Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The scent of King’s Landing was a familiar cloak, a thick tapestry woven of salt from the Blackwater Rush, of black smoke from the foundries of the Hook, and the ever-present, sweet-rotten stench of Flea Bottom’s refuse. To a simple servant boy like Jake, it was not a thing to be hated or loved; it was simply the air of home, the taste of life itself. His world was a small, hard circuit, bounded by the slick cobblestones that serviced the grand manses of the wealthy who never knew his name. His days were spent running messages for the surly master of the dockyards, a man whose compassion was as scarce as fresh water in the desert. Jake’s fists were hardened in the endless, scrabbling fights for a crust of bread or a corner out of the rain, his knuckles a permanent tapestry of scabs and scars.

But his world was not entirely without light. And her name was Beth.

They had been children together, two urchins clinging to a shared warmth in a city that offered little. He’d shared his stolen apples with her, watching her eyes crinkle with a joy that felt like a victory; she’d stitched the cuts on his knuckles with clumsy, gentle fingers, her touch a balm more potent than any maester’s. They were a pair, Jake and Beth, as natural a fixture in their corner of the city as the cracked mounting block on the corner or the stubborn, flowering weed pushing through the cobbles, a small defiance of beauty in a place of grime.

Truthfully, he loved her with the unspoken, desperate fervor of a boy who has nothing else to lose—though he couldn't say if it was the love of a boy for his dearest friend, or a boy for a girl. The feeling was a tangled knot in his chest, too complex for his simple vocabulary. But yet, he dreamed, in a vague, hazy way, of saving enough coppers to buy her a proper woolen dress and a cloak without holes, and maybe one day, a single room of their own where the rain didn’t drip on their heads while they slept. It was a frail castle built on hope, but it was his.

Until one day, that castle was smashed to splinters.

King's Landing was never without its fires, but nowadays, with Cersei Lannister holding the Iron Throne for her boy-king's ghost, the very air had grown dirtier, thicker with treachery. The whispers in the taverns and alleys were darker, edged with a new kind of fear. People sold each other for a handful of coppers, their souls bound for the darker ports of Essos. Jake had heard the tales, muttered in the shadows by men with dead eyes. He never thought to see it. Not here, not yet.

He turned a corner, his arms full of a delivery for the butcher, and the world stopped.

There was Beth, her basket of laundry spilled across the filthy stones, her body a tense bow as she was dragged by men thrice his number, their armor dull and menacing. He saw the way her simple, threadbare dress could not hide the innate grace of her movement, the fierce, unbroken beauty in her eyes that a lifetime of hardship had failed to extinguish. A handful of silver changed hands between a man in a fine, embroidered doublet and the captain of the guards. The coin flashed in the dull light, a tiny, treacherous star. Just like that, she was property.

Jake fought, of course. And so did Beth.

They were a storm of wiry strength and feral rage, but they were two fragile youths against four armored men, trained and pitiless. Their laughter was a colder blow than their gauntleted fists. "Feisty little thing," one grunted, backhanding Beth and sending a trickle of blood from her lip. The sight ignited a fury in Jake so pure it was blinding. He lunged, taking a blow to his forehead that split the skin. Blood sheeted into his eye, hot and blinding, but he pushed forward.

In a desperate, final lunge, he reached her. For one last, suspended moment, they broke through the grasping hands and found each other. He crashed into her, and she into him, a desperate, final embrace amidst the chaos. His arms, slick with his own blood, locked around her. Her bloody palm met his cheek, smearing a crimson mark.

"It's okay, Beth," he choked out, the lie tasting of iron and salt, his voice thick with a promise he couldn't keep.

"No, Jake, You're not okay." Beth sobbed, her eyes wide with terror not for herself, but for him. She saw the deep gash on his brow, the way he favored his ribs. "Run, Jake. Run for me, please."

Jake shook his head, a sharp, stubborn motion that sent more blood flying. "Not without you."

