Chapter Text
When the plane falls, burning, from the sky, Alicent clutches Rhaenyra’s hands and prays.
Prayers tumble over each other within her mind, in a panicked, discordant choir. The Hail Mary weaves through every other line, the simplest refrain —pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. At her mother’s deathbed, Alicent knelt next to her father and murmured the words she now uses for herself, and for Rhaenyra, and for all of the girls with them: Lord Jesus, holy and compassionate, forgive me my sins. By dying you unlocked— and the memory of her mother’s final breaths jolts her mind back to the Virgin Mary, Holy Queen, mother of mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness and hope. To thee we do cry, poor banished children of Eve—
The plane spins, end-over-end, as it falls. The air is choked with smoke and screams and the violent rushing of air. Alicent is weightless and lead-heavy by turns, tossed up and down like a careless child’s doll. Her hair whips against her neck and flutters upwards like little birds trying to escape. She keeps her eyes squeezed shut. The banging of unsecured bodies haunts her, but as long as she doesn’t open her eyes, Alicent can pretend she didn’t hear the familiar sound of breaking bone. Gravity and momentum and hard pockets of air throw them all back-and-forth, up-and-down, side-to-side. The seatbelt is still tight against her lap, but distantly, Alicent thinks it is Rhaenyra’s soft hands, more than anything else, that keep her tethered.
—now and at the hour of our death; Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death—
And beneath it all, beneath the terror and the sorrow and the bitter sting of banished dreams, Alicent feels relief.
Thank God, she thinks, as strong as any prayer. She never has to know.
***
Rhaenyra wakes before Alicent, but even though she sees the flames eating up the narrow corridor, it takes her long moments to get moving.
As terrified as she is, her bloodstream flooded with adrenaline, her moments are still slow and clumsy. She has to fight to pry her fingers out of Alicent’s grip, white-knuckled even while unconscious. She paws the oxygen mask off her face and does the same for Alicent’s. Then their seatbelts. Her head feels like a balloon connected to her body by a single grocery-store ribbon, and her ears are ringing, and she cannot breathe well, and all around she hears terrified screams and sobs, but there is fire, and that means she must get Alicent away from it.
She doesn’t bother trying to wake her. Just fumbles to get her arm under Alicent’s shoulders and stand. Her feet slide out from under her on her first attempt, so she grits her teeth and tries again. Alicent’s hair still smells like tea and honey.
“Come on,” Rhaenyra says, or tries to say. She thinks she says it. She can’t hear her own voice over the screams and the cracking of flames and the straining of metal. “Alicent, wake up, wake up, come on!”
The private chartered jet provided by Johanna’s father is nearly unrecognizable from the elegant, cushy setting it had been when they boarded this morning in New Jersey. The red curtains separating the cabin sections have been torn off their hooks, and the leather seats are littered with debris from the plane and the busted-open luggage of the twenty-two passengers. Some fifteen feet ahead, a half of a panel of the plane was ripped off, weak light peering in. Some of the other girls are clustered around it, weeping, but it doesn’t seem to be doing any good. Smoke billows forth from somewhere behind them, casting a hazy film over her vision and burning her lungs as she tries to breathe. The thin lights under the overhead compartments are flickering wildly, creating a strobe effect; when Rhaenyra looks down the aisle, some of the lights are bleeding bright orange sparks, as heavy as raindrops in a summer storm.
And Gwenys Staunton lies dead in the path, neck bent at an unnatural angle.
Rhaenyra hauls Alicent closer, looking around frantically. The girls by the torn panel. They’re moving left. A new beam of weak, gray-tinged sunlight is opening up from a pocket of screams, single syllables repeated over each other in a frantic chant of pushpushpushpushpush , slow and jagged but sure, and as she gathers Alicent up, Rhaenyra understands that the girls are getting the emergency door open. All at once, there’s a low rolling sound, and then a dozen cries of terrified relief as light pours in. The cry becomes gogogogogogo! and shadows cross the stream of light, so they’ve got it; they’re getting out.
