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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 10 months

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Comet Donati [Chapter 1: History]

Series Summary: Sex, drugs, boy bands. You are a kinda-therapist recruited (via nepotism) to help Comet Donati through a recent crisis. Things are casual with Aegon, very not-casual with Aemond. Loosely inspired by One Direction.

Chapter Warnings: Language, references to sexual content (18+) and drugs, alcohol, smoking, astronomy, mental health struggles, Missouri.

Selected Chapter Quote: “You’re gonna love Aemond. He’s so fucked up. He’s like Disney World for therapists.”

Word count: 4.1k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

* * * I’m going to tag like a bazillion people since this is the first chapter of a new fic, but I WILL NOT TAG YOU AGAIN unless you ask me to. I hope you are all doing well, wherever you are in the world. 🥰😘 * * *

@borikenlove @myspotofcraziness @teenagecriminalmastermind @quartzs-posts @tclegane @poohxlove @narwhal-swimmingintheocean @chainsawsangel @itsabby15 @padfooteyes @arcielee @travelingmypassion @what-is-originality @burningcoffeetimetravel @randomdragonfires @aemcndtargaryen @jvpit3rs @sarcastic-halfling-princess @flowerpotmage @ladylannisterxo @thelittleswanao3 @libroparaiso @tinykryptonitewerewolf @girlwith-thepearlearring @minttea07 @trifoliumviridi @deltamoon666 @mariahossain @darkenchantress @doingfondue @atherverybest @namelesslosers @skythighs @moonlightfoxx @partypoison00 @bellameshipper @coffedraven @greenowlfactif @catalina-howard @babyblue711 @marvelescvpe @heimtathurs @ammo23

Let me know if you’d like to be tagged in future chapters! 💜

“You are a professional,” you tell your reflection threateningly, like it owes you money. Your hair is painstakingly tidy, your makeup neat, subdued, businesslike. You are wearing a black blazer, a white blouse, and Cookie Monster pajama pants. You are in your one-bedroom apartment in Kansas City, Missouri: grey, thunderous, humid as hell, June raindrops on the windows. “You have a master’s degree and hundreds of clinical hours and you are not afraid of clients. Not at all! Not even a little bit!”

You check your phone. 2:55 p.m.

“Oh God,” you whine to the checkered tiles of the bathroom floor, to the floral wallpaper. You clutch the cold porcelain of the sink: rose-pink, 1950s, diners and Thunderbirds, housewives and Valium. “Oh my God. Oh my God. I can’t do this. Oh my God.”

But there is no escape! You hurry, sweating profusely, to your laptop. You start the Zoom meeting and wait for your client to arrive, chewing your thumbnail until it bleeds, a scarlet semicircle of dull warm pain, a crescent moon like spilled merlot. You glance at your notepad again. David Mills, 25, married, anxiety upon relocating to a new city and beginning employment there.

Wait.

You confirm with a quick Google search in a new tab. David Mills was the protagonist in Se7en.

You sit back in your swivel chair, eyes narrowed with suspicion. The blue-white luminance of the screen glows on your face like moonlight. Your client is either a coincidence or a liar.

So what? People lie. People lie about therapy especially. So he wants some anonymity. Big deal.

“Strange,” you murmur to yourself.

You have no further opportunity to mull it over. A gratingly cheerful ding announces your client’s arrival in the Zoom meeting waiting room. No avatar, name still listed as David Mills.

“Okay. Okay. It’s fine. Here we go.”

You shake the tremors out of your hands and admit him. He pops onto the screen like a bloom of ironweed, like fireworks on the Fourth of July. It’s nighttime wherever he is. The background is dark and indistinct, shadowy; lamplight cascades across his face, topaz and fool’s gold. You are startled to realize that you already know him. And his name is definitely not David Mills.

“…Aegon?!”

He grins, sly and cocky but never cruel. “Hey.”

“Aegon Targaryen??!!”

“That’s me!” he concurs brightly. “What’s up, Stargirl?”

