81

Chapter 81: Chapter 52: Perspective

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

"Right or wrong is not what separates us and our enemies. It's our different standpoints, our perspectives that set us apart. Both sides blame one another. There is no good or bad side. Just two sides with different views."

-Queen Helaena Targaryen, the White Queen

112 AC, Tower of the Hand

I only needed one look to tell that Daena was pissed.

Daemon's firstborn was never the most even-tempered of individuals, and had quite the explosive temper ever bubbling beneath the surface, as Harrenhal could attest to, but this was something else. There was an added ingredient in this nasty brew, one I wasted three seconds frowning over before I finally managed to put a name to it.

Betrayal.

A deep and truly soul-cutting wound, one which had ever more salt poured in as they realised that someone they considered their friend or family, their kith and kin, had stabbed them in the back. And by stabbing, I meant stabbing. This wasn't just some sibling cheerfully throwing another under the bus, but a real betrayal with all the pain and hurt that implied.

I sighed and wordlessly pushed away the goblet of water I'd prepared before pouring myself a glass of wine. Then, I paused, pushed away the glass of wine, and rummaged around before pulling out a bottle of King's Landing brandy. I placed a hand on a crystal tumbler before I put it back down, dragging the entire bottle back to my desk and setting it down with a satisfying thump.

"I can already tell it's going to be one of those conversations." I sighed, slumping in my chair without any pretense of poise. "Let's get it over with, shall we?"

"You say that like I have a choice in the matter, like you can't just order me to do whatever you want." Daena snapped, voice filled with far more bile and poison that I'd ever heard from her.

"Daena, when have I ever stopped you from doing anything?" I asked, deliberately keeping my voice even and patient. "While I do not deny having… curtailed you on several occasions, by and large I have given you an extraordinary amount of leeway in a lot of things."

"Just because a slave is allowed freedoms does not mean that they know liberty." Daena snarled, and for a moment, I thought that her teeth were fangs, glinting sharp and bright.

"Is this about Ezraa?" I cautiously asked. "I thought that we'd already sorted that issue out."

"Don't play dumb, Rhaenyra." Daena hissed. "I'm referring to the chains you've stuck onto every single one of us Dragonseeds."

Ah.

Crap.

How did she find out about the leash?

Melisandre? No, Daenys and I deliberately went out of our way to make them as undetectable as possible. Even Shaera didn't notice that she'd been shackled until the whole Tyrell fiasco years later. And bindings and illusions were Shaera's forte.

Ezraa? Even less likely. Based on my experience, natural healers had quite a bit of sorcerous tunnel vision, and rarely branched out of their field in any meaningful manner. While I was pretty sure Ezraa was a more competent mage than Haegon, I doubted that she had the right skillset to find the leash.

And that left only one plausible option…

"Have you considered the possibility that the Undying Ones were lying to you?" I asked, consciously forcing myself to maintain a poker face. "Visions in the House may not truly reflect reality as it happened. And even if it did, I'm sure the Undying Ones could have easily presented the facts in the worst possible light."

Lying with truth was the oldest trick in the book.

Without any context, truthful statements could come out in a way that painted a damning picture.

Case in point; Back on Earth, I was guilty of human trafficking. I'd taken a two-week-old baby girl from her mother's arms. I'd then snuck said baby girl through airport customs and smuggled her into another country without a valid visa or passport. These were all undeniable facts, and ones I would freely admit to.

But the truth behind that statement was a bit more nuanced.

For one, the person I was trafficking was my very own newborn two-week-old baby daughter, Yuri. And her mother Yuuki had willingly surrendered custody to me. For another, the whole kerfuffle happened in March 2020, right when Covid-19 was quite literally, going viral.

Singapore had just issued an edict that all Singaporean students overseas were all but ordered to fly back home in order to flee the virus. So that's what I was forced to do, barely two weeks after my daughter was born.

London had been hard hit, and everything was shutting down left right and center. Including the Singaporean Embassy there, which meant that I couldn't get a Singaporean passport in time for my daughter. In hindsight I probably should have waited a while until they reopened, or found alternative methods to get Yuri a valid passport. Maybe checked up with the Japanese Embassy to see if I could finagle a passport there. But I was barely 19 years old at the time, and completely unprepared for the double-whammy of a pandemic and fatherhood.

It didn't help that there was a genuine worry that if I tarried long enough, the borders would be closed, and I'd be trapped far far away from home for what could have been months if not years on end. Half my relatives were literally calling me every single day, urging me to fly home ASAP. Dad even went so far as to order me to leave Yuri behind with either friends or an orphanage and fly home alone.

