Desires Be Damned • Aemond Targaryen

Chapter Eighteen

Dyaena

"Do you love him?"

Her eyes widened and snapped to his, and she knew from the look on his face that there was only a chance as thin as the first frost of winter that she could play the fool. Someone didn't ask with that much grave sincerity when the relationship between two people was plainly platonic.

Did she love Aemond?

Perhaps...

At the very least, she wanted him, lusted him, craved him, and that she had love for him, but was she in love with him? How could she possibly know where he laid her in heart for certain when their recent time together had been so brief? Did she even know what love was supposed to feel like?

All her life, she had read of fairytale princes and princesses falling in love and living happily ever after, no further obstacles or feuds or bad blood between the families to be had as they rode off into the sunset after a grand wedding. Their loves were pure. Their stories were perfect. Their endings wrapped up with a neat little bow that didn't leave anything uncertain, for the good always triumphed over the evil without room to consider that not everything, and everyone, was as black and white as made out to be. But, they were also fiction, a product of someone's imagination that was brought into fantastical fruition with will and ink and parchment. So what exactly was love when it wasn't being used as the driving force for two characters to conquer all in a child's storybook?

Was it supposed to be easy, something natural that falls perfectly into place within one's present? Or was it supposed to be a disruptor, to make everything else seem much less significant as it made one sick with need to be with the object of their desires?

Could it be a source of strength, or one's greatest weakness?

Did it make one blind to the other's faults, or was it acceptance for who they were, flaws and all?

Was it an addictive high, or the deepest agony?

Or was it all those things at once, a frustrating entanglement of complications and bliss, a mixture of heaven and hell eternally interluding and overlapping the other?

Perhaps...

When she opened her mouth to give him an answer, nothing but a hitched breath sounded from her throat as her dry tongue failed to form words, for she had none. A naive part of her wanted to say yes, and logic begged her to say no, but the only truth she was certain of was that she was uncertain. Everything felt right between her and Aemond, but it was outside forces that constantly pulled them apart and screamed that it was wrong, that it could never be when duty and loyalty were paramount.

After a vain attempt to swallow, she forced her mouth to conjure something, anything to get her twin to look away. "I... it doesn't matter."

"Yes, it does." Jace at last tore his piercing stare from her and averted his attention to the wall in front of him before sighing and bowing his head. "Because you do."

"Jace, I-"

"You've always had, more than you should. It's just now that we're older, your favor for him has grown into something much more dangerous, and has turned you into a fool. He sees you as a conquest, Dyaena, a means of revenge towards our family."

She closed her slack jaw and struggled to swallow once more as she pulled her knees tighter to her chest, her cramps maintaining their steady pattern like waves crashing and receding on a shore.