And instantly, you are transported back to almost exactly one year ago: a rooftop bar downtown, neon signs coiled in shades of violet and rhodonite and sapphire, night wind, constellations, ice clinking in misty glasses, locks of his hair skating between your fingers, the sting of his teeth on your throat, the Weeknd. “Hey,” you say softly. And then again, with more enthusiasm: “Hey! I saw you on Good Morning America last week!”

“Yeah? Was I good?”

“Jace was good. You were slightly offkey.”

“Aw shit. I usually am.”

“That’s okay. You’re the hot loser, right? That’s your character?”

“That’s me, baby. That’s why it works so well.”

It’s impossible: time has passed, thousands of miles have opened up between you, and yet it’s like he’s right here in the room, he never arrived, he never left, he’s always been here for life to grow up around like the framework of a house, a trellis, a skeleton. “How did you find me?”

“I couldn’t remember your name, but I figured you must have finished school by now. So I Googled therapists in Kansas City. Do you know how many there are?”

“500,” you guess.

“712,” Aegon says. “At least, that’s how many I scrolled through before I found your photo.”

“Wow.” You’re smiling; you can’t take your eyes off him. A lot of girls have that problem. That’s why he’s worth $100 million. “Couldn’t remember my name, huh? I guess I didn’t make much of an impression.”

He chuckles, a little bashfully, sweeping his blond hair off his face. “No. No, you definitely made an impression.”

So did he. In the downstairs bathroom of the bar, tucked beneath a staircase, stark white florescent lights and red walls, lip biting and ripped seams on your dress. He’d finished in approximately thirty seconds—which, oddly, felt more like a compliment than anything else—and then promptly snapped off the condom, dropped to his knees, and went down on you until you came not once but twice, a rarity for you. But that wasn’t the best part. Afterwards you’d gone back up to the roof together, sat in a quiet corner booth until the bar closed, talked about anything and everything with your bodies folded unconsciously into each other, origami, blended watercolors, whispers and murmurs, your palm on his thigh, his fingertips ghosting the underside of your wrist.

“So,” Aegon says through the laptop screen. “Are you, like, kind of unemployed currently?”

“No,” you reply, palpably defensive. Embarrassing! “I’m clearly working right now. You literally made a virtual appointment with me. I’m just…getting my practice off the ground.”

“Yeah but you seem lowkey unemployed.”

“You are so fucking rude.” But you’re laughing.

“I’m just saying, you had a lot of appointment times available. A lot.”

“I’m recruiting clients!” you exclaim. “I’m not like you. I can’t simulate sex with microphone stands to sell tickets.”

“That was one time!”

You smirk at him, eyebrows raised.

“That was…four times. That I recall.”

“I’m a professional. A serious, grown-up, certified professional.”

“You’re a glorified hobo, admit it.”

“You’re a dollar store Harry Styles.”

“Fuck,” he sighs, clutching his chest. “Okay you win.”

“Why did you do this? Why did you track me down in order to make some fraudulent therapy appointment?”

Now Aegon is something you’ve never seen from him before. He’s nervous. “I, uh…I need your help.”

“Really?”

“Well, not me specifically,” he amends. “We need your help. Comet does.”

Comet. What he means—what screaming fans all over the world mean when they drop this name in Reddit threads or Twitter hashtags or Tumblr gifsets—is the boy band Comet Donati. Three albums, five members: Aegon, Jace, Luke, Cregan, Daeron. The lineup has changed recently. Everyone knows why. “Help with what?”

“I mean…I’m sure you heard about what happened.”

“Yeah,” you say, somber now. Six months ago a piece of rigging collapsed during soundcheck at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. It hit Aemond, costing him six inches of flesh on the left side of his face, his sight in one eye, and his position as the undisputed, archetypal fearless leader of Comet. The celebrity gossip sites had reported that he was taking time off to recover, and then that his younger brother Daeron would be filling in for him at a few shows, and then suddenly Daeron was the fifth member of the band, and everyone was so charmed by his distinctly buoyant, sunshine-and-rainbows quality that Aemond faded from the discourse almost entirely, a ghost, a phantom, an antiquated word like telegraph or courtship or laudanum.

