Note: There has been a change to the broadcasting schedule. Ignore everything I said would happen this chapter last chapter. We've taken a little detour in the name of Visenya trying to eat things she shouldn't.

Five: A Ripe, Rotten Peach

XXXV

There was an old saying that went a little like this; it is better to laugh with sinners than to cry with saints. Visenya Potter had done her fair share of both in her relatively short life.

She'd laughed when Hermione had set fire to Snape's robes, and yet she'd cried when Luna's shoes had been thrown over a tree branch out of her reach. Laughed when Quirrel had reared back in pain when she'd touched his face, cried when she'd laid Cedric's cooling body before his distraught father. Laughed at Tom Riddles death, cried at seeing Remus's ghost and knowing what that really meant.

You see the problem was she had never really done it at the same time before, at the same circumstance.

But when Sirius takes a step back and off to the side, as he swings his arm out in a grand gesture gilded with a chin tip, and he looks at her with those shiny silver eyes of his as bright as vest buttons, Visenya finds company with sinners and saints.

"Matches, this is Rhaenyra and Daemon Targaryen… your mother and father."

Visenya takes a sweep of them both as Sirius's sidestep brought them into view, more perfunctory than actual curiosity, catches snippets of silver hair and purple eyes and pale skin, and she laughs because why in Circes name wouldn't she?

"You're having a lark."

It's a joke, Visenya thinks. A tacky joke to be sure, to play on a twice over orphan, but a joke nevertheless. Sirius, like Visenya herself, sometimes took things too far. Perhaps everyone was in on it. Maybe that was why everyone was dressed up like a better, more polished, fun house mirror reflection of herself.

"Visenya-"

Sirius began anew, and that was never a good sign. The use of her actual name and not some amalgamation of Matches, Enya, or little love.

Visenya is only ever reserved for trouble, when it came to Sirius. To the world.

"There's no game being had here. This is your mother, this is your father, and those two boys here-"

Sirius gestured to the two boys besides the woman, dark haired, strong looking lads unsure of their own footing in the sand.

"Lucaerys and Jacaerys, are your brothers. You have two sisters, Baela and Rhaena, but they are currently visiting their Grand Sires at Driftwood."

Now, now, Visenya looks at them. Really, truly looks. What she took as wigs and contacts from a distance proved to be otherwise this close up. She could see hints of scalps, pupils, the silver eyelashes that couldn't be as easily faked. There's other similarities too. A nose here, a jawline there, herself torn up and ripped up and burnt up and scattered like ashes in the faces of strangers.

Her laughter abruptly stops dead in her chest.

XXXVI

As a child, Visenya used to tell people all sorts of stories about her birth parents.

She had known she was adopted from a very young age. Not only did the sparse few photos Petunia kept of James and Lily Potter tell her so from the glaringly obvious disparities between her features and their's, but because her aunt and uncle had derived some sort of perverse pleasure from reminding Visenya she wasn't really 'one' of them.

So yes, she had known, but it had never really meant much to her until she started going to school.

Children are curious creatures by nature, with a nasty habit of being monstrously blunt. When her classmates saw no awaiting mother or father at the gate coming to pick her up, when her assigned seats were always empty at the Christmas play, when she was left with nothing but a packet to take home to a oscitant aunt and uncle at teacher-parents evening, they asked their blunt questions one after another.

They typically boiled down to the same thing, however, even if the words or tone changed.

Where is your mum and dad?

The fact of the matter is, down in her little rebellious black heart, Visenya was a story teller by ilk. Not a liar (Visenya would say it was telling the truth with a fantastical flare) per se, but even from a young age she had preferred a good yarn over the boring truth.

And Merlin, Visenya detested anything boring.

She knew, even as far back as then, that sometimes stories were more honest than the truth in their own way. Showed a man's bones clearer. Better too. They allowed you to live in the comfortable spaces of self soothing imagination rather than the stark, and often barren, reality.

So Visenya told her stories. Many stories. They changed radically between each question that was really one question and what mood had struck the capricious girl. Growing more and more outlandish with each rendition, just to see how far she could push before doubt set in her target.

She told a boy in year two that her mother couldn't come to the school fair because she was really a successful surgeon who worked at Buckingham Palace. That the Queen was in need of a heart transplant and her mother was tasked with the duty as the best doctor in England, but the only resource for the emergency operation they had at hand was a Corgi. Hence why the Queen kept so many of them in her castle. A conveyor belt of hearts to steal.

