti on the floor, broken glass, crumbs from the catered appetizers—gyros, hummus, pita, mini spanakopitas, baklava—stomped into the carpet, spots that are soggy with spilled champagne. The Plaza might have to replace it. Outside, rain falls in a mist. Your makeup is smudged; your hair is falling out of its clips and pins. Aemond is waiting, standing with his back to the wall and his arms crossed over his chest, blonde hair slicked back, blue suit, prosthetic eye filling the void in his skull. You know what happens next, but you can’t bring yourself to rise, to speak, to set it into motion. You stare down at the lines in the palm of your uninjured hand and think of the ropes of a sailboat, the invisible strings of gravity that enchain the universe.

Aegon swipes at his eyes: bloodshot, vacant, continuously streaming tears. “I’m gonna go back to Yuma.”

You look up at him, startled. “Right now?”

“Right now,” Aemond agrees from the wall.

Aegon begs you in a hoarse whisper, eyes dark and glistening like the Atlantic at night: “Come with me.”

Your hands shaking, your voice splintering. “I can’t, Aegon. I can’t.”

He drums his knuckles on the table, gets up from his chair, rushes to you before Aemond can stop him. He’s holding you, his lips to your forehead, the salt of his tears on your cheeks and your lips, like the ocean is bleeding out of him, like he’ll drown you. “I’m sorry,” he says, breath catching in his throat, his pores hemorrhaging smoke, horror, rum, ruin.

Once you pushed Aegon away, hated him, stained him with your husband’s blood. Now your fingernails hook like claws into his army jacket and cling there, frantic and childlike. “Not yet, please, Aegon, don’t go, please don’t go.”

“I have to, I’m sorry.”

“Aegon, no–”

“I’m so fucking sorry.” He’s sobbing, he’s trembling, he’s gone. The doorway is empty like an unfinished sentence, like a myth no one remembers. The silence floods back into the rain-grey November air. The room is cold like a mausoleum. You touch your own face: tears Aegon left there, muscles and nerves dead beneath your skin, disbelief you sink through like the sea, waiting to hit the floor deep with the silt of rocks and wreckage and bones.

He’s gone? He’s really gone?

Aemond stalks over to the table, smirking, radiant, his hands in the pockets of his suit; he takes his time, he savors it. He’s never been higher. He was right all along. He can’t be killed, he is destined to be the president. It is God’s will. “Get ready,” Aemond says. “I have a victory speech to make.”

~~~~~~~~~~

He heads west on Route 70, billboards and drive-thrus, toll booths and reflective green mile markers, the kids fighting over who gets to pick the radio station from the back of the Dodge A-100 that Otto had hastily procured, handing over the keys as Aegon rolled his suitcase out of the Plaza Hotel. That first night they stop in Wheeling, Ohio, and the kids have startlingly little resistance to this upheaval. They can’t find much to complain about. A road trip with Dad and only Dad, no journalists badgering them for photos or quotes, no orders barked from Otto or Aemond, no exacting campaign itinerary, no scripted propriety, Mountain Dew spills on the carpet, Pizza Hut boxes on cheap springy motel mattresses.

“What do you think about all this?” Aegon asks Orion when the younger ones have dozed off: Cosmo and Thaddeus on one bed, Violeta in another, Spiro lounging across the threadbare sofa with a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring resting open on his chest.

Orion shrugs, that adolescent aversion to vulnerability, like the whole world is out to shake you down for evidence of the defections you’re so convinced define you. “It’s cool, I guess. It’s like an adventure. And we’ll get to see you a lot more.”

“Yeah you will,” Aegon promises. He feels sick: no booze, no pills, the grease of pepperoni churning in his belly. “And I’m never gonna be the way I was before.”

The bathroom is tiny and spartan, white porcelain, black specks of mildew. When he’s done showering, Aegon wipes the fog off the mirror with his fist. In Ancient Greece, a shaved head was the mark of a slave; it was meant to strip the man of his past, to make him brand new. He remembers Aemond saying this one afternoon as they were all out sailing at Asteria, Aegon sprawled on his back and drinking rum from the bottle as beams of sunlight refracted through the glass, Aemond leafing through one of his history books, Helaena throwing bits of pita to the seagulls, Daeron peering through his telescope for glimpses of dolphins, sharks, bobbing treasure from shipwrecks, imagined enemy vessels. Aegon thinks as he studies his reflection under the harsh fluorescent lights—crinkles by his eyes, skin ravaged by years of careless sunburn—that he wouldn’t mind not having a past. He opens his shaving kit and takes out the straight razor he never uses, shears off his tangled, windswept locks of blonde hair, smiles when the kids laugh and call him Yul Brynner the next morning over breakfast at the diner beside the motel, blueberry pancakes and toast wet with egg yolks. He’s not brand new; it’s impossible to be. But he’s getting closer.

The Fort Yuma Indian Reservation has grown during the Kennedy and Johnson years. The tribe now enjoys a steady income from numerous projects, including the leasing of farmland, a convenience store, a casino and resort, and an RV park. The school has been rebuilt—bigger, more modern, air conditioning, hallelujah—since Aegon was first exiled here twenty years ago, but several of the employees have familiar faces, and the current principal was once an English teacher assigned to be his mentor, a different lifetime, an ancient myth.

“You look good,” Artie says as he descends the concrete front steps on an afternoon in mid-November, 75 degrees, bright cerulean sky, no clouds. He takes Aegon’s outstretched hand and shakes it. “Kind of fat, but good. You still play guitar?”

“I do, yeah. I have one in the back of my van right now.”

Artie glances at the giggling, waving children behind the glass windows. “Jesus Pleasus, how many kids you got?”

Aegon chuckles. “Five, I think.”

“Five! Well, they’re welcome to attend here, if you want them to be where you are.”

“That’s a very generous offer. They’ve never gone to a real school before. They had private tutors in New Jersey.”

“What a great way to raise jackasses, if you ask me.” Artie gives him a stern look over, wrinkled brow, narrowed brown eyes. “You sober?”

“No pills, no drinking, occasional weed.”

“Goddamn, that’s a lot better than I expected.”

“Hey Artie?”

“Uh huh.”

“Would you happen to need a math teacher?”

Artie studies him thoughtfully. “I mean, we’re always looking for qualified math and science people. They leave the quickest, those aerospace and electronics companies over in California pay too much. Why? You know someone?”

“I used to,” Aegon says, then motions for his kids to get out of the van. Artie lets them eat ice cream in the cafeteria while Aegon signs his contract.

He’s in Yuma for three weeks before he meets a girl. Her name is Rachel, and she’s a dream that walked out of the Summer Of Love: hair down to her waist, boots to her knees, handknit vests, chipped nail polish and teasing smiles, a taste for sun and smoking. At night they sit under the stars behind Aegon’s bungalow out in the desert, roasting marshmallows and hotdogs with the kids, Aegon strumming his guitar, Rachel playing her harmonica, a few homely adopted mutts loping around instead of purebred Alopekis. She likes him, this boyish sunbeam of a man who always seems just a little lost, a little sad. She might even love him.

And yet there are ghosts, beasts, threads the fates have not yet severed. One night in January after the kids have gone to sleep, Aegon is flipping through television channels as Rachel returns to the couch with a bowl full of Jiffy Pop, plops down onto the cushions, curls up against him. Aegon stumbles upon CBS Evening News, a clip from the inauguration, and his words vanish mid-sentence, his eyes—an opaque, stormy, melancholic sort of blue—growing wide. He doesn’t change the channel. He doesn’t move at all.

“What?” Rachel asks. On the screen is a clip of President Targaryen being sworn in, his wife at his side and cradling the Bible in her hands. She’s wearing Oscar de la Renta—a powder blue wool coat that matches her husband’s tie—and a stately new hairstyle that is very distinctly inspired by Jackie Kennedy. Her smile is serene and dignified, if perhaps a bit remote. She could be a marble statue in a garden or a museum. It must be a lot of pressure for her, Rachel thinks. To live up to being the partner of a man that remarkable. “Aegon? Baby, are you okay?”

After a long time Aegon says, very softly, like it’s only to himself: “He made her cut her hair.”

Rachel stares mystified at the television and then turns back to Aegon. “What happened with her?” Something must have. He looks staggered, he looks haunted, he looks like someone Medusa turned to stone. Rachel knows about who Aegon is, of course, everyone does; but he never wants to talk about it. When people mention his family, Aegon smiles politely and then changes the subject. When they ask about his sister-in-law, he says he needs a cigarette and walks out of the room. She sent him a beautiful, shimmering gold acoustic Gibson guitar for Christmas; the first lady’s name was on the return address. To Rachel’s knowledge, Aegon never thanked her.

Aegon shakes his head, and Rachel can’t tell if that means the story is too long or too short, unrealized potential, loose kaleidoscopic strands of stardust, infinitesimal moments that wouldn’t have meaning to anyone else. “Nothing.” Then he resumes switching channels: I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, the Newlywed Game.

