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Alicent does not set eyes on the boy for the first weeks of his confinement in King’s Landing. Rhaenyra’s sole surviving heir sits manacled in a cell below the Red Keep. Guards watch the boy’s every twitch and shuddered breath and report it back to Lord Larys, who then brings it to Alicent and the Small Council for dissection and scrutiny at the Small Council table. They debate his fate, never once exchanging a word or a glance with the child in question.
His existence is nearly hypothetical. Alicent has not seen him since he was a babe in his mother's arms.
It had been mere days before the war broke out.
The faces of those she loved and lost are fresh in her mind as Alicent refuses every suggestion of reconciling the boy. She would not sacrifice Jaehaera any more than she would have Helaena. Her line would prevail over Rhaenyra’s tainted stock without compromise. Even in death, Alicent would not vindicate her jailor, murderess of her children and grandchildren. It takes hours and days and weeks to chip away at the tar of her disdain for the mother to see the glimmer of political value in the son.
Even so, he remains a faceless, nameless body in the dungeon far beneath her feet.
Alicent refuses to think of the boy when she needs not; she will not relish his suffering as Rhaenyra had Helaena's.
Then her Aegon returns to King’s Landing, angry and wounded, and he all but lashes the pale boy to his wheeled chair, parading him through the Red Keep for all to see like a war prize. He strikes the child with both an open hand and a closed fist. Splashes him with the very wine he forces the boy to pour and taste. He refuses the same match Alicent once did but goes one step further.
“My dear sister’s line will be extinguished. If I do not have him beheaded, I will have him gelded. The best he can hope for is that dragon blood will keep him warm on the Wall.”
The boy is a pale shadow at the king’s back as this is said. He makes no faces and utters not a word of horror or protest. It is difficult to think of the boy as Rhaenyra’s blood, let alone Daemon's. There is no fire in the boy, no hunger for their Green blood. The Blacks' Aegon is silent and half a ghost already. The sight of him gives no pleasure to even those who had grown to despise his mother.
Perhaps that is why the King relents.
Aegon the Elder releases the Younger from his bondage and betroths him to his only daughter -- and names him heir to the Iron Throne, in keeping with the basic order and principles that their side had fought to uphold in the first place. It is magnanimous and just.
Yet the boy does not suddenly brighten with relief. Alicent watches him pour Aegon’s wine and act surprised when a hired taster takes the cup to test for poison. She listens to his silence amid the hopeful talk at dinner. And she catches him shivering alone in his bed chamber as if it were a black cell. The spiteful, festering wound on her heart speaks out: “You should feel grateful.”
The boy turns from the window he sits curled against. He sees the Queen Dowager and ducks his head, white hair falling in his dark eyes.
“Your Grace,” He greets her. It is plain that he lacks both confidence in her words and the willfulness of his parents to challenge her.
Alicent steps further into the chamber. She reminds him, “The King could have had your head.” It would have angered Rhaenyra’s supporters, and cemented generations of malice between houses, and the fighting might not even end, but it would lose its last purpose.
The boy lifts his morose gaze back to the window. There is no wistful view, only the brick of another tower. “The King will have it soon enough,” The boy says. He looks the closest thing to longing since her Aegon had dragged him up from the dungeon.
“No,” Alicent tells him.
The boy plainly does not believe her.
“No,” She repeats more forcefully. “The King has given his word now. You are his heir until he weds Cassandra Baratheon and sires a son, but even so, you will wed Princess Jaehaera and make peace for the realm. It is owed.” She speaks the facts of the matter, believing the boy will see the truth of how his situation has improved far beyond what he could have hoped and feel a speck of gratefulness toward them.
Instead, a flesh and blood child materializes from the shadow by the window. He is distraught. Aegon does not cry, but he looks as if he might fall to pieces with one false touch.
“Why can’t he just kill me?” He asks her. “Be done with it. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
It sounds like treason. Like the child had, indeed, been dreaming of escape all these months past. But beyond hearing his little voice for the first time, Alicent finally sees his little hands curled in his lap. His nails are chewed to the quick and bleed from the beds. She turns on her heel, fleeing the boy and the phantom taste of iron.
