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fibula-rasa · 1 year

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Lost, but Not Forgotten: The World’s Applause (1923)

Direction: William C. de Mille

Scenario & Titles: Clara Beranger (more about Beranger at the Women Film Pioneers Project)

Camera: L. Guy Wilky

Sets & Costumes: Paul Iribe

Studio: Famous Players-Lasky (production) & Paramount (distribution)

Performers: Bebe Daniels, Lewis Stone, Kathlyn Williams, Adolphe Menjou, Brandon Hurst, Bernice Frank, Maym Kelso, George Kuwa, James Neill

Status: presumed entirely lost

Synopsis (synthesized from magazine summaries of the plot):

Corinne D’Alys (Bebe Daniels), f.k.a. Cora Daly, is a theater star who has “taken the Rialto by storm.” Unfortunately, Corinne also has a desperate hunger for publicity. Her manager, John Elliott (Lewis Stone), who also happens to be in love with her, advises her to be more sensible about her career. A famous artist, Robert Townsend (Adolphe Menjou), has become enamored with Corinne, and wants to paint her portrait. Despite John’s warning that Robert wishes only to “see more of her,” Corinne sits for the portrait.

Robert plans on throwing a party to celebrate finishing the painting but declines to invite his wife, Elsa Townsend (Kathlyn Williams). Elsa comes to her husband’s studio anyway and finds the portrait and a pearl headdress that Robert is going to gift to Corinne. In a jealous rage, Elsa takes a knife to the painting and then to her husband—fatally stabbing him. Elsa also happens to be John’s sister and she calls him in a panic to help her. John arrives at the studio in secret and helps Elsa escape the scene. Meanwhile, Corinne and the guests begin to wonder where their host is, and Corinne then finds the body of the painter.

John convinces the police that Corinne is innocent. Corinne leaves town to avoid the storm. Unfortunately, John then becomes the primary suspect, as he had a notable fight with his brother-in-law months prior. When John is arrested, Corinne returns and confesses to Elsa that she feels morally responsible for Robert’s murder. Elsa then confesses to committing the murder herself. It’s implied that Elsa commits suicide via “the watery route.”

Now that both John and Corinne have been cleared of suspicion, they are free to marry and Corinne has lost her appetite for publicity.

Transcribed sources & annotations below:

Moving Picture World, November 11, 1922

News from the Producers

Conducted by T.S. da Ponte

Changes Titles of Two

Three new titles have been chosen for as many forthcoming Paramount pictures.

William de Mille’s recently completed production from an original story by Clara Beranger, in which Bebe Daniels, Lewis Stone, Kathlyn Williams and Harrison Ford have the important roles, has been permanently titled, “The World’s Applause.” “Notoriety” was the title originally chosen, but when it was found that another company had a prior claim, it was changed temporarily to “Paths of Glory,” which in turn has now given way to “The World’s Applause.”

Mary Miles Minter's latest picture, just completed under the direction of Charles Maigne and adapted from Stephen French Whitman's novel, "Sacrifice," is to be called "Drums of Destiny."

"Racing Hearts" is the title chosen for the new picture Agnes Ayres is just starting under the direction of Paul Powell. This is a story by Byron Morgan, author of the Wallace Reid automobile racing pictures, and Miss Ayres has the role of a race driver who goes in and wins a thrilling speed contest when the regular driver fails to show up.

Both "Drums of Destiny" (titled "Drums of Fate" on release in 1923) and "Racing Hearts" are also lost films.

Exhibitor’s Herald, January 20, 1923

REVIEWS

BEBE DANIELS IN

WORLD’S APPLAUSE

(PARAMOUNT)

A fascinating story of the life of an actress who unwittingly becomes involved in a murder mystery which almost brings about her downfall professionally. Lavishly presented, very well acted and directed in William deMille’s best style. Length, 6,528 feet.

An original story by Clara Beranger provides Bebe Daniels, Lewis Stone, Kathlyn Williams, Adolph Menjou and others with a suitable vehicle in which to display their talents. There is good story interest for the most part, with good surprise value and considerable dramatic suspense in the contest of wits between the detectives and John Elliott and his sister.

Lewis Stone plays the role of Elliot and gives an unusually convincing and consistent characterization. The director, author and producer are to be congratulated upon securing Mr. Stone’s services for this part. Miss Daniels appears in the role of an actress who is a hound for publicity, and the moral of the story shows how ready the public is to condemn these children of the stage. Kathlyn Williams has the role of Elsa Townsend, wife of an artist in love with the little actress, who in a fit of jealousy kills her husband. A difficult role, but played with restraint and conviction. Adolphe Menjou is the artist. Bernice Frank was the maid; Mayme Kelso, secretary to the actress, and George Kuwa, valet to Townsend. James Neill was Elliot’s valet, while Brandon Hurst played James Crane, owner of a string of newspapers.

Corinne d’Alys, popular Broadway star, poses for Townsend while he paints her portrait. On the day he is to display the painting he gives a party at his studio. As the guests assemble, Mrs. Townsend comes to the studio, discovers a valuable pearl headdress which her husband is to give to Corinne, and the portrait of the actress. In a fit of jealousy she strikes him down and leaves the studio with her brother, John Elliot. The discovery of the dead artist throws suspicion upon the members of the party. Corinne telephones to her affianced husband Elliott and he succeeds in convincing the police that she is innocent. Crane takes a hand in the investigation, however, and dogs Elliott’s footsteps. A confession from Mrs. Townsend finally clears Elliott and the little actress, and she no longer seeks the world’s applause, but is content to settle down with John.

The Film Daily, February 2, 1923

A Typical DeMille Entertainment With the Usual Atmosphere

William DeMille Prod.

“THE WORLD’S APPLAUSE”

Paramount

DIRECTOR…William DeMille

AUTHOR…Clara Beranger

SCENARIO BY…Clara Beranger

CAMERAMAN…L. Guy Wilky

AS A WHOLE…Consists of situations and atmosphere intended to provide visual appeal but that is as far as it gets

STORY…Artificial and quite theatrical; flavored with sensational bits that will make it popular with a certain crowd

DIRECTION… Very good as far as production goes and usually handles story with good judgment but ending is too long arriving

PHOTOGRAPHY…Excellent

LIGHTINGS… Good

PLAYERS… Lewis Stone and Bebe Daniels featured with Stone doing his usual good work and Miss Daniels a suitable but not beautiful Corinne d’Alys; others Kathlyn Williams and Adolphe Menjou

EXTERIORS…Few

INTERIORS… Many elaborate settings

CHARACTER OF STORY…Star seeking publicity is cause of man’s death at the hands of his jealous wife

LENGTH OF PRODUCTION… 6,526 feet

Probably because there is a moral to it the unpleasant bits in “The World’s Applause” will have to be excused but it does seem unfortunate that they have to wade so deeply into scandal and sensation providing incidents in general, to get to it. Before you finally learn the lesson of this film—that success is not measured by the amount of prominence you attain—you are treated to some mighty intimate scenes in which a popular stage favorite is the sensuous, central figure. She is very deliberately sought by a famous portrait artist, a married man, who plans his seduction in elaborate style. Of course he has a studio establishment which figures prominently in his scheme and the very innocent young moth runs headlong into the flame heedless of the warning of her manager, who really loves her. The aggravating thing about these petty publicity seekers is that you are expected to accept their sugar-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouth attitude for the real thing.

But this Corinne d’Alys spoils it all, or the title writer does it for her, when she admits that her would-be lover will give her everything but “a narrow gold band.” The titles, incidentally, are very bad. There is one in which the true lover warns the girl that the artist wants her to pose for him so that “he can see more of her.” The titles are quite off color in many similar instances. This one particularly seemed to strike the Rivoli audience as a thoroughly fine humorous touch.

William DeMille is following closely in the footsteps of his brother, Cecil, when it comes to making pictures with plenty of pictorial appeal and colorful atmosphere. In this respect the picture is interesting and should satisfy. From a story angle, it is all a matter of taste. Where they like theatrical, sensational stuff, it is all very nice but where they want clean, wholesome stories, it may be different.