~~~~~~~~~~

Your parents fly north for the inauguration, so proud, so effusive, interviewed by every major news network. Business is booming at the Spongeorama Sponge Factory back in Tarpon Springs. They are seated between Alicent and Ludwika’s mother Elzbieta, newly arrived from Poland. LBJ and Lady Bird are cordial but uncharacteristically understated, retreating back to their home state of Texas like kicked dogs. All the defeated adversaries of the campaign trail attend to show their support, to wordlessly plead for a long-awaited national reconciliation. George Wallace won’t meet your eyes. Richard Nixon whispers through your hair as he clasps your scarred hand: “Aemond could never have done this without you.”

Jackie Kennedy’s chosen cause as first lady was the restoration of the White House, Lady Bird’s was environmental protection. You want to visit schools and help teach math to little kids, but Aemond decides it would be more politically expedient for you to be seen tending to wounded veterans of Vietnam; so you spend many of your days in hospitals, inhaling charred flesh and Lysol and dying flowers and blood. The Japanese ambassador bows lower to you than he does to Aemond. The prime minister of France tries (unsuccessfully) to flirt with you. Athenagoras I of Constantinople, the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, brings you a komboskini he has blessed. Reprieves come in slivers like a disappearing moon: lunches with Fosco–carpaccio, caprese, bolognese, polenta–and drinks with Ludwika, always something with rum, something that tastes like Aegon. You dream of incubators and arterial spray, stitches and scars and crimson bandages, the flash of blades, the thunder of bullets; but the would-be assassins go to prison and no one else ever tries. You are Persephone in the Underworld. You are Io in the wilderness.

You are just beginning to panic about what you’ll do when your tiny pink birth control pills run out when Fosco shows up to one of your lunches with a paper bag full of familiar circular packets. “I have been informed that I am to be your dealer,” he says, grinning. “I will be back with more in six months. I told the doctor they were for my mistress. I don’t even have a mistress! Isn’t this exciting? I am like a secret agent. I am the Italian James Bond. The name’s Viviani, Fosco Viviani.”

“Aegon asked you to do this?”

“Well, he did not ask, exactly. I do not think I was allowed to say no.”

You hide the paper bag in the Louis Vuitton purse Ludwika bought you, so thankful you don’t have words for it, missing Aegon like Orpheus missed Eurydice, searching through the shade-haunted grey haze of the Underworld for her.

“It was odd,” Fosco says quietly, delicately. “He did not want to know anything about you. He asked if you needed anything else that I was aware of, I said no, and then he hung up when I started to tell him about Christmas dinner.”

You remember Aegon’s words, ghosts from where Long Beach Island meets the Atlantic Ocean: Mimi wasn’t as strong as you. Maybe what Aegon didn’t say is that he isn’t either. You imagine the fates snipping threads, the memoryless oblivion offered by the River Lethe, moons becoming greater and lesser. He has to try to forget you. You have to let him.

On Valentine’s Day weekend, Daeron comes home. He and John McCain are the last two men freed from the prisoner of war camp known as the Hanoi Hilton. When he steps off the plane, Daeron is carrying with him, of all things, a single white rat in a wire cage. The first question he asks, after being engulfed in embraces from Alicent, Criston, and Fosco, is: “Where’s Aegon?” And he knows from the stilted, piecemeal explanations he receives that something has happened. You take Daeron to breakfast the next morning, and you don’t tell him everything, but you tell him enough. He spends a month recuperating at Asteria, then follows Zephyr, the god of the west wind, across the country to Arizona.

Aegon didn’t send you anything for Christmas, and he didn’t respond to the guitar you gifted him with Ludwika’s assistance. But on July 13th, a green envelope arrives in your mail basket with no return address. You open it to find a greeting card with an exuberant cow on the front. Inside, the original message—You’re mooooooving on up in the world! Happy retirement!—has been crossed out with black ink. You laugh, your first real laugh in weeks, and then read what Aegon has written in his chaotic, scribbling penmanship:

I thought this was blank :)

Hope you’re doing okay. You look great on tv.

Then there is an expanse of open white space, like a weighty hesitation. There’s no signature, but there is one final note like a postscript.

Thank you for the guitar, but please don’t send anything else. It fucks me up, you know?

Yes, you do know. Aegon never calls you, but Cosmo does. Once or twice a week he dials your private line at the White House–Aegon must have asked Fosco for it–and tells you all about his new life in Yuma, his school, his friends, the dogs, the desert. Aegon’s met someone named Rachel; Cosmo mentions her intermittently yet with unmistakable fondness: “Rachel makes the best s’mores,” “Rachel told me about seeing Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock,” “Rachel took us to pick pumpkins for Halloween.” You’re glad Cosmo calls, and you’re glad he’s happy; but afterwards you always feel so indescribably, irredeemably sad.

You sneak your pills and avoid Aemond as much as you can, something that becomes easier as he spends long hours reviewing briefs in the Oval Office, preparing speeches, meeting foreign dignitaries, strategizing with his cabinet, and scheming against his conservative foes across the nation, a faction soon led by California governor Ronald Reagan. You stand perfectly still as designers alter Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy to fit you like woolen armor. You strike up a chaste, harmless flirtation with a Secret Service agent from Atlanta named Nathaniel, not because he reminds you of Aegon—Nate is 6’4, 250 pounds, and a former Navy SEAL—but because he listens, because he is kind. He gives you riveting summaries of films and books that are considered too scandalous for you to be seen enjoying. He makes fun of your matronly skirt suits. He takes you to get lemon-lime Mr. Mistys at Dairy Queen. He massages your scarred hand with rose oil.

In May of 1969, Aemond voices support for university students across the nation protesting in favor of increased Black faculty and Africana Studies courses. In July, the Apollo 11 mission lands the first men on the moon, effectively ending the Space Race with an American victory. In September, Lieutenant William Calley receives a sentence of life in prison for his role in the My Lai Massacre the previous year. In November, the Rolling Stones release a new album entitled Let It Bleed. Ludwika gives you the record for Christmas along with an array of perfumes and lipsticks, all extravagantly packaged in a pink Gucci gift box. Your favorite song is Gimme Shelter. You listen to it at dusk in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, your chair facing west, taking slow drags off Lucky Strike cigarettes that Nate buys for you, embers glowing as the sun disappears.

“What’s out there?” Nate asks you one night with a slinky half-grin, and then when you don’t immediately answer: “You’re always looking that way. What are you looking for?”