She told a pig-tailed little girl in year three that the reason her father was absent from coming into class to speak about his work was because he was actually an MI5 agent who was currently working in the Antarctic against a despotic dictator who was trying to build a moon destroying base there (the poor girl still, somehow, believed her).

She told her substitute year five teacher that had failed her maths exam that her parents were like Bonny and Clyde, and were due out of prison any time now, and should she not change the unfair mark on her papers they'd roll up to her house and rob her blind (that one had gotten Visenya into serious trouble, and a weeks worth of hour long sessions with the school councillor she would never get back).

The thing is, what no one else saw, what they were too blind to see, was there was a snippet of truth in every single story Visenya conjured on a whim. At the core, at the heart. Her parents were gone. The ones from the car crash and the ones from her stories. There it is. They are gone, they are not here, and they are not coming back.

Yet here Visenya stood, wrapped in fine linen trappings, smothered in, what she was sure, was some sort of funeral balm that made her nose itch and eyes water (she's not crying, it's the fuckin' oils they've lathered her in) faced with two people who should be gone, should not be here, should not have come back.

From the corner of her keen eye, Visenya sees Hermione shuffling in the sand, kicking out her nervous energy. Watches as Sirius, beside them, a very not joking Sirius, toys with the hem of his doublet. They are edgy, skittish, waiting on a hair trigger.

Visenya can't blame them for that.

They are waiting for her to explode.

XXXVII

Visenya is mercurial (just how she likes it, thank you very much), and her friends are likely expecting one of two outcomes to this dropped bomb. They possibly believe she will either run for it or lash out.

Heads or tails.

Once more, Visenya can't blame Sirius or Hermione for their unease, for this presumption. She's never been the best with surprises, any better than being shoved into situations where she, yuck, has to examine her own emotional landscape. She is, however, a little chagrined at their own lacks of imagination. Agitated that her first instinctual reaction, running, has been guessed already, and her second, lashing out, has equally been correctly speculated before it had even crossed her own mind.

They know her too well, at this point, and that's one big knock to her ego that rests on being chancy.

She loathes it when people begin to be able to calculate her. Capable of rightly appraising her reactions for what they truly are. She'll have to remedy that later. Perhaps use a sticking charm on all their bedroom furniture to glue them to the ceiling while they are sleeping so they wake up thinking they were upside down. Just because she could. Just to throw them off her track and make them spend a day wondering why she had done it when even she herself does not know.

Her dearest friend and Godfather they might be, but that only makes them easier targets for Visenyas unpredictability. It's all in good fun (it's mainly all in good fun).

Yet, for now, they expect her to go either left or right. Right or left. Visenya, instead, takes them head first for the clouds. Up.

Why?

Because she looks at these two before her. The woman, hands clasped at her stomach, are as nimble and fine fingered as Visenya had imagined as a child, but they are shaking in their hold, trembling as her fingers anxiously twirl a ring around a knuckle, lacking all that surgeon steadfast precision she'd imagined once upon a time.

The man is eye catching in the same way Visenya is, horribly, but he lacks all the subtlety of a supposed spy, has a bloody sword strapped at his hip and the devil in his shadow. There was no way, by mere appearance alone, just like Visenya, that he could convince anyone that he was't up to no good.

Both have lush velvets on, expensive leathers, soft decadent fur cloaks that must tickle a little at long, pale necks. They are not robbers, not on the run, the jewels and the gold and the ruby-eyed hair pins and broaches scream silver spoon in a mouth.

These are not the people Visenya told so many stories about. Horrendously, dreadfully, they are boringly real. The woman has a slight crook to her nose, the man the bourgeoning of a wrinkle by a violet eye, the two boys, for they are boys, though Visenya suspects the taller might be only a short year and odd months older than her, have yet to grow into their own bodies, fill out the lengthening of their limbs teenage-hood has began. They are achingly, breakingly, boringly real people.

Odder yet, Visenya doesn't immediately hate them for it, chaff against it. Their humdrum nature she'd typically find monotonous. She feels something, certainly, she feels a whole lot of something, but she can't name it (can but won't, really).

So she does the next best thing, one Sirius and Hermione have foolishly failed to predict (they haven't got her mapped out quite yet). Make this a story worth telling her own blunt, monstrous kids one day.