Bebe Daniels handles the role of Corinne adequately but she never gives the impression of being sufficiently beautiful to have “The World’s Applause.” Lewis Stone is always capable but deserves a more sensible role. The cast, on the whole, is suitable.

Story: John Elliot’s new star, Corinne d’Alys, is swept off her feet by sudden success. She accepts the attentions of Townsend, an artist, the husband of Elliot’s sister, who paints her portrait. Townsend is accidentally killed by his jealous wife and Elliot is arrested. His sister, realizing Elliot loves Corinne, commits suicide, leaving a confession which clears Elliot and cures Corinne of her craving for publicity.

One of those negative reviews that makes you want to watch a movie more, eh? Moralizing and misogyny on full display! Phew.

The Moving Picture World, February 1923

“World’s Applause” Released January 21

William de Mille, Paramount producer, departed temporarily from his custom of filming stage dramas when he made "The World's Applause," which was on the Paramount release schedule of January 21.

This is an original story by Clara Beranger, who has written the scenario of all of Mr. de

Mille's recent photoplays. Bebe Daniels and Lewis Stone are the featured players in a cast which Mr. de Mille considers one of the best he has had in his long career as a producer.

An ultra-modern note is struck by Miss Daniels in her costumes, it is reported. In each succeeding scene she wears something different from the preceding one, and although Mr. de Mille never allows his photodramas to descend to the level of mere fashion shows, this feature of "The World's Applause" is certain to intensify every woman's interest in the picture, Paramount says.

Variety, February 1923

WORLD'S APPLAUSE

Paramount picture presented by Adolph Zukor. William DeMille production, featuring Bebe Daniels, Lewis Stone and Kathlyn Williams in story by Clara Beranger.

At the Rivoli, New York, week of Jan. 28.

Corinne d'Alys..........Bebe Daniels

John Elliot........Lewis Stone

Elsa Townsend...Kathlyn Willams

Robert Townsend, her husband…Adolphe Menjou

James Crane...Brandon Hurst

Maid to Corinne...Bernice Frank

Secretary to Corinne.........Maym Kelso

Valet to Townsend..George Kuwa

Valet to Elliot......James Neill

“The World's Applause" is a screen treatise on theatrical publicity and exploitation with a twist that a certain theatrical personage's craving for newspaper "notices" and the desire to be the talk of the town boomerangs viciously when she is indirectly implicated in a murder mystery.

The theatrical personage is Corinne d'Alys (born Cora Daly), who has "taken the Rialto by storm," but who is counselled by her manager-lover (Lewis Stone) to cease her craving for the world's applause and deal seriously with her work. This is momentarily disparaged by her

with ensuing developments taking the audience rather interestingly through the usual five-reel span.

It starts with Robert Townsend, an artist who has "arrived" (Adolphe Menjou), becoming enamored with the favored and favorite footlights beauty and honoring her with painting her portrait for the annual Parisian exhibition. Townsend is married to the sister of John Elliot, the impresario, and a parallel situation develops of Townsend slighting his wife for Corinne, and

Townsend interposing himself between the actress and her suitor, Elliot.

At a studio party in Corinne's honor to which Townsend did not invite his wife, the latter enters

through the private studio door and, enraged at her husband's nonchalance, slashes the portrait and stabs the artist fatally. She telephones for her brother, who also enters unbeknown to the guests in the outer rooms. Both slip away, but not without being seen by a newspaper

publisher, whose testimony implicates Elliot, who shields his sister. Elliot is arrested on first degree murder charges, but is absolved when his sister confesses to Corinne. The sister runs away, and there is a suggestion she commits suicide via the watery route.

Not much to the story, but rather deftly handled by DeMille in his customary pretentious manner—never lavish but always in good taste. The captioning is pithy and bright, and such leaders as "the public always believes the worst about an actress" is good lay propaganda for the profession.

Miss Daniels sports a nobby collection of clothes to excellent advantage. Mr. Stone is a sincere opposite, who also has the ability of really acting when called upon. Miss Williams, too, accounted for herself handily.

The picture pleased at the Rivoli

Abel

Cine-Mundial, April 1923 p. 218 & 239

EL APLAUSO DEL MUNDO

(The World’s Applause)

“Paramount” — 150 metros

Intérpretes principales: Bebé Daniels y Lewis Stone. Colaboradores: Kathryn Williams, Adolphe Menjou, Brandon Hurst, Bernice Frank, Maym Kelso, George Kuwa y James Neill.

Argumento de Clara Beranger. Dirección de William DeMille.

Argumento

Corina, actriz, tiene sed insaciable de publicidad y se muere por ver su nombre en letras de molde, bien grandes, aunque sea a costa de escándalo, sin escuchar los consejos de su empresario, Elliot, que la ama. Los periódicos mezclan a la joven en un lío en el que ver un famoso pintor que le está haciendo su retrato. La noche en que el artista va a celebrar con un banquete la terminación del cuadro, se presenta en escena su mujer, disputan, y en un acceso de rabia, la consorte se apodera de un cuchillo para destrozar la pintura y, accidentalmente, mata al artista. La homicida es hermana de Elliot y éste trata de salvarla a to-

(Continúa en la página 239)

NUESTRA OPINION

(Viene de la página 218)

da costa del presidio. Llega hasta a asumir la responsabilidad del delito, cuando las sospechas recaen en su contra, por causa de un disgusto tenido, meses antes, con su cuñado. Pero, justamente cuando la policía va a detenerlo, la hermana confiesa su crimen y Elliot y Corina, sus nombres limpios de mancha, se casan.

Tengo debilidad por Lewis Stone como actor. Quizá por eso me haya gustado tanto esta película, de impecable dirección. Por causa de la reducción de los escenarios, se concentra el interés en el tema y eso añade fuerza dramática a toda la obra, aunque el argumento no tenga, ni con mucho, excesiva novedad. Si se sujeta la película al análisis, se corre el riesgo de dejarla maltrecha. Prefiero, pues, dar sólo idea de lo que a mi me pareció. — Guaitsel.

Translation:

Lead actors: Bebe Daniels and Lewis Stone. Supporting actors: Kathlyn Williams, Adolphe Menjou, Brandon Hurst, Bernice Frank, Maym Kelso, George Kuwa and James Neill.

Scenario by Clara Beranger. Direction by WIlliam DeMille.

Scenario

Corina, an actress, has an insatiable thirst for publicity and would die to see her name in lights, even at the cost of scandal, without listening to the advice of her manager, Elliot, who loves her. The newspapers mix the young woman up in an imbroglio with a famous painter, who is painting her portrait. On the night that the artist is going to celebrate the completion of the painting with a banquet, his wife appears on the scene, they argue, and in a fit of rage, the wife seizes a knife to destroy the painting and, accidentally, kills the artist. The murderer is Elliot’s sister and he tries to save her from prison at all costs. He goes as far as assuming responsibility for the crime, when suspicion falls on him, due to a disagreement he had with his brother-in-law, months before. But, just as the police are going to arrest him, the sister confesses her crime and Elliot and Corina, their names clean, get married.

I have a soft spot for Lewis Stone as an actor. Maybe that’s why I liked this impeccably-directed film so much. Because of the limitation of settings, interest is concentrated on the theme and this adds dramatic force to the whole work, even though the scenario isn’t very excessively novel at all. If you subject the film to analysis, you run the risk of dealing damage to it. I prefer then to give only the outline of how it seemed to me. — Guaitsel.

Photoplay, April 1923

THE WORLD’S APPLAUSE—Paramount

CLARA BERANGER seems to have dramatized the recent newspaper headlines. An idol whose fame has been built upon publicity gets involved innocently in a murder and the aforementioned publicity turns out to be a boomerang, demolishing said idol. Tritely told by William de Mille, who isn’t living up to early expectations. Bebe Daniels is pleasant enough as the idol.

Presumably, this writer is alluding to the Mary Miles Minter / William Desmond Taylor scandal from February of 1922. Kind of an interesting assumption given that, at the time, Minter was still under contract with Famous Player-Lasky, the same company that produced The World’s Applause.