You don’t know what to tell him. Nothing. Everything. Something that almost happened. And slowly, under a lavender twilight peppered with the remote glimmers of constellations—stars that cannot be changed, disasters predestined since before you were born—Nate’s smile dies, and he never asks again.

~~~~~~~~~~

Three time zones away, Aegon’s hair grows out and he gets his ears re-pierced, tiny gold hoops that make him think of wedding rings. Rachel pretends she doesn’t want to get married. Aegon doesn’t offer. Once in a while after the kids have gone to bed, he climbs into the hammock in the backyard and smokes a joint, staring absently into the east as the new Rolling Stones album spins on the record player. Aegon’s favorite song is You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Rachel stands at the telescope they set up for the kids—Cosmo’s idea—and stargazes, making her way down a checklist of visible celestial objects.

One night Aegon asks as she’s squinting through the eyepiece: “Where’s Jupiter?”

Rachel glances over at him, then points up at the indigo sky. “It’s that one, the really bright spot near Perseus. Why?”

Aegon shrugs, exhaling smoke. “No reason,” he says; but he’s still looking at Jupiter, wounded, stoned wonder floating on the surface of his watery eyes.

Daeron settles down in Yuma and buys a ranch. He does some work at the VA Hospital a few hours away in Tucson, some white water rafting on the Colorado River, some hiking in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, a whole lot of roughhousing with his niece and nephews. John McCain, now a war hero and national celebrity, is always calling to see if Daeron has decided to run for office yet. A few times a year, they receive visitors from the East Coast: Alicent, Criston, Ludwika, Helaena, Fosco, and their three children. The president and first lady are not mentioned unless by accident. The kids adore their grandmother, and she loves them back, although Alicent never learns to appreciate Tessarion the rat and refuses to hold her. In 1970, Helaena and Fosco have one last baby, a daughter they name Marina after Mimi. Life goes on, but the ghosts remain.

On a chilly evening in January of 1972, Aegon is flipping through television channels when he lands on an NBC segment about First Lady Targaryen touring the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. “That’s so fucked up,” Aegon murmurs as she calmly soothes the suffering of mutilated men, and his voice is dark with scorching, clandestine fury. He gestures to the screen with the remote control. “She hates hospitals. He makes her do things that hurt her. He does it just to prove he can.”

Rachel says as she stands in the threshold between the living room and the kitchen, a question she has finally worked up the courage to ask: “No one is ever going to be able to compare to her, right?”

Aegon opens his mouth to protest, and then closes it again. And something washes over him like waves of the ocean, sun on sand, poison in the blood and the lungs, myths that carve themselves into your bones so deep you can see the red of the marrow underneath. He replies truthfully, his eyes still on the screen: “Right.”

Rachel packs her bags. Aegon gets up to help her. He feels it’s the least he can do.

~~~~~~~~~~

When you and Aemond return to Asteria for summer vacations, the seaside Targaryen compound is full of ghosts. You catch glimpses of Mimi stumbling up staircases, Cosmo trotting after you as you turn corners, Aegon smoking a joint under the statue of Zeus in Helaena’s garden. You open cabinets and bottles of his pills fall out. You see Sunfyre bobbing abandoned in the boathouse. The basement is just as Aegon left it. Sometimes you go down there and stand on the green shag carpet in the hushed, cool, damp emptiness, not knowing what you’re waiting for, staring at the wall until someone comes to look for you.

“What’s in these?” Nate asks one afternoon, snatching a notebook off the shelf. “Oh wow, look!” He shows you messy sketches in black ink, cartoon versions of the stories of Greek gods and goddesses, myths reimagined. “Who do you think drew them?”

“Maybe Daeron,” you reply, but it wasn’t him. You’d know Aegon’s handwriting anywhere. Nate leafs through a bunch of the notebooks, booming laughter—he especially enjoys that Poseidon has been characterized as a sexually insatiable dolphin—and reading his favorite parts out loud to you. One notebook is only half-full; the last few pages are covered with drawings of tiny cows, telephones with long spiral cords, the moon in all its phases. You tear these out to keep.

On each July 13th, there is a card with no return address waiting in your mail basket at the White House, always featuring a jovial cow, always making you smile. You entrust Nate with the task of hiding the notebook pages and greeting cards away somewhere safe, an arrangement he honors like an oath.

Every so often, when you feel lethal bitterness kindling, you are struck by the inspiration to find Aemond’s Ouija board. It must be here in the White House someplace, but you can’t figure out where. You search the bedrooms, rummage through closets, climb into the oak cabinets beneath bathroom sinks; you scrabble around like a rodent under the cover of darkness while Aemond is away on state visits and campaign rallies for fellow Democrats. Maybe he makes secret stops in Tacoma or Seattle. If he does, you don’t care. You’d rather Aemond be there than here.

In the spring of 1972, you find the Ouija board in a drawer of the Resolute desk, where Aemond conducts official business in the Oval Office. “Oh, that is insane,” you say to yourself as you slide it out. You mean to burn it in your bedroom fireplace, then think again. On the back of the board, the inscription has faded, as if traced by Aemond’s fingertips again and again.

If I destroy this, what will he do to Aegon and his children? What will he do to me?

You place the Ouija board back where you found it, slide the drawer shut, and crawl into bed, besieged by dreams of smoke and rum and the rumbling bass of Season Of The Witch.

Aemond’s national approval rating hovers between 55-70%—far about the historical average, although he never stops pining for an heir and proper first family to maximize his allure—until May of 1972, when the tide begins to turn. The treaty formally ending U.S. involvement in the war was signed back in early 1969, but the hasty troop withdrawal left capitalist South Vietnam vulnerable, and now it is being invaded by the communists backed by China and Russia. The Fall of Saigon is immortalized in the evening news, printed on the covers of newspapers; people who once collaborated with the Americans are shot dead in the streets. Refugees flee west to Laos and Cambodia and Thailand, east on makeshift rafts into the ocean. The few that Aemond manages to hurriedly admit into the U.S. inspire racism and xenophobia from suburbanites. Many of the hippies have grown up, had children, gotten jobs, settled down with credit cards and mortgages. Protestors march with signs out on Pennsylvania Avenue: America abandons her allies! Our global reputation is in peril! Will the communists invade here next? What did my son die for?

“They wanted me to end it,” Aemond marvels as he gazes out the White House windows. “They begged for me to end it, and now look at them. Ungrateful imbecile bastards.”

And you give him a rare piece of advice that he listens to: “You should call LBJ.”

On his ranch fifty miles outside of Austin, Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson is dying of heart failure. Still, he smokes more or less constantly, and refuses to adhere to the diet Lady Bird fretfully lectures their chefs about. He has grown his grey hair long and sits for as many interviews as he can, desperate to salvage his legacy and remind people of the things he did right: civil rights legislation, the War On Poverty, rising from a poor farming family to the Oval Office. He knows exactly what it feels like to be hated for having no good options. He says gruffly through the phone: “The Vietnam War needed to end, Aemond. It had to happen. But someone has to pay for it, too. That’s your job now. Take the fall, and the country survives. Plenty of people still love you. And I’m proud of you, son. I know it ain’t easy, believe me. But I’m real proud.”

Still, Aemond fights. He can’t help it. It’s all he’s ever known.

He campaigns at a murderous pace, and you have to follow him across the nation. Perhaps intentionally, there are no campaign stops in Arizona. Aemond does very well, but Ronald Reagan does better; he’s quick and he’s cutting, but he’s also funny, and grandfatherly, and warm, and God knows the American people could use some of that after the past decade. He characterizes Aemond’s policy regarding Vietnam as “peace without honor.” He calls Aemond short-sighted about a dozen times, a jab his supporters guffaw at. He says the United States has surrendered its rightful place as the leader of the free world. His wife Nancy—his second wife—is vehemently opposed to recreational drugs and other supposed moral crimes including abortion and premarital sex. You hate her, and she hates you right back, though in a perfectly pleasant, ever-smiling, mid-century housewife sort of way. Reagan’s disciples call you a whore. Aemond gets the newspapers still loyal to him to publish scathing denials. You aren’t exactly sure why he does this; no comment at all would almost certainly be wiser politically, as Otto advises. But Aemond does it anyway, with deep trenches of violent determination knit into his scarred brow.

The 1972 presidential election is held on Tuesday, November 7th. It is not until the early hours of the morning on Wednesday the 8th that Aemond learns he has narrowly lost. It couldn’t possibly be construed as your fault; he wins Florida by a greater margin than he had in 1968. As the sun rises in a bright, cloudless sky, Aemond’s entourage clears out of the Lincoln Sitting Room, leaving the two of you alone with the droning television. Aemond is sipping an Old Fashioned on one end of the couch. You light yourself a Lucky Strike cigarette on the other. For once, Aemond doesn’t seem to mind.

“You know,” Aemond muses after a while. “Ronald Reagan is divorced.”

Your heart is racing; you aren’t sure what he’s offering. You’re petrified to say the wrong thing and change his mind. “Yeah, he is.”

Aemond nods, twirling his Old Fashioned so the ice cubes clink against the misty glass, not looking at you. “I think I’ll marry Alys and adopt the boy.”