Visenya pins her focus to the man, eyes him from boot to blond hair, and she quirks an eyebrow with a head tilt.

"You're shorter than I expected. Fatter too."

It's a lie. A bold faced lie (a story embellishment, Visenya would correct). The man is as trim as they come, at least a head and shoulder taller than Visenya, honed tight and lithe by using that sword at his side she assumes, and everyone who hears her declaration must know it's the most audacious spit in the face there is Visenya could have done.

And Visenya doesn't stop there, she never stops just there. Swinging her gaze to the woman.

"You've got a lazy eye."

The boys aren't safe from her tongue, either.

"And don't get me started on those faces. They're something only a mother could love."

XXXVIII

Visenya waits for a moment, a breath, buzzing with anticipation, just for her words to catch up from ears to minds. Just as she knew would come, waits until Sirius sucks in a stinging breath to hiss out a warning of Visenya!, and she cuts him off completely before he can do any such thing.

The thing Sirius and Hermione had forgotten about Visenya? The one thing someone should always remember in dealings with her? As likely as she is to bolt at an uncomfortable truth and make up a story in its stead, as much as she is plausible to lash out when backed into a corner with a surprise (nasty or welcomed or otherwise unspecified), Visenya is liable to do one thing in all things. Test boundaries. To push someone to a cliffs edge until they push back (if they do at all), just to see how close she can get them to the ledge.

Sometimes they end up going right over.

"Please, Sirius. If they can't handle that, there's no hope for any of this, and we all may as well save our precious time, wash our hands of this sordid day entirely, and head our respective ways apart."

Sirius goes to argue (his second mistake that proves how long they've been parted), but he doesn't get the chance. The man, Daemon was it, insults her right back before Sirius could whittle off his tedious admonishments.

"You are a feral little thing."

It is not lost on her, nor those around her, that he sounds startlingly… proud of this simple detail. Visenya blinks once, twice more than that, and her face breaks out into a toothy smile.

"I prefer the term undomesticated. I believe it gives me an air of refined savagery. A cat in a hat, if you will."

The reference is dropped on this group, who are seemingly taking this whole renaissance fair gig they have going on a bit too far, in Visenya's not so humble opinion, but they must get the gist, and the gist stirs up movement.

Movement of the woman.

It takes three strides for her, Rhaenyra Visenya belatedly remembers Sirius calling her, to cross the distance, two long out stretched hands to cradle her face, and then one singular tug to pull her close.

"My girl,"

She does nothing less than woundedly croons as Visenya is crushed to a chest, sounding like she's had a dagger slipped between her ribs to let the air in her lungs out.

"My Visenya."

It's this that makes the younger girl stop from pushing the distraught woman off her like one would try to kick away a venomous snake. Visenya has never been 'my' before. That Visenya, yes, your Visenya too, when the person wanted to fob her off on someone else, there Visenya, when she was being aimed like an arrow at Tom and his followers, and even, more than once, an it, but never my. She would say it gave her the warm and fuzzies, if she was anyone else but Visenya. Instead, she thinks it… acceptable.

"I thought you lost."

The rings are cold brands on Visenya's cheeks, but the palms are warm and soft, and, sadly, perhaps the most gentlest Visenya has ever been held. It causes a lump in her throat, a sniffle, a cresting dampness to her eye that rises with the broken little gasp Visenya gives. A pathetic noise. Disgusting. Not so easily blamed on anything merely 'acceptable'.

So Visenya blames it on something else entirely.

"I don't suppose you have a bath I can use? I think I'm allergic to the funeral balm you smothered me in to set me on fire."

If Rhaenyra didn't sound like she'd been stabbed before, the chuckle that comes from her now does sound like it's been ripped from throat.

XXXIX

Sirius fills her in with little details from the other side of the closed door as Visenya strips herself naked. He leaves a little while later, a patter of feet on flagstone she can't see with a promise to be back soon after checking on Ron and Hermione not three floors down.

Visenya let's what he's told her, as sparse on flavour as that is, sink in as she too sinks into the depths of the tin bath. This was not, in fact, a renaissance fair gone wild as Visenya had guessed. It was another world entirely, through the slip of the veil. A place she had originally come from, before being stolen away still covered in the blood of her mothers birthing pains.

A world where dragons flew in skies, great Houses ruled the land, and Visenya's own grandfather was a King.

