Chapter Text
They offer to let him hold his son when the child is born, but he refuses.
The little thing is cleaned and swaddled, its arms left free and akimbo as it reaches for nothing and everything. He came with such screaming, his and Luke’s, and Aemond had not known what to do about either except to let it happen. To wait. To pray, a little, to gods he was not sure were still his.
And now, here he is.
They give the bundle to Luke instead, who, despite the sweat on his brow and the blood he’s lost, takes it and knows how to hold it just right.
Luke looks at him from the bed, sweat still drying on his face—sweat, or tears. His hair is matted to his head from his effort.
“Is he well?” Aemond asks, for he has not spoken for a long time.
“I think so. He looks right. He looks—he looks like you,” he says, and quickly looks away, as if it would have been otherwise. There is no love between them, no, but they were wed under the Seven as those in love do. They have shared a bed and meals and a home in High Tide. And now they share this tiny thing, precious as the pearl they named his mother after, with hair as white.
A tangle of heat knots in Aemond’s stomach, slowly rising, threatening to choke him. He swallows it once, and then again. “What will you