And that’s how you learn that what Aegon said in the doorway of a hospital room four and half years ago was true, no impassioned declarations, no gratitude, only grudges that have grown quiet and cold and dormant. At last, Aemond is done with you.

~~~~~~~~~~

Otto, glowering spitefully, getaway car procurement extraordinaire, hands you the keys to a green Chevy Nova. On the front steps of the White House, you say goodbye to a palpably heartbroken Nate. He gives you the notebook pages and greetings cards. You give him a kiss on the cheek, a parting stain of red lipstick. But instead of blood, the color makes you think of cherry-flavored Mr. Mistys, the Lucky Strike logo, roses, sunburn, firelight, the rust-hued earth of the desert. You duck into the Nova and start driving.

The East Coast unfolds into the Midwest and then turns jagged as you hit the Rocky Mountains. At a gas station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, you toss your remaining birth control pills—still squirreled away in a box of hollowed-out tampons—into a trash bin. At a McDonald’s in Asher, Arizona, just forty minutes outside of Yuma, you stop to get a large Coca-Cola and touch up your makeup in the bathroom mirror: black eyeliner, gold shadow, both as heavy as you want them to be. You stroll back to your Nova under a radiant November sky that feels like summer, smiling to yourself. The hem of your roomy, floral skirt billows around your brown leather boots in the desert wind. Your earrings are small, glinting gold hoops. Your white tank top is simple and hand-crocheted, found at a yard sale in Amarillo, Texas; but your sunglasses are Bugatti, a gift from Ludwika.

You park outside the only school on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation and go inside to the front office. The secretary says distractedly: “Can I help you, ma’am?” Then she does a double take. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear, do I…do I know you from somewhere…?”

“You might,” you say, pushing your sunglasses up into your hair. It’s only shoulder-length now, but growing, and wild from the wind. “I was hoping to find Mr. Targaryen, does he still work here?”

“He sure does, but he doesn’t like anyone calling him that.”

Of course he wouldn’t. “Just Aegon then. Which classroom is…?”

But before you can finish your question, and before she can answer, you hear echoing through the labyrinthian hallways the start of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising, not just an acoustic guitar but bass and drums too.

“I see the bad moon a-risin’

I see trouble on the way

I see earthquakes and lightnin’

I see bad times today

Don’t go around tonight

Well it’s bound to take your life

There’s a bad moon on the rise.”

The secretary laughs, keeping rhythm with taps of her pencil on her desk. “I guess you can find him on your own, can’t ya?”

Yes, you can. You follow the music through long empty corridors, wondering where all the students are. You drag your fingertips—black polish, chipped around the edges—along grooves in the cinder block walls that have been painted over with vibrant murals. The song is getting louder, and now you hear other noises too, an ocean of energetic voices and squealing chairs.

“I hear hurricanes a-blowin’

I know the end is comin’ soon

I fear rivers over flowin’

I hear the voice of rage and ruin

Don’t go around tonight

Well it’s bound to take your life

There’s a bad moon on the rise, alright!”

You step into the cafeteria, raucous with students swapping pudding cups and bags of chips. Many of them are watching the stage, clapping along, playing their own imaginary guitars. Aegon is there strumming the sparkling gold guitar you sent him for Christmas back in 1968. He hasn’t seen you yet; he’s grinning at the kids up on the stage with him—his fellow bandmates, his fledgling rockstars—and leaning back from the mic to give them pointers. But Cosmo has. He flies out of his seat and crashes into you, now nearly ten years old, long blonde hair, a Rolling Stones t-shirt.

“You’re back!” he bellows over the music as you hug him. Teachers chatting amongst themselves by the wall give you curious glances.

“Yeah, kiddo. I am.”

“For a visit?”

“Maybe for a little longer than that.”

“Yay!” he shouts, jumping up and down.

You look back to Aegon, and now his eyes catch on yours: instantaneous recognition, disbelief, amazement. He’s just like you remember him; he’s just like he is in your dreams. You raise an eyebrow and wave tentatively. His own words surface in your skull like swimming up through cool, sunlit water: What are we gonna do about it? And Aegon smiles, the god of light, music, healing, truth.

Now his tiny bandmates are yelling at him, irate. He’s still plucking at his guitar on autopilot, but he’s missed his cue to sing the last verse. He shakes off his astonishment and continues, beaming, watching you.

“Hope you got your things together

Hope you are quite prepared to die

Looks like we’re in for nasty weather

One eye is taken for an eye

Well don’t go around tonight

Well it’s bound to take your life

There’s a bad moon on the rise.”

Cosmo sprints back to his lunch to stop a friend from seizing his unguarded Ding Dongs.

“Don’t come around tonight

Well it’s bound to take your life

There’s a bad moon on the rise.”

Aegon gives his guitar a final few strums as the cafeteria erupts into cheers and applause. His bandmates bow to their audience as Aegon takes off his guitar, leaps down from the stage, runs to you as children twist in their seats to stare. He’s wearing khaki shorts, tan moccasins, a half-unbuttoned white shirt that actually fits him, dog tags with Daeron’s name on them. He’s so afraid to ask the question; he’s terrified you won’t say the right answer. “Io…what the hell are you doing here?”

You shrug, casual, teasing. “Didn’t like where I was. Thought I’d try someplace new.”

He touches your face to make sure you’re real, marveling at you, his voice going hushed. “We’ve lost so much time.”

“Don’t worry. Your life’s only half over.”

Aegon laughs, eyes shining. “I’m really, really looking forward to the rest of it.”

You can feel the smile on his lips as he kisses you; you can hear a quiet, kind melody that fills the universe, the sound of all the chains of gravity breaking and moons drifting free from their planets.

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 12 days

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1968 [Chapter 10: Poseidon, God Of The Sea]

A/N: Only 2 chapters left!!! 🥰💜

Word Count: 7.2k

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It’s Friday, November 1st, and it begins like every day does: with you sneaking a birth control pill and swallowing it with a handful of cool water from the sink. Aemond is usually gone before you wake up—writing speeches, reading newspapers, strategizing with Otto and Criston and Sargent Shriver—but you always lock the bathroom door just in case he reappears. You’ve popped the tiny pink pills out of their circular packages and hidden them in hollowed-out tampons, each opening sealed with cotton balls. You don’t like taking the pills; you don’t fully understand how they work, and you don’t like feeling out of tune with your body’s own rhythms, but they are infinitely better than the alternative. You can’t imagine having to carry Aemond’s child now, sacrificing your comfort, your health, your future, your life for a man who doesn’t know the real you and doesn’t want to. You return the modified tampon to the box you keep in the linen closet, then begin to pin up your hair.

When you venture downstairs, you’ve thrown on a long flowing floral skirt and chunky black sweater, black flats, small unceremonious gold hoops in your ears. You’ll have to change before the journalists arrive to fawn over the children as they bake homemade apple pies this afternoon. You’ll have to wear whatever Aemond tells you to. But presently, it’s Aegon you’re looking for; you begin with the basement.

He isn’t sprawled across his futon, he isn’t lazing on the floor. He isn’t there at all. As you stand on the steps, you see only Eudoxia, muttering irritably in Greek and crawling around on her hands and knees as she picks globs of red out of the shag carpet.

“What is wrong with him?” she says when she glances at you. “Can you believe this? Melted candle wax everywhere. He is a pig. A pig! Someone should make bacon out of him. Then he could finally be useful. He’s just about fat enough. He could feed the whole family, and all the dogs too.”

You don’t know how to reply; you can’t apologize for helping to make the mess, you can’t agree that Aegon is a plague and nothing more. “Do you want help cleaning up?”

“If Aemond saw me putting you to work, I would be deported back to Tyrnavos.”

“No, Doxie. Asteria would fall into the sea without you.”

She peers up at you through fallen strands of her hair, dyed a palpably artificial pitch black. Then she grins, large doughy cheeks, crinkles around her eyes. “Go help Aemond win his election.”

“Yes ma’am,” you say dutifully, and head back upstairs.

In the living room, Aemond and Otto are hissing like snakes as they leaf through the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reports that Nixon’s poll numbers are climbing in this crucial eleventh hour. They can’t decide if that’s true or if the Wall Street Journal, a Nixon-friendly publication, is trying to give him a little extra momentum as Election Day approaches. Criston nods at you from where he sits on the couch, looking exhausted, dark shadows around his eyes and shoulders slumped low; Aemond and Otto don’t notice you at all. You keep moving.

There is chatter and giggling and the clanging of bowls and pans in the kitchen. You peek inside from the doorway. Fosco, Helaena, and the nannies are making pancakes with the children. Butter sizzles, spatulas scrape, bubbles appear in wells of batter. Helaena is lifting Evangelos so he can pour a cupful of smooth, milky batter into one of the pans on the stovetop. Cosmo, drizzling maple syrup over an ambitiously tall stack of pancakes, waves at you. You smile and wave back. In the corner of the room, Ludwika is smoking one of her Camels and shooing away Aegon’s second-youngest son Thaddeus, whose fingers are covered with flour.

“Please take your paws elsewhere,” Ludwika says, flicking ashes into the kitchen sink. “This dress is Prada.”

Fosco spots you. “Would you like some pancakes?” he asks as he approaches, wiping his palms on the apron tied around his slim waist. Flour dusts his eyeglasses. “We have enough batter to make about 500. Although I cannot promise they will not be burnt. Our chefs are rather inexperienced.”

“Thanks, but I’m not really hungry.” You take one last look around the kitchen, wondering where Aegon could be.

Fosco understands. His voice drops low and discrete. “I have not seen him this morning.”

“He isn’t usually up yet.”

“He’s not, this is true.” Fosco taps his chin, leaving white dabs of flour there. “Maybe he’s sailing?”

“Maybe. I’ll check.”

“And I have no idea where you’re going or why,” Fosco says with a wink before returning to the stove.

Outside it’s grey, misty, only 50 degrees. It would be a bad day for sailing. The wind rips at your clothes and your hair like a man’s lustful hands; the waves are choppy and treacherous. You think of Icarus plummeting into the ocean, of Andromeda being offered as a sacrifice to assuage Poseidon’s wrath, of sirens beckoning doomed sailors. From where you’re standing in the backyard of the main house, shivering with your arms crossed over your chest, you can’t see Aegon’s boat Sunfyre bobbing in the rough surf. You turn left to investigate Helaena’s withered garden.

As you walk, the hem of your skirt dragging dead autumn leaves, you skim your fingertips over the evergreen emerald hedges, cool and damp. At the center of the garden—like a diamond in a wedding ring, like the sun surrounded by its planets—you don’t find Aegon smoking a joint or napping under Zeus’s shadow, only a silent stone circle of gods who watch you with unmoving, all-knowing eyes. You spin slowly, studying each of them, deities who loved and cheated and offered mercy and cursed and killed. From his gurgling fountain in the middle of the clearing, Zeus glares at you most fiercely, wielding his lightning bolts, aching to loose them. The wind rattles the leaves of the hedges; crows caw from somewhere out in the mist.