The Story World and Photodramatist, April 1923

The World's Applause

With the excellent theme of regeneration after a terrifying experience, William De Mille slices his emphasis a bit in the story of The World's Applause; though he presents a warning to all actresses or public servants who, in their greed for applause, get themselves talked about in the wrong way, he misses the hole by a few inches because Corinne D'Alys is not the one to pay the piper most heavily. Even though she claims she is morally guilty of the murder, I found it

difficult to believe her regeneration more than skin-deep, possibly because the suggestion of the suicide of the physically guilty but wholly justified wife fades so quickly into the scene of Corinne's future happiness.

In lieu of convincing plot to express his theme, Mr. De Mille has resorted for public appeal to the tinsel more often found in a C. B. de Mille production—to lavish sets and to gowns for Bebe Daniels as daring and gorgeous as any of Miss Swanson's. For admirers of this young actress, the picture will doubtless be more or less satisfying, but contrary to dramatic principles, to the opposition have been given the histrionic opportunities

It is many pictures since I have seen such an amusing lothario as the unfaithful husband; but pushed too far by his desperate wife, he rises to the breaking point very naturally. The development of the battle of their wills into one of physical violence and murder deserves high

praise as an example of loss of mental control at the moment of physical contact. The stellar role from the dramatic angle is that of the neglected wife—excellently portrayed by Kathlyn Williams. The story revolves around her problem of protecting her home and retaining her

husband's love. It is she who struggles and suffers through her hasty deed, and in the end sacrifices herself that her brother and the foolish enticer of her husband may be happy.

The weakness of the plot is early evident for the first big dramatic scene does not include the supposed lead. While Corinne is in another room with the guests, the artist's wife declares to her husband her intention of being present at the dinner to celebrate the completion of his portrait of the actress. When her husband urgently remonstrates, she seizes a knife and in the old sensational manner slashes the portrait. He seizes her hand, the exasperated animal rises in her, and she plunges the knife into his side. Horribly frightened, she phones to her brother; he assists her to escape and later denies all knowledge of the crime.

Meanwhile the supposed lead, growing tired of waiting, opens the door on the body of the artist. The guests, sensing a scandal, leave Corinne to enjoy the notoriety her desire for applause has brought upon her. The brother is suspected and his and Corinne's financial backers withdraw their support. Instead of remaining to fight it out, Corinne leaves town. The brother is arrested, and his sister is torn between her love for him and her fear of prison bars for herself. When Corinne returns, she goes to the wife and claims the moral guilt.

In a rather confused manner the story rushes through the confession of the wife and the suggestion of her suicide to the inferred regeneration and future happiness of the actress with the recently bereaved brother. Odd thing, poetic justice! Frankly this picture is not up to the De Mille standard; its appeal is to the more superficial emotions and through the eye rather than through the intellect or heart of the discriminating spectator. It is not the clean, wholesome picture I had anticipated.

Picture Play Magazine, May 1923

The Screen in Review

“The World’s Applause.”

If you are a young actress who will do most anything for publicity, this film will be a lesson to you. Otherwise it will be sheer entertainment, cooked up by William De Mille and charmingly acted with Bebe Daniels as the publicity-mad star and Lewis Stone as her manager. The story has really original twists in it and is directed with humor and restraint. Its only flaw is the incredibly silly subtitles. I don’t understand how Mr. De Mille let them get by in one of his productions which always bear a certain imprint of good taste and sophistication.

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em-writes-stuff-sometimes · 1 year

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ñuhus prūmӯs (my heart) │Chapter 10: Birth

terms of endearment ‘verse: see my Masterlist for the correct series order!

Chapter 1 │Chapter 2 │Chapter 3 │Chapter 4 │Chapter 5 │Chapter 6 │Chapter 7 │Chapter 8 │Chapter 9 │Chapter 10 │Chapter 11 │Chapter 12 (COMPLETE!)

Synopsis: Childbirth is the duty and dismay of all highborn women. Together, you and Daemon experience the trials, tribulations and triumphs of expectant parenthood. You meet your twins.

(Set post-episode 7, though Daemon never married Laena or Rhaenyra.)

Thank you to the awesome @hotdapologist for editing this monster! Thank you also to @angelqueen04, @ewanmitchellcrumbs and @ajthefujoshi for holding my hand throughout the drafting, teehee!

Triggers: incest, age gap, purity culture, detailed depictions of pregnancy, graphic childbirth/difficult birth.

Daemon ought to be rewarded for his self-restraint.

When he’d overheard your warbling confession to Rhaenyra, his first impulse had been to leap atop Caraxes and make the return journey to that shithole he’d only just left behind, to storm into his brother’s Keep and run his whore of a wife through with Dark Sister, to hunt down any and every rotten cunt who had dared involve themselves in this unspeakable transgression against you. Against him.

Moon tea. Moon tea. You had been drinking moon tea all along, dosed without realising by that evil bitch and her cronies.

He knows rage. It is his very best ally—has been since before he grasped the words to describe what lay black and beating like a stone drum in his soul. This rage, the one he has carried about since the awful truth reached his ears, is not the sparking fire that imperils all that surrounds it. He recognises that feeling well. This rage, this throbbing, squalling echo, is a pain in the chest, a stab to the heart, one that pulses and bleeds rather than ignites and incites.

You tried your best to assuage him. He cannot help but admire how unaffected you had been by his roaring madness as he’d stormed into the room, angry enough to daunt even Rhaenyra. But there are no assurances you could make—no promises of the comeuppance that awaits the Queen in the far-off future—that can satiate the stinging need to tear flesh from flesh, take a life for every one that you and he had been robbed of.

He had indeed attempted to mount his dragon, getting so far as the split in the path that takes one around the perimeter of the Dragonmont before being stopped by Ser Lorent Marbrand and whichever unfortunate bastards had been collected for the task. Six or seven sentries had milled about nervously as the knight delivered your command, blasted impudent girl forbidding him from what is his right and keeping him grounded upon the isle. He did not wish to chance the odds of a skirmish against those gathered, nor your wrath, so he’d abandoned the notion and stomped off to walk the beaches until he was calm. Though he had spoken with you later in the afternoon and indulged in a rather enjoyable romp in the bath, the thoughts of what he had learned refuse to leave him be.

Moon tea. How many babes, fruit of the seed he’d fucked into you with utmost dedication and unrelenting regularity, had been swilled away by that damned concoction? Had they existed at all, or did the tea perform its task so efficiently that they never even had a chance? The unknowns spiral relentlessly in his mind.

He’ll not plague you with them, though. You have enough to contend with.

“Soon,” the healer woman keeps advising him, eyes turned to you as you wince and cup your belly, impossibly great and heavy. “They come soon. Any day.”

So large have his heirs become that you now refuse to leave your shared chambers, waddling about in naught but one of those sheer shifts that make him ache with the desire to touch, only to be rebuffed by the very knowledge that you are far too uncomfortable for such things.

Damn it all.

You wear no smallclothes, complaining that they fit poorly and rub against your belly. No, it’s nothing but those fucking nightgowns, baring everything and nothing at the same time and driving him mad.

Truthfully, he is somewhat surprised you still deign to wear anything. Even the shifts are too much for your sensitive skin in this final waiting stage, and he often finds you cringing at the brush of fabric over your tits.

On occasion, you sit upon the chaise with the hearth lit and one of his thick woollen coats to lay over your feet while you read or re-read your books, resting the heft of them on the protruding mound of your middle in a manner that is far more comical than it ought to be. On others, you recline on the bed with your swelling feet propped up and a miniature gown or sock or cap in your hands, stitching long-necked crimson dragons or black-and-green snarling wyverns or brilliant golden beasts across the fabric. Most often, you toddle about very carefully through your rooms, fussing with the items in or around the sizeable cradle you had insisted belonged here rather than in the nursery.

“I do not want them so far from us, Daemon,” you say, folding then refolding yet another blanket lovingly embroidered for the babes, examining it consideringly before placing it in its particular spot. Your face glows with delight as you take in the results of your reorganisation, soft toys and snug coverings and stacks of clothing arranged in peculiar collections across the corner of the room closest to your bed. “They belong here, where we can see them, where they are safe—”

“Sh, sh.”

He watches avidly as you move about with one little hand cupping your immensely distended belly while the other arranges and rearranges items into a configuration only you can envision. As you work, his eyes devour the lush curves of your body.