“So things are different now,” Aegon continues. “Things are…not always easy. And I think it might be a good idea to have you around.”

“Look, I’m not…like…” How can you put this? It’s something you have difficulty admitting out loud. “I’m not a real therapist, you know? You’re right, Aegon. I’m basically unemployed. I’m fresh out of my master’s program, I don’t have anywhere near the kind of experience that someone would need to adequately help Comet. So, maybe I could recommend some people to you, but other than that I don’t think I can—”

“It has to be you,” Aegon says.

You shake your head, gazing through the screen at him, through the space and the time. “Why?”

“When Comet performed in Kansas City…when we met at the bar that night…” He is hushed, meditative. “I don’t really remember what we talked about. But I remember exactly how you made me feel.” He smiles, the sort of smile you didn’t know he had in him: soft, pure, nostalgic, without edges. “I think Aemond could use some of that.”

The walls fall down around you, this apartment, this city, this life. “Where are you right now?”

“Capri.”

“Where?”

“Capri,” he says again, amused. “But we’ll be in Rome tomorrow. You can meet us there.”

“In Rome,” you repeat, like it’s Mars or one of Jupiter’s moons.

“Catch the next flight out. The band can reimburse you. We’ll get you a contract of some sort. Nothing too long-term, so you won’t be locked in or anything. A few months. Then we can reassess.”

“Okay, but…I don’t feel comfortable serving as an official therapist to you or anyone else in Comet, Aegon. The circumstances are less than orthodox. And not just because of the…um…bar bathroom situation.”

“Fine, whatever.” He’s high on the victory; the details don’t matter so much.

“Okay,” you say. And then again, giggling wildly at the ludicrousness of it all: “Okay! I guess I’ll see you in Rome tomorrow!”

“Cool. Let me give you my WhatsApp.” You exchange information, and then he grins at you, crafty and radiant through the screen. “You’re gonna love Aemond. He’s so fucked up. He’s like Disney World for therapists.”

“We’ll see,” you reply distractedly, already opening Expedia in a new tab.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Midwest, the East Coast, the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, Southern Europe, green to blue and then green again as the plane descends into the Leonardo da Vinci Airport of Rome. You roll your single carry-on bag through the corridors, peering out the windows at cloudless cerulean skies and towering stone pines. Aegon meets you at the bottom of an escalator. He’s wearing cargo shorts, a neon green tank top, and matching Crocs. He’s slightly chubbier than you remember, just as beautiful, just as chaotically charismatic, the sun made flesh. He’s standing with a man you don’t recognize.

“Benvenuta, bella!” Aegon proclaims, nearly tackling you with a hug before taking your bag. He smells like beer, sunscreen, Axe body spray, summer air that unfurls warm and golden in the lungs.

“Oh, thank God,” the other man—possibly Italian, definitely gorgeous—exhales with great relief. “Aegon said he needed to meet someone at the airport and I was 90% sure that you would be a drug dealer. But you do not look like a drug dealer. You’re not a…are you a…?”

“No, I’m definitely not a drug dealer.”

“Okay. Great. Hello.” He extends a hand, tan and muscley. “I’m Criston, I’m the tour manager. It is my job to keep everyone alive and uninjured.”

“Four out of five isn’t bad,” Aegon says. And then, when Criston is clearly distressed by it: “Uh, anyway, there’s an Escalade waiting outside.”

The SUV is massive and black with tinted windows. As you follow Aegon into the backseat, several paparazzi appear on the sidewalk and begin snapping photos, calling out to you and expelling rapid-fire white flashes like lightning. Aegon ignores them. You’ve been travelling all day, and the sun is setting now in Rome. The sky is the color of embers, autumn leaves, Saturn. Criston climbs into the passenger seat and gives instructions to the driver. The Escalade wheels out of Arrivals, paparazzi sprinting down the sidewalk after it to take a few final pictures.

“So,” Aegon says, smiling. He pops open the mini fridge and hands you an ice-cold can of San Pellegrino. “Do you have a boyfriend back in Kansas? Or, maybe, boyfriends?”