“Oh! You’re here, darling?” Alicent says from the arched doorway cut into the greenery. She’s pushing Viserys in his wheelchair. Sparse white spiderweb-strands of hair hang limply from his head, mottled with liver spots. His fingers are bony and clawlike. “In this awful weather?”

You scramble for an explanation. “I just, um, needed some quiet.”

“Yes, the children are very rambunctious this morning, aren’t they?”

“Children?” Viserys echoes, as if he is only just learning of them.

“Your grandchildren,” Alicent reminds him. “Aegon and Helaena’s kids. Orion, Spiro, Violeta, Thaddeus, Cosmo, Daphne, Evangelos, and…” Panic crosses her face. She realizes she’s forgotten one, but she doesn’t know who.

“Neaera,” you say.

“Of course. Such a sweet girl, gentle like a lamb.”

You weren’t blessed with that sort of disposition. Sometimes you wish you were. Life seems easier for women who don’t feel bitterness or forbidden ambition, who pain moves cleanly through like clear water. They have no thorns for it to snag on and grow roots into the bones, the soul. They are never at risk of becoming poisonous like Jupiter’s moon Io. “What brings you to the garden on a day this dreary?”

“I feel close to them here,” Viserys rasps.

You stare down at him, baffled. “Close to who, sir?” You rarely interact with the ailing patriarch of the Targaryen family. He is often confined to his bedroom, attended by Alicent and Eudoxia and his nurses, and even when he is physically present his mind is sluggish, alien, impenetrable. Now Alicent’s eyes are downcast, and she drifts away to inspect the statue of Poseidon, a formidable bearded man holding a trident and with dolphins and sea turtles emerging from the waves of white marble at his bare feet.

“I left them back in Greece,” Viserys says, his gaunt face vacant, distant, vaguely sad. He is bundled up in a thick wool robe that hides how skeletal he has become. “I thought about having them brought over to be interred at the mausoleum, but it felt wrong to disturb their bones. Now I cannot visit their graves. I can only hear them here, among the gods our ancestors worshiped.”

“Who…?”

“Aemma and Rhaenyra,” Alicent tells you from where she now stands by Aphrodite, gazing longingly at the goddess of love. You notice that she is clutching a komboskini in one hand; she must believe that what her husband is saying is blasphemy, but she doesn’t condemn him. “Viserys had a wife and daughter before he met me.”

You feel a sudden and overwhelming stab of grief for the old man; you are thinking of Ari. “What happened?”

“The sea took them,” Viserys explains. “A riptide off the coast of Euboea. We found their bodies three days later.”

“Oh God. I’m…I’m so sorry for your loss.” You don’t know what else to say; it’s too disastrous, too unspeakable.

“Aemma was pregnant. It was a boy. She delivered him in the water, a coffin birth.” And you know from his face, his voice, that Alicent and her children never stood a chance, that Viserys has only one true family, only one set of names carved into the scarlet chambers of his failing heart. You think of Aemond’s heart, claimed by Alys and her son; you think of your own.

“They’re at peace, Viserys,” Alicent says. “They are in heaven with my mother and Ari and Mimi.”

He continues, as if he hasn’t heard her: “I thought that if I made something of myself in America, if I helped contribute something incredible to the world, then they would not have died for nothing.” Viserys reaches out with trembling, gnarled hands, and when you realize he wants to hold yours you let him. His grasp is weak and cold. “Aemond will be president. He will save countless lives, he will save this nation’s soul. And you have made that possible.”

Where’s Aegon? Is he okay? Why is no one else ever looking for him? “Thank you, sir.”

Viserys begins hacking, doubling over in his wheelchair, and Alicent hurries to soothe him and provide a handkerchief that Helaena embroidered green spiders onto. When he has recovered, you leave them with the gods: Viserys to grieve his old life, Alicent to mourn the one she never had.

You plod through sand dunes out to the Atlantic Ocean, peering into the fog as you search for Aegon’s sailboat. Still, there is no sign of him. You glance back towards the main house as sea spray peppers your cheeks and your knuckles. You’re beginning to get nervous. Where the hell is he? Is he passed out somewhere, is he sick, is he hurt?

And then, at last, you see him: sitting at the bottom of a small bluff so he is invisible to anyone not at the water’s edge, arms linked around his bent knees, not smoking, not drinking, not gulping pills, just gazing out into the waves that thrash and rumble beneath a grey sky, his too-long blonde hair whipping in the wind. He wears one of Daeron’s army jackets over a white turtleneck sweater, ripped jeans, no shoes, a collection of other men’s dog tags slung around his neck.

“Hey,” you say as you join him, dropping down onto the cool, crumbling sand.

Aegon smiles. “Hey.”

“It’s strange to see you awake before noon.”

“Yeah…I didn’t really sleep.” No, he didn’t, you can tell: his eyes are bloodshot and his voice tired, husky. He is watching you, so hopeful but so afraid. “What are we gonna do?”

About us. About Aemond. “If he loses on Tuesday, I can leave him.”

“What if he wins?”

You don’t have a good answer. You shrug, avoiding Aegon’s eyes. “It’s not forever, you know? It would be four years, and then…”

“Four years?” Aegon says. “No, I can’t wait another four years. I’ve been waiting my whole life for something like this. And what if he gets a second term? Eight years? I’ll be almost fifty. We’ve already lost so much time, I can’t surrender another decade.”

“Aegon, first ladies don’t quit. It’s never happened before, not once since 1789. It’s a part of the democratic process. People aren’t just voting for Aemond, they’re voting for me too. You know that. You told me we were a package deal, and you were right. If they trust me and I walk away, it’s…it’s…it’s treason, it’s abandonment, it’s wrong. And Aemond needs to have the political credibility to get what he wants done.”

“Look,” Aegon says, like it pains him. “I get that my life is already half over, and I haven’t done anything worthwhile with the last forty years, but I want to be different. I want to be better. And I can do that, but I need you to give me a chance.”

“You think Aemond would let me leave? If I publicly humiliated and undermined him?”

“We don’t need Aemond, we could figure it out—”

“What do you think he and Otto would do to you, Aegon? They would ruin you anywhere you go, they would have you declared mentally unfit and take your children away.”

“They don’t own us!”

“They do,” you insist. “And if you try to fight them it will destroy you. You’ve never cared about strategy, and I love that you’re truthful, and I love that you’re real, but I need you to understand what you’re asking for right now.”

“But he breaks the rules,” Aegon says, and his eyes are glistening. “He has Alys. He has a kid out of wedlock.”

“Yes,” you agree softly.

“And what, I’m supposed to hope Aemond loses?” Aegon swipes tears from his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Because that’s the only way I get to touch you? Nixon wins and more draftees get butchered in Vietnam, and Daeron doesn’t come home, and the white supremacists get to resegregate the beaches at Biloxi, Mississippi and wherever the hell else they want to, and civil rights protesters get attacked by police dogs, and teenagers get sentenced to decades in prison for marijuana possession?”

“I’m sorry.” You can’t tell him he’s mistaken about any of that. He isn’t.

“I’ve spent my whole fucking life in a cage, but I’ve never felt this powerless.”

“Aegon?”

“Yeah.”

“Am I…” It’s terrifying to ask. “Am I the same way Mimi was when she was younger? Is that why you like me?”

“No,” he says immediately. “No, you’re different than Mimi. Mimi was fun, and we could party together, and I cared about her, obviously, but…” He stares out at the ocean, shaking his head. “She wasn’t as strong as you. And she couldn’t really get to me. I feel like you could kill me if you wanted to, you could reach inside my chest any time it crossed your mind and crush me in your fist and I’d be gone.”

You stretch out your fingertips until they collide with his sweater, warm yielding flesh woven over his ribs. “Not so easy,” you say. And then Aegon smiles and he leans in to kiss you, the ocean roaring like an ancient beast, a titan, a maelstrom. The wind rakes through your hair and stings your eyes. You ask when he rests his forehead against yours, your hand on his face, your thumb stroking his cheek: “Do you wish you could go back to when you hated me?”

“Never. I’ve gotten used to not being alone.”

“The kids made pancakes. You should go have some.”

“Come with me.”

“You first. I’ll be five minutes behind you. We shouldn’t walk to the house together.”

“Why?” Aegon teases. “Because people might think we fucked in the basement last night?”

“I’ve already told them. Aemond is waiting for you in the kitchen with a bazooka.”

Aegon laughs and struggles to his bare feet, slipping on the sand. “Okay. See you soon.”

“See ya.” Once he’s gone, you recite the full length of Here’s To The State Of Mississippi in your head, then trek across the sand and through the backyard to rejoin the rest of the Targaryens.

When you open the sliding glass door, Otto is standing in the hallway. His icy blue eyes sweep from your simple black flats to your windswept hair, still pinned up but unacceptably tousled. “Why the hell aren’t you dressed for the reporters?”

“Because they won’t be here for another two hours. Surely you are well-acquainted with the itinerary that you yourself arranged.”

“Don’t get yourself in trouble, girl.”

“Remember when you used to defer to me about things? Were you stupid then, or are you stupid now?”

“Do you know what Joe Kennedy did when his daughter Rosemary threatened the family’s reputation?” Otto says, eyes glittering cruelly.

You really don’t know; you weren’t aware that JFK had a sister named Rosemary. “What?”

“He took her to a surgeon to be lobotomized. Now she’s hidden away in a little cottage in Wisconsin, can’t speak, can’t walk, with full-time nurses to wipe the drool off her face and change her diapers. How would you like that? Would your obscene little flirtation still be worth it? We could tell people that you were in a car accident or fell down the stairs. The doctors go in through the eye socket, you know. And you’re awake the whole time.”

“You can’t do that to me,” you say, shellshocked.

“Oh, if that’s what it takes, I’ll find the will somehow.”

There is shouting from the basement, and you and Otto both bolt for the staircase. At the bottom of the steps, Aegon and Eudoxia are embroiled in a ferocious confrontation, red faces, hands itching to slap and shove. Aegon roars, jabbing his index finger at her like a petulant teenager: “I told you to stay the fuck out of my room!”

“You are filthy, you leave crumbs everywhere! We will have mice!”

“Where’s the garbage?” Aegon demands. “Huh? Where’d you put it? Out by the curb?”

“It has already been picked up.”

“No, no way! That’s bullshit!”

“You’re too late!” Doxie says. “The truck went by 20 minutes ago. And why is this a problem? What precious heirloom did I steal from you? An empty rum bottle? A magazine full of naked women? Candy wrappers, cigarette ashes, melted candle wax? You live like a pig, you should not be so outraged when you are treated the same as one.”

“Aegon, what happened?” you ask. Otto is equally bewildered, surveying the markedly clean basement, his brow knitted into deep crevices.

Aegon doesn’t answer. He only glances at you—frustration, anger, but shame too—and then sighs in defeat and stomps up the stairs to the main floor of the house.

Eudoxia looks at Otto and shrugs nonchalantly. “At least there were not so many used condoms this time.”

Your gaze catches on the end table by the futon. The empty cups are gone, the ashtray is spotless…and there is no folded white corner of a receipt poking out from under it.

The math problem from Mount Sinai, you think, that relic, that talisman, that worthless scrap of paper that Aegon never wanted to talk about but kept so close to him, just like you cling to the card he gave you and Aemond cherishes his engraved Ouija board. It’s gone. It’s almost like it never happened.

