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virgineaChapter 2: You Must Look Back

Bran and Daenerys become key players.

Notes:

First of all, thank you so much for each of your comments. I know it's just SO ME to write another story with the same plot points, but truth is, as I always have stated, I am no writer nor do I aspire to be one. This is purely recreational for me.

This fic will allow me to explore other character complexities and storylines. So I am very excited. I hope you are still around when it's all said and done.

Enjoy!

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

2.

You Must Look Back

Dany cannot process any coherent thought for a moment until she lands back into reality. The first thing she does then is to refuse to accept it.

"That's not true," she says. 

Brandon looked at her steadily. "It is."

All the air is kicked out of her lungs when those words are left hanging in the air. The gash under her throbbing at the bitter memory of him.

But the dream, she thinks. I am no ordinary woman. My dreams come true, she had told that man some many years ago.

She had seen him as real as if he had been there.

He was alive.

He was happy.

He's got a family. 

"It's not!" she protests, "I saw him. I saw him with his family, living in the North. He is not dead."

This time, Brandon blinks in confusion, "Pardon me, what family? Jon died unmarried and childless."

"Do not dare to lie to me at my face," Daenerys snarls.

"Where did you see this image?" he asks her. 

Her eyes well up with tears at the realization that he is not going to insist. Then it hits her, leaving her numb. Dizziness and a foul feeling washing over her senses, emotions escaping her control.

"My dreams," she whispers. 

"Your dreams?"

"My dreams come true," she repeats her thoughts. "Not long after my resurrection, I received this dream. It was prophetic like the one that told me my dragons were going to be born."

Comprehension dawns on his face. 

"A dragon dream. Like Daenys, your ancestor."

"Exactly." Her hand tries to reach for the goblet of wine but she no longer owns her movements. "I don't know what you believe or if this is another scheme of yours. I don't care. This meeting comes to its end."

She stands abruptly but her legs don't respond. She ends up stumbling and falling to the ground. 

***

"Here, my lady. Take this."

Her hands shake as she accepts the cup of water that a servant girl offers her. 

"May what you have experienced is a prophetic dream. I do believe you."

Brandon keeps talking as if she's listening.

Two voices are fighting in her head meanwhile, battling to decide which one she should heed. The one that told her to get out of there and the other that she needed to know more. 

"Unlike you, I only can see what my sight allows me, once it happened," he stresses. "I am a living memory. I saw Jon die."

She felt another pang in her chest. 

"Stop."

"I saw him falling for a harmless fever and giving up before it had started to take root," he keeps on. 

"Stop!" Daenerys rises from her seat with a start. "It doesn't have sense. My dream—"

"That's what I wonder. Your dream," he ponders. "But it has sense if what I believe possibly comes to happen. Perhaps it's not how it was supposed to be."

"What are you doing here?" she then questions him. "You've only come to dig up the dead and expose them to sunlight? Why should I care about any of this?" she says, though she has done a marvelous job of exposing herself. "Just tell me what your intentions are Brandon Stark."

"My purpose is to observe and let life move on his own rhythm. I cannot be the hand moving the pieces at my will." He pauses, folding his hands in his lap. "Tyrion once said that I was fit to rule because I do not want things, and that's true but this part of me who is Brandon Stark...he's seen Arya wreck in the middle of the sea. Jon dying alone in the cold. Sansa suffering the burdens of an underserving and heavy crown. It's a strong bond that that bounds people. It makes me wonder if maybe I am doing something wrong." 

And when he said this, Dany realized that it was like talking not to Brandon Stark but to the being that inhabited his body. 

"What do you mean?"

"There's one possibility that we are not exploring," he answers, "A journey to the past."

***

The moment he proposes such a misbegotten idea, Dany exiles the room and leaves behind everything she has heard till now. Daario asks her if they should throw the Broken King out and she hesitates before deciding to allow him, out of consideration, a few more days. 

