Chapter Text
The light was wrong.
Not the harsh fluorescent buzz of the lab. Not the grey nothing of — whatever had come after the raid. This was sunlight. Real, golden, warm-on-your-face sunlight pouring through a window with wooden shutters, and it smelled like salt and something floral he couldn't name.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling was old plaster, slightly cracked, slightly yellowed. A fat fly traced lazy circles near a wooden beam. Somewhere below the window, he could hear gulls and the creak of rope and the distant murmur of a harbour.
He sat up and the world shifted. Everything was too big. The bed was too wide, the window ledge too high, and his body — his body was wrong. Not wrong in the way of injury or sickness. Wrong in the way of scale. He was small. He held up his hands and they were a child's hands. Soft, pale, unblemished. The hands of someone who had never held a volumetric flask, never stained his fingers with iodine, never scrubbed potassium permanganate from under his nails.
A child's hands. Ten years old, give or take.
Hair fell across his face when he looked down. Silver hair.
His heart didn't race. It didn't skip. It stopped, for one perfect crystalline second, and in that second his mind — which had always been his best and most dangerous instrument — did what it did best. It calculated.
Silver hair. Violet eyes, if the blurred reflection in the copper wash basin across the room was to be believed. A harbour city. A room that was comfortable but not lavish, the kind you gave to a guest you respected but didn't fear. And from somewhere deeper in the house, the thin, hiccupping cry of a baby.
He knew who he was. And he knew whose cry that was.
The door opened and a large man filled the frame. He was old — well past fifty — with a broad chest going soft and a face weathered by decades of sun and salt. But his arms were still thick and his eyes were sharp, and he carried himself with the careful authority of a man who'd spent his life in service to kings.
"You're awake, my prince." Ser Willem Darry's voice was deep and gentle in the way of men who were genuinely kind rather than performing kindness. "You cried out in your sleep again. The old dream?"
The old dream. Viserys's nightmares — of dragonfire, of the Trident, of his mother weeping as they were bundled onto a ship at Dragonstone. Memories that belonged to a boy the SI had replaced.
"I'm fine, Ser Willem," he said, and his voice came out high and thin. A child's voice. It almost made him laugh. Thirty-four years old in his mind, ten in his body, and he sounded like he should be asking for a second helping of pudding.
Willem studied him with those careful eyes, then nodded. "Breakfast is ready. Your sister is already making a mess of it, I'm afraid."
He followed Willem down a narrow corridor — noting the house as he went. Modest but solid. Thick walls, tiled floors, a lemon tree visible through a courtyard window. The house with the red door. He'd read about it so many times that seeing it felt like stepping into a painting.
The kitchen was warm and smelled like porridge and olive oil. A Braavosi servant woman — one of the few who attended them — was trying to spoon something into the mouth of a silver-haired toddler sitting in a makeshift high seat cobbled together from a chair and several cushions. The toddler was having none of it. She'd gotten porridge in her hair, on the cushions, on the servant's sleeve, and on a truly impressive radius of the surrounding table, and she was now babbling at a wooden spoon she'd claimed as her own, gumming it with deep satisfaction.
Daenerys Targaryen. Not yet two years old.
Something hit him in the chest that he hadn't expected. In his old life, he'd read the books. Watched the show. He knew what happened to this girl — what Viserys did to her, the fear and the cruelty and the selling of her like livestock. That was a toddler. A baby with porridge in her hair who was chewing a spoon and looking at the world with huge, delighted violet eyes.
That wasn't going to happen. Not on his watch.
He sat at the table. Willem lowered himself into a chair across from him with the careful movements of a man whose body was starting to betray him. The SI studied the old knight while pretending to eat his porridge. Willem Darry was loyal to the bone — the man had smuggled two Targaryen children out of Dragonstone at enormous personal risk, spent his own money to keep them housed and fed, and would, in the original timeline, waste away from illness within a few years. After that, the servants would steal what little remained and throw two children into the streets.
That was the clock. Willem was the only thing between the Targaryen children and destitution, and Willem was dying by inches.
Which meant the SI had maybe two or three years before everything fell apart. Two or three years to build something — anything — that would keep them afloat when Willem was gone.
He was ten. He had no money, no connections, no resources, and a body that couldn't reach the top shelf of a pantry. What he had was a thirty-four-year-old mind with a doctorate in organic chemistry, fluency in the language of clandestine enterprise, and a very clear understanding of what happened to children who had nothing in a world that ate the weak.
He chewed his porridge and he thought.
Braavos. The Secret City. That was the first asset. Founded by escaped slaves, ruled by merchant princes, home to the Iron Bank and the most sophisticated trade networks in Essos. The city had alchemists. Glassblowers. Traders who imported materials from Yi Ti to Asshai. It had a functioning economy built on commerce rather than conquest, which meant a clever person could find margins to exploit.
But he couldn't cook. Not yet. Not at ten years old, not in the city of the Faceless Men, not with zero capital and zero infrastructure. A child buying alchemical reagents would attract exactly the kind of attention that got people killed.
So what could a ten-year-old do in Braavos?
Learn. A ten-year-old could learn.
He could haunt the docks and the markets and the alchemists' quarter. He could catalogue what existed in this world — what reagents, what precursors, what botanical resources grew where. He could learn the trade routes and the economies and the gaps in the market. He could figure out what Essos had that was close enough to what he needed and start working out synthesis pathways on paper long before he ever lit a burner.
And he could do something else. Something mundane but critical.
He could make soap.
The thought almost made him smile into his porridge. Soap. The most boring product in the history of chemistry, and possibly the most revolutionary thing he could introduce to a medieval economy. He understood saponification inside and out — fats plus lye, the most basic reaction in the book. Braavos had tallow, it had olive oil, and any half-competent child could learn to render wood ash into lye. The product wouldn't make him rich overnight, but it would make him credible. A boy who made fine soap was an oddity, a prodigy. A boy who bought strange chemicals was a target.
Soap first. Build a reputation as a gifted young artisan. Earn enough coin to buy books, materials, better equipment. Map the chemistry of this world. And when Willem finally passed and the safety net disappeared, the SI wouldn't be a beggar prince dragging his baby sister through the streets.
He'd be ready.
"Ser Willem," he said, setting down his spoon. "I'd like to visit the market today. I want to learn about trade."
The old knight raised an eyebrow. "Trade, my prince?"
"We can't rely on the charity of others forever. I want to understand how money works in this city."
Willem's expression shifted — surprise, then something softer. Something almost like pride. The real Viserys had probably never said anything like that. The real Viserys had been dreaming of the Iron Throne at ten, not thinking about how to pay for dinner.
"Your brother," Willem said quietly, "would have been glad to hear you say that."
Rhaegar. He meant Rhaegar. The SI filed that away — Willem's loyalty, his grief, the lever that name represented — and simply nodded.
Dany chose that moment to fling her spoon across the table. It clattered against the wall and she shrieked with delight, porridge-smeared and triumphant. The servant sighed. Willem's stern face cracked into a reluctant smile.
The SI looked at the toddler and the dying knight and the modest kitchen in the house with the red door, and he began to plan.