“Missouri,” you correct him automatically. “And no. None worth mentioning.” A guy you’ve had lunch with twice, a guy you made out with at an Olive Garden, a guy you hooked up with back at UChicago who you’re still texting, guys who flit in and out of your mind like birds through the sky, impermanent, inconsequential.

“You still on the pill?”

“Yes.” You’re not offended. Aegon is teasing, and so are you. It occurs to you that talking to Aegon is a bit like talking to yourself; there are no awkward lulls, and he rarely says anything that shocks you. “But that’s not why I came to Rome.”

“That’s fine. That’s not why I invited you.”

As the Escalade zooms by iconic landmarks—the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, the Piazza del Popolo—you ask Aegon about them. He has no idea; he makes things up instead.

“That’s the duck waterpark,” he says as you pass a fountain that’s over 1,000 years old. Then he points to a naked statue of an extremely buff Mercury. “That’s me before I started eating carbs again.” His only snippet of accurate trivia comes as you drive by the twilight-lit Colosseum. “Holy shit, that’s where Taylor Swift made out with Tom Hiddleston!”

“Surely more important things have happened there at some point in the past two millennia.”

“I doubt it,” Aegon replies, frowning out the Escalade window, taciturn. “I wish I got to make out with Taylor Swift in the Colosseum.”

Comet Donati is staying at the Anantara Palazzo Naiadi Rome Hotel, which closely resembles a palace. When the Escalade stops at the front doors, you drag your luggage out onto the cobblestones.

“No no no,” Criston says, grabbing the rolling suitcase from you. He gives it to a white-gloved butler along with a room number and then escorts you and Aegon to the top floor. It’s not until the three of you are in the elevator that you realize you are still wearing your highly unsophisticated travel-day attire: yoga pants, flip flops, a tie-dye hoodie with Louis Tomlinson’s face on it that you purchased from Etsy last winter. Aegon catches you scrutinizing your reflection in the mirrors that line the inside of the elevator.

“Traitor,” he says with a grin, massaging your shoulders. His eyes lock with yours in the mirror. His touch is—just as it was a year ago at that bar in Kansas City when you were home from school on break and he was a transient visitor, fleeting like a rainstorm—familiar somehow, pleasant and comforting but not profound, welcome without being necessary.

“Don’t hate him ‘cause you ain’t him. When was the last time you wrote a #1 hit single?”

“Never,” Aegon readily admits. “Although I got into the Top 5 in Norway once.” No, everyone knows that Aemond was Comet’s Louis Tomlinson: their best songwriter, their relatively unproblematic and grounded team captain, their protector, their compass. And now he has no official place in the band at all.

When the elevator doors open, Criston leads you and Aegon down the hallway to a bustling suite. Inside there are white leather couches and gold-colored lounge chairs, a bar, a staircase that leads up to the loft bedroom, people wandering in and out of air that is hazy with whispers and cigarette smoke. There are men in suits, women in short tight dresses, leather and velvet and sequins. You are woefully underdressed. Fortunately, so is Aegon. He is greeted with a dizzying array of cheers, waves, and toasts. Someone shoves an emerald green bottle of Peroni into his grasp. Kesha’s Your Love Is My Drug is vibrating through the speakers mounted on the wall: “What you’ve got, boy, is hard to find, I think about it all the time…”

“Hey, hey, listen up!” Aegon shouts, stepping on top of an ottoman, and the chatter lowers in volume like a radio being turned down.

You scan the smokey room until you’ve located all five current Comet Donati members: Aegon the disaster playboy, Luke the sensitive and kindhearted one, Daeron the energetic ray of sunshine, Jace the heir apparent in the power vacuum created by Aemond’s departure, Cregan the brooding, mysterious, sexy Northern Englishman. You know them, and yet you don’t. You know the characters they play, their reputations, their public personas…but that doesn’t mean you know them. Aegon is the only man you spoke to at the rooftop bar that night in Kansas City a year ago. So far, the mythical version of him seems quite consistent with reality.