After nightfall, after the King has dismissed his cupbearer from his dinner table, Alicent commandeers Aegon from his guards. They look at her oddly, remembering the one-sided confrontation in the boy's chamber earlier, but do not intervene. Her maids guard the door to the royal sept within the walls of the Red Keep, instead.
The boy steps inside and is a foreigner.
It is in watching the boy circle the ring of flickering candles before the Mother, uncertain and lost and lonely, passing through shadows and candlelight, that Alicent sees Rhaenyra in her son's stride, in his worried brow, in his curious eyes. Alicent had wondered if this would prove a mistake - if she would hate the boy in a heartbeat. That hatred does not come. Something else wells in her chest, but she cannot name it. There is no one name for it.
“Kneel with me,” Alicent bids the boy.
She holds out a hand and he takes it. Their palms are clammy and their fingers equally savaged.
Aegon sinks down beside her. He does not know what to do with his hands after Alicent clasps her own together. He reaches for a nearby candle and lets its flame lick his fingertip. His quick retreat proves that he is not a ghost yet. And perhaps no longer a dragon either.
Eventually, he settles on mirroring Alicent’s posture.
They sit in the dark and golden light for quite a while, the roar of a thousand tiny fires in their ears, fidgeting side by side. There is a septon spying on them from behind the Warrior, and likely rats in the rafters.
Alicent lets out a sigh and gets on with it.
“I find prayer...to be more than an escape. I find it is a way to be with those whom I’ve lost.”
Aegon remains silent, staring at the burning candles.
“My sons, my Helaena, her children…” She sees their faces in the candles. Flickering brightly, melting away so slowly, then gone in a quick blow. There is one face she can no longer remember. “My mother.”
The soft word makes the boy flinch in a way the King’s beatings never had. No one speaks of his mother since her death except to curse her name.
“Here, I remind myself that we are all together in the love and embrace of the Seven. And we will see each other again. Someday.”
“And it helps?” Aegon asks in a small, disbelieving voice.
“It does,” Alicent answers, half a truth and half a lie.
That longed-for reunion felt too far away some days; others, when word of the Lads and Cregan Stark reached the Small Council, too close. The boy might yet still need to die, despite the King's promises.
“Would you like to try, my prince?” Alicent asks.
Aegon mulls it over, as his mother once had. “What do I say, Your Grace?”
“Whatever you wish,” Alicent answers. Then, “No one will punish you for what you say to the gods.”
Aegon does not appear to know what to make of that. He truly has no fear of punishment. No doubt, he finds the Queen Dowager’s behavior today quite strange. He must decide not to care whether it’s a trap or not.
Alicent watches him dip his head, hands clasped tight and injured fingers woven together like her own. White hair curtains eyes squeezed shut. His face screws up in confusion for some time, like a pupil stumped by his tutor’s test. Then, the determined set of his frown gives way to a quivering lip. Fat tears spring from the corners of dark purple eyes.
“They’re all gone,” The boy weeps. “Why am I still here?”
“Because we must be,” Alicent tells him instantly. She clasps Aegon's praying hands in her own and looks him in his teary eyes. Her own feel just as wide and wet. Her voice trembles as much as the boy does. “Because we have a duty to our families, to the realm, to all the lives taken in the name of them all. We must live and serve. Otherwise, what has it all been for?” She asks.
Aegon looks at her and her hands holding his tight, utterly lost at this link being forged between them.
“We must, Aegon,” Alicent tells him again. The words ring familiar in her ears. “You must. We cannot simply sit idle afterward and wait to die - wait to see them all again. We will carry on till the end, doing our duty, putting the realm right at long last, making this suffering all worth something. Otherwise, all of it is meaningless pride and vanity. Do you understand?”
Slowly at first, then vigorously, Aegon nods his head. Alicent embraces him. Prayers to the Mother spill past her lips as she combs the head of pale Valyrian hair resting against her breast. It reminds her of when her children were small - of when she and the boy's mother were small.