Work Text:
Be with me. Build the new world with me. This is our reason. It has been from the beginning, since you were a little boy with a bastard's name and I was a little girl who couldn't count to twenty. We do it together. We break the wheel together.
There is an imploration that lingers in the air and Jon recalls her earlier words: I have never begged for anything, but now I do. Please don't do this. He shudders, his whole body struck by stark realization again, tenfold harder. How's that he did end up here, with this decision in his hands? Tyrion's warning woven into a careful scheme to have him do exactly what Jon knows he must do. There is no doubt about it. But it is not so simple when he is confronted with the truth of it: his own fears have taken the form of a monster that haunts him, closes its claws around his throat and squeezes and forces him to choose.
It is easy to choose the good when it is apparent.
The Night King never meant anything but absolute evil. There was no ulterior motive in his quest for eternal darkness. Jon was ready to defend the Realm from men as he had sworn in his vows and so he did. Hadn't she believed the same not so long ago? That humanity deserved redemption. But then Jon was confronted with a facet that while he was not unfamiliar with, less he was able to comprehend: the war of man against man, in the name of power.
"You are hurt. It's just that. When your mind's clear again and the clouds of grief dispel you will see in all its light what you have done," he replies.
"What I have done?" she rebuffs, baffled, "And what others have done?"
"The others don't matter in the grand scheme of things, Dany. You were the one who's will be imposed," Jon says with a tinge of rage and reproach. "I'll grant you. By all accounts, the City fell the moment Missandei died. But this doesn't have to go on. You have your throne and no one, no one after seeing King's Landing, will ever dare question that it is yours by own right."
She takes a step back.
"No one but your sister."
It makes Jon's skin crawl. Of course it did. It's only natural for him to react like that at the mere thought that harm might befall his family, again. It had always been so, and it was the belief he lived by. But something beyond him placed an inevitable restriction on the use of his senses. And that was the tangle he could not quite untangle.
"Sansa can raise her voice all she wants - who would risk their own well-being on a whim? Varys, as you said, is an example." Jon takes a sharp intake of breath. "If both cannot make peace with each other, then I will forcibly exercise my own will. You both know well enough that I can do it. Only that, of the two of us, you are the only one who could prevent it."
And then Jon gives her a look of sincerity, causing her expression to drop. Dany swallows hard and her mouth twists. Even in this perverse light taken by circumstances, she looks confused and innocent. Hurt. Too damn hurt. It makes him ache for her, because he has faith that she's not the person she's been.
She retrieves her shield and hides behind it again, soft features turning like Valyrian steel as she asks him, "So it's a no for an answer?"
A no to accompany her in this...madness.
Jon offers only a face of commiseration and in response she lifts her chin.
"It's a pity you choose this when your own men have deserted you," she states in retaliation. "Grey Worm told me. You tried to stop the sacking, but the Northmen followed their Queen."
His blood boiled. It was a good thing that in the midst of all this grief and despondency he still had it in him to feel anger. Ser Davos had to persuade Jon against execute them for disobedience and crimes against the citizens of King's Landing...they had disobeyed him who was now below the line of command.
"Aye," Jon doesn't even deny it, "They're men, all of them. Wild and cruel like beasts when they can. Any validity in their claim has expired in light of their own behavior. But now those men will go home, Dany. Unless you wish to take them to the ends of the world in pursuit of this goal of yours, in which case they will turn against you as well, one by one, until there is nothing left but ashes instead of an army, or subjects, whatever you choose to call them."
"When they know who you are-"
"What does that matter, for all Gods sake?" Jon snaps at her and Daenerys backs with a start. "It might have mattered when I had Rhaegal but if there is a glimmer of reason in you yet, you will see that no one will care that a deserter from the Watch, a King fallen in disgrace, born of the union that plunged the continent into war twenty years ago, will be seen as nothing but a bastard!" Jon screams, putting all their frustrations into it.
Jon thinks for a moment she is feeling for him but then her eyes turn dark, and a rumble lets him know that Drogon is coming. So will Grey Worm and her blood-riders.
You have to choose now! Tyrion's voice reverberates inside his skull. Damn you imp, you should be here to be dragged into to the seven hells with us, he curses to himself.
Jon puts a hand on the handle of his dagger.
"I can make it painless," he says in a broken voice, "And we'll both go," he promises her, knowing it will be Drogon or by the sword of her followers. He will do it himself, in fact, he decides. "There's no way I can live with this Dany. We didn't save the world from the Night King's darkness for you to plunge it under your fire..." Jon crosses the distance between them and she only has time to let out an audible breath.
He nimbly imprisons her with his strength and places the dagger between them, but especially so that it is Dany, her hand that holds the dagger to his neck as Jon secures her wrist with a hurtful grip.
"One of us has to make the choice, Dany. And one of us has to live with the consequences..." Jon tells her, trembling in the effort to hold her as Drogon's shadow falls over them.
Dany's face contorts in pain.
So before the eyes of the gods and the only dragon left in a world increasingly devoid of magic and hope, the last Targaryen decided the fate of the Seven Kingdoms and the rest of the world.