Evacuating. That’s the word for leaving in emergencies. Their plane crashed.
Dad, Rhaenyra thinks. Where was he sitting?
Alicent moans as she falls against Rhaenyra, and she realizes that until then, she hadn’t had any confirmation Alicent was alive. But of course she had been. Rhaenyra is, and Alicent would never leave her behind.
She drags her feet, but struggles to wakefulness as they stumble over Gwenys. She pants out a soft, confused sound, and then all at once snaps up to stand on her own, gripping Rhaenyra’s shirt. “What?” she blurts, high and panicked. “ What’s—?!”
“Crash,” Rhaenyra answers, dragging her another few steps further, towards the peeled-up emergency door. Everything is noise and confusion. Rhaenyra stumbles forward two more steps, Alicent clinging to her like a child learning to walk. “We crashed, the door, get to the door, Alicent—!”
Around them, the plane shifts backwards, slow and grinding for one long moment before it pitches sharply. Rhaenyra holds them steady, grabbing the edge of a seat while Alicent grabs onto her. It’s over in a second, then just shuddering as the plane settles, and Rhaenyra turns them to the side so that Alicent doesn’t notice what she did—that Gilliane Glover is in the window seat of this row, pinned in place by a long piece of metal speared through her throat. Her eyes are wide and glassy and very blue, and blood is splattered over her shirt and chin. How long did it take her to die? How long has she been dead? Rhaenyra has been on her feet for less than twenty seconds, and already, the fires have grown, the world has shaken, and she’s found another friend dead. Where is her father?
Alicent whimpers next to her, holding her wrist in a raptor’s locked grip. The plane has stopped moving, but as soon as the groaning metal quiets, she hears a high, piercing shriek of pain— near.
In unison, Alicent and Rhaenyra’s heads snap forward. Past the emergency door ahead of them, towards the back of the plane, which is nothing more than a whirling inferno. A still, charred body burns before it, like a guardian, or a warning, and not six feet away, pinned in place, Alysanne Blackwood cries for help.
“Help me help me help me help me,” she chants, crushed under a fallen section of the overhead compartment, “I can’t move!”
Alicent tears free of Rhaenyra’s arms. “It’s Alysanne!” she gasps. “We’re coming, Aly!”
Rhaenyra stumbles after her, batting aside a deployed oxygen mask.
“I’m stuck!” Alysanne sobs. The overhead compartment has fallen on her seat and crushed it into her back; too heavy for her to push off at this angle. It’s lucky it didn’t break her spine. But when Rhaenrya reaches her, the heat is too close, the fire roaring angrily in her ear, warning her to get away. The angle is awkward, and she can’t reach around Alicent and still get a grip, so she has to duck into the seat in front and try to lift from the front, but the overhead is heavy and it’s jammed into something, and the heat from the flames is washing over her skin, and the air reeks of chemicals and burning plastic and cooked meat, and they simply are not moving the overhead. Alyssanne is still stuck, screaming, “I can’t get out!” and the flames are growing closer, they’re getting hotter, and Alicent is even closer, she is breathing in the smoke and then she coughs, and the overhead has not budged, and Alicent is too close to the fire, she is too, too close to the fire, and they’re not doing any good, and—
Rhaenyra’s body decides for her.
She has to get Alicent out.
“We have to go,” she says, choking on a sob, and on the smoke, and abandoning the overhead. “Alicent, I’m sorry, we’ve got to—!”
She wraps her arms around Alicent’s waist, and—horribly—her eyes meet Alyssanne’s. There’s a kind of animal terror in her gaze, but—there is the reflection of fire, too, and there is nothing they can do.
“I’m sorry,” she tells her, hauling Alicent back. Alyssanne shouts, begging no no no nonononononono! and Alicent jolts, kicking out on instinct, but though Alicent might be faster, Rhaenyra is stronger. Metal shrieks, and a series of thuds from behind them say something has torn loose. “I’m sorry, Alyssanne, I’m sorry, we have to get out! We’ve gotta go!”