Nothing brings back the peace, however. The seeds of sorrow and doubt have been planted in her mind when she had barely managed to harvest a semblance of peace after many years of inhuman efforts to return to being the Daenerys she once was. The daring, brave, and full-of-life version she was until she traveled to that wrecked land. 

She thought of Tyrion and she thought of Jon Snow, having avoided any intrusion of the latter's memories as if a viral disease. 

How many times did she wish them both dead? And how many times did she have to stop herself from going after them, risking the last shred of pride she had left? 

But every time she has told herself that she was entitled to justice for herself, Dany thought of the reason why they had both betrayed her.

And that was another thought she was trying to leave behind. 

A journey to the past, she thinks, letting out a dry snort as she watches Drogon lick one of his giant talons before raising his muzzle and watching her intently. He is formidable than ever, so much so that every time they fly over Pentos he covers half the city with his shadow. 

The years have not made the pain less intense for either of them, just more bearable, enough so that tears no longer well up in her eyes at the memory of their lost loved ones nor does he sings a sad song every night at the memory of his brothers.

Drogon purrs softly feeling where her thoughts are going.

What if? she wonders. What if it is possible? 

***

The next time she encounters the Broken King, he and one of his guards are on the terrace overlooking the gardens, chatting about the flowers and the weather. As Daenerys approaches, she fleetingly recognizes the guard's face from the past. 

"Podrick, you may leave us," Bran says. 

Daenerys leans her rear against the stone railings and faces him.

"If you weren't supposed to be the King, why did you agree first?" she asks him with an edge to her tone that betrays some grudge. She is not going to pretend she has made amends with that.

"I never said I wasn't, but rather that Tyrion overestimated his ability to weigh things carefully. He used to be a measured and even cynical man, but then he met you." Bran looked at her squinting in the sunlight. "He was too naive to believe you would have any glimmer of mercy left after he betrayed you by freeing his brother. Rightfully."

"Tyrion mocked me, repeatedly," Dany harshly reminds him. "He was never sincere on his true feelings. He pretended to have one foot on each side of the war. In the end, both sides perished and he stood gracefully safe and sound. I have no sympathy for him."

"And I can't know of people's hearts, only their reasons. And Tyrion's were, like all other human beings, selfish. The what-ifs haunted him to his grave nonetheless."

Daenerys huffs and looks away, letting the subject go. 

When she turns her face to him, is to glare at him. 

"You told Jon about his parents. You decided to tell him exactly the moment he returned to Winterfell." She clenched her jaw. "You and Samwell Tarly took him away from me."

"Jon needed to know."

What for? she is about to ask him when he blurts out another question,

"Would you have preferred a love conditioned to a lie for the rest of your life?" 

She is speechless. 

"The truth always makes us see things more clearly. And he needed to see who you really were, Daenerys."

"What are you trying to imply?" she almost barks at him. 

"Did you love Jon the same once you found out who he was?"

"I would never have hurt him," she states. 

"That was not the question."

She again dodges his piercing inquisitive gaze and focuses on her own thoughts on the matter.

After so long, it was simply impossible to put herself back in the place of who she was back then. All Daenerys had now were the memories of what she had felt, and it was built on a weak foundation.

She wasn't about to let Brandon Stark destroy that.

"It doesn't matter what would have happened because the story would have ended the same anyway. What difference does it make if we had all act differently? Jon had betrayed me long before he stuck a dagger into my heart. And now he's dead too, according to you. And I'm alive —what's the point of all that?"

Bran flashes her the hint of a smile.

"I'm glad you ask that question."

***

"We learned about your return almost exactly when it happened but we believe telling Jon served no purpose," Bran explains, now the both of them in the same room where they shared supper nights before. By orders of both, they are alone.

Dany winces but tries her best to hide it. 

"I don't think it would have served any purpose either," she says, her attention on the loom hanging in the high wall, a gift from someone unimportant whose name she no longer remembers. It was her own image and that of her children flying high in the sky as the Unsullied march off into the distance. The image of a glorious past. "All these years I thought Jon was..." she hesitates, searching for the right word to put it, "...contented, living the peaceful life he always wanted."