~~~~~~~~~~

After the journalists arrive and the apple pies, so quintessentially all-American, are made—you help Cosmo with his job, layering strips of dough into lattice crusts that turn golden in the oven, glinting with sugar crystals like diamonds—Aemond’s retinue begins the last of their campaign stops by travelling via limousines to Philadelphia, just an hour and a half across the width of New Jersey and over the Delaware River. In your penthouse suite at the Ritz-Carlton, you soak in a bath opaque with bubbles, steam hot and dewy on your skin. Your hair is long and free. The Zenith radio out in the kitchenette is playing Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles.

Your hands have just slipped beneath the hot water—your skull full of Aegon, things he’s done, things he’s said—when you hear the bathroom door open behind you. You rest your arms on the spotless white rim of the tub, porcelain-enameled steel, and try not to look like you’ve been interrupted. Aemond’s footsteps cross the linoleum floor, then he kneels by the bathtub and wraps his arms around you, his long uncalloused fingers skating over your shoulder, collarbones, nipples, before linking like a long necklace. He likes you best like this, when your scar is hidden, something that might have been a nightmare or a sad story that happened to somebody else. He rests the mutilated left half of his face against the right side of yours; his eyepatch scratches against your temple. You shift uncomfortably, you can’t help it. You don’t want him touching you. His arms tighten around your ribs.

“You know, JFK’s mother went through a crisis of sorts as a young wife,” Aemond says calmly. “She realized her husband was a hopeless philanderer and tried to leave him and go back to her parents. But her father sat her down and explained that she had made a commitment. Marriage is for life, and you don’t abandon your vows when the circumstances prove difficult. So she went back to Joe. And if she hadn’t, there never would have been a John F. Kennedy, or a Bobby, or a Eunice or a Ted, or a million other things too.”

“I am so fucking sick of hearing about the Kennedys.”

“You used to love being compared to Jackie.”

“I’m not her. I’m never going to be her.”

“I’m giving up things too,” Aemond says. Now he’s combing his fingers through your hair, unraveling tiny knots, yanking at your scalp. “If I win, I won’t be able to see Alys and our son. It would be too risky, someone might catch me. For as long as I’m president, I’ll have to be apart from them. You don’t think that’s painful? But Alys understands. She knows it’s for the greater good.”

“Please stop touching me.”

“You’re mine to touch as much as I want to.”

You stare at the seafoam green wall and try to pretend you’re in another place, another year.

