Chapter:
Cowboys and Carnivores
Part One of Eight
Summary: Sent packing to live with her estranged grandfather and grandmother during the summer after getting into one too many fist fights, Haraella Targaryen tries desperately to adapt to countryside life, where the days are long, the sun is hot, and her cousin and uncle, Jon and Daeron, ride shirtless on horseback. There's definitely something not quite right about the Valyrian Ranch, and she's going to get to the bottom of it. Jon/Haraella/Daeron. Werewolf AU.
Male!Daenerys & Jon & Haraella
I
Haraella Targaryen had a black eye for the third time that year. A black eye, a split lip, and a pretty set of skinned knuckles that looked like a cluster of ruby rings in the right type of low lighting.
It was only June.
She stretched her hands in her lap where they laid hidden in the shadows of the table, felt the cuts pull tight over bone, felt the sting of fresh wounds not yet scabbed over, and the bite of it all kept her grounded.
Pain was present.
Pain was now.
Haraella could use that to focus.
Amusingly, Lily Evans, her mother, appeared ten-times more exhausted than herself sitting opposite her at the kitchen island, donned in her terrycloth nightgown, red-hair still mussed from a hasty awakening from the banging at their townhouse's door at three in the morning.
"I can't keep doing this, Harry. You can't keep doing this."
But she could keep doing this.
She had kept doing this.
Haraella didn't mean to, she never meant to do much of anything at all, and yet-… And yet, sometimes, seldom, she thought this was all she was ever good for.
A tired mother and a startling array of bruises and cuts.
No matter how hard she tried to keep her head out of trouble, and Haraella did truly try very hard to, she always found herself back here, back to this, back to being wrangled home in the back of a police car in the early hours of twilight, the coppers banging on her mother's door, a haggard Lily spotting Harry sandwiched between the blue badges, a stern and tired lost something, Lily?
Lily.
Not Miss Evans anymore: Lily.
It was never a good sign when the police were on a first name basis with your tired-sick mother.
"I don't know what's gotten into you."
That was the thing, Haraella thought. Nothing had gotten in, but everything was getting out.
Out of control.
Out of order.
Out of service.
It started slowly, gradually, a creeping decent that left her legs shaky and her mind numb and her finger trigger happy.
She was eleven when the first fight happened. She was at school, the first of seven she had been kicked out of, and some year twelve who looked like a mountain troll had been bullying some poor buck-toothed girl in the bathroom stall and-
And Haraella earned her first black eye from the bout.
Her first detention too.
Then there was the assistant teacher, a Mr Quirrell, who had cornered her in the supply cupboard, and the closest thing to hand had been a stapler, a stapler that she had reached for and raised, and brought down on his head like a whip and-
That had been her first expulsion.
Lily had been on her side that time, had reported the school to the governmental boards, had strapped her into the passenger seat of their Ford after blowing up at the headmaster, rubbed a soothing hand on her shoulder, and told her everything was going to be alright.
It hadn't.
It had only gotten worse from there.
Dogs and convicts, gangs and guns, every underbelly delinquent of London seemed out for her blood, and Haraella…
Haraella proved swift on her feet, and swifter yet to throw a punch. Nevertheless, she was just never quite fast enough to run out from under the reach of the long arm of the law when they finally did turn up on the scene.
While other teens were dealing with pimples and hormones, Haraella was dealing with an insatiable…
Temper?
Anger?
Hunger?
She didn't really know what to call it, pretty prose weren't exactly her thing, she only knew it was getting worse. Like her skin didn't fit her bones anymore, like her teeth had become too sharp for her mouth, like her claws were longer than her fingers, there was a sense of growing too far out of what she was made from.
A house plant with her roots creeping out the pot, Haraella was a girl who was too much in a place too little.
"If you keep going down this path, you're going to end up in jail. Is that what you want?"
Want?
No.
Heavens no.
But it was what she got. Anger and a bad attitude in a leather jacket, and something growing in her chest that growled.
"It didn't end too badly for Uncle Sirius."
It was meant as a joke, but her mother didn't appreciate the quip, clearly, by her fierce answering scowl.
"I don't know what to do with you anymore."
Lily's lacklustre words formed glass in Haraella's throat, and she had to swallow through the cracks in the reflection. The hands in her lap tense, tighten, constrict, as does the breath in her lungs. Everything burned, everything was now.
She felt the wounds on her hands begin to bleed anew, and Haraella idly wondered if they were going to stain her jeans.
Most probably.
She hoped they would.
"Then don't fuckin' do anything."
Haraella knew it was bad when her mother didn't reprimand her for the language, when she let the biting tone pass, when she, instead, slumped in her chair, thirty looking fifty, and ran a tired hand down her face.
