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The king is wrathful, they say.
The King is wrathful, and lecherous, and has children upon a thousand different men and women. The king has brothers and sisters he rescued from imprisonment inside their father, and then by fate they divided all that was and is betwixt them. The sons, in any case.
The queen is vengeful. And Jealous. The most beauteous of her sisters and yet, unable to keep her man from wandering. The Goddess of marriage, and women, and yet scorned by the first and scorning the second. They say she murders. She torments.
Any who look upon her husband with lust, who know him carnally she breaks with her wrathful hands and in that way, she and her husband are one. After all, he knows what she does to his paramours and yet… he still strays.
They are two sides of the same coin.
This is what they don’t say.
Daenerys is scared.
She is young, and scared, and alone.
Her brothers are dead, her father mad. Her mother secreted her away at her birth, disguised by a storm and swaddled a stone in her stead. She was raised not so much by a person, but a place.
In Essos, far from her father’s view she grew. More than that though, she saw. Daenerys saw that the foibles of her father were not limited to those of Titan blood, she saw that those with power were corrupted by it and swore that she would help those they crushed beneath their heels.
Starting with her kindred.
She learned.
She returned.
And now she stood on the side of the road, clutching the potion Missandei had sourced for her, the brew which promised to force her father to give back all those he had stolen from life, stored in his gullet to tide his irrational fears. How many before her, how many after? The Mad King, they call him. The mad dragon.
She has heard of the things he does to those too large to eat, roasting women and babies of lesser blood over open fires, listens to their screams then takes her mother as the fat from the body bubbles. She clutches the flask once more, feeling its unnatural heat simmer away, barely contained within the flask.
We shall see who is the dragon, father.
Sansa comes back into the world with nary a sound. Her younger sister Arya comes screaming, she knows- she’s still screaming- and her brother (cousin) Jon grumbles in a way too much like her father. Sansa had been there longer, had learned that screaming and weeping did no good. Her manners were one of the few things she had that the mad king could not take, and one of the few things the others trapped with her could be given.
Covered in bile with Margaery Tyrell sitting on her hair, she looks up and thinks, oh.
Jaime Lannister slashes the throat of a gagging titan still covered in bile behind her but for now a beautiful woman with eyes like freedom and hair like moonlight looks down at her and holds out her hand and--- ----oh.
So this is what it was to be alive.
She takes her hand.
After it is all said and done, after the old guard has been smote, and the wheel crushed, Daenerys discovers she is not the last of the Targaryens. She has a nephew, two, Jon and Aegon, sons of the brother she never knew. She surveys them for a long moment-the demands that she take the throne, now, before another may come along dull to her ears- before finally plucking three jewels from the recess of the Mad King’s Crown. A Sapphire for the heavens, a Turquoise for the sea and a Ruby for the underworld.
“We must remember the wrongs of our forefathers.” She declared, powerful voice ringing out across the dark of the mad King’s palace, shedding new light where it struck.
“We must remember what power does in the wrong hands, and ensure that it never again can be abused in this way.” She offered the helmet to Jon.
“Choose your realm, brother.”
In the end she draws last, the deep blue sapphire staring up at her; the glimmer of the dying flame reflecting in its perfectly polished edges as Illyrio moves forward to present them with their gifts, weapons three in the style of their new realms.
They still declare her King.
Daenerys is a conqueror, a visionary, a leader, but her approach to ruling has always been the hard line and if she wishes to be better than her father she must not follow his ways. She knows, from the first moment their fingers touch that Sansa is special- it is mere days before she realises she is a Queen.
Sansa knows her people. Sansa knows how to get them to cooperate, how to balance the factions and their egos while keeping their respect. There is some innate quality in the girl who went into the belly of the beast armed with only her courtesies and came out leading the pack. Sansa understands which situations require motivation, and which require demonstration. She is a steel fist in a silk glove, and the people love her for it. Not just the others of royal blood, not just her fellow kings, but the smallfolk. The nymphs and the dryads and the satyrs and centaurs- they all flock to Sansa for aid. Sansa knows which factions require ambrosia, and which require human food. She knows traditional nourishment is an insult to the empusae, but a direction to the best human village and a strict reminder of mortality always successful. She knows and each childs favourite colour, and how to use each able body to its best fulfilment. Sansa is as asset Daenerys never expected, but one she eagerly recruits.
Working in such close quarters, Daenerys expected to grow familiar with the beautiful maiden- she hadn’t expected to fall in love with her. It’s the soft light of morning on her glimmering hair, the brush of hands when reading a scroll over her shoulder, the sweep of her chiton on stone as she comes to share the latest success story. It’s the way she cares for her people- not simply for the sake of the kingdom but in and of themselves and Daenerys knows; knows that it will always be Sansa. It has always been Sansa.
She might have wed Drogo in her quest for the throne, might have lost him in the battles that followed and mourned, but it had never felt like this. They share bread together and Sansa asks softly, sweetly, what it is to be wed. She had been betrothed to Joffrey long ago, and the wedding draws ever nearer. Daenerys tells her all she can, shares secrets with her sweet companion late into the night in hushed tones under shared blankets. Sansa has stars in her eyes and all the while Dany suffers so sweetly.
