Kingdom of One

Daenerys

Daenerys sat with her back against the hard, stone wall, legs tucked up to her chest. Her dirty, disheveled hair hung limply, her eyes sunken into her skull gazed at the floor, unfocused and blurry with tears.

Across from her was Jon's tomb, hewn from dragonglass. The stone that had brought them together. Five days ago, she had brought his body to Dragonstone to give him a proper Targaryen burial, and found herself unable to leave. For a fortnight now, grief had wrapped its arms around her chest, embracing her, entrapping her, suffocating her. Jon was gone. Forever. Nothing she could ever say or do would change that fact. The only man she had loved nearly  as much as she had her moon and stars, was gone. Another wave of agony swept through her whole body, causing everything in her to seize as she silently screamed into the empty void in her heart. Her life held nothing. Never again would she be able to hug him, kiss him, seek his comfort or his counsel.

Grief was an evil, relentless bastard. All her life it had tormented her. First her home had been taken from her, then her husband and child, then her khalasar, her dragons, her closest friend, and now her lover. Grief had given her only brief moments of respite since it first started its destructive rampage in her life.

Even those moments it had used for its own malevolent purposes though. The joy in those moments of happiness and peace had just made their end so much more agonizing. But this. This was the hardest of them all.

Thirteen days ago, she had held in her hands everything she had dreamt of all her life: the Seven Kingdoms, the Targaryen name returned to the Iron Throne, and someone who loved her as much as she loved them.

And yet.

Jon had betrayed her. She thought she could trust him to stand by her side, to understand her, to rule alongside her. But in that moment, that one moment when she had looked into his eyes, she had known.

When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die.

She knew what needed to be done to survive, to win, she had been doing it her whole life. Jon had never had to make the decisions and sacrifices she had. He had not been raised a Targaryen, hadn't clung to the promise of the Throne like she had all her life. He would have never understood her decision to burn the Dothraki Khals, nor to crucify the Grand Masters of Meereen for their atrocities. She had time and time again done what needed to be done in order to maintain her power.

 It was her birthright. She had been born destined for the Iron Throne. Everything she had done, everything she had given up, she did so that she could make things different for those without power, to break the wheel. She had wanted change. But in order to enact change, one must have power and must know how to hold on to it. Jon hadn't understood that. His betrayal bit at her again, triggering another wave of grief at his loss. If he had just trusted her, had even tried to understand, she could have let him live, let him stay by her side forever.

She had wanted so badly to be enough for him. She had tried to reassure him, to show him her vision for the Seven Kingdoms. But he hadn't understood...and now he never would.

Again, grief struck her, this time driving the blow so deep into her stomach that she gasped and choked. She let a wail escape her, the emptiness threatening to overwhelm her, take her beneath its wave and drown her. She sat there for a while longer, waiting for the pain to take its toll so that numbness could follow.

It always did. In those brief times of respite, she sat dazed and shell-shocked, her body refusing to feel, her mind refusing to think. For those few hours, she paced the abandoned halls of Dragonstone, neither seeing the dragon heads etched into the walls, nor hearing the waves crashing on the rocks below the abandoned fortress.