In the end, I went with Mom's suggestion; Call the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority back home and ask for advice. I called ICA and they essentially told me: "Fuck it, it's a pandemic. Just bring your baby home without a passport and damn the consequences. We'll sort the mess out once you're back on Singaporean soil."

Thus, I had little choice but to essentially smuggle my baby through British immigration and onto the plane. Thankfully, Heathrow was a mess at the time, and all the airport staff were being run ragged, so they didn't look too closely at Yuri and I.

We flew back into Singapore, and I turned myself in at Changi Airport for human trafficking. I got off with just a fairly minor fine—which I was happy to pay— and Yuri got her red Singaporean passport.

So, once again; Back on Earth, I was guilty of human trafficking. I'd taken a two-week-old baby girl from her mother's arms. I'd snuck then said baby girl through airport customs and smuggled her into another country without a valid visa or passport. These were all undeniable facts, and ones I would freely admit to.

But if one were to discount the extenuating circumstances and take the statement at face value, without any context or background knowledge on the incident, then one might be deceived into thinking that I was some sort of criminal mastermind instead of a teenaged father way out of his depth.

As in all things, perspective and context mattered greatly, and when framed improperly, even truth could be used to lie.

"They puppeteered my body, Rhae!" Daena shouted, slamming a fist down onto a table with an audible clatter. "Used your very own leash against me! You can't claim plausible deniability here!"

"Hold up, they were able to control you?" I anxiously repeated, holding my hands up in a placating gesture. "That shouldn't have been possible."

"The House of the Undying is a strange world-between-worlds." Daena elaborated, voice cooler now, but still smouldering with suppressed rage. "They summoned an apparition of Daenys and possessed her."

"And it worked?" I asked, frowning at the implications. "I suppose it would. Neither of us predicted that someone would summon an alternate version of ourselves in order to trick the leash. It wasn't exactly a scenario we considered in great detail."

"But that still doesn't excuse the fact that you've enslaved me!" Daena continued, voice rising to a crescendo. "How could you, Rhae? How?!"

Tears pooled in the corner of my cousin's eyes, as she glared angrily at me.

"Ezraa was right, you know?" She half sobbed, half hissed. "You're just another tyrant, enslaving your subjects like they're cattle, and I should kill you on the spot for this offence!"

"You will try. You will fail." I mildly said, without even the slightest speck of doubt or worry.

"Maybe. But Jaehaerys convinced me to reconsider." Daena glared. "So here we are. I'm giving you a chance to explain yourself, and if you don't manage to talk me around, I will come for you."

"I see, is that all?" I asked, calmly watching as my cousin shook in both rage and sadness.

Daena said nothing, but looked back up at me, eyes shining wetly yet with a great volume of fire within.

I let out a long sigh, and took a pull from the bottle before I spoke, savouring the way the liquor went down my throat like a dollop of lava, using the time the movement bought me to formulate my arguments.

"Will you believe me if I say that I never intended on using that leash at all?" I softly asked, reclining tiredly back in my chair. "I've considered it, I won't lie. Particularly after the Ezraa incident, but in the end I chose not to."

"Because Melisandre was here to snap me out of it."

"Partially." I conceded with an inclination of my head. "But the greater part of the matter was that you're my cousin, and I didn't want to deprive you of your independence."

"That horse left the stable the day you leashed me like an unruly dog."

"Has the leash ever compromised your freedom?" I challenged. "Have I ever used it to curtail your wishes, force your obedience or demand your compliance? I've never pulled on it even once after the initial binding, and had every intention of never doing so for the rest of both our lives, if I could help it."

"An infinitely long leash is still a leash." Daena rebuffed. "Liberty is not an allowance, no matter how generous. My siblings as I cannot know true freedom so long as we bear chains around our necks."

"A few restrictions in personal freedoms and rights is a cheap price to pay for a comfortable existence. As a Dragonseed, you want for nothing. I've fed and clothed you all, gave you all a roof over your heads and a place at my hearth. You have status second only to the royal family, with all the rights and privileges that entails. Is the loss of a few freedoms too steep a price for all that?"

"I suppose it is not." Daena conceded. "But there is a difference between rules and slavery. You can command our obedience at but a word, and kill us in two. Your leash isn't rules, it is a sword to our throats."

"A dragon is arguably the single strongest weapon in this world as it stands, and you Dragonseeds make up three-quarters of the current riders. Keeping an insurance policy to shut down any traitors where they stand is not just wise, but common sense."

"I do not disagree. It is prudent to have a way to call people like Shaera and Aerion to heel when they misbehave. But that is no excuse for the draconian terms you have enforced upon us. A less vicious set of rules would have done just as well. I don't think any of us would particularly complain about swearing to rules of good behaviour."

"Shaera would have weaseled out of those within a week and you know it."