“Lovely, sweetling,” he says when you step back to present your handiwork.

“Do you think they will like it?” you ask, mouth twisted to the side with uncertainty, rubbing at your middle while you ponder and ponder over your efforts.

He doesn’t believe the babes will care either way, to be perfectly honest. All they’ll do in the beginning is eat and shit and cry, for fuck’s sake. But instead of voicing this, he merely smiles and says,

“Of course they will. They’re their father’s daughters, after all.”

Your eyes flash impishly. “And my sons’ father really likes it?”

He nods, striding over to peer down at the nest you had made for your little dragons and kiss you soundly on your petulant cherry-blossom mouth, silencing your hesitation once and for all.

In the mornings, you accept visitors. Your apartments become a revolving door of attendees from across the Keep, everyone from Rhaenyra with Joff and Corwyn in tow to Ser Lysan helped along by Laenor stopping by to keep you company in your self-imposed confinement. It is in this time that Daemon is free to leave you to conduct his own tasks, secure in the knowledge that you are safe and chatting away about your studies with your tutor, huddled up with Jace, Luke and Daeron, or braiding Rhaena and Baela’s hair.

In the afternoons, you like to sit in his lap, rounded arse wedged firmly into the parting of his thighs. You are always clasping the babes through your belly with a hand as you nibble at candied figs and honey cake steeped in warm milk.

“I hope at least one of them looks like you,” you say, lips sticky with sugar smacking with the sound of each word. Trailing an unsoiled finger down the length of his nose, you admire his profile and the cut of his jaw. “Your chin, mayhaps, or your brow. I think they would be most handsome with your features.”

Your cheek nuzzles against his, pampered little pet seeking affection, and his mouth curves unbidden at the pretty praise, earnest and charming.

“They’ll be beautiful.” There is an image in his head of two darling little girls with wispy silver hair and your eyes and lips, perhaps a gentler replica of his nose framing the parts of them that come from you. “Like their mother.”

He holds very still as you beam and take his face between tacky fingers to press your mouth against his, hot and wet and syrupy-soft. It takes what little remains of his willpower to conjure up a rotation of the most heinous scenarios he can conceive of—old Otto in an ornate gown with shoulders bared, Viserys’s deformed, mottled flesh-prison, Hightower blood seated upon the throne of his ancestors—to prevent his cock from stirring beneath you.

You cannot bear for him to fuck you as of late. The walls of your cunt are thin and sore, the pinprick opening of your womb low and tender while your body prepares itself for birth. Daemon knows you would endure the imposition if he pressed, but even he is not so monstrous that he’d disregard the sight of his little wife wincing and holding back tears as he worked himself into a space too burdened to accept him with pleasure.

The perverse delight he usually feels in eliciting such reactions from you falls away at the vision you make under his watchful gaze, generous swathes of supple skin swelling almost to breaking point. You are forced to bloom because of him, glowing from within and easily surpassing any effigy of the Mother. He scoffs at the thought of any person possibly comparing you to such a paltry idol. Being so beholden to the whims of his heirs in your belly, you are the very dichotomy of indomitable and fragile, the inexplicable marvel of creating life from vacuity swallowed by the delicate softness of one far too vulnerable for a rough hand.

No, he refuses to inflict his lusts on you in your state—but that doesn’t mean he is bereft altogether.

You love for him to lick you in the evenings before slumber and in the early hours when you wake, lavishing laps through the split of you that paint slick and saliva in shades of shine. He toils away the hours with his head between your thighs, luring peak after peak from perennially puffed folds in recompense for how good you are being for him, how brave, laving at your cloying wetness to make you claw and twist at his mane.

Afterward, you summon him up with little tap-taps on your firm, rounded belly, gentle bleats of “Come here, kepus,” so that he’ll prop himself over you and withdraw his cock from his breeches. He strokes himself to completion like that, allowing you to search out the taste of yourself in his mouth as your fingertips dance over the head of his shaft, quick panting breaths while he growls and wrings himself dry. You twist contentedly in the warmth of the sheets, rubbing his spend into the flesh of your middle like a brand marking his ownership from inside out.

Later, you entice him under the covers with you, prodding him through the process of shucking off layers of clothing so that you can pet and kiss him and stroke little hands across his arms and legs and chest. You shuffle laboriously to your side between his legs, head nestled on his thigh so that you can suckle indolently at his shaft. It is self-soothing more than anything, a nursling calming herself to sleep with a rhythmic pull and release, pull and release. He cards through your hair as you work. When his fingers catch tangles, you emit a sound and vibration that speeds him to a torturous end, stones drained of seed and body aching with the unfulfilled desire to exert his physicality against yours.

Everything fades away—the grief and madness and anger surrounding the attempt on your life, the folly of his brother, the transgressions of the Hightower bitch—dimming in a thick haze of primitive urge and heady anticipation.

When you make Ser Lorent bar the door and demand Daemon remain by your side, refusing to listen to the many reasons why he cannot, in fact, lounge about with you all day, he realises how very near your time is.

“No!” you say sharply, hair fizzing and cheeks flushed and belly swaying as you push at his chest, a futile attempt at blocking his path if there ever was one. “Go back to bed, now.”

“Talītsos.” Holding firm to your hands despite your resistance, he smiles at your fussy huffing and sullen glare. He gathers you in his arms, smoothing his palm down your spine, inhaling the scent of you—honey and rose and milk, sweet, sweet, sweet—as you burrow into him. “I have men to train. Nephews to teach. Duties to fulfil.”

��No.” You whimper, cleaving to his frame like he is set to disappear if you should let go.

“Please stay with me? Please? ‘M frightened, I feel strange, I want you here, it’s too much—”

He cannot help but revel in your neediness, putting on the face of one who is reluctantly capitulant so that you’ll draw him back and strip him down and reward him with sweet kisses until, finally, you fall asleep cuddled into him, arms and legs trapping him to you with all the might you possess.

As the days roll by, you grow even more whinging and restive, wanting his finger to breach you to the first knuckle while you rock your pearl into his thumb, tongue twining with his as you wiggle to completion over and over again. You peck at fruit slices and venison smeared with jam and clotted cream—a bizarre combination, but how can he deride it when you are so delighted?—and onion soup thickened by the Vale’s sharpest goat’s cheese. Your skin grows hot like fire, and you take cool baths so often that you seem perpetually pruned, staring hood-eyed into the distance, trancelike.

He knows you are close. So too does the healer.

Her preparations have settled into the periphery of his routine, and his chambers have become the setting in which great overhaul has occurred. From motley instruments packed and stacked neatly to bowls and sheets and towels and a birthing stool, a whole host of equipment is collected in the corners of the room, ready to be brought out at the pivotal moment.

“Hm,” Ūlla says, frowning, hands pressing in increments along your middle. “Hm.”

“What?” he asks, knotted with tension and about ready to jump from his skin. You are silent, brows wrinkled and bottom lip jutting out, darting glances between him and the woman.

“Feel—” She directs him by the wrist to the top of your belly, digging into the solid mass of you, and below that, the unyielding rigidity of a diminutive skull. His child. “One not turned. Should face down, like other one.”

“Breech?” You tremble, face ashen. “One is breech?”

Fuck. Fuck. He’s heard the stories. The maesters have little success in bringing out babes that lay in the wrong position inside the womb, this he knows. If their meagre efforts to rotate the child fail, then the blade is used to tear apart the mother, assuredly killing her and only sometimes saving the infant. It is why his great-grandmother Alyssa perished. It is why his cousin Aemma perished.

It may be why you will perish.

“How was this not caught earlier?” He must force back the wild urge to backhand her, to steal you away and run, run so fast that time slides into reverse and he can undo the terrible, terrible mistake of getting you with child in the first place. “How were you not aware of this?”

“Daemon,” you whisper, clutching onto his arm. He strokes his palm across your cheek, holding you firm by the jaw, desperate.

“Both facing down last time I check, boy.” She doles out an unimpressed look his way, lip curled lightly in a sneer. Gentling her expression, she turns to you, nudging him out of the way with her hip—the fucking nerve—and taking your hands in hers. “Do not worry yet, Princess,” she says soothingly. “Very common. Babe might turn again before birth, or turn during birth. If not, I will fix. Do not be afraid, yes?”

