Chapter Text
Lord Rogar Baratheon marches into King's Landing with an army at his back and a dragon at his head. Jaehaerys is only fourteen. He is dwarfed by the dark dragon still languishing in the Great Hall. What matters is that Jaehaerys is obviously alive, bronze scales flashing in the sun, while the Beast King bloats and rots as a corpse too large to pry from the Iron Throne. The remnants of Maegor's forces fold with minimal bloodshed.
Alyssa, an undisputed queen, sets to purifying the Red Keep. Maegor's corpse is hauled from the throne and burned. Every window is thrown open to fresh air and a hundred septons who cleanse its walls of the Beast King's innumerable sins, so that a new monarch might be anointed upon the very throne he bled out upon.
By the time the hall is ready all uncertainty of that claimant has passed. Rhaena may be the oldest dragon alive, uncrowned Aegon's widow, but wishes only to retreat to Dragonstone. Tainted by Maegor's shadow, not many seek to convince her otherwise. Nor is the claim for Aerea, her eldest twin by Aegon, acknowledged as anything but technicality. She is a little girl, the spawn of incest. Why should the realm rally for a child queen, when Jaehaerys is both near a man grown and a true dragon?
So is crowned King Jaehaerys, first of his name. He does not wear the Valyrian steel of the Conqueror, salvaged from Maegor's pyre alongside Blackfyre when the fires had broken their connection to his natural magics. His crown is yellow gold, adorned only by seven gemstones for the seven gods. Such comes to mark his reign, for his earliest days are marked by reconciliation with the Seven, pardoning what remains of the Warrior's Sons and taking their Faith beneath the crown's protection. They remain too broken by Maegor to protest being taken beneath the dragon's shadow.
The realm that erupted in outrage over Rhaena and Aegon's incestuous match, Maegor's blatant polygamy by seizing seven brides to mock the gods his sired had embraced, scarcely whispers when Jaehaerys weds his sister Alysanne on Dragonstone. They are dragons both, the last two untouched by Maegor's madness. Rogar's furious attempts to annul their marriage are all in vain. He resigns from Hand in disgrace, when his rage over being foiled by his rightful rulers instead drives him to try kidnapping poor, innocent Rhaella in an attempt to crown her as Queen Aerea.
For all the realm knows the crown's protection of their Faith, so must they know dragons are exceptions to the rule. Dragons are born men, but so do they become more. House Targaryen are the last dragons in the world, the last children of Old Valyria, where laws and traditions older than all those in Andalos held sway. So must dragons wed brother to sister, as had been done since the dawn of days, as the gods have made them. There is no other way to guarantee the dragons continue. How can dragons protect the peace of the realm, of the very Faith, if there are none left to defend them?
Jaehaerys and his sister-wife are no beasts like Maegor and his mother, who burned those who displeased them alive. Nor are they like Aegon and Rhaena before them, so absorbed in their blood and callous to the people. Jaehaerys is the Conciliator, wise beyond his years, who buries grudges and lays down laws to stabilize the realm, to bind Seven Kingdoms together so they might forever be one. So does Alysanne quick become the Good Queen, whose almshouses shall serve the poor and desperate forever more, whose earnest reforms shall see no Andal daughter forced out of their inheritance by an overreaching uncle.
Even as a young man Jaehaerys is handsome and dignified, with a beard of silver-gold and eyes of warm bronze. For his scales he is also called the Bronze King. Unlike the dragons before him, marred by war and the cruelty of other dragons, his hide shimmers whole and pristine beside Alysanne's lustrous silver. In their early years the realm comes to know his form intimately, for he flies at the head of every royal progress when Alysanne's pregnancies keep her grounded.
Compared to most, Jaehaerys and Alysanne are fortunate in their brood. Only Daenerys and Viserra do not live to see their majorities. Daenerys alone can be blamed on the Stranger. Viserra has only her own recklessness to blame when she breaks her neck in a wild gallop through the capital's crowded streets. Jaehaerys has always known her and Saera to have shared the same self-destructive tendencies. Their fates are circumstances beyond his control. He could no more tame them than Maegor could the beast in his blood.