“I’ve been thinking,” Aemond says sympathetically, an appeasing sort of tone, like he’s trying to strike a bargain. “I’m a realist, I’m aware that I can’t keep you locked up in a basement or put you in a straightjacket for the next fifty years. That doesn’t serve either of us. If you are truly desperate to be rid of me, there’s nothing I can do to change your mind. And I require a partner who is fully committed to my cause, my legacy. Not a captive. I can’t fight Nixon and you too.”

You twist around in the tub to look at him, skeptical, amazed. Is there a way out? “So what are you offering?”

“I need you for as long as I’m president,” Aemond says. “If I win, I need you for at least four years, probably eight. And a short while after that to establish myself in retirement and fade from the headlines, another few years. But then…we could work out some arrangement that is mutually agreeable.”

The hope is so fragile, so fearful, splintering glass. “You would let me go?”

“We’d have to negotiate the details, particularly as far as our future children are concerned, but…yes. In some sense, at least.”

You can’t find any words. You don’t want to offend him, to shatter this moment. And yet the price is so steep. Four years, eight years, ten years. But then…but then…

Aemond smiles, his remaining blue eye bright and cunning. His fingertips trace the slope of your jaw. “I care so deeply for you. You are my Aphrodite, you have made my wildest ambitions possible. You will help me save this country. I am worshiped because of you, I am trusted, I am envied. No one has a wife as beloved as mine, and everybody knows it. So I feel…I’ve considered…” His hand moves down to your throat, drawing invisible chains of gold or silver. “If you’ve given me so much, I can extend some mercy in return.”

“You can’t harm Aegon,” you say. “Or take his children away, or do anything else to punish him.” And then you lie, a necessary fiction, an invention, a myth, Prometheus stealing fire to give it to humans, Zeus hiding Io from Hera. “He hasn’t betrayed you.” And he’s saved me over and over again.

“Of course I won’t harm Aegon. I need him too. This act he has now of the devoted, reformed, tragedy-besieged single father? People adore it. At this rate, I’ll be able to make him the attorney general for my second term if he uses the next four years to rack up some experience. And his children are gold mines for the photographers. They have filled the void left by our own son’s death.”

“Ari,” you say.

“What?”

“He had a name. He wasn’t just ‘a son’ or ‘our son.’ His name was Ari.”

“You’ll feel better once we’ve had others.” Aemond stands and holds out a hand to you. He’s wearing a black suit like he’s getting married, like he’s going to a funeral.

You gaze up at him, not wanting to leave the water. You belong to him, but when he touches you it feels like the earth dying when Persephone is stolen away by Hades each autumn, it feels like Eurydice’s spiderweb-fragile life evaporating when Orpheus dared to look back at her as he led her out of the Underworld. “What if I can’t get pregnant again?” you ask. “It took over a year the first time. And the surgery…what if there’s too much scar tissue, what if I’m just…just…broken?” There’s real pain in your voice that staves off any suspicion Aemond might have. You do want more children, you believe, you know; just not with him.

“Then it is God’s will. But we’ll keep trying.”

Aemond draws you out of the water like a fish from the sea, something to devour, skin and muscle, delicate bones sucked clean.

~~~~~~~~~~

The sunlight is cloudless and glaring. Leaves swirl in the brisk wind in jewel tones: gold, ruby, fire opal, honey calcite, tiger’s eye, red jasper. Aemond has just finished a speech at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, standing in a stone gazebo that you can’t help but think resembles a Greek temple, tall columns that house deities of love and death, oceans and fire. Alicent and Helaena have taken the children to attend the opening of a new public library on the other side of the city. The rest of Aemond’s entourage—you, Criston, Otto, Ludwika, Fosco, Aegon—are arranged in a semicircle around him on the stage. Only 50 yards away, there is a small parking lot full of police and press vehicles. Philadelphia residents have walked miles to hear Aemond speak, to glimpse him, to cheer for him, to take leaves he’s stepped on or loose threads from his navy blue suit as relics like the bones of a saint. You match him, as you always must: navy blue dress, high heels, hair neat, makeup mature and understated, gold jewelry gleaming on your ears, throat, wrist. Ravens flap their wings from the skeletal limbs of bare trees. A car radio is blaring Break On Through by The Doors.

“Senator Targaryen,” a reporter calls as flashbulbs strobe dizzyingly. “What do you think about Tommie Smith and John Carlos getting death threats for raising their fists in the Black Power salute at the Olympics in Mexico City?”

There is a split-second lull; it is a difficult question. Aemond must remain the savior of the hippies and college kids and civil rights activists, yet he must not let the old-money urban elite or suburban families mistake him for a discord-sowing radical. You and Aegon exchange a glance; Otto placed him on the opposite side of the gazebo, and this is not a coincidence. Then Aemond decides what to say. “Peaceful protests—even those that can make us confused, defensive, fearful—are not a threat to democracy,” he speaks into the microphone steadily, deliberately, commandingly. The crowd leans forward as they listen, enraptured. Journalists’ pens fly across the pages of their notebooks. “They are not the harbingers of some doomed descent into anarchy. They are a manifestation of the fact that we have already failed. Our nation has failed, our laws and our leaders have failed, and this is our chance to address those dire inadequacies. I urge every single American to listen to what Mr. Smith and Mr. Carlos have actually said about their concerns and their hopes, to be empathetic, to be honest when reflecting on what our country has achieved and yet so desperately still needs to improve upon. These men are not enemies of the United States. They are the United States. They are a part of us, and we are a part of them, and we must not allow prejudiced, ignorant voices”—he means Wallace, he means Nixon—“to draw divides between us. The harassment that Mr. Smith, Mr. Carlos, and their families have experienced is a travesty. It is something that we should expect from a fascist or communist regime, not from a democracy. And to do my small part to show my admiration for them and atone for the mistakes of this nation that I so fervently hope to make better, I would like to personally fund private security services for the households of Mr. Smith and Mr. Carlos for the foreseeable future.”

The crowd erupts into applause, cheers shouted, signs held aloft. Your eyes snag on one, clutched by a middle-aged woman bundled up against the cold; only her eyes—grey, tearful, shining like quarters—are visible above the red plaid of her thick wool scarf. On her sign is a large photograph of a young man in uniform, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty. Below the photo in red marker is written: Ryan Farrelly, my youngest son, burned to death in Phan Thiet on September 21st. Bring Daeron home! Bring them ALL home!

The woman waves at you. You raise your hand wave back. And then there is a sound that comes from everywhere, a boom of thunder, an explosion, bullets like the one that demolished Aemond’s left eye in Palm Beach back in May, a lifetime ago, a truth that has become mythology. There is something hot and sticky splattered across your face, and you can’t see; when you wipe it away with your sleeve and open your eyes, there is a hole in your palm that you can look through like a window.

Where else?

But when you check your chest, your belly, you are whole. It is only a hand would, and that won’t kill you. It doesn’t even hurt yet, though the blood runs in torrents down your arm. You peer frantically around to see if anyone else is hurt.

Aegon, Fosco, Ludwika, Criston??

People are rushing the stage to shield Aemond and his family from bullets. Police are tackling somebody in the audience and beating him bloody with their batons. Aegon is screaming and shoving through the chaos as he fights his way towards you. Otto slams him against one of the columns of the gazebo and holds him there, because Aegon is not the one who’s supposed to get to you first. Now Aemond’s arms are around you, and he is ushering you down the stone steps towards the parking lot, and Criston is running alongside him and telling Aemond that the closest hospital is Jefferson Methodist, but UPenn is better and only two miles farther.

“Who else?” you ask as you cradle your hand against your chest, blood turning your dress from navy to black. Now it hurts plenty, like waking up from your c-section, like a crimson wave that is scalding and crushing and dragging you under to be drowned. “Is anyone else—?”

“No, just you,” Criston says, a reassuring grip on your shoulder. “Don’t worry. Nobody else is hurt.”

“Senator Targaryen, this way!” a police officer is yelling, and he leads the three of you to his black and white car. Criston leaps into the passenger seat; Aemond pulls you into the back with him and slams the door. The sirens shriek and the police officer careens out of the parking lot, Criston giving directions, Aemond yanking off his suit jacket to wrap around your hemorrhaging hand.

“I’m not going to lose it, am I?” you ask dazedly. None of this seems real. You wish Aegon was here. “I need my hands.”

“No, honey. I don’t think they’ll have to amputate.” Then Aemond stares down at the blood on his palms, warm scarlet ruin, water and oxygen and iron that once pulsed in your arteries and veins and now stains him. He frowns, then wipes his hands on his white shirt until almost all the blood is gone from his skin. He is cleaning you off of him. He is readying himself for the cameras that will undoubtedly be waiting at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Inside the glass doors of the building, dust motes circle in aisles of sunlight; you watch them as doctors and nurses push you towards the operating room on a stretcher.

“We’re going to take excellent care of you, Mrs. Targaryen,” a doctor says as he ties a sterile white mask over his nose and mouth.

Don’t let Ari die, you almost murmur in response; and then you remember that’s already happened.

There are needles gliding into your veins, bright lights, pain vanishing like the memory of a dream dissolving when you wake.