He is caught between warring desires—to know exactly how she proposes to ‘fix’ this, to keep quiet and force all unease so far down that he no longer feels it, to slip away and climb atop Caraxes and release his terror to the wind. You make the choice for him, letting the matter lie with an unsteady nod of the head and an implicit dismissal toward the healer. He comes to lie beside you.

“You cannot leave me,” you tell him seriously, eyes wide and shining. “Not—not when it happens. You have to stay here. You promised.”

“I did.” Bearing down on the terror and kissing your hand, he scores the vow beneath your skin with his lips. “And it is a promise I intend to keep.”

Your pains begin at night. He wakes to the sound of your hissing voice in the dark, fingers digging into his arm and shaking, frenzied.

“Daemon. Daemon!”

“What?” His mind is slow and his mouth is dry and sour. He squints up, trying to discern the shape of you in so much black space, but all he can see is a vague silhouette backlit by the weak glow of the moon from the balcony.

“I—I think the babes are coming.”

At that, he startles to full consciousness. “What?” he asks, strident, feeling for your form. His hand catches on the mound of your belly, hard like stone, none of the give of flesh and blood.

“The babes are coming.” Your cadence is firm, surprisingly measured, and the words are enough to vault him from the bed and wrench the door open to bark orders at Marbrand. The urgency lifts the man from his own standing half-stupor. He takes off running, and Daemon steels himself for what is to come.

Soon enough, the hearth is lit, the candles are flickering, the midwives are bustling, and he can see you grimacing, hand clawed into the sheets as your womb clenches through the wave. He dimly senses the arrival of others, new voices added to the mix of low tones dispersed around the room, but you are all he cares for.

The sound of loud retching shakes him from his inertia. You hunch over the basin beside you, expelling the contents of your stomach—which he had been assured is a normal sign, that it indicates ‘things are progressing well’, whatever the fuck that means—and convulsing periodically.

He is down on his knees before you in a heartbeat. “What do you need?”

Your toes dig into the mattress and you gasp, wilting back into the pillows propping you up, and he can do nothing but watch. Even after a few beats of silence have passed, you do not acknowledge him. He tries again, calling your name.

Your lashes flutter, wet, and your gaze lifts to his. “I want to get up,” you say, coughing past the remnants of bile. A midwife deftly leans in and plucks the basin from the bed to carry it away. You struggle to sit upright. “I want—I want to walk.” You inhale sharply. “I need to walk.”

There is something strange and ominous about the way you speak. Fear wrings his heart. Please. Please let her survive this. He casts the plea wide, not quite a prayer, though he thinks he would be willing to kneel before any gods who might sustain you through this ordeal.

Daemon is already banding his arm behind your back by the time he is fully cognisant of your wish, supporting you as you squirm along the bed to the side of the frame. When he hoists you up by your forearms, you stumble and sway, blinking, mouth falling slack.

“Sit back down,” he says. You shake your head, leaning into his body and breathing, slow, deep exhales that abate once you get your bearings. “Listen to me. Sit.”

“No, Uncle. I need this.” You grasp onto him and take two or three shaky steps, quivering like a lamb new to the world, and he wraps his arm around your waist.

The pace is slow and disjointed as you move toward the balcony, then to the hearth in an aimless trajectory. It allows him to see the outline of your belly through your shift, less rounded and more slanted. When he cups the swell, he can feel how pronounced it has become at the base, how heavy and low it is. You bow into yourself when another wave hits, grunting as your fingertips hook into the meat of his flesh and your middle turns rigid under his touch. All he can do is remain solid while you rest your weight into him, murmuring meaningless nonsense under his breath and waving the midwives away impatiently.

You don’t need them. He is here.

“How long?” The healer bustles into his line of sight, scarcely a word of acknowledgement offered before she places hands over your belly to feel the changes for herself. Fucking shrew. He cannot help but be desperately grateful she is here. She snaps her fingers at him, brow quirked. “Well, boy? How long?”

“How long what?” he snarls back. “I’d answer if I knew what you were fucking talking about—”

“The pains woke me up,” you say through gritted teeth, staring through bleary eyes at the woman. You sag into him then, grip relaxing while you breathe a sigh of relief. “I do not know when they started.”

“Hm.” She nods, peering at the bed before looking back to you, ignoring him entirely. “No fluid yet?” She gestures to your nethers, making her meaning clear.

“No,” you say. Then, your face twists oddly and you glance down, pensive. You peer fleetingly at him, biting your lip and wrinkling your brow. “But—I kept… leaking… earlier. Before I went to sleep. I thought it was strange because I did not feel the need to make water.”

Daemon remembers that. He’d had to assist you from the bed to the privy numerous times, endure your frustrated tears as you’d changed your nightgown then been made to change it again after you wet yet another one, coddle and cosset you back to a state resembling calm. To think it might have been a sign—

You hesitate. “Could—could that have been—”

Ūlla smiles. Out of the corner of his eye, he spies Gerardys enter the room and make his way to the table of instruments. What the fuck is he doing here?

There is a reason he’d sought out another to take care of you during your labours. He has no intention of allowing the Citadel to get their grasping hands on you or the babes, no matter how amiable the man may be.

“Ah, very good,” The healer nods far more vigorously than before. She is squinting at him suspiciously, the old shrew. “Yes, yes, sometime it happen that way.” With a wave of her hand, she beckons over one of the nervously idling attendants and wordlessly points to the bed. “You go lie down,” she tells you, the midwife moving to your free side, “and I will feel how far you come.”

He wants to protest when the girl begins to tug you gently from his hold, leading you back toward the bed, but the maester is headed his way. He does not wish for you to hear him speak unkindly to a man you view as an ally.

“Why are you here?” he asks—quite rudely, at that—before the physician can greet him with a friendly smile and even cadence. The sight of his robes makes Daemon feel ill. He cannot separate this man from the memories, the knowledge that too many women in his family had died under the care of the Order, succumbing to the perils of childbed with nary a herb or poultice to halt the descent. “We didn’t send for you.”

Gerardys shifts uneasily. “The Lady Ūlla requested my presence, your Highness.”

Daemon glowers at her. “You requested his presence?”

Ūlla rolls her eyes. “He know how to heal,” she says slowly, as though he is simple-minded. The fucking audacity. “I will help Princess, and he will help twin. Two head better than one, yes? Even though he maester.” She practically spits the word out.

“What high praise, my Lady,”

“Not praise for you,” she mutters. “Do not kill anyone here, maybe I think better after this.”

“I do suppose we shall see.”

“If you could both cease bandying about the possibility of my wife’s death in your quarrel…” Daemon is certain that the gravel in his tone and the scowl on his face is threat enough. Saying the words aloud leaves him momentarily winded, robbed of breath in the face of such a possibility.

Please. Please.

“My apologies, Prince Daemon,” Gerardys says, head bobbing brusquely before moving away to tend to the supplies being unpacked by the midwives.

The healer has no such contrition, smacking him across the arm. The fucking impudence of this woman, by the gods. “Pah! Stop panicking. You stress her. Bad for her and babe.”

With that, she bumbles off to the bed where you sit half-reclined, curled on your side and grunting. One of the attendants dabs at your forehead and temple with a wet rag, tracks of sheen sliding down your skin that is either water or sweat. He cannot tell.

Daemon settles gingerly behind you and reaches out to touch your side, your belly a rock beneath his palm. A low, rattling moan preludes the release of tension, your entire body loose as the tightening dissipates.

“Good girl,” he says, adrift and helpless. What can he do? He cannot shoulder this burden for you.

You turn over, heaving with the effort, all but collapsing into the bedding when you are finally facing him. “It hurts.” Tears begin to track down your flushed, pretty cheeks, pain and pleasure so intertwined that the sight sends a confusing bolt of terror-want pulsing through his extremities. “Kepus—”

“I know.” He sweeps the hair back from your face. “You’re alright.” Perhaps if he says it enough, it will bleed into reality. He directs his next words to Ūlla, who has climbed onto the foot of the bed and situated herself between your legs, propping one up to feel inside you. “Get her something for the pain, will you!”