"So we are all tarred by association? Shaera is the worst among us all. The outlier. Chain and enslave her if you wish, but the rest of us should not have such onerous shackles laid onto us as well. No, the truth of the matter is that you don't trust any one of us, no matter how loyal we are and have proven ourselves to be."

I paused at her words. It was true, I'd always found it hard to trust people. Mostly due to how many of my once-friends on Earth had mercilessly betrayed and thrown me under the bus once I'd overrun my usefulness. Ryan, Justin, Joshua, Geow, Samuel, Chong, Pierre, Donovan… And those were only the ones I could remember the names of. The actual list was easily three times longer.

Hell, one of the main reasons why Yuuki and I hit it off so well was because we'd both had a long history of betrayals and a consequent lack of genuine friends we could open up fully to.

Generally speaking, even now, I rarely fully trusted anybody. Laena, Daenys and maybe Bell were the sum total of people I trusted wholly in this world. That was it. And it wasn't much better on Earth. Up until my death, I could count the number of people I trusted wholly and unrestrictedly on my fingers. And back during my teenaged years, that number was even smaller, being countable on a single hand.

I trusted people to act in the way their nature dictated, nothing more or less. The frog and the scorpion came to mind. I trusted scorpions to sting, even if it would kill them, for such was their nature.

But Daena wasn't wrong. Trust was a road that went both ways. I should not have poisoned the entire well, just because I found one bucket of scummy water. 

"… I'll admit that I made a mistake, and I'll apologise for that." I finally said. "It was a bad decision, made in haste. I was reeling from Shaera's first betrayal, and that brought out… a horrible part of me I'd rather never see the light of day. My paranoia kicked into overdrive, and I began seeing knives in every shadow. I should not have done what I did."

I'd struggled with depression for most of my teenaged years, caused by a combination of bullying from schoolmates and largely apathetic parents, and turbo-charged when my grandfather died. I got a handle on the problem when I was 17, and have since managed to largely keep a lid on the whole issue.

But every so often, I'd relapse and find myself wallowing in misery and darkness. Or the 'Gloom', as I liked to call it. And like my susceptibility to tickling, the Gloom was one of those things that had followed me even through death and reincarnation,

I usually drank heavily when within the Gloom, to avoid the pain, but that tended to lead me to perform… impulsive acts. The leashing of the Dragonseeds was but one of a truly long list of irreversible deeds I'd done while under the Gloom.

"I'm sorry." I whispered, looking down in shame. "I'm sorry for what I did."

"You tricked us all into bondage and then wiped our memories of the entire incident! Do you know, just how betrayed I felt, after seeing my very own cousin chain me without even a speck of mercy? Sorry doesn't cut it!" Daena threw her hands in the air in frustration. "I would have consented to this leash, had you been upfront and honest about it! But no, you just clapped us all into chains, without even thinking to ask first."

"In hindsight, yes, I could have asked you all to consent knowingly to the procedure. Would probably have gotten considerably stronger bindings out of the whole thing, even." I agreed.

It wouldn't even have been that difficult. I could have set up shop in Dragonstone, during a dark and stormy night. Then I could have made a whole three-act-play out of the whole affair.

Probably said something along the lines of:

"You are now dragon riders, entrusted with the most important weapon in House Targaryen's arsenal. Trained in the most coveted of magics, and given the best training and tools money cannot buy in the entire world. But there are threats out there that can enslave your mind, bind your heart and extort your loyalty. These binding contacts, freely signed, will make sure nobody except me can ever do that to you. Nobody else can ever exploit you against our family and kingdom.

When you sign it, your memory of it will be wiped, as an additional layer of defence. But know that your vows will now be absolute.

Should you decide not to sign the binding. We will give you your freedom, but as a commoner. Permanently seal your magic and irreparably sever the bonds you have with your dragon. You can go back to a life a normal person with all the freedom and limitations of that life.

Which do you choose?"

That way, I'd probably be able to get anywhere between three-quarters to five-sixths of the Dragonseeds willingly under leash, and only have to trick the bare handful that didn't swear the vows into the binding contract. Shaera, Aerion, Daemon… and probably Vaelon and Baelon, whom were too dumb to even comprehend the terms and conditions.

"But like I've previously said; Tunnel Vision." I reiterated, stressing the words with my hands. "You of all people should know how stubborn and hard-headed I can be at times."

"I know. But I'm still reeling at the fact that you enslaved us all and wiped our memories of the whole thing."

"Ignorance is bliss. I wiped your memories because I wanted to spare you all this." I gestured emphatically at Daena when I said that. "In a perfect world, I would never have to pull on the leash even once, and you would have all lived your lives out without ever finding out about it."

"But this is not a perfect world, and this leash is a stone around all our necks."