“No!” she wails, waving her one free arm helplessly. “No no don’t leave me don’t leave please Alicent Rhaenyra please —!”
“What are you doing?!” Alicent screams as Rhaenyra lifts her and turns them around, setting Alicent back on her feet once she’s at her back and using the position to march her forward. Alicent stumbles, but Rhaenyra keeps her hands on her and pushes her along. Alicent is still so frazzled that she hardly even fights, and ducks her head obligingly when Rhaenyra shoves her out the emergency door.
Alicent falls onto her elbows, hair spreading over her back and into the dull, dark brown earth, gleaming in the firelight like a shawl of amber feathers. Rhaenyra staggers after her, one step behind, and collapses onto her knees, hanging her head as she inhales the fresh air. Everything still smells of smoke and death but now there is also pine, pine and petrichor, and it’s almost the sweetest thing she’s ever known.
The world, for a moment, is swallowed by a pocket of calm.
She looks up in a daze, gulping in lungfuls of clean air. They’ve crashed—in the woods. Somewhere very, very green, and brown, and the sky that dips down in the spaces between trees is a calm, pale, blue. She braces her hands on her thighs and pushes up to standing, taking stock. Her ears ring. Where is her dad? She looks around, numbly taking a headcount—there is Bethany staggering against a tree and Johanna standing limply, tears pouring down her cheeks; Arra is doubled over wracked with spasms and Sabitha is lurching from person to person checking something; Criston has Myrielle slung over his shoulder and he’s dropping her a safe distance away like a sack of potatoes and they’re both covered in soot; Jonelle and Tess are curled on the ground like dead insects while Lynara stands over them, hands fluttering—
… and Gwenys is dead on the floor and Gilliane is skewered through the throat like a butterfly to a board and I left Alysanne to die—
“We have to go back!” Alicent blurts, like she’s had a revelation, and then an explosion tears through the air.
A dozen voices scream as one, a perfect choir of terror, and everyone scrambles backwards, crawling like animals. Rhaenyra shoves Alicent ahead of her, then grabs her by the back of the jacket and drags her up and forward, craning her neck to look back.
Flames crest over the back of the plane, the inferno poorly guarded by a corpse she hadn’t recognized, the place Alysanne was trapped, the place that Alicent and herself were ten seconds ago. Alicent’s raw, scabbed-over fingertips are bunched in the fabric of Rhaenyra’s letterman jacket. Her head whips back and forth, taking in the complete state of chaos that surrounds them. Rhaenyra continues the headcount, searching frantically for her father, still dragging Alicent as far from the fire as she can, while her winger scrabbles at her coat and trips over their feet with a lack of grace that’s unfamiliar on Alicent Hightower.
Rhaenyra can’t clearly make sense of much of anything. Their plane crashed. Alicent is holding onto her. She cannot find her father. Everything is coughing and crying and girls stumbling blindly, crippled by terrible uncertainty. The plane is in pieces around them. It broke raggedly into chunks, like a badly-made toy. The wings have been ripped off, one engine is still spinning weakly fifteen yards away and oddly clean, and the main body has split down the middle, like a horrible compound fracture. It burns in a dozen places, nowhere worse than the place that she pulled Alicent from fifteen seconds ago. Fifteen seconds. An entire lifetime. How long has Gilliane been dead now? How long has Alysanne been dead? Oh, Christ, Alysanne is dead, and ten seconds were all that kept her and Alicent from dying, too. Don’t they have to put the time of death on the certificate? They’d called the time for her mother, Rhaenyra remembers, 10:57 A.M, they hadn’t even stopped serving breakfast. Where is her dad?
There’s a slow trickle of girls towards the other side of the plane. Rhaenyra leans her head against Alicent, inhaling the tea and honey of her hair, and grits her teeth against pain. She hurts. Now, out of the most immediate danger, she can catalog it. Her wrist and her knuckles and her lap and her chest, fuck her chest hurts, she thinks it’s just smoke but it fucking hurts to breathe, and she thinks she’s got a cut on her ankle, which is stupid yet it stings.