Viserra is more trouble in death than she ever was in life, for her internment on Dragonstone is only the beginning of the end.
"Jae," Alysanne murmurs the night after the funeral, as their daughter's urn begins to gather dust. They lay entwined side by side in royal chambers scarce used. Jaehaerys has despised Dragonstone since his youth. Here is where Visenya's poisons withered their father away to nothing. Here is where they where they remained her prisoners until their mother at least took their vengeance. "Jae, I'm tired."
Jaehaerys sighs into the warmth of her neck. "So am I, Aly. So am I." His hand traces the constellation of freckles down her shoulder, much faded from their carefree days frolicking nude on Dragonstone in those first blissful weeks after they found their fire and had tried to drown out the horrors of their father's late reign. "Our Aemon is a man grown now. Perhaps I might permanently declare him my regent, and we might see where the wind takes us."
His queen raises her head away from his. "I am tired of burying my children, Jae. No woman should outlive a child, much less two barely on the cusp of womanhood."
Jaehaerys swallows his own bitter guilt. Perhaps they should have delayed Daella's marriage a year or two. Perhaps, if Daella had been a mature woman in carrying their first grandchild, Aemma would still have a mother and Oswin would not be a grief-stricken wreck without her. "We are still blessed, Aly. We still have six hale children and four grandchildren. Gods know how many great-grandchildren we'll be blessed to see."
Alysanne draws away, silver eyes blazing in the dark. "Seven. Seven are the children left to us."
He bites back his snarl. He is no Maegor, no Visenya, to be so possessed by his bestial side. "The seventh is no longer our concern."
The only intelligence he keeps on that one is to ensure no credible dragon sightings in the area around her. Gods know what bastards she might spawn to challenge the trueborn succession.
Alysanne goes quiet and Jae settles. He believes that the end of it. His sister-wife is not like Rhaena and Visenya, to bury and nurse her grudges so bitterly.
So he believes until she ambushes him in the Red Keep with Septon Barth. Jaehaerys finds himself clenching his teeth as the septon rambles on and on and on about forgiveness, about the healing distance of time and reflection, how death should drive families together and not apart. Still, he remains in control of himself. He is even starting to douse his inner fire when Alysanne dares utter Saera.
"If it helps you put her to rest, sister, we can inscribe her a proper urn and be done with it," he grits out. "The time has long come to bury her."
Septon Barth's eyes widen, but his response is drowned out by Alysanne's growl. "Saera is my daughter, Jaehaerys, your daughter. She is alive and well, and the time has come to bring her home."
"I hear only the name of a Lysene whore," he hisses. Perhaps their other forms match each other inch for inch, but as a man Jaehaerys looms tall over her.
"She is still your daughter, Jaehaerys, as much as Maegelle and Alyssa. Unless you think I fucked a Lysene whore twenty years ago!"
Jaehaerys tries and tries to reason against her fragile heart and foolish sentimentality, but is bolstered by dragonfire. So are his thoughts drowned out by the roar in his head and his vision by a red haze of fury he has not felt since Rogar wronged their mother so, until the fire is all there is.
The Great Rift begins with the Conciliator and the Good Queen spilling out the Red Keep in fang and fire. No witnesses quite recollect if one chased the other or else tackled them over the balcony. All of King's Landing witnesses dragons of silver and bronze surge out to sea. All of Blackwater Bay hears their thunderous roars, until their three frantic dragon children swoop after them.
That year Jaehaerys makes his royal progress alone. His hosts scrupulously avoid staring at the burn mark that lances across his cheek, rising up beyond what his beard can cover, or the many more scars riddling what had been a pristine bronze hide on all the processions before. Alysanne remains on Dragonstone to grieve their daughters. Still she hosts balls to bring together the families of the bay, flies out to Gulltown to found a new motherhouse especially dedicated to sheltering the city's poor and downtrodden whores. She uses a cane to ease her new limp. In her other form she supports herself heavily on her wings, to avoid straining a mangled leg.