Visenya does laugh at that. The irony of it all. She, who had spent her life as a rebel rouser fighting tooth and nail against a nepotistic institution hell bent on blood purity… a Princess. The Gods, if they existed, were having a right giggle, weren't they?

It's terribly droll and far too ordinary for Visenya's tastes, however.

This story had been told before, had it not? Another land through a wardrobe or other such nonsense. A missing princess who serendipitously returns. What's next? A clandestine romance with a forbidden love interest?

Merlin forbid she finds herself a willing participant in something so quotidian.

Visenya slips even further down into her bath filled with oils and petals and fragrant wedges of dried lemons (she tries to eat one but spits it out at the first taste of salt), dips down so low her nose breaks below the surface, until only her eyes, like a crocodile in the Nile, peek over the rippling surface. The water is hot enough to scold, to turn flesh a piglet pink, but it does not burn Visenya.

Nothing ever does.

The quiet, the calm, nevertheless, gives her chance to think, to drop her guard out from under the eye of so many watchers.

Visenya has a mother, a father too, brothers as well, sisters on top of that that. From the rush of conversations that had flooded in from every which direction as Rhaenyra had led her inside the castle and away from her own fuckin' funeral pyre, Daemon was flying over to collect the two sisters as they spoke. A family.

Now isn't that some spicy goodness that is decidedly not boring at all?

Of course, there are still so many questions to ask, answers to find, like is everyone slightly Albino here and is that why her parents look so similar to each other, a way forward to carve out from a dense thicket of being missing for near on sixteen years, but Visenya brushes that off like lint from a Salisbury suit. She'll muddle through, she always does, and as a last resort, one she falls back on frequently much to Hermione exasperation, she could always set fire to something and call it a day, escaping off into the ensuing chaos she habitually leaves behind in her wake.

Taking that final plunge, Visenya's head delves fully into the hot dark, the sweet waters, the heat that sparks life back into her sore and aching body that, apparently, was caused by being four days dead.

Dead, again.

Visenya is almost disgruntled in herself for it. A reprise of a previous performance? How gauche. Or, perhaps more honestly, if she was in such a mood, beneath the sarcasm Visenya was more… tired. Tired and worried.

How many times could a person die before it stuck?

Fingers crossed she wouldn't find out any time soon. Not when everything was starting to get so interesting, now that she had people to meet and get to know, Sirius alive and well and a nice warm bath to have.

Food too. If luck would have it, she'd get a hot meal before she kicked the bucket again.

Who knew dying was such hungry work?

Visenya, having lived through her fair share of licks and kicks, who had fought a war since she was eleven, knew intimately when and where to pick her battles. There was a time to fight, and a time to rest, and right now she needed the relaxation. Rest… and then to cause as much havoc as humanly possible for a five foot fuck all girl to get into.

Death, it seems, cannot change who Visenya is.

Through the muffling waters clogging her ears, Visenya catches the sound of a handle turning, the creak of a wooden door creeping open, and she rushes up and forth from the water like Atlantis rising.

Rhaenyra peeks at her from the crack of the ajar door in the wall, a single step inside the chambers, fabric in her hand and a worried nip to her lip as Visenya clings like a limpet to the side the tin tub.

"I thought I might help you get ready?"

XL

"Do people normally have help getting washed and dressed here?"

There's no bite to Visenyas question. No sting. Only a nebby sort of inquisitiveness that lends to the impish dimple by her mouth she can't quite suppress in time.

Visenya and the word restraint do not naturally go together. Moreover, some would say they were antithetical.

Rhaenyra steps fully into the chamber, shutting the door behind her as she went. Visenya doesn't really do dresses, but Rhaenyra is holding one between her hands, to her chest, and she doesn't looked excited but hopeful, which is infinitely worse.

Visenya doesn't worry too much about her modesty, not that she had a lot of it to begin with, again, much to Hermione's exasperation, but Rhaenyra is so far across the large chamber and Visenya is pressed up so tightly to the side of the tub that clearly all the older woman sees is a floating head over the side.

"You do not?"

Answering a question with a question, lesson number one in diversion. Nonetheless, Visenya doesn't think Rhaenyra is purposefully trying to divert attention, she honestly looks a little perplexed at the prospect of alone bath time.

Obviously, Visenya has taken too long to answer, and Rhaenyra has taken that as answer itself.