“We left Aly,” Alicent whispers, horrified. “We—how could—?”
“There’s nothing we could have done,” Rhaenyra tries. It’s not much of a comfort. “I—I had to get you out, Alicent. All three of us would have died.”
“We left Aly,” she repeats. She claps a hand over her mouth and jerks away from Rhaenyra, leaving Rhaenyra to stumble. “Why did you—you—we left her to die!”
“Alicent,” she begs.
Alicent turns to her, wearing an expression that looks something like betrayal. Her hair is blown to hell, her chin juts out, and her eyes are shining wide and fathomless with a thousand layers of fear. There’s a long, awful moment of stillness, the air still writhing with smoke and screams, and Rhaenyra’s stomach turns. She can’t stand when Alicent is upset with her—she can’t deal with it right now. Their plane just crashed. She can feel bruises blooming up and down her body, and her chest is burning from within, because that’s what smoke inhalation does, and she hasn’t seen her father, and she can’t stand it when Alicent looks at her with sadness in her sweet brown eyes.
“Alicent,” she says again, but Alicent only presses her lips together and shuts her eyes.
Something cold sinks deep into Rhaenyra’s gut. She hates it when Alicent is upset with her, and she can’t blame her for this. She dragged Alicent away from their dying friend. But she’ll take Alicent upset and alive over pleased and dead any day, and this way, Alicent is both alive and blameless. As, Rhaenyra thinks absently, she should be. Let her be angry, as long as she is alive. Rhaenyra wouldn’t trade Alicent’s life for anyone’s.
But where is her father?
The flow of girls towards the other side of the plane is picking up speed now, and even Criston is jogging over, dark hair flopping artfully. Rhaenyra casts her eyes over to Myrielle, but the junior girl doesn’t look like she’s in need of any—
“Heeeelp!”
Rhaenyra snaps her head to the side. She grabs Alicent’s hand and marches towards the cry—which, she realizes, is the direction that everyone else is stumbling. The call for help was low, weak, and pained, but it was a man’s voice indisputably, so it might—it could be—
She leads them around the nose of the plane, which is driven into a peeled-apart tree. She has to duck under a green-leafed branch, and as she does, she comes face-to-face with the pilot in his compartment; dead, his head a smear of blood against cracked glass.
She staggers. Feels sick. Keeps walking.
There’s a tangled knot of voices, too low for her to make out words over the hissing of sparks and general low cacophony. Rhaenyra sees dark heads of hair strewn before a huge section of torn-off wing, burning where it lays, and a shape pinned beneath it—
And then Alysanne Blackwood crashes through the branches of a downed tree, one side of her face bleeding from half a dozen small scratches and absolutely covered with soot, but alive.
“Aly!” Alicent seems to melt with relief, smiling like a movie star. She releases Rhaenyra’s hand to cling onto Alysanne’s elbows, checking her over with a breathless,“You’re alive!”
Alysanne smiles tightly, brushing her hands on her jersey. She makes eye-contact with Rhaenyra over Alicent’s shoulder, and when she says, “No thanks to you,” they both flinch.
Alysanne grabs Alicent’s wrist, then Rhaenyra’s shoulder, and drags them both farther from the plane; closer to the cluster of their teammates. Rhaenyra is caught between clashing waves of relief that Alysanne survived and shame that she left her, that she carried Alicent away, but there’s still room for more when she sees the man pinned under the burning wing.
It’s not her father.
“Do you think…” Coach Lyonel pants, “that you girls… can move it…?”
Laena is there with him, her dark hair wild like a Persian kitten. “Yeah,” she gasps, cheeks wet. “Yeah, yeah, we can—guys?”