"You promised me you would try harder this time. You promised-"
"The man pulled a bloody knife on me! What was I supposed to do? Sit there and say sorry sir, please sir, can you not stab me to death in some dingy hole in the wall for my mother dearest would be very cross-"
"You weren't supposed to be in that bar at all. You were meant to be sleeping in your room. All this sneaking out and running around the streets like some wild animal-"
"I wasn't the only one there! Ron was. Neville was. Fuck, Malfoy was there too! This is-"
"Ridiculous. You're nearly eighteen, and you have a criminal record longer than my employment history, and I can't keep-"
"I'm trying! The last fight was weeks ago. I was doing good until-"
"I don't know where you get it from. It's not me, and, the Lord knows, your father was never like this. What do you think Viserys would say if he was here right now to see you like this-"
"Well he's not here, is he? He's fucking dead and six feet under, and if he were, he would most undoubtedly be asking why the best man at his wedding is now banging his widow. How is James these days, by the way?"
The silent drifts like snowflakes in winter. Frosty and harsh.
This is how they talk now, Haraella and her mother. In stilted arguments. In harsh words.
In things they don't mean to say, but do.
Haraella most of all.
Haraella couldn't remember the last conversation between them where one or the other didn't leave hurt. As she couldn't remember a single memory of her father before he died when she was fifteen months old, out in the woods somewhere, alone in the dark with strange bite marks littering his corpse.
An animal attack, the morgue report said.
What kind of animal could tear a mans throat out in Surrey's woodland park?
Not one she knew of, and not one native to Britain.
For a long, drawn moment, Lily held her gaze.
Green to green, red to white, mother to daughter, lost to lost.
"Go to your room."
Haraella wanted to say sorry. She didn't mean it. She didn't mean any of it. She was trying, desperately, frantically, to be better, to do better, to be the daughter her mother obviously wanted, but she…
She couldn't.
She felt it again, that growing sense of being too much, of not fitting her skeleton, anger and frenzy lapping waves on the shores of her belly, hot and uncontrolled, and she was barely holding on.
So she didn't say sorry.
Instead she spits like a firework on the fourth of November, silently rages, always silently raging, and the squeal of the chair legs on the cheap linoleum of the kitchen is almost deafening in the quiet kitchen, her boots thudding up the stairs even louder.
She nearly knocked the door off its hinges with the slam.
Haraella was getting stronger these days.
Stronger and more feral, and more a disappointment to a mother who wanted a picket fence, a tidy home, and a daughter who was in med-school. All she got was Haraella, and maybe Harry couldn't resent her mother for her anger at the injustice of it all. It was a bit like paying for a haircut, and ending up getting scalped.
She was angry at herself too.
Haraella sagged against the closed door at her back, and she heard the tell-tale hum of her mother's voice drifting through the floorboards, voice low but not low enough for Haraella's ears.
She was on the phone.
Of course she was.
"I don't know what to do anymore, James. It's like living with a caged tiger. I'm half afraid she's either going to bite my hand off, or gnaw off her own to break out. One night I'm going to wake up to that banging on the door, and the police will have a body-bag with them. I can't… I can't take this anymore."
Animal.
That's what he mother thought of her.
A savage animal.
The teachers too. Friends as well. It was a gimmick that drew thin easily. Wild Harry, feral Harry, mad Harry. Always up for a laugh and a spot of mischief. Apart from she wasn't.
She just couldn't control herself.
"Yes… You're right. I don't want to. I really don't… What Viserys told me about them… But maybe it's for the best. I'll-… I'll see if I can find their number. Maybe they haven't changed it and-"
Haraella dropped to the floor slowly, arse hitting carpet, head falling into scraped hands.
The split lip stung, but not as much as her soul, and definitely not as much as her bleeding knuckles when she knocked a hole in the brick wall with a punch.
II
It wasn't Lily who took her to the airport but James Potter, her mother's boyfriend turned fiancé two years ago. Haraella liked him. She liked him a lot. Much more than most people.
She had never told him that.
She likely wouldn't get a chance to for a while yet.
"I heard the weather's lovely in Valyria this time of year."
He was trying to make small talk, chatter to fill the staining stillness, but Haraella was having none of it from the passenger's seat in the back of his BMW.
"I'll make sure to enjoy it when I'm surrounded by strangers."
Her reply was bitter like black bile, rose in her chest like sick too, and she watched James fiddle with his glasses in the rear-view mirror.
Three days after being carted back home under sirens, she was being carted off to another country to visit family she had never met before in her step-father's vehicle.
Haraella had never really known much about her father's side of the family. No one had told her a lot. Her mother included.
Targaryen seemed to be a taboo word in her mother's circle of friends.
It seemed to be a taboo word everywhere she went.