"Forgive me, I did not mean to intrude. I shall leave you to your-"

She's going for the door again, and she's still cradling those fabrics, so as Rhaenyra does not seem inherently inclined to the nerves she was obviously battling, Visenya decided for once to be kind, to be real, and instead was restrained.

"Stay."

Visenya says softly, sweetly, as rosy as the petals floating in the waters. It's a crack in the mask she perpetually wears, one crafted from a house of abuse to a school of war to a death on a battlefield, one painted in sarcasm and wild wit, and for once in so long, Visenya sounds just like the sixteen year old girl she really was, unsure and Bambi kneed.

She pointedly coughs to cover it up, but she suspects Rhaenyra hears it anyway by the way her hand stalls on the door, the way she glances back, the way she smiles.

The woman, Visenya is not ready to think of her as anything beginning with M, places the folded dress she holds on a small table by the door, before making her way over, a tap, tap, taping of her heels on stone.

She does not come to the bath, however, instead diverting towards the hearth on the opposite wall, using the pile of wood in a bucket by its mouth to stoke embers to a roaring sizzle and crack. By the time Rhaenyra does come to the tub, Visenya is sitting up, curled up, knees drawn to chest. Somewhere behind her, Rhaenyra settles on a stool. A moment later, Visenya feels fingers in her sodden curls.

"I wouldn't."

She laughs a little meanly. Not at Rhaenyra, but towards herself.

"My hair is horrendous. You'll lose a hand in there. I normally just wash it and bung it up in a bun to be forgotten about."

From her back, Rhaenyra hums and the fingers retreat. Yet she's not gone for long. She comes strolling up and over from the side, back to the wall with the shelves, and she skims the glass bottles safe and sound on their perch. She stops at a particularly large domed bottle, filled with amber speckled liquid.

"Your father has the same grievances with his own, as much as he would deny using such ampules."

She's grinning, Rhaenyra, as she turns back, wiggling the bottle at Visenya, the bottle that must belong to Daemon.

"Our secret, yes?"

Visenya's grin matches her own, matches the fire popping and spitting away in the hearth, and just like that, it becomes easy, painless, warm.

XLI

Before she knows it, Visenya is bundled up in a thick linen sheet, a little coarse to catch the water, and plopped before the warm fire to dry on the stool Rhaenyra had used to help wash her hair on. She could have used a drying charm, but Visenya quite likes the feeling of flames dancing not so far behind, licking kisses up the expanse of her back.

She also doesn't really want this moment to end, this tender calmness where the world feels like it begins at the window and ends at the door of this chamber, where she and this woman are the only two souls around.

It does, of course, end, as Visenya's curls start quickening on her head, coiling tighter in their dryness, springing up like river rushes. Then Rhaenyra is before her, that hopeful dress in her hands.

"There is to be a feast held in the honour of your return tonight. I thought you might like to wear this. Tis not much, I know, but I made it a moon tide ago, and with your clothes destroyed from the beach as they were I thought-"

She's rambling a little, holding tight to the dress, in a way that tells Visenya she is not used to rambling at all, and if she's Bambi kneed, than this woman is a little bit shot.

Visenya shuffles under the linen wrapped around her shoulders.

"I'd like that."

She says.

"I'd like that a lot."

She adds for good measure, because she can, because for the first time in her life, Visenya can say that to a mother and mean it, that she has a mother who can make a dress for her to wear and hear her say it.

It's a little bit dizzying, really, a little bit exciting too, something else entirely deep down. That tender softness that is as sweet as the waters from the bath.

The next hour is spent getting dressed, layers of fabric slung over her form, and more than that spent on sitting by the fire as Rhaenyra takes the stool to brush her hair with a bone comb, pinning up curls and braiding other locks away, despite how many times Visenya tells the woman it's hopeless, that by the end it will still resemble a birds nest.

When Rhaenyra's deft fingers pull away for the final time, Visenya feels a little bit liked a cooked goose. Poked, plucked, and oiled up for dinner.

"Come."

Rhaenyra gestures for the only other door of the room, and as Visenya follows her through, she finds a chamber already stocked with a bed, a table with cheese and bread awaiting her hungry belly, and a mirror on the wall. Rhaenyra pulls her up front of it.

The reflection is not the best. The mirror is real silver, polished to a gleam, but it is still only shiny metal. Visenya gets a good look though, a look good enough.