~~~~~~~~~~

Four hours later, you are propped up in bed on a mountain of pillows, your hand surgically repaired and bandaged, morphine in your IV drip. The doctors think you shouldn’t lose much function—the bullet was from a pistol, blessedly small in size and missing most of your major tendons and nerves—but you won’t know for sure until it’s healed. Ludwika is here with you, lounging in the chair beside your bed and flipping through a copy of Cosmopolitan with her Louis Vuitton stilettos propped up on the ottoman. She is content to be here, but this is technically a job; she has been tasked with supervising you while Aemond and Otto meet with the Philadelphia police who are investigating the attack. The rest of the family—everyone except Aegon, who you suspect has been forbidden to enter the premises—has already been here to fret over you and ask if you need anything. But you aren’t in the mood for visitors. You are stunned, and aching, and you hate hospitals. You keep thinking of tiny babies in incubators, priests in black robes.

Your room is already filling up with flower bouquets. Every few minutes, the phone rings and Ludwika has to answer it. Each time she announces who it is—“Oh, hello Lady Bird, so nice of you to offer your well-wishes!” and then looks to see if you nod, agreeing to take it. The current first lady says that you are already as beloved as Jackie Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. Pat Nixon calls you a gladiator.

There is a mint green Zenith radio on your nightstand, the volume turned way down low, and a television mounted on the wall. NBC news is on, but you’ve muted it to attend to the barrage of phone calls. There is a knock on the doorframe. Aegon stands there in his khaki pants and ill-fitting viridian button-up shirt and tan moccasins, wide searching murky blue eyes, carrying a white Dairy Queen cup.

Ludwika observes him as she puffs on a Camel cigarette. “I am suddenly struck by the inspiration to spend Otto’s money at the gift shop. I hope they take American Express.” She rolls up her magazine, shoves it into her oversized Gucci purse, and clicks in her heels out of the room and down the hallway.

Aegon commandeers the chair and drags it closer to your bed so he can feel your cheeks and your forehead, so he can get a good look at you. “Hey, little Io. You hurt your hoof, huh?”

“It’s not that bad. The caliber of the bullet was really small. Who shot me? One of Wallace’s Klansmen?”

“No, just some insane guy who thinks Aemond is a Russian double agent trying to overthrow capitalism here and put us all in gulags. I heard you could see right through the wound.”

“Yeah, I had a hole in my palm.”

“Just like Jesus.”

“I guess they fixed it.”

“Messiah status revoked.” Aegon sets the Dairy Queen cup on your nightstand. “I brought you a lemon-lime Mr. Misty.”

“I need to get out of here.”

“They gotta make sure you’re okay, babe. You could spike a fever or something.”

“Aegon,” you say seriously. “I can’t be in a hospital. I need to leave.”

He understands; his voice is gentle. “I might be able to get you out tonight, okay? I’ll try. I’ll talk to the doctors.”

“Okay,” you whimper.

Aegon turns up the Zenith radio, Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl. He sings along, snapping his fingers and shimmying his shoulders, his hair shagging over his eyes:

“Hey, where did we go?

Days when the rains came

Down in the hollow

Playin’ a new game…”

Reluctantly, you give him a smile. And you think very clearly, though you don’t say it: I love you.

Aegon leans across the bed to rest his head on your lap. He says softly as you run your fingers through his hair with your good hand: “Maybe Aemond will lose.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

On the muted television, Nixon is giving a speech in Charlotte, North Carolina to a euphoric crowd. You can’t hear the people gathered there, but you know their applause are thunderous. Nixon is flashing peace signs with both hands and beaming radiantly, this man who was once so poor, tragic, ordinary, unwanted, unloved. He has learned what it feels like to be a god.

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s Sunday, November 3rd, and your hand hurts like hell. You swallow your pills, smiling a little. Now Aegon is getting clean and I’m the one swimming in a haze of narcotics. Who could have predicted that? Still in your robe and bare feet, you swish to the hotel bathroom to wash your face, brush your teeth, rebandage your hand and make sure it isn’t growing dark insidious vines of blood poisoning.

When you venture out to the kitchenette, Aemond is in a sapphire blue suit and seated at the table, reading the Wall Street Journal, his face hidden by columns of black ink and interspersed photographs. This is unusual; he should be scheming with Otto and Sargent Shriver by now.

“Everything okay?” you ask with only vague interest as you go to the refrigerator to get yourself a leftover slice of apple pie, meticulously wrapped and packed in a cooler by Eudoxia before your departure from Asteria. Aemond doesn’t answer. You plop a piece of apple pie onto a plate, return the rest to the refrigerator, and then turn to your husband. And only now do you register the newspaper’s front-page story.

The photographs, all three of them, are of you and Aegon. They are blurry, taken from a distance, but you recognize the moment immediately. You can feel it again: ocean wind in your hair, his lips on yours, your hand on his face as you willed him to be closer, healed, permanent. You are sitting at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, turbulent and perilous. The journalists must have been north of you, shrouded in mist, their camera shutters clicking feverishly. The headline reads: A Family Affair?

And you remember what Aemond said on your 23rd birthday before he left for the Washington State Convention in Tacoma, how he scolded Aegon when he saw him lighting a joint in the backyard at Asteria: You know journalists will sneak around trying to get photos. You know we’re never truly alone out here.

You can’t speak, you can’t breathe. Aemond knows. The whole world knows.

Slowly, Aemond lowers the newspaper so you can see his face, scarred and hateful and horrifying, lethal like the volcanic hellscape of Jupiter’s most cursed moon.

~~~~~~~~~~

What are my earliest memories? Aegon getting drunk on his futon in the basement while I played with toy soldiers on the green shag carpet, Aemond with his poems and his myths, Helaena letting a praying mantis creep across her knuckles, Criston teaching me how to swim and sail, my mother cleaning sand from my face and hands and giving me water to wash the grit out of my teeth, my father wandering through the doorways of Asteria like a ghost, always on the periphery of my vision, and I had the sense that if I reached out to touch him my hands would pass resistlessly through his skin and sinew like a stone through water.

These are the things I think of here in the rain-dripping darkness, bruises down to my bones, eyes swollen almost completely shut, teeth broken and throbbing like blows from a hammer, fingernails ripped out. I know Tessarion is here because I can hear her, soft sympathetic squeaks, the padding of her tiny feet. I know John McCain is still alive because sometimes he taps back through the cracked concrete wall. I have run out of folklore, so now I tell him the truth. I tell him that I am afraid each beating will kill me as my body becomes a stranger, someone weak and brittle and helpless. I tell him that all my life I wanted to run as far as I could from home, but now I would crawl back to them through razor wire, I would fall into their arms in a shredded bloodstained heap and I’d be happy to do it. Isn’t that funny? I mean, I don’t laugh much these days. But maybe you can appreciate the irony.

Has the election happened yet? Has Aemond won? I’ve lost track of the days, but it has to be getting close to November 5th. What happens if he can’t get me out? What happens if Nixon wins?

I don’t want to be a hero anymore. I don’t want to have adventures like Heracles, Achilles, Jason, Odysseus, Perseus, Orpheus, Ajax. I just want to go home. Please let me go home.

I can hear keys jangling against the lock on my cell door. My heart jolts into a breakneck, pounding rhythm; I think that sound will terrify me all my life. Some things you just can’t forget, you know? Some things dig down deep and build a home in the marrow of your bones, a rust-red cave of immutable memory. I know exactly what the communists want from me. They’ve been asking since they dragged me out of the Loach four months ago.

Everyone has a breaking point. This is mine.

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