Cregan is slumped at one end of the couch by the window and knocking back shots of what appears to be straight vodka. In the night sky beyond the glass, you can see stars and the illuminated Rome skyline: modern skyscrapers, ancient rubble. At the other end of the couch is Aemond. He’s smoking, drinking something iced and bloody pink, hunched over with his elbows on his knees, all in black like he’s trying to disappear. His left eye, the blind one, is an ethereal cloudy blue that reminds you of renderings you’ve seen of Neptune, Uranus, exoplanets, the Earth from space. He glances up at you and holds your gaze for just a few seconds too long. Then he looks away, bewildered, taking a drag off his cigarette.

Aegon introduces you to the room as you stand beside the ottoman, awkward and ashamed in your Louis Tomlinson hoodie. “She’s a friend,” Aegon says. “And she’s also a therapist.”

“Good, you need one!” Jace shouts through cupped hands, and there are tipsy titters and guffaws.

“Not for me,” Aegon snaps. “For you deranged bitches.”

As Aegon descends from the ottoman—klutzily, stumbling, clutching onto Criston like a baby lemur to its mother—Luke approaches to present himself. He has a mess of dark curly hair that falls over his face and large, honest eyes. There’s a black spiral notebook and a white gel pen in his left hand. He offers you his right. “Hi! I’m Luke Velaryon.”

“Yeah, I know. I spend a lot of time on Comet’s Spotify page.”

He groans. “I look so bad in that header photo.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s the nose. I have a pug nose. The label has been trying to convince me to get it fixed for years.” He turns to a girl who is practically hiding behind him: arrestingly beautiful in a fragile sort of way, gentle like a doe. “Maybe you can help Rhaena talk to people.”

“I have social anxiety,” she explains apologetically. Her voice is very quiet yet lyrical. There are weights tied to her confession, years of shame and despair. Luke throws an arm across her shoulders and hugs her to him, touching his forehead briefly to hers.

“That’s okay.” You give Rhaena a reassuring smile. “It’s super common, and there are a lot of strategies you can try that might make it more manageable.”

“It wasn’t a big deal at first, you know?” Rhaena says. It comes out in a rush like water through a cracked dam. Luke looks astonished but pleased. You have been known to have this effect upon people, a compulsive sort of disclosure that drains, empties, unburdens. Aegon is watching from several feet away, beaming between swigs of Peroni. “Luke and I met before he got famous and we could just hang out around the neighborhood. Ice cream, public parks, Pret a Manger, riding the Tube together. But now…now he’s always meeting new people and there are all these events I’m supposed to go to with him, and I can’t sleep properly for days leading up to each one, and half the time I end up hiding in the bathroom or being too nauseous to eat anything, and…”

Jace is at the bar and slurping a vesper: shoulder-length curls, flashy blazer with nothing underneath it, a contemplative appraisal of you. There’s a stunning girl sitting beside him that he’s not listening to.

As you are explaining the potential benefits of exposure therapy to Rhaena and Luke, Daeron bursts through the crowd to greet you. He’s their Niall Horan: warm, uncomplicated, disarmingly friendly, beachy blond hair, a golden retriever on two legs. He hugs you—spiritedly, like Aegon did—and then compliments your flip flops.

“So you’re our new therapist?” Daeron says eagerly, like this is something he knows they’ve needed.

“Well, I’m a therapist, but I’m not really your therapist. Because I can’t hang out with you guys all the time and also be your therapist. It’s unethical. But Aegon thought I might have some good ideas, I guess. In a strictly unofficial capacity.”

“Okay! Cool! And you and Aegon are…friends?”

“Um…yeah. Sort of.”

“Remember that show in Kansas City last summer?” Aegon tells Daeron. He’s supernaturally gifted at making everything sound blissfully casual, like there couldn’t possibly be more to the story. “I met her at the bar we went to afterwards.”

“Totally,” Daeron says. “Great city. Awesome barbeque.”

Criston asks him: “So, uh, how’s your mom doing?”