“Wait, wait.” Her brows furrow in concentration. You emit a soft noise of discomfort, nose scrunching, and the healer clucks. “Over half-way, Princess! Very good!”

She withdraws, wiping her hand on her skirt. Her fingers leave bloodstains over the fabric. Is that normal? he wonders, heart racing.

“How long you been feeling pain, Princess? Pain that continue?” The healer gestures in a vague circle around her middle, extending behind.

“My… back has been aching for nearly two days now,” you say, eyes growing wide. “I thought it was normal. It felt much like it has in recent weeks, anyway—”

“Hm. Early labour.” She drags herself from the mattress, tinkering about with glass vials on the table beside the bed. “Not strange to not know, first time. You rest for much of it. Lucky you! Some wait left, yet.”

You groan frustratedly at the announcement, head flopping onto his arm. Your skin is unbearably warm against his chest, even through the thin layer of his nightshirt.

The woman holds out a cup, filled part-way with a familiar milky liquid. “Milk of poppy and water elder,” she explains at his confuddled expression. “Small dose, very safe—help the pain.”

He cradles you with one arm while the other holds the cup to your lips, tipping the concoction slowly into your mouth. You shudder, whether at the flavour or the coolness, and when you are finished you fall into an uneasy doze.

What follows is minutes or hours or days of the same. Time is meaningless, an endless cycle of watching as you toss from side to side, knees pulled up and locked in position while you pant and groan, loosening when it passes, devoid of everything but this. You are consumed by it, lost to the elemental force of your own body’s innate undertaking, a creature beyond his understanding.

He is immensely proud. He is deathly afraid. There is not a place you could go to that he couldn’t follow until now.

A woman’s battlefield is the childbed. Daemon had thought it a trite saying before, but it’s proven here in the way that your face twists with the growing hurt, sheened with sweat and glowing like fire. He sees it in the way you ride through the agony, and surely there’s never been torture quite so harrowing as this, enough to make one vomit and shake with fever so vehement that you will surely crumble to ash in the heat of it, but no, you refuse to let it. You keen and whimper, but you do not break. Not you. Not his brave, sweet girl. He sees it in the silence, in the lulls between the storm, the way you focus inward and find refuge within your mind, steeling yourself for the next surge and the next and the next.

A weak light begins to filter in from the balcony, signalling the arrival of dawn. Your cries reach a new height, grating, primal, heralding a change he is not ready for, not yet. “It burns,” you say between bursts of uneven breath, startling him, suddenly struggling upright after so long spent recumbent. “Daemon—it—”

“Paghās, riñītsos.” Breathe, he says, bracing behind you so that you do not fall. Keep breathing and do not stop, he wills, stomach curdling sour and vision spotting.

The healer stands, solemn, midwives and maester already moving around her. “It is time, Princess. Do you want to go to the stool, or—”

“No!” You sob, twisting, wresting yourself onto your hands and knees before him. Hands slipping over his shirt, you grab for his neck and hold tight. “No, I can’t get up, it burns—”

“Push, your Highness!” one of the midwives says, and she is too close, too close, hand on your back and touching what isn’t hers to touch, but there is no recourse. You and he are awash in the sound of the word, “Push!” said over and over again in chorus. “Push!”

You strain, face puffing and distorting as you shriek, so loud that his ears ring and his head throbs, and your fingers are claws in his skin, digging, digging. He strokes over your back, over your sides, the fabric of your shift wet with the salty, earthy scent of warm fluids and sweat, clogging the air around him.

His gut writhes and his heart pounds and, beyond, a terrible hope wells like the glow before a sunrise, blooming gold across dark skies. “It’s coming, sweetling,” he whispers into your temple, or perhaps he laughs it, exhilarated, disbelieving. “You’re so close, you’re almost there.”

“Push, Princess!”

“Push, your Highness!”

You snarl between gritted teeth, perspiration winding rivulets down your face to traverse the valley of your breasts, disappearing below your gown. Daemon watches, overcome, the world fading from view as awe chokes in his throat and in his lungs.

She is magnificent.

“I see the babe!”

“I cannot do it!” You weep, snivelling into his chest as you collapse forward. He is reminded of the time you had thrown your book of Valyrian tales as a small girl, cheeks streaked with tears after too long spent tripping over the words in his mother tongue, a rare instance of stubbornness as you’d stamped your foot and yelled that very same thing. “It’s too much—I cannot—”

“Yes, you can,” he says, firm, forehead pressing to yours. Cupping your jaw with his hands, he tugs your line of sight up, waiting for you to meet his eyes. “You’re nearly there, my girl.” Your molten stare shifts from fearful mistrust to reluctant resolve, bolstered by his encouragement. “You can do this.”

You nod, frantic and afraid and confident, if not in yourself then in him, and he will lead you to this finish, he swears. “I can do this… I can do this…”

“Another push, Princess!”

“Again, your Highness!”

“You can,” he repeats, smiling, all teeth, gleaming and savage. “You’re strong, so very strong.”

His gaze bears into your lids as they flutter closed and crinkle. When you howl, belly rippling and body shaking, he thinks he can hear your dragon howl with you, screeching upon the wind, chilling.

“Good, Princess! Almost!”

Your head falls back, slick strands of silver hair slipping from your shoulders as more tears leak from your eyes. You shake, pink tongue showing, and the noise you emit is beyond hearing, beyond knowing.

It stops.

A babe wails.

You sob hysterically, just barely turning over before you crumple against him, arms already reaching out to the healer, the woman who cups his child in her wizened hands. “Well done, Princess!” she says.

“A son, your Highness!” Gerardys beams, peering over her shoulder. “A boy!”

A son. An heir.

The babe slots into the cradle of your arms like he was born for it, and of course he was. He is small, dusky and soft, shrivelled and squalling like the greatest of indignities has been visited upon him. Atop his head, a cap of bloody, matted silver-white hair, your hair, his hair.

My son.

“My boy.” Trembling and panting in short, jerky bursts, your fingertips judder delicately along the tiny swollen belly of your child. “I love him. I love him so much.”

His heart stops fully and restarts, a second birth, tears of his own welling and falling as he takes his first look upon the face of his babe. His son.

“He is perfection,” he murmurs, arms around you, palm coming to rest upon the head of his firstborn. He is ours.

As exhausted as you are, it is not over.

It is as though time stops and speeds by all at once, sitting with you and the babe. Slowly, his petal-soft skin shifts from purplish to pink, rosy against your own flesh. He is quieter now, emitting little grunts and gurgles, each sound drawing forth a hitch in your breath or a surprised huff of laughter. Beneath the gore and odd waxy coating is the promise of your features, from the shape of the eyes to the tilt of the rosebud mouth.

He looks so very like she did at this age, Daemon thinks wondrously, feeling the miraculous thud of a miniature heart beneath paper-thin ribs.

You whine tearily when a midwife steps forth to take his son from your arms, carrying him to the maester to be cleaned and assessed. Daemon hushes you, rocking lightly from side to side, and he thinks he’s repeating, “You did it, sweetling, you did it!” but he cannot be sure over the roaring in his ears.

The healer and the maester are conversing in low tones, the occasional heated syllable wafting from the corner to which they’ve withdrawn, but he cares little.

That is my boy over there, his mind echoes. My babe. My son. He had never seriously contemplated the likelihood of a male heir. It is not for the second son of a second son to hope for such a thing. And yet, you have done it.

“Move, boy!” Ūlla says then, urgent, shoving Daemon out from under you with all the haste of one in a desperate rush. You fall flat onto the mattress, hand flying out to grasp his with a soft yelp. The healer tugs up your shift, baring you to the room. “Any new pains, Princess?” she asks brusquely, pressing hard on your belly. You hiss, shaking your head and wriggling as if to dislodge her, but she will not be dissuaded from her course. She mutters a curse in some unknown tongue. “Babe still in breech.”

It is not over. He had nearly forgotten in the wash of activity and sound and emotion. Fuck. “What is to be done?” he asks, staring down at you.

With hair impossibly frizzed and skin slick and shining, the happiness in the creases by your eyes as you smile at your babe is a sight to behold. You don’t seem to notice anything but the infant across the room, and certainly have no part in the current conversation. The boy hasn’t even been alive an hour yet and he’s already stolen you from him. Daemon cannot find it in himself to mind.

