ℒove always wakes the dragon (Aemond x OC)

The White Worm

The kitchen is spacious, squeaky clean but full of smells: of something roasted, baked and boiled, of herbs dried and fresh, with wreaths of steam from the oven wading through the room. Cupboards are filled with tableware of all sorts — plates, glass cups with metal stems, heavy goblets decorated with gemstones that catch the light and leave gleams on the walls. It takes her a minute to take it all in. Only then, behind the glitz of all that, Lia notices dozens of eyes gawking at her. The servants stopped what they've been doing — hands frozen in the air with silver trays, carving and slicing ceased, all of them unmoving and astonished like mice being caught unawares by a cat. She is so unused to that kind of attention, she suspects that her face expression doesn't differ much from theirs.

"I need to get lady Lia some breakfast," Annora announces, unexpectedly dropping her shyness and quickly moving around the room. "Bring me a plate, and that freshly baked bread, and I've seen some roasted pig left... Hey, don't just stand there!" the remark is directed to one of the servants, but her sonorous voice also revives Lia from the momentary stupor.

She backs away to sit at the small wooden table, further across the room, and silently observes Annora fussing around, giving instructions and talking over the resumed clinking of dishes, sounds of cutting, swarm of whispers. The maid clearly feels more at ease within the perimeter of the kitchen, as relaxed and comfortable in here as Lia usually gets in... She tries to think of the equivalent for herself, of what she can associate comfort with. She ponders for a minute, for two, then for some more. But there isn't a place she can name, there isn't a home she can come to, go back to and feel safe in. A wave of numb anguish rises up from her stomach, caustic and sickening, and as much as she tries to swallow it down, it disheartens her appetite all the same.

Annora is oblivious to it — she is too busy carrying the food, and she is also very generous with it: she puts a plate in front of Lia, then brings another one, and another one, and —

"Please, stop," Lia politely interjects as her hand cuts in between the dish that's already on the table and the one Annora wants to add. "This is too much even for my dragon."

Well, it would've been too much only if he also ate the servants, but she leaves that detail out.

The maid looks slightly abashed, and the organized movement in the room stops again — and Lia realizes they didn't know about the dragon. She suppresses a groan at her own carelessness, her voice is timorous when she forces out for everyone to hear:

"I truly didn't mean to intrude. Pretend that I am not even here."

They do try to but not one of them is particularly good at it: servants gaze at her hair, her clothes, her eating with them at the place where noble people don't go to. But she isn't noble, she wants to tell them — to scream, to carve it on her forehead as if the way she looks isn't enough of a proof.

The meat is roasted to perfection, with some dark sour sauce poured over, accompanied by baked potatoes and beet, vegetable stew, chopped carrots and onions, and some other vegetables she can't name. The food dissolves on her tongue, and flavorless wet clumps fall down her throat. But in the process of mindless chewing an idea forms in her head — not very well-thought, yet she desperately fastens on it.

"There is one thing, however, that I'd like...," Lia pauses upon seeing that even the unfinished sentence easily interrupts the servant's cooking routine. She takes a deep breath — this time, she swallows the unsaid, the obvious, all the words that threaten to escape her mouth:

you don't owe me this obedience that only makes me feel chained to this colossal, unwelcoming place that I never wanted to come to, hate being at, will leave at the very first chance I get, and you will forget every feature of mine that you now find intriguing, and I would've given it all up in a blink of an eye if only I could —