Jaehaerys tarries in his progress for a year. Every court but his is preferable to the resentment festering at home.
When he reaches Oldtown, he is relieved to discover at least one child has not taken their mother's side. Vaegon receives him with his usual distant, apathetic affection. Maegelle is the best of him and Alysanne, his carefulness with her wisdom and patience. She consoles Jaehaerys as no other except Alysanne can.
Until even her patience in him runs out. "Father," she sighs one day, interrupting an entirely different conversation. "Can you please just swallow your pride and apologize already?" She heaves a long-suffering sigh when he instinctively draws himself up with the look that turns the blood of lesser men to ice. "That's the dragon speaking, Father. I want to hear you."
The king cannot help his bemused blink. "We are one and the same, daughter. We always have been." Not even a child of his can understand, unless they are a dragon themselves. The temper and the pride, for all he has chained them down, are still his. They have been his for over fifty years, when assassins first gave him no other option to protect his baby sister.
"I know, Father," Maegelle says flatly. "You are as much a dragon as Mother is. But do you despise Saera so much you must despise your own wife too?"
His stomach drops. "I do not despise your mother, Maegelle. She is as much apart of me as your faith is to you, or Baelon to Alyssa. I... simply..."
The words fail him. They do so moons more. He can scarcely choke out any at all, when Rhaenys' wedding looms on the horizon.
His pathetic apology is still enough to drop the tension from Alysanne's faces, as a shadow of her true self appears from behind the cold fury. "There you are, Jae," she murmurs. "I missed you, too."
That night they fly together, free and foolish as they have not been in decades and decades, uncaring of witnesses and disgusted children below.
Jaehaerys still remains heavier built than Alysanne, without her slender grace. His bulk weighs him down but still she matches him wing-beat for wing-beat. No longer does she do so willingly. Her wings do not move as easily as they had a mere three years ago. Yet, for all the years between them, still they match each other inch to inch.
That night the Bronze King's heart soars higher than a dragon ever could. He prays to any and all gods listening he and his queen need never come down ever again.
What was once known as the Great Rift becomes merely the First Quarrel, when Aemon's sudden death rips out of the heart of his family. His sole heir is Rhaenys, heavy with her first child. In her the realm does not see a dragon; not like her Uncle Baelon, with a warrior's might and bulk of golden bronze. He is near the splitting image of his sire, comfortably familiar in the face of such uncertainty.
Jaehaerys hopes himself wiser than his predecessors, that he has learned from the mistakes of the past. He remembers Rhaena, stranded in siege while carrying her twins. So does he remember Alysanne, who depended on him to be the dragon time and time again as their children grounded her. How can he subject Rhaenys to the same rigors, that she must sacrifice every unborn child if the throne demands a dragon to avenge their people? With her father dead she has no others to rely on, not when Corlys is merely a Sea Serpent, and not a Sea Dragon.
Naming Baelon his heir is mercy, the realm argues, truer to Valyrian precedent than Alysanne's sentimentality.
Chroniclers assure the Second Quarrel was once more eased by Maegelle, that she once more ended the rift between her parents before she too succumbed to her greyscale. Jaehaerys dies beloved, at peace with all his loved ones, leaving behind a legitimate heir and stable succession secured by his Great Council. The Dance of Dragons rests on the shoulders of later grandchildren, weak of heart and unworthy of spirit, to corrupt his legacy so.
There are none left to speak of a septa who could not work miracles, a distraught queen that preferred shades to the prideful beast at home, a king so broken in his last years he passively sat as everyone but himself decided his family's future. The Dance has swallowed them all.
The Wise King dies believing himself at peace, for in Alicent Targaryen he sees Saera returned from across the narrow sea, and all his demons laid to rest.
The tale is sweeter that way.