“I try to turn babe,” the healer says gravely, hesitating. He tracks the anxious flap of her arms. “It… will hurt her. Might not work. But—breech too dangerous not to try.”

He swallows back the sickening sensation of dread, that pool of acridity that sits in the back of his throat as the words settle in his mind. He can hear the unasked question. To be made the beneficiary of such a choice… It is the stuff of nightmares. Your nightmares.

She is not yet beyond reach.

Daemon calls your name once, twice, three times. Finally, you take notice of him, blinking slow and befuddled at the interruption of your silent watchfulness. He squeezes your hand.

“They have to try and turn the other babe,” he says carefully. He doesn’t know what else to say. He doesn’t know what else to do. There’s nothing. He’s never felt so fucking powerless, and he despises it. “I’ll be here the entire time.” It feels hollow as soon as he speaks it into reality.

As he is shunted off the bed, his gut knots up tight at the fear that overtakes your expression. Your wearied form shifts half-heartedly in his direction until his vision is blocked by the midwives crowding you to assist in the procedure. He braces himself for the ensuing moments, fingers balling into fists as he stands by helplessly.

You scream.

Get out, he thinks wildly at the child inside you, entire body jerking with the urge to dart forward and throw these people off you. Get the fuck out, get out—

“Daemon!” You bawl, hiccoughing from the force of it, and it hasn’t even been that long but it’s enough.

“Stop!” Jostling the attendants out of the way and flinging the woman’s hands off you, he makes good on his wish, snatching your upper body in his arms and clutching you to his chest as you sob into his shirt. “Find some other way, because that’s not happening again!”

Her jaw clicks as she grinds her teeth—but, instead of responding with something rude or inflammatory, she offers naught but a curt nod. “Babe too low for turning, anyway,” she mutters in lieu of an apology, patting your leg sympathetically.

“What does that mean?” you ask between shuddering breaths, cowed and uneasy.

“If it progresses, your Highness,” Gerardys tentatively says, “we may have to—lay open the womb to retrieve the child—”

“No.” Your face grows wan, drawn with horror. “No, no, no no no no—”

Daemon snarls so viciously that the maester takes a step back, drawing the bundle in his arms closer to him. “Shut the fuck up. If you even think about bringing one of your fucking blades anywhere near my wife, I’ll slice you clean in two—”

“I said before, nobody using anything sharp,” Ūlla says, drowning out the sound of you expelling what little remains in your stomach over the side of the bed, splashing on his shoe. He grimaces in distaste. “I check, anyway. Babe has both leg up, good for breech birth. We use stool. May work.”

“My Lady,” Gerardys says, “we’ve discussed this! Breech babes rarely ever exit the womb naturally—”

“This one twin, stupid.” She sneers. “Womb already open. Stool will let babe move down itself. Good idea.”

“You will not be able to see the movements of the canal in such a position—”

“There will be no movement if she lay flat, stupid man! Sit on stool is best.”

“Will you both stop fucking arguing—”

“What in the Seven hells is going on here?”

Rhaenyra’s appearance coincides with a loud slamming of the door, frightening the squabbling pair into muteness. Her hair is mussed and she is adorned in a dressing gown and slippers, looking for all the world as though she has thrown on the nearest coverings and rushed to your rooms. Shock parts her mouth as she takes in the scene. “My sister’s in—and one of the babes is—and you didn’t think to wake me?”

“Rhaenyra.” Your breath hitches, lower lip quivering.

The sound of your cries spurs her into action. She all but flies across the room, crawling onto the bed on your other side so that she can take your hand and kiss your crown, releasing meaningless noises at a low, steady cadence, hushing you into a somewhat composed state.

“The second babe,” you say, “it—it’s stuck.”

“You’re going to be just fine, darling.” Smoothing your hair behind your shoulder, she turns to the general assemblage of attendants. “And? What is to be done about it?”

When the maester opens his mouth again, Daemon stares daggers at him. “If you value your tongue, you’ll keep quiet.”

Ūlla ignores the outburst entirely. “Give,” she says, already moving to take his boy—his son—from the physician. Leaning forward, she tugs the ties of your shift loose and pushes the fabric to the side to bare your breast.

You squawk, abruptly falling quiet when the babe is placed on your chest. Daemon watches, rapt, as his son whines, head twisting and little lips closing over your nipple, unerringly seeking out the sustenance you have made for him.

“Oh!” You gasp, not quite a sound of pain, peering down with startlement as the boy’s suckles deepen, small fist flexing and unflexing against your skin.

“Good boy,” the healer murmurs, straightening up with a suspicious shine in her eye. He knew she fucking cared. She clears her throat. “It has been longer than I like. Feeding should begin pain again. Princess must walk to drop babe down, and then to stool. We deliver breech… and pray.”

He sees the expression on her face and turns away. He cannot—will not—allow himself to indulge in thoughts of doom.

“He is lovely,” Rhaenyra whispers as she examines him from beside you. You beam.

When the boy stills, one of the midwives unlatches him from you, conveying him small and sleeping to the cradle. Eyes welling with tears, a new resolve sets the line of your jaw as you retie the fastenings of your shift and lean on him to pull yourself upright.

Then, you cry out. He looks down. His stomach turns at the sight of the spiralled cord drawn and lodged firmly under your knee, disappearing inside you.

By the gods, he thinks with a fresh sense of horror, the deed hasn’t even been done to completion and she’s being forced up.

“Careful!” the woman says, frantic, dragging you to stand upon the stone floor. “You must walk, Princess. Bring babe down.”

You sag. Daemon has no choice but to take you under the arm to keep your legs under you. Rhaenyra takes your other side, lips pressed together to maintain composure. He wonders if she’s as caught in the growing sense of wrongness as he is.

“Help me,” you mumble, taking wobbly steps that rely more on the shared weight of your supporters than your own. “Walk with me—”

Your face contorts in a rictus of discomfort, but still you persist, stumbling doggedly on feet ill-prepared for the task of movement. He and his elder niece do as best as possible to prop you up, offering what paltry praise can be given in such a case as this. Daemon cannot help but consider the scene as it must look to an outsider. A girl being hauled about half-conscious, sweating and bloodied with viscera swinging between her legs. A bizarre, sickening spectacle. It’s fucking cruelty.

Then, you stop, lips parting in a silent plea. His blood chills in his veins at the ripple along the flesh of your belly, the sure tightening that precedes fresh danger. Your hands flutter toward your middle, or perhaps to the gaping wound that his children have scored open, his seed, his fault—

“Take her to stool. Now!” Ūlla says, snapping her fingers and gesturing to spur the attendants to action. “More cloth! More water!”

Daemon directs you to the chair, almost carrying you bodily. Such is the limpness of your frame against his that he fears this next enterprise will unmake you. Rhaenyra tugs up your night-rail as he lowers you down, twisting the drape of it and tucking it below your thigh. You loll, moaning, wordless, and he crowds up behind you to hold you firm.

“Sit up!” He shakes your arms for good measure. The healer gets to her knees before you, hand vanishing within you to check the babe. “It’s nearly over. Just one more and you can rest.”

“‘M tired,” you say, the words slurring into a weak groan. Your head bows, neck straining, lost to the function of muscles you can no longer control yourself. “So—so tired.” Your teeth chatter, sweat traversing down your face.

“Push, Princess!” the woman says, midwives bracing your legs wide. You yell, putting what strength you have left into fulfilling the command, but your strength begins to waver. Ūlla smacks your knee. “More than that!”

When you slump exhaustedly, whining through the end of the contraction, she tuts, expression shadowed. The midwives sniffle. His heart stutters.

“With the next wave, you need to push harder, sister,” Rhaenyra says. “As hard as you can!”

Whining into her shoulder, you repeat, “I’m so tired.”

Gerardys looks on with doleful eyes. “Lina… prepare the blade.” An attendant backs away slowly, head bowed. You begin to cry, near insensate.

No. You will not meet your mother’s fate. Daemon refuses. You must force this child from you, for the alternative is unthinkable.

Bending low to speak directly into your ear, he must project the words over the rasping wail that escapes you, your whole body clenching. “You can sleep when the babe is out. But you need to do as you are told now. Do you hear me?”