Meredyth, Jeyne, Tess, Lynara, Alys, and Criston are standing around with her, looking horrified. Rhaenyra understands why. Amidst the warring hope—that her father is not in this dire position—and dread— then where is he? —she feels woozy, looking at Coach Lyonel’s face. As he tries to give them a reassuring smile, his teeth are bloody, and there’s a nasty gash on his forehead that’s just pouring blood. One of his legs is pinned under the burning wing. He’s grimacing, and the students around him are fanning out, looking for the best place to grab the wing.
Rhaenyra swallows. “Grab from there.” She points to where it sits on his legs. “If we can just—just lift it up, and— no.” She grabs Alicent by the bicep when Alicent moves forward to grab the wing. She doesn’t want Alicent anywhere near the fire. “Alicent, you, here, grab his arm—Coach, can you—?”
Coach Lyonel, breathing harshly, lifts both arms up like a child. Alicent automatically grabs one, and Alys steps forward to take the other.
“Okay,” Rhaenyra says. “Okay. Girls, everybody—” she squats down and gets a grip on the metal, and fuck it’s hot, it’s hot — “on three, okay, one two three —!”
The seven of them heave, and fuck fuck fuck it’s hot and it is heavy, it’s like trying to lift a car— and Alicent and Alys brace Coach Lyonel and pull. He screams, and the metal gets too hot, and one by one within a single second, they all have to put the wing down.
“Again,” Rhaenyra calls, shakily. “Sleeves—” and they pull their sleeves over their hands. “One two three —!”
They heave again, groaning, pulling up with all their strength. She feels something shift, and Coach Lyonel makes a horrible noise, and Alicent and Alys drag him free.
Rhaenyra drops the wing and pulls up her hands to blow on them. Gasping, she looks over to Alicent, and finds her best friend wide-eyed and white-faced. She follows her gaze automatically to Lyonel’s leg, and almost loses her breakfast.
It’s—it’s— bad — a tangled snarl of gleaming red ribbons, bloody and pulpy, muscle torn off bone and pulled the wrong way out —
“Oh fucking God!” Laena whispers, horrified, and the rest have all fallen back like the injury is catching. Tess turns her back and retches. Alys just turns and walks away. Rhaenyra wants to sob, wants to join in on the forming hysteria, wants to climb back on the plane and it takes off peacefully for Seattle, wants to hide her face in her father’s windbreaker, wants to lay her head in Alicent’s lap and for this to all have been a dream.
“Coach?” the others are calling, afraid. “Coach?”
It… it looks like the bone was completely severed. Because she thinks that when he was moved, it kind of stayed behind. His foot doesn’t seem to have moved, but the wet slop of muscle that resembles nothing so much as wet cat food looks… pulled.
Rhaenyra shuffles back over the carpet of dead leaves and wraps her arms around Alicent. Alicent is picking viciously at her cuticles, fresh blood dribbling fast down her wrists. “Stop that,” Rhaenyra mumbles, grabbing her hands. “Stop, you’re hurting yourself.”
“Rhaenyra,” Alicent breathes, sounding on the verge of tears. She can’t even look away from the mangled remains of Coach Lyonel’s leg. It looks like it was fed into a meat grinder.
“It’s okay,” she says stupidly, turning Alicent into her neck. “It’s okay, you’re okay, it’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
“Excuse me,” Alys says, and Rhaenyra steps aside without thinking. She lifts her eyes to track the movement, and when she sees the gleam of an axehead, she doesn’t understand. It doesn’t click until she watches Alys lift the axe— where the fuck did she get —?! over her head, and in one clean, sure motion, bring it down on Coach Lyonel’s leg.
Screams erupt. Rhaenyra spins Alicent behind her and stumbles backwards, but Alys doesn’t lift the axe up again and go on a murder spree. She just drops down to her knees, pulls her belt out from the loops of her skirt, and wraps it around the stump under Lyonel’s knee. Stunned, Rhaenyra’s hand drifts up to Alicent’s shoulder as she watches Alys tie a tourniquet.
When it’s done, Alys flicks her long hair over her shoulders with bloody hands. “Rhaenyra,” she calls, somehow perfectly calm. “Could you pass me something burning? I need to cauterize this.”