Daeron is puzzled. “Fine…?”

“Criston, please stop asking about my mom,” Aegon says. “It’s getting weird. It’s been weird. It was weird four years ago and it’s weird now. She has a husband.”

“Yeah, but is that…you know…is that still going well?”

“Yes, Criston.”

“Fantastic,” Criston mutters, pouring himself a Scotch. He uses the glass to gesture to you. “So what the hell am I supposed to bill her as? Aegon’s friend?”

“She’s a…” Aegon considers this, waving his Peroni around in the air. “Human resources mental health consultant.”

“She’s a what?”

“She helps resolve both intra and interpersonal conflict.”

“That sounds imaginary.”

“Well then you figure something out!” Aegon says, exasperated. “Isn’t this what you get paid for? To make problems go away? To keep us happy? To stop us from killing each other? You figure it out.” He saunters off to grace the drunken masses with his presence. Criston sighs and goes to stand by the wall with a herd of stone-faced businessmen in suits, record label guys, guys who only know how to see the world in terms of contract clauses and account balances.

Rhaena goes to stand by Jace’s companion, who—as you conjure up vague recollections of celebrity gossip sites—is named something like Bella or Bailey. Daeron is commandeered by a gaggle of adoring Italian women. Luke is showing Aemond something in his notebook: black pages, sparkly white ink. Aemond is nodding and giving critique, not that saccharine, generic, brainless kind of praise but authentic encouragement: try to think of a more specific word here, move that line up to the first verse, I love the use of this metaphor. Aemond’s voice dredges up memories you didn’t know you had of him on talk shows, in YouTube compilations, in songs you’ve been streaming on Spotify for years. Smoke drifts from his lips. Ice jangles in his organ-pink cocktail. And again, he looks up at you, inhaling poison as Luke makes his opal-ink edits.

“What’s that drink called?” you ask the bartender, and he squints across the room to where Aemond is seated on the snow-colored leather couch to discern it.

“A Bramble,” he says. “It’s named after blackberry bushes.”

“Can I get one?”

“Sure.”

You procure your drink and when Luke leaves the couch, you whizz past him like a meteor as you walk towards it.

“Hey,” Cregan flings impassively, not knowing why you’re here, not caring either.

“Hey,” you return.

And then you sit down next to Aemond, deliberately on his blind side. He glances over at you, his brow crinkling with confusion. Because—surely, undoubtedly—no one ever speaks about his injury, but it’s veined through everything they do, it’s a perpetual undercurrent that steers his life and yet cannot be voiced without breaching those vigilantly constructed levees of propriety. It’s the elephant in every room. It’s a ghost rattling doorknobs and tapping on windows. And sometimes the only way to free yourself of something is to throw the cage door wide open and set it loose.

“I accidentally wore your competitor’s merch,” you say. “I didn’t want you to have a good view.”

Aemond laughs, and the strangest thing happens: everyone in the room turns to look. On their faces are expressions of shock, bafflement, relief, wonder. Aemond shifts so he’s facing you, one elbow propped on the back of the couch. He sips the Bramble in his right hand, puffs on the cigarette in his left. And there it is, what people like to call a spark, but it’s something deeper than that: organic chemistry, neurotransmitter plumes, wells of marrow that sing to each other from beneath the darkness.

You nod to his cigarette, Benson & Hedges according to the shimmery gold pack that lays open on the glass coffee table. “You think that makes you cool?”

“I know it does,” he says. His gaze flicks down to your Louis Tomlinson hoodie…or what’s under it, perhaps. “Wouldn’t work on you though. Too far gone.”

You hold out your hand. After a few seconds, Aemond passes you his cigarette. You—very stoically, very nonchalantly—take a single drag and then erupt into a coughing fit, eyes watering, lungs gasping, surrendering the cigarette emphatically. Humiliating! Irredeemable!

“Told you,” Aemond notes. But he’s rubbing your back with a hand that is large and strong and yet careful. You smile at him. Aemond smiles too.

Criston pulls one of the suit guys aside and says: “Get her on the payroll.”

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