She recognises herself, undoubtedly, but she also somehow doesn't.

The dress is a fine thing, made from layers and swaths of thin gossamer, the quantity the only thing that makes it opaque. Slipping it on had proven Rhaenyra had been a little less generous at the hips than Visenya needed, and far too generous for Visenya's form at the breast, but she had silently and subtly cast extension and shrinking charms where needed as they went. If only not to ruin the moment with a reminder that Rhaenyra did not know her daughter's shape.

Another kindness. Visenya was on a roll, wasn't she?

Now it sits rightly on her, floaty almost, airy in a way that makes her bared shoulders and neck look thin and delicate, as if she's come dancing out the fog around Dragonstone's seas and carried the clouds with her, kissed in a dusky lavender that matches her eyes. Not all her hair could be pinned up, half left loose to swing at her back, but what had was braided into a bun at the back, still holding its curls, shiny in a way it never had been before with Visenya's own haphazard attempts to reign it in.

"Do you like it?"

XLII

Does she?

Visenya does not know. On one hand she absolutely loathes it all, the merry flush to her cheeks, how soft she looks. Where are her biker boots and jeans? Her second hand bobble hats? The sneer and the snarl? This is not her, not really, not in a way that says VISENYA in capital letters as if people need their own warning from a mile off.

And yet… yet she does like it, more than like it in fact. She looks… she looks… healthy. Like a girl. Not like a soldier who's just come off the trenches. Visenya's never gotten the chance to be girly before, forced into practicality and functuality with a year honed blade sharp while on the run. It's nice, if not explore but to peek at that side of herself she hasn't had the chance to play with.

Femininity.

Plus, Visenya thinks a little darkly, with her looking so berry sweet, no one would expect a throat punch, would they? Clothes could be armour, but they could also be a ploy. There could be a time for both boots and bows. Really unsettle everyone, wouldn't it? And that, alone, is enough for Visenya to keep the dress on.

Visenya smiles into her reflection, and Rhaenyra smiles right back as if, a little bit, she knew exactly what the younger girl was thinking.

"I'll leave you to rest and eat for a turn before the feast begins. Daemon and the girls should be back before then, and we will collect you before we journey for the main hall."

Rhaenyra punctuates her words with a soft and slow rub up and down Visenya's arm before pulling away and walking for the door. She pauses at the threshold, voice as slow and soft as the affectionate pat.

"It is good to have you home."

Visenya can't repeat the woman. Not in full sentiment. This is not her home. Not yet. But she can be honest, which, apparently since her second death, is becoming a nasty habit of hers.

"It is good to be here."

The door clicks shut, and Visenya waits a beat before descending on the bread, cheese-

Fantastical black grapes, like a ravenous dragon.

XLIII

Visenya satisfyingly hums as she nips her last grape into her mouth with a suck and a pop to her thumb. With little else to do, now that her stomach was full, she turns her attention to the table, tracing along the wood grain with an errant fingertip (if she's still for too long Tom's smile, Bellatrix's laughter, and Molly's tears will catch up to her).

This keeps her regard for all of two seconds.

Her gaze skitters to the bed at the far end of the room, but she's quicker yet to brush that possibility off. She had been sleeping for the last four days-

Well, dead for the last four days, but it had felt like sleeping. Dreams and all. Horrible dreams of big fat, grey rats nibbling away at a dented crown. A shield stripped with blue, red and green falling from a storm cloud to shatter in a raging sea. Terrible white, dead eyes watching her from the snow banks-

Perhaps that is why, really why, Visenya does not want to sleep, does not want to see those things play out again, and so much more, things she can't put into words yet, though, like all good lies, she tells it to herself that it is because she's already gotten plenty of rest for now.

Lilac eyes land on the only other stimulus in the room. The mirror. Visenya huffs and looks away sharply. Contrary to popular belief, which was that Visenya was a raging egomaniac who couldn't get enough of her own reflection (which coming from Malfoy had been rich), the prospect of staring at herself to whittle the hours away made her want to weep.

Too worked up and wide awake, belly grumbles quietened, that left only one thing.

The door.

The chair makes little noise as she rises from the table, her bare feet even less as she ignores the silk slippers at the end of the bed in favour of a handle. She swings the door open and steps out into the hall-

Only to find herself sandwiched between two hulking forms.