"So it is."

There was a long silence as the two of us stared at each other. Rhaenyra the Dragonqueen, clad in a beautifully tailored dress of red silk. Daena the Dragonseed, wearing worn leathers and practical garments.

"I can't decide what to do now." Daena confessed after five minutes of thought, breaking our mutual silence. "I cannot tell if you're a loving cousin, or an absolute monster."

"You say that like I can't be both."

"Hmm… fair enough, I suppose."

"So what now? Are you still going to come after me?"

"… Probably not. I cannot forgive or forget this transgression. But I can understand why you've done it. You've shown me your point of view, and through I think it is not right, I do not deny that it is not wrong."

"Thank you." I softly said, and to my surprise I meant it. Relief bloomed like a beautiful flower in my heart, that I'd not lost another beloved family member. I never realised just how much Daena meant to me until I was about to lose her.

Daena smiled as well, but there was something else, lurking beneath that warm expression.

"What is it?" I gently probed.

"I saw… other things in the House of the Undying. The Undying Ones told me that should you come to power, you would slaughter and massacre wholesale millions of people." My cousin all but whispered fearfully. "Please tell me that's not the case. That you wouldn't murder millions in your quest for power."

I raised an eyebrow at that little question, but honestly I wasn't that surprised. I'd long made up my mind on the matter. Long before I'd even thought about killing her father.

"Daena, you've known me for half your life. Surely by now you should know that I don't perform needless massacres. If I slaughtered a million people, it would have been for a good reason."

"What could possibly justify the murder of millions, then? Whatever could possibly constitute a reason so compelling as that?"

"It might not be out of malice or viciousness, you know." I shrugged. "Ignorance and incompetence can and has killed millions. A botched management of a pandemic, perhaps."

Memories of Covid-19 came to the forefront then. I remembered seeing my old boarding school empty out as everyone fled back home. Alcohol hand sanitiser stockpiles plummeted so horribly in the region that the school was forced to jury-rig up a homemade distillery to brew more. In fact, the shortage had gotten so bad that in the last few days before I left, that the teachers were all but begging students to turn over their contraband liquor to feed the distillery.

While Singapore managed to ride the pandemic out pretty well, a lot of other countries weren't so fortunate. The USA came to mind. I remembered seeing on the news the hundreds of thousands of black chairs sitting empty outside the White House. Victims of a President more interested in reelection than the lives of his own citizens. Four hundred thousand dead, if I recalled correctly. Arguably more, as one could make the case that a lot of the deaths during the Biden administration was due to the knock-on effects of the Trump administration's mismanagement of the crisis.

"What kind of pandemic could—quite literally—shatter entire cities?"

"Hmm. Perhaps I used a weapon of mass destruction then. Or more than one." I mused contemplatively, thinking of Daenaerys atop Drogon or the Mad King and his alchemists. "Dragons come to mind. Or a copious amount of Wildfire."

"And you would unleash them on a city? Cities even?"

"It would most certainly not be my first option, nor even my second, and likely not my third thru tenth option." I solemnly declared. "But…"

"You really would do it, wouldn't you." Daena faintly said.

"If by some reason I decide that I must murder millions for the sake of the greater good. If I find a reason or goal so compelling that there can be no other alternative but to commit mass murder on such a massive scale…"

"You would do it."

"I would do it, and not lose a wink of sleep over it."

Silence reigned once more, as Daena idly groped around behind her and found a bottle to bring to her lips. She knocked back the entire thing in a single gulp, slamming the empty bottle down onto a nearby table.

"I suppose that's why you're the king, and I'm the wanderer." My cousin finally said. "If you have a legitimate reason for slaying so many, I shall not hinder you. But, if I find that your mass murder is wanton and needless…"

"You will come and kill me."

"I will likely fail. But I shall still try anyway."

We didn't say anything else on the subject after that. There was no need to. Some things were just so evident, that no words were required to convey a message.

"But I do have some good news for you, Daena." I smiled. "More than one piece, in fact."

"Which is?"

"Lord Corlys' fleet is ready. Thirteen ships of the line, all well-provisioned and stocked. All ready for an expedition to the lands west of our shores."

"No way, oh no no no no way." Daena gasped, putting her hands to her mouth in disbelief as her eyes lit up with girlish glee. "You're serious? It's finally happening?"

"Yes, which segues into my next piece of good news: You're invited to come along for the journey."

"When and where?"

"They depart the Arbor at the end of the month."

"Already on my way!" Daene whooped, immediately dashing off and cutting the glass candle connection, enthusiastically cheering the entire while.

Notes:

And so ends the Daena arc of this story. The next chapter will be a timeskip, and feature Rhaenyra's wedding to Laenor.