"Did you really think someone like Jon Snow would live in peace after what he did to you?" Brandon asks her with some resemblance of emotion in his voice.

This is Bran, she reckons when she looks at him sideways. 

"Men are of passions but not of reasons," he muses, and she thinks, that's the Raven. 

"You never think the best of someone who meant you great harm, much less if you thought this someone loved you," Dany retorts. Brandon just watches her so she continues, "How it is possible? This journey of yours...how it is possible something like that?"

"I've been there, in the past," he tells her, "and I've seen that it is possible, though not always convenient. To intervene I mean." 

His words remind her of her own words. 

"But I haven't been there, not really. Just a whisper in the wind." His eyes seem to go to a faraway place, a memory lost in the many he collects. "I can't be separated from my body, my mind is just one of the thousand minds living in the collective memory. But you...maybe I can take you to the Daenerys of the past."

Her skin tingles.

"How it would work?"

"I don't know if it'll work. Only that there's a chance," he admits. "Something is amiss in the reality we are in. The year of the Long Night was supposed to mean the beginning of a new age, everything was set to serve a purpose."

She stifles the urge to roll her eyes. As much as it pains her to remember that time, she can't help but view it all with a certain cynicism. The passage of time has only hardened her wounded heart, to such an extent that she does not realize until then what it all means. 

"Maybe this all started to go wrong even before the death of the Night King."

"Facing the army of the dead again?" She swallows hard. Memories of that night flooding in, and long before that when she lost Viserion by his hands. It shakes her to the breaking point. "I can't go back there...I...I...NO."

Dany gets up, walks across the room, and takes a deep breath. 

"There are some things you need to know, Daenerys," he says behind her, "We are only to mend the wrong. Not changing what already is. What we are now." 

She turns around, suddenly glum. 

"We can't change who we are, that would create more chaos and bring us back to the same place we are now."

She thinks of her life as it is now, in the years that have passed and in all the battles she has fought. When she left Essos behind to return home to Westeros, she believed there would be no force capable of making her go back.

If I look back, I am lost.

How little she knew what awaited her.

"Sometimes you must look back," the Raven speaks, "To keep walking forward."

Dany sits close to him again, contemplating his expressionless face with a serious look.

"How long it'll take?"

"Here? It'd be like a blink of an eye. For you? The time that is necessary."

Dany looks up at the Pentosi morning sky, wondering if it was really all happening. Was it all real?

Maybe I am dead and I haven't realized yet.

Images of her loved ones flashed before her eyes. 

If what Brandon was saying made sense, then there were too many things in the past that didn't make sense. She thought of Viserion dying only to serve as the Night King's slave, of Jorah dying to defend her only for her to die at Jon's hands. Of Missandei dying in chains. Of Grey Worm and the Unsullied disappearing never to be seen again.

On Jon.

Unbidden, she thought of Jon.

Dead after all and his purpose lost forever.

"You still have feelings for him, don't you?"

Dany turns her head like a whip. "I'm not doing this for Jon," she says emphatically. "You came here for a reason, Raven, Bran the Broken, or whoever and whatever you are." She shifts in her seat to stare at him pointedly. "If I'm willingly participating is because I have so much to gain and so much to lose."

Brandon nods.

"Some things are meant to be. Are you ready?"

What else? she wants to yell at him, but she keeps it to herself and says, "Yes."

Notes:

This was actually longer but I cut it out so Bran will be elaborating on the consequences of traveling to the past throughout the story, and we'll see it in Dany's memories.

Before someone brings up the "But Dany doesn't feel guilty of becoming Hitler!!!" argument, I'm saving it for the future chapters, when Dany is actually in the city.

So just...chill out.

Regarding the romance, YES, this story is Jonerys, but from a different angle. I want to work their dynamic from another perspective and address issues that maybe I omitted in my other stories such as Jon's identity crisis and Daenerys' struggle to understand her own power, the sort of scenes that would've added depth to their romance, rather than take for granted that they love each other.