"Uh… hello?"

She says curiously, and the men, the men in fuckin' armour and cloaks, one gold and one white, glance her way, which was embarrassingly downwards, from their stations at the doors edges.

"Princess."

One says sternly, voice gruff. Right… okay…

"I'm just-"

Visenya motions down the hallway with a obtuse flap of her hand.

"Going for a stroll."

Neither Gold nor White answer her, so she takes that as all the go ahead she needs and begins her march away, the door clicking shut behind her.

Four sets of footsteps join her own in quick procession. She halts a few feet away, swivelling on her heel, and spots exactly what she thought she would.

Gold and White following closely behind.

"Why are you following me?"

It's Gold who answers first, kinder than the White, though he too is quick to reply.

"The Crowned Princess has tasked me with your safety-"

Gold shot a pointed look to White, hardly as inconspicuous as he obviously wanted it to be.

"There are some… unsavoury people in the castle, currently. Best you have a man-at-arms at your side."

White, nevertheless, more blunt and direct, batted back.

"Queen Alicent wishes only to extend the King's protection to his grandchild. I am here to watch over you on the Crowns orders."

Watch over her, indeed.

Yet, yet, Visenya gets her first peek right here, right now, at the chess board she's suddenly found herself on. Just a glance from the corner of her eye. Two guards, clearly in friction of the other, sent all the way to little old her?

There's something going on here. A tension. A pressure. A pot on the stove that has been left to simmer unminded.

Visenya grins brightly, playfully swishing about in her skirts innocuously. As docile and innocent as a little lamb.

"Well that's enough of a walk for me, I think. Back to bed!"

She almost dances past the two men, back for the door, much to their surprise and confusion.

"Princess?"

They echo together, parrots for a cracker if birds of a different feather, but Visenya is already slinking through the entryway.

"Good evening, boys!"

Slam.

XLIV

Visenya loops for the table, plucking up the used cheese knife to stash away in the folds of her skirts with a fixing hex. She ignores the door for the bathroom, or what constitutes as a bathroom in this world, and instead goes for the window.

If she were to try to leave out the bathroom door, the only other way out of these rooms, she wouldn't be far enough away from this door, and thus the guards, to get by unnoticed. She too was lacking her wand, having to, so far, use wandless and nonverbal magics, her invisibility cloak and all her other trouble causing trinkets Hermione likely had in that bottomless bag of hers, the magpie she was.

Best go retrieve them, then.

It's not that Visenya is up to something. Truthfully, she is not. She has nothing to hide, not from the guards or the women who sent them to stand vigil at her door, it's just that being followed about like a hen herded into a pen is… not really her style.

Three floors down isn't that far, anyway.

Heaving herself onto the slip of stone that constituted a window ledge, grateful she's small enough to fit into the tight, narrow box of a window frame, Visenya unfastened the lock, a latch and eye ordeal that worked for her purposes, and peered out.

The drop was quite high. Quite high indeed with a watery end. She must be up in one of the towers of this castle, near the top turret, and such a drop would give Visenya plenty of time to contemplate her mistakes and rue them on the way down before a brisk sharp stop on the craggy cliff outcrop below.

Good enough for her.

Toeing a bare foot out onto an overhang of a thin stone that jutted from the wall and snaked it's way around the tower, Visenya eyed the protruding black stone dragons that decorated the outside between windows and edgings.

It would be difficult, dangerous, but not impossible.

One slow and steadying intake of breath through a nose is all she takes before she slips out the window.

The way is lean, so tapered she has to stand on the very tips of her toes and push herself harshly back against the stone wall, hands flat and spread to give herself as much purchase as she could borrow.

And then Visenya Potter is shimmying her little arse off to ventures unknown.

XLV

There is too many close calls for comfort. The outcrop breaks, nearly taking Visenya down with the stone into the sea at one point, and trying to monkey-bar across the black dragons had been more strenuous than she had given it credit for in her harebrained bid for freedom.

Visenya loses her way somewhere between the second floor downwards and a corner she takes. Her sense of direction flipped on its head by the fifth dragon she has to scrabble over in mid air.

No foul, she thinks however, as she comes to another window in a long line she's climbed past. She should definitely, one hundred percent, be far enough away from those rooms back there, and out of sight from the guards at the door, to merely sneak in and then out whatever rooms door she's entered to then take to the halls and away from a very, very long drop.