She has never wanted so badly before, not even her throne, and yet she stays. She wants Sansa, yes, but more she wants Sansa happy.
She will let her go.
Sansa disappears on the eve of her wedding, and reappears weeks later to declare a death. She is bloody, and there is a new fierceness to her that both dazzles and worries Daenerys.
She retreats.
Daenerys grows restless with worry, equal parts fierce and despondent, cycling from snapping at minor troubles to the listless wasting of her hours. The fire within her stokes with every horrid thought, every troubling possibility. Some beast within whines pitifully, dangerously bereft of the comfort of home. And that’s what Sansa was, wasn’t it? That warm feeling in her breast whenever she neared, even something as mundane as sorting correspondence grew soft and sweet with her presence.
And then, slowly, Sansa returned. She was there to break her morning fast, she was there to negotiate between the satyrs and the naiads, she was there to share a warm smile with Brienne, to hug Jon tight when he made one of his infrequent trips to Olympus, to scold Arya with a secret, wry smile when she trekked mud and shrubbery in through the throne room and all the while something stoked that fire within Daenerys, burning ever hotter.
The feelings warred within for months; worry for Sansa; thankfulness for her return; guilt for her relief at the loss of what her companion so desperately desired and that selfish, all encompassing yearning. One day, the chaos within becomes too much.
Daenerys keens once, and lets go.
Sansa meets Joffrey for the first time the day before they are to be wed. He is beautiful, she thinks, and his golden hair draws her in with a sense of familiarity she can’t quite place. All she’s ever sought is wedded bliss, has known deep in her soul that there is her calling, the way love calls to Margaery and the forest to Arya. Sansa looks upon this boy and sees the finality of herself; sees all that she wishes for.
She looks upon him, and sees a King.
And if she wishes his hands were smaller, and rough with battle? If she wishes his hair swirled around him in a cloud of silver, his eyes pierced her soul with purple fire? Well, those were just the wishes of a silly little girl. She would be a woman, soon. It was time to give up childish things. Mother always said marriage was about compromise, and this was to be her first.
And so, when he takes her hand ever so gentlemanly and asks to accompany her on a midnight walk, she agrees.
Joffrey looks upon the sleeping Sansa, nodded off in a clearing, using a log for a pillow and dreaming happily of a wedding where a shadowed figure with moonlight hair awaits her at the end of an aisle, smiling. He looks upon her peaceful mein, and her radiant features, and he yearns to break.
He can always find another bride.
Sansa awakens to pain. She gasps at the arrow lodged in her side and lashes out, eyes wide in terror. Her beautiful groom still looks handsome with her blood dripping down his face, but his eyes hold no fires. They are as cold and dead and mad as the depths of Tartarus.
He draws back his bow and aims once again.
She awakens again to paws and not feet, to fur and claws and teeth stained with the taste of tainted blood. He did not deserve her courtesies. She does not regret, but she cannot return. She will never be that girl again. She has learned that while marraige calls to her, something else calls too.
She stays that way for days, crying and howling and growling as a great storm builds, finally breaking to empty what seems like the entire ocean down through the canopy of the forest, cleansing everything it touches. Lighting flashes against the damp leaves and Sansa feels safe for the first time since she woke to the scent of iron.
She washes her face with human hands.
Their true names cannot be spoken by mortal tongue and so, as they grow in reputation so to do they develop new names, new titles. Daenerys is, of course, ever first.
They cannot comprehend Daenerys but they hear ‘storm born’ and ‘sky’ and name her- him, for it seems too that the human mind cannot fathom a woman to be so powerful, and imagine a God in her place- Zeus. Jon becomes known as Haides, for the realms he guides and the black cloak he dons, and Aegon Poseidon for his quaking temper.
The humans tell tales of them. Of how the King of the Heavens broke the wheel and took the most beauteous of the mad king’s victims as his bride. Some of them are even true. They say the Queen refused to wed, had been hurt and broken in her naivety following her second birth and that she had hurt and broken in turn. Those that harmed her would never harm another and in that way they named her protector of women, slayer of monster. Hera, protectress.
They say the Queen scorned all talk of marriage, and that the King flew into her room in the shape of a dragon bedraggled by a raging storm. They say the queen took it upon herself to nurse the small creature back to health, tenderly stoked a fire for its nest. They say she took the creature in her lap and stroked the soft, silver scales upon its forehead. They say the dragon closed its eyes like a great cat and purred. They say the dragon turned back into a king and kissed her, then and there.
Hera; to be chosen.
They are almost right.
It is the beat of wolf paws that draws the dragon. It is wolf fur that warms the dragon. It is a wolfs tongue that laps away tears from dragon eyes. It is a wolves heartbeat that lulls the dragon back to sleep. In the morning, they wake, hair hearts and hands entangled. Daenerys is a conqueror, but Sansa is her saviour.
They wed as the sun sets.
"I'm sorry?"
"I told Europa to tell her father the babe that quickens in her womb is the child of Zeus. They'd hardly harm the lover and child of the mighty King of Gods now, would they?"
Daenerys smiled, pulling her wife in for a languid kiss.
"My beautiful Queen, protectress of women." Sansa smiled against her lips, eyes closing in pleasure.
"And how are you going to explain the peacocks?"