Viserys had been a runaway, a breakaway, a wanderer from a tiny island on the equator to the coastlines of England when he was seventeen. He had a name, money out his arse, but nothing much more than that and a dimpled smile. He had met Lily at Cambridge, and the rest had been history left to take up mantel space in postcard perfect photographs on her mother's fireplace.
He had been estranged from his family; Lily had told her once when she had asked where her grandparents were after visiting the Burrow for Ron's birthday packed with extended family members. On the Ranch, had been Haraella's reply. What ranch, she had asked as all curious kids did. The one on Valyria, was the answer. Can I go had earned her a barked no, and that had been that.
Only it wasn't.
It was as she got older that Haraella had learned that there had been a fierce custody battle over her after her father's death, fierce enough that it had made headlines in the local paper that Haraella had stumbled across when doing an English exam.
An English exam she had failed after she had stormed out the examination hall after reading that little tit-bit with a smirking Malfoy at her back. The posh-prick had likely pulled strings with his father, head of the school board, to put it in there in the first place just to see her blow up and fail.
The rest of the bloody gobbets had been about farmers and fifty-year old celeb news gossip articles.
The Targaryens had petitioned the courts for Haraella be extradited, and custody to be given over to the Valyrian estate. Lily had taken it to the magistrates, and it had gotten nasty. However, seen as Haraella was born in Britain, had British citizenship, and the matter was held in British courts, favour had fallen on the British parent inevitably.
And here they were now, with Haraella being extradited seventeen years later anyway.
She really must have fucked up bad if her mother was willing to backtrack now.
That guy in the bar had only needed a few stitches.
"This is for the best, Haraella. It will give your mother and you time apart, time to cool off and calm down, and when you get back at the end of summer I'm sure we can all sit down and work something out."
Work something out.
As if she were a problem in need of fixing.
Maybe she was.
"Perhaps they can help you get your… Temper under control."
James grinned at her in the rear-view. Haraella couldn't meet his eye, coasting her gaze over to the window her temple was resting against to watch trees thinning out to houses, and houses condensing to shops, and shops squeezing to carparks and shopping centres.
They were in the next town over now.
It wouldn't be long.
"Or maybe they'll bury me underneath the barn. Problem solved either way, I suppose."
There had to be a reason Viserys had left so young and never looked back.
What would Viserys say if he could see you right now?
Most likely run, Haraella thought. That's what he had done, and he had died not five years later.
"Don't say that, Harry. Your grandmother seemed excited on the phone this morning. Your cousin is going to be there to pick you up from the ferry ride over, and-"
Haraella drowned the rest out.
Everything was planned. Everything was done. Every T and I was crossed and dotted and-
No one had asked her about a damned single thing. She rather would have had Lily ship her off to boarding school again.
Her hands tightened around her seatbelt, and the scabs on her knuckles prickled.
Lily had been sleeping when they had left.
Haraella didn't get the chance to say goodbye.
Maybe that's how her mother had wanted it.
III
It took Haraella twelve hours in air-time to reach the last stretch, a short bus ride from the airport of the nearest country over to the closest dock, a ferry-ride from the adjacent dock to the small island of Valyria, to find out it was not a ferry ride at all.
She had lined up on the dock near the biggest ship, waited her turn in the queue between a woman covered in cat hair and a bolding sun-burned man, handed her ticket over to the pimpled check-in clerk only to be turned away.
"We don't go there."
Haraella had despairingly taken her ticket back after it was shoved in her direction, as if the paper and ink were diseased in the young man's hands.
"Then how am I supposed to-"
He cut her off with a jolt of his chin, aimed down the end of the sprawled harbour.
"That way. Now move along."
Reaching down, she had plucked up her small duffel bag, Haraella had never needed much to get by, slung the strap over her shoulder, and had stumbled out the queue a bit dazed by it all.
Brilliant.
Ambling down the dock, it wasn't until she got to the very end of the pier that she found another living being passed the ferry.
He sat kicked back on the support strut, a slim man with brown hair and similarly coloured eyes, while his trimmed beard was speckled with more than a fair share of grey.
Over his salted clothes was a small leather pouch strapped around his neck with twine, a cigarette in his fingers travelling closer to his mouth for a drag.
There was something strange about that hand, Haraella thought before she noticed the fingers were not, in fact, curled, but straight.
Straight and too short, as if the tops had been cut off.
He glanced her way, and he did not smile, only nodded, forgetting his cigarette altogether as he flicked it to the planked floor, stomping out the embers undeath his scuffed boots.
The butt fell into the dark waters below, through a crack with a roll and a drop.
"There you are. Can't mistake that hair even with that shiner on ye' face."
He turned and hopped off the dock with practice ease, right into the belly of a-
Small rowboat.
Haraella froze on the port.