From there, she's bound to run right into Hermione and Ron, surely?

Squeezing her way to the window, Visenya crouches down hard, cupping her tired hands around her eyes to squint through the glass and into the room beyond.

There's a fire going in the hearth, an inviting glow bathing the rest of the chamber a welcoming low lit amber to stave off the chill of the sea outside, a bookcase too, she thinks, pushed up by the furthest wall, and, from her angle so close to the window, the end of a bed she can just about peek. There's another half of the room she can't see, elongated out left where the window and the wall cut off from her eye, but it looks empty.

She can't hear any chatter, no movement, and that fur rug before the fire does look awfully soft to Visenya's now sore and cramping legs.

She slips the cheese knife free from her skirts, stashes the blunt blade through the crack of the window, and in a clean and sure slice upwards, the knife catches the latch in the lock, as she knew it would, and unhooks it from the eye. Pushing the window open, Visenya ducks in.

She tumbles right down onto a table. A table that must have been placed below the window for the natural light it gave. She winces when the parchment she's stepped right on, etched with elegant hand writing, clings to the bare sole of her foot, and unceremoniously scrapes it off on the corners edge where it crumples to the floor below.

"Ooooh, berries."

Visenya bends over, lured in by her sweet tooth, snatching the plate she finds on the table up. A little bronze dish with something like blackberries inside. She uses her knife to stab a rather fat looking one, sucking it off the tip as she jumps down from the table with a muted thud.

It's short work to the fire and the rug, fur she wiggles her cold toes in, stealing another sweet berry that's likely staining her tongue purple before abandoning the dish and the knife altogether on the rug in favour of warming her hands by the fire.

"Next time-"

She tells herself sternly.

"Take the fuckin' stairs."

With the bitter nip of chill that spending an hour scaling a bloody towers wall has seeped into her flexing fingers and toes wearing off, Visenya hums contentedly-

And something deep hums back.

"Hmm."

XLVI

Visenya stiffens at the fires edge, comically frozen in place, and steadily, by degrees, turns her head in the direction the noise had come from. To the side of the room she couldn't see from the window, from the space she'd been sidetracked from by the offer of sweet fruit.

She finds a chair shoved up in the very corner, next to a low hanging side table, the space darkened by its reach from the fire. Much more than that, she finds a man.

He's spread out in the cushioned chair like it's a throne, one long leg slung over the other, dressed in leathers from head to boot. In one hand is an open book, another a goblet filled with blood red wine. What isn't in leather is pale, silver white, sharp features fox-like and rapacious. The kind of face that belonged on the pages of a Grimms fairytale book. The Sidhe King tempting a girl off the beaten track with a ripe, rotten peach. His silver hair contests her own, though his long locks lended themselves whiter than Visenya's hoary curls.

His one amethyst eye, the one not hidden underneath a mean looking scar that matches the side of her own and an eye patch, blinks slow and cattish at her.

Visenya does the only thing she can think of. She crooks down, picks up the abandoned plate by her skirts, his own food she's clearly stolen as she trampled across his parchments, and stretches it out towards him. Brazen and contrarily bashful like daybreak, and says-

"Berry?"

A.N: listen, I did have this whole dramatic meeting between Visenya and Aemond planned for the Dragonstone bridge, but then I started writing Visenya and she just became an absolute gremlin, and this is what we ended up with.

I also know I promised some Jace, Luce, Daemon interaction, along with some Hermione, but I decided against it. As this is the first time we get a flavour of Visenya as a character, from her own point of view, i wanted to keep that in sharp focus and side tracking to other characters I felt took away from the tone.

Similarly, I wanted this chapter out pretty fast, as I have a feeling, especially now that I've started writing from Visenya's point of view and have a feel of her, that she's going to be a very Marmite like character. Perhaps the most divisive Fem!Harry I've written yet. You're either going to love her or hate her lol. So I wanted to give you guys a little taste test so you can decide whether to dip out or not.

So, basically, I failed on everything I promised last chapter lol. I do hope, however, that this chapter might still have lived a little bit up to expectations, and if not that, then you enjoyed reading it anyway for something to pass the time.

As always, I'm shocked and a little bashful at all your kind words. Thank you all for them, really. If you can, don't forget to drop a review, and I will hopefully see you all soon with some piping hot Visenya-Aemond shenanigans. Until then, stay beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21