The veins pop in your temple as you exert your energy, quaking hard enough that the stool wobbles on uneven ground. Your grip is white-knuckled on the midwife beside you. She wrests her hand from you, clutching her arm to her chest.

Daemon crouches down to take her place. You wrap your free arm around his neck, biting down into the meat of his shoulder and screaming into his shirt.

“There we go, Princess!”

“The babe is coming, your Highness!”

You weep. “I think I will die. I think I will die, oh, gods—”

“No! Look at me!” Daemon snatches your chin in his grasp, leaning back to gaze directly at you. Your focus is hazy, shifting in and out of awareness. “I love you,” he says, the depth of it choking in the back of his throat. “I need you. I need my wife. Our children will need their mother. You’ve done it once. You can do it again.”

You bellow, the volume loud enough to occlude his hearing. He thinks he’s yelling with you, but he cannot tell through the ringing in his ears.

“Leg both out! Almost there!”

Rhaenyra laughs, rubbing your back as she peers between your legs. “She’s nearly here, darling!”

“It—it’s a girl?” You pant, twitching as the wave subsides. “A daughter?”

He looks down. Beneath the blood and birthing matter and what he can only assume is shit, he sees the tiny form of his second child. He cannot look away. “She is,” he says, eyes burning. A daughter. “Two legs, ten toes, and a distinct lack of cock.”

When you smile, it is like staring into the face of the Mother herself. If there is anyone, anything, who might persuade him that such a being existed, it is you, here and now. Your curls are thoroughly frazzled and stringy with perspiration, your lips chapped and flaking, your eyes wet and ringed with the circles of one who is far past the point of fatigue—and yet, inexplicably, he doesn’t think you’ve ever been more beautiful, more worthy of the honour of the name Targaryen.

You are a warrior, pushed beyond pain into something greater, something that the songs and stories of Old Valyria could never hope to capture in lyric or verse.

“Pōnte lua arrīs iksā,” he says, cutting through the noise from the depths of your spirit, from your sister, from the woman and the midwives and the maester. Show them what you are.

“By the gods. A breech birth—this is unheard of—”

“Under shoulder now! Big, big push, Princess!”

“Perzys iksā.” You are fire. Daemon can see his reflection in your lilac eyes, ardent, fanatical. “Jaqiarzir iksā.” You are glory.

He doesn’t know if you can even hear him, but your gaze does not leave his, unwavering, intensely focused. Your lashes clump and your lids flicker from the sweat that slides down your forehead, your mouth open and screaming. Still, you stare staunch and resolute at him, the axis upon which your entire world spins. He himself cannot hear anything other than his own beating heart, the rest silent and immaterial.

“Head—the head, darling—”

“Vīlībāzme ērininna, ñuhus prūmȳs,” he says, breath shivering expectantly from his lungs, overcome. You will win this battle, my heart. Never has he been surer of the truth of his own words.

With a final, echoing shout, the babe falls away into the hands of the healer. You cave into him, too drained to shed a tear this time, and he is not ashamed to admit that his own fall instead when the robust bleating of his second-born—his daughter—reaches his ears.

A son and a daughter. One of each.

“Oh, praise the Mother!”

The attendants babble amongst themselves in mingled relief and rapture, no doubt thankful to have witnessed a happy conclusion to the eve’s proceedings.

This time, the healer passes the child to Daemon, tucking her carefully into the crook of his arm. His daughter wiggles and wails furiously, face screwed up in the angriest expression he has ever seen on one so young.

She will be trouble, he muses through his delirium, ogling her with captivated eyes. Brand new to the world and already creating strife.

Like her brother, her head is adorned with thick silver-white hair. Although she is covered in a multitude of substances he doesn’t care to name, she may just be the bonniest girl he has ever seen.

It is as though you have read his mind.

“Look at her,” you say, tracing the whisper-fine lashes that sprout from her lids. “She is a beauty, is she not? Oh, I love her.” The sensation of touch on her skin seems to set off a fresh wave of outrage. You giggle at the tiny fists that shake aimlessly about, ready to fight the universe itself. “You are the loudest creature I have ever met!” Catching a flying wrist, you press a kiss to her fingers, heedless of the muck still coating her.

He knows not where to look. To his daughter, clasped in his hold; to his son, asleep though stirring in the cradle; or to you, wearied and victorious and alive, you have lived, you are here.

“I love you,” he says to you helplessly, adoringly, an echo of words already spoken but ones that must be said again. “I love you.”

You beam, iridescent in the light, radiant with exhilaration and utterly, staggeringly divine. “I love you, too.”

Where the birth of his children seemed to take a millennia, the aftermath is relatively straightforward.

After nursing his daughter at your other breast, you are kept upon the stool until the afterbirth has come away. It’s thoroughly disgusting process that may well have put him off meat for at least a sennight. He can cope with viscera when it’s spilling from the guts of an enemy combatant, but it is certainly unsettling at the least when it has spilled from you, his sweet little niece.

My niece, my wife, mother to my heirs. My son and daughter.

You cry a little as the tissue exits from you—two of them, one for each babe, or so he is told by the healer rubbing firmly at your belly as she coaches you through these final steps—but the pain seems fleeting enough by the speed in which your tears depart.

Though he wants nothing else than to sit and watch his brand-new children, he had made a promise to see you through the entirety of this ordeal. Thus, it is with as good a cheer as he can muster that he keeps you from tipping over while the healer and the maester check you over and an attendant begins to sponge the toil from your skin.

“I trust you’ll not need a more concrete reminder that the blade is to stay the fuck out of the birthing chamber,” he hisses at Gerardys. It is the only thing he feels he can say with you still present.

Despite his attempt at restraint, the vitriol does not appear to escape the physician. The Maester pales, nodding and muttering some meaningless words of contrition. Daemon doesn’t care to listen.

You pay no mind as he helps strip you of your shift, discarding the ruined thing and positioning you obligingly so that the servant may access all the parts of you that are necessary to cleanse you of the mess of your labours. She pays close attention to the flesh between your legs. By the time the deed is done, the bowl is filled with water pinked by your blood. You are then bound with thick cloth over your waist and groin, no doubt to soak up the bleeding has surely commenced by now.

After you are garbed in a clean night-rail and he in his own unsoiled evening wear, Daemon manoeuvres you slowly to the freshly made bed, easing you gently beneath the blankets.

Rhaenyra brings forth one of the babes, depositing the warmly wrapped bundle in your arms. “The girl,” she murmurs by way of explanation, settling beside you and pulling your hair back.

One of the remaining midwives—the majority having filed out after packing as much of the equipment away as was feasible—passes his son to him. Daemon leans forward, touching his lips to the boy’s forehead and inhaling the velvety scent of new life upon his fair crown. His breath hitching, he brings the child back down to rest beside his sister on your lap, two moonshine miracles side by side.

“Look at them, kepus,” you whisper, spellbound. “Look at what we made.”

He is. The mist of devotion muddles his view of anything but the two infinitesimal beings braced between you and him, the soft features of infancy already carrying hints of their procreators.

They must be the only flawless creatures in all of existence, he thinks, utterly paralysed by the sentiment clogging his lungs and coursing in his veins, not love but something deeper, darker, ancient and elemental. For he knows that, should they ask, he would give his son and daughter worlds upon worlds, would slay their enemies and burn the bodies at their feet in lavish tribute to their very lives.

“I see them,” he says, choking on the strength of his own emotion.

“What will you call them?” Rhaenyra asks.

You look to him, grinning, a question in your eyes. He dips his head, a silent agreement.

“This is Rhaenar,” you say, fingers tracing along his son’s cheek. “And this”—your hand curves around his daughter’s tiny skull—“is Aelys.”

Behind his ribs, his heart twists and burns, roaring with the rectitude of your declaration, the names carried in his heart from weeks and months of secretive conversation waiting to be given to their rightful owners.

Rhaenar and Aelys. Firstborn heirs of Daemon of House Targaryen.

He tries out their names himself, speaking them into existence, carving them into the pages of history as the Rogue Prince’s greatest of triumphs. “Rhaenar and Aelys.”

Read it on AO3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/44058132/chapters/116946517

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