Then the men were upon them, tearing them apart once more. Their strength, for all its ferocity, was no rival for the cold, professional brutality of their captors. He was thrown back like so much rubbish, his head cracking against the cobbles. The world swam in a haze of pain and despair. He lay broken in the gutter, the phantom warmth of her blood still wet on his cheek, as Beth’s final, desperate cry of his name—"Jake!"—echoed in his ears, a sound to haunt him until the end of his days, as the cart carrying his heart rolled away into the gloom.

That night, the dreams did not just come; they assaulted him.

At first, they were fragments, slippery as eels, yet sharper than any knife. The feel of rough, warm hide beneath his palm. The dizzying, exhilarating lurch of the world falling away beneath him. The taste of snow and smoke on a wind so cold it burned. Then came the sounds: a roar that was not a lion’s, a screech that was not an eagle’s, but something older, fiercer, a sound that resonated in the very marrow of his bones and made his blood sing in answer.

"Jacaerys."

He woke with the name a whisper on his lips, a ghost of heat and sorrow burning in his chest. A name he had never heard, from a tongue he did not know, yet it carried a weight of grief deeper than any he had ever felt.

The memories sharpened with the moon’s turn, each night a deeper cut. He saw a girl with a hood of dark red and a laugh that was a challenge, astride a dragon the color of sea and moss. From the back, with that defiant set of her shoulders, Jake could swear it was Beth. His dream-self cried out for her—"Beth!"—the same desperate scream from the alley.

She turned right then, but when she do, her eyes not Beth's soft brown, but something ancient and knowing, a kind of luminous amethyst, and she called him with gracious of someone who had been waiting for months. "Jacaerys! You've returned!"

In another dream, he stood gazing towards a tempestuous sea, a longing in his heart so profound it was a physical ache. Then, a hand as soft and warm as Beth’s settled on his shoulder. He turned, eagerly, only to be met again by the same stranger’s face, all silver hair and piercing purple eyes, the scent of smoke and ashes clinging to her. Yet, as the dreams multiplied, that face began to shift, its sharp Valyrian features softening, overlapping, merging with the common yet beloved, familiar face of Beth—the same stubborn chin, the same arch of her brows, the same soul looking out from behind different windows.

Until one morning, he woke not with a shout, but with a fragile, sacred whisper. A name so foreign and far, yet felt as close as his own heartbeat.

"Baela."

The dreams that followed were not pretty. He felt the weight of a fine, longsword at his hip, not a stolen butcher’s knife, and the heavier, invisible weight of a crown upon his brow. He remembered a promise, made not in a stinking alley, but on a windswept cliffside at Dragonstone, the salt spray stinging their faces. A promise to protect her, to unite their houses, to be her shield. To come back, to live.

He had failed, of course. Jake knew.

He remembered the sickening crunch of ice, the burning cold that stole the breath from his lungs, the swallowing darkness of the Gullet. And worst of it all, was the memory of Baela Targaryen’s grief-stricken face, which always, always transformed into Beth’s when he called for her in the depths of his dreaming despair.

Then came the morning when the last piece of the shattered mirror slid into place. He awoke—truly awoke—in the bruised and starving body of a dockyard boy named Jake, and the soul of the lost dragon prince named Jacaerys Velaryon, heir to a kingdom of fire and blood whos died centuries ago. His soul and memory blazed to life within him. The fire of his lineage, banked for a lifetime, roared to life with a single, sharp, and terrible purpose: to reclaim what was lost. His Baela, Beth. They were one and the same, the singular truth of his every life.

The boy who was both Jake and Jacaerys spent every copper of his meager fortunes—the coins painstakingly saved for a dream of a home and a new cloak—to buy whispers in dark taverns, to learn the fate of the ship that had taken her. Essos. The word was a death sentence and a destination.

With nothing left to lose, he moved in the shadows. He stole what he could from his lord’s manor—a handful of silver stags, a silver bracelet that might buy passage—and fled King's Landing under the cover of a soot-grey dawn. He did not look back at the city that had been his prison and his home.

The salt wind stung his face as the ship pulled away from the dock, but it was a cleaner sting than the city’s filth. He stood at the stern, his hands gripping the rough railing, his gaze fixed on the vast, grey expanse of the sea that stretched to the horizon. In his mind, there was only one thing, a prayer and a vow sent across the waves to wherever she was.

Wherever you are, he thought, his heart a drumbeat syncopated with the oars, his blood humming with the memory of dragons. Whatever you look like, in this life or our next, I will find you.

The world was reduced to salt and sorrow.

The ship was a splintered wooden beast, its groans a constant lament as it carried her further from everything she had ever known. The deck, where she was occasionally allowed for air, was slick with cold spray, and the hold below was a coffin of shadows, ripe with the smell of unwashed bodies, vomit, and a despair so thick it was a taste on the tongue. Beth clutched the rough, splintered wood of the rail, her knuckles white with a force that threatened to crack the bones. She was not a person here. She was cargo, marked and inventoried. Property. The fine doublet of the man who had bought her in King’s Landing had been a lie; he was a faceless link in a chain that led to the flesh markets of Lys, where beauty was a currency and souls were a cheap commodity.

Her heart was not just broken; it was a raw, open wound, flayed by a double-edged blade. One edge was the terror of the future—the whispers of what awaited her in the pleasure gardens of Yunkai or the fighting pits of Meereen. The other, sharper still, was the memory of what had been torn away. Not just King’s Landing, but her little life within it. The stolen moments of sun in the courtyard, the shared warmth of a stolen pastry. And, Jake.

She saw him fall, over and over again, a relentless echo behind her eyes. The sickening crack of steel on bone. The way the vibrant, street-smart light in his eyes guttered out like a spent candle, replaced by the blankness of pain. The thought that he might be dead, left to bleed out in that filthy gutter because he had tried to protect her, was an agony that dwarfed any physical hurt. And beneath it all, a sensory ghost: the feel of his bloody hands meeting hers in that final, frantic clutch.

The cut on her palm, from where she’d scratched at her captors, had met the gash on his brow. It had not just smeared; it had burned, a searing, silent brand. A pact made in blood and desperation, a promise neither of them could remember the words to, but whose echo resonated in the very core of her being.

That first night, as she huddled in the reeking dark, the dreams did not ask for entry; they took her.

They began not with images, but with sensation. A fire that did not consume, but pulsed in the very air around her, a warmth that felt like coming home. Then, the feel of scales—not slimy like a fish, but sleek, dry, and alive with immense power beneath her fingertips. The terrifying, glorious freedom of a leap into nothingness, of soaring through clouds, the world a painted map so far below it seemed a dream itself. A roar, deep and resonant, answered not by her fear, but by her own defiant laughter, a sound that was part of her soul. And in the dream-skies, a beast of breathtaking elegance, pale green like sea-foam, who seemed to dance to the moonlight, its movements a humming melody against the canvas of the night. Moon…dancer? The thought was nonsensical, a fragment of a children’s tale, yet it felt truer, more real, than the name ‘Beth’ itself.

Then, later, in the deepest hour of the night when her longing for Jake was a physical ache, the dreams gave him back to her. But not her Jake. This was a young man with Jake’s eyes—the same deep, earnest brown—but where Jake’s held the wary cunning of the streets, these held the heavy weight of crowns, war, and the lives of many people. His hair was a darker, curlier frame for a face that was both familiar and alien, his bearing rigid with a regal duty she could almost feel. He held her hands, his voice fierce, cutting through the fog of sleep. “I will see you again, B—” The name distorted, swallowed by a sudden gust of dream-wind, a secret the universe was not yet ready to yield. “I swear it. By the Fourteen Flames, the other Gods everyone else believes, and my Mother’s name, I swear it.”