"Do you know where I can find a ship that goes to Valy-"
The man was already fast at work undoing the knot holding the boat in dock, his mutilated hand clearly not hindering him at all.
"This be it. Best hop in now. We ain't got all day, and I ain't sailing these waters come night no matter how much I'd be paid."
Haraella didn't move a step.
"I was told there was going to be a ferry I needed to catch-"
The rope came free with a hearty splash into the water.
"Oh, aye, this is your ferry, lass. Best there is that would be willing to go where you're going. Now get in or turn around. We're losing light."
Dazed, Haraella tumbled into the rowboat, feet wobbly as the water waved below.
The ripples of her reflection stared back, and Haraella didn't recognize herself in the mirror's edge.
She had never been on a boat before, had hardly left London apart from that boarding school in Scotland.
It all felt alien.
It all felt strange.
It all felt rather... Exciting.
"What do you mean willing to go? Is there a problem at customs or the immigration office-"
The man sat down at the head of the small boat, sliding up the oars in their hooks.
"I'd sit down if I were you. Keep low, and if ye' gonna be sick, over the edge will ye' lass? These are my only kicks."
And away he started rowing.
Haraella huddled down, frowning, jittery-
Feeling all to too much.
"Don't you want to see my ticket?"
The man laughed at her, bright and foamy, biceps flexing in the ebb and flow of his pulls as the rowboat pulled away from the pier.
"Nah, Lass. Haraella Targaryen, yes? Aye… I know where ye' going just fine. I'll get ye' there. Now be quiet. Not a peep. Or the grey-scaled men will get ye', and Rhaella will have my head."
Grey-scaled men, rowboats and ferries, men missing fingers and-
Haraella dumped her duffle down between her feet, just as fog began to flow over the waters, thick and heavy and grey.
Dense haze.
Thick vapor.
It smelled like volcanic ash and slag.
"Look, I think there's been a mistake, and if you just turn around I'll-"
"Shh!"
Haraella's mouth clamped shut.
Her hand fisted.
Cuts stung.
Calm.
IV
The ride over, despite being taken in a bloody rowboat, was relatively short.
Short and silent and sweaty.
The man really did mean not a peep, and it was hot.
Boiling.
The fog had cleared forty minutes in, as if the haze were a dam, deep and dark and murky, still visible when she glanced backwards.
And Haraella did that a lot, glancing back, almost as if she were waiting for her mother to appear in the fog, standing on the dock they had sailed away from, waving and telling her this was all some silly joke.
The oceanic air was swapped with a seabed of kelp, salty brine meeting Haraella's tongue as she licked her lips, and she only stopped glancing back when she spotted the beach rising from the lacy waves.
In the sunset it was tinted sepia, the sand more bronze than gold, the waters somehow darker, deeper, softer than black velvet in the dim gloom. The stretch of beach was thin, a fingernail width around tall dark trees, wild roses, towering thorny hedges and cranberries.
Haraella could smell the pine long out in the driftwood floating by.
The rowboat came up to shore, and cut off short from the beach.
Very short.
"There ye' are. Off you trot."
Haraella glanced down at the waters, back to the man, down to the waters again.
"Aren't we going to pull up to a dock?"
The man hauled up the oars, resting the oaken handles against the rim of the boat, out in the salty air and far away from any possible rowing.
That, too, was never a good sign.
"This is as far as I go. Ye' can wade the rest of the way."
Wade? Wade? It would be up to belly button length on a fully grown man, and Haraella, short, barely topping five-one, would hardly keep her chest out of the tide.
"You're having a laugh aren't you, mate?"
She grinned, dimpled, chuckling and-
The man did not smile back.
"Go. I have to get back before dark, and the suns setting."
Haraella cursed, snatched up her duffle, slung it crossed over her chest, less she lose her things in the bloody ocean, knotted the strap, and glared.
"You're a right bastard."
The man did grin at this.
"Aye. Ye' right on that one."
Haraella glared down at the water, flung a leg overboard, and with one last glare to the man, dived into the waters.
She had been right.
The tide lapped at her neck, and she had to tilt her chin up to keep it above water.
And it was warm.
Hot.
You didn't get that in Britain.
With a gulp of air, Haraella swam, and she heard the man laughing as he sailed away, the slap-plop of his oars in water, the splashing of a tide rolling in drawing her to the beach.
Haraella cruised on the current pulling her to land, to what would be her home for the next ten weeks.
A.N: So it has begun! I've been working on this for a little while now, and I'm, for once, quite happy with what I've got going lol. I hope all you guys are too.
I will be tackling the other shorts mentioned previously as we go, so if you're disappointed this isn't the one you voted for, yours will come around.
As always, if you want to see more don't forget to drop a review, and I will likely see you all soon with an update. Until then, stay beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21