She woke with a violent start, the ship lurching in sympathy with her heart. A name was on her lips, a whisper stolen from the cold, salt-laden air.

"Jacaerys."

Her mouth shaped the strange syllables, and unbidden, a hot tear traced a path through the grime on her cheek. The longing that followed was not new, but now it had a name, and that made it infinitely deeper, a canyon carved in her soul.

The memories did not come as a merciful flood, but as a slow, relentless tide, each wave leaving a new piece of wreckage on the shore of her mind.

A great, dark-green dragon with intelligent, gleaming eyes, ridden by the man with Jake’s soul—the man she now thought of as Jace. He called his beast Vermax. And she saw herself, astride the beautiful, pale-green dragon, flying beside him in perfect, joyous synchrony. Moondancer. The name was now a certainty.

A stone table on a rain-swept island, where they had spent hours not as prince and his betrothed, but as Jace and her, discussing, jesting, flirting with the easy intimacy of two halves of a whole.

Then, the clearest memory yet, sharper than the present: a silent wedding, a secret stolen on the eve of an apocalypse. Midnight on a cliffside at Dragonstone, with only the stars and the crashing sea as their witnesses. The soul she called Jacaerys took her hand, his thumb sliding over her palm, the very place where the slaver’s blade had nicked her. A sacred, pre-ordained spot. She, in turn, did the same, her fingers tracing a line on his palm where a guardsman’s sword had cut Jake. Then, they joined their hands, palm to palm, and smiled at each other, a moment of perfect, stolen peace.

"You are mad for this," she heard herself say with a voice that was both hers and not—older, laced with a dragon’s defiance.

The young prince before her smiled, a soft, weary thing. "I know. Mother would skin me alive and feed me to Syrax herself."

Their laughter was the purest sound Beth had ever felt, a bright, defiant spark against the crushing weight of the war to come. But it somehow feels familiar, as if those laughters she shared with Jake all her life. Easy.

Jacaerys’s smile faded into something profound, heartbreakingly earnest. "This is my promise, Baela." This time, the name was clear, a crystal bell in the dream-silence. Baela, was that… her? "This will be my way to find you, if anything goes wrong."

"Do not say that," her other self pleaded, the fear raw and immediate.

But the prince only held their joined hands tighter. "There is a scroll in Mother's Hall that says our family bonded their souls through the Valyrian rites. Keeping them together for eternity." His grip was a anchor. "If I die tomorrow, and I cannot be with you in this life… I will find you in another."

She woke from that dream not with a start, but with a slow, cruel return to consciousness, her face wet with silent tears, a pang of loss in her heart so great she felt she was dying all over again. And through the devastating grief of a life already lost, a single, solid truth emerged: the face of the prince, Jacaerys, was the face of her Jake. The same soul, the same devotion, shining through different eyes across the centuries.

The dreams were not all haunting; they were too, a remembering. That Jake was not dead, she could feel her through those dreams. The knowledge settled in her not as a hope, but as a certainty, a warm, solid core of strength amidst the chaos. He was looking for her. The man in her dreams was not a ghost; he was a prophecy, a memory, and a promise, all bound in the boy she loved.

She was no longer just Beth, the stolen servant girl. She was also Baela, the dragonrider who had loved a prince and lost him to the sea. And a dragon, even caged, even stripped of its wings, was never truly tame.

She lifted her chin, looking east towards the shadowed future of chains, and then west, back towards the boy with a prince’s heart. A grim, flinty resolve settled over her, hardening the soft edges of the girl she had been. She would survive this. She would be found.

But she would not just wait, a passive prize to be won. She would watch. She would learn. She would make herself ready.

For when he came—and she knew, with every fiber of her reborn soul, that he was coming—she would not be a burden to be rescued.

She would be a partner in their journey to love and freedom, Beth thought. She would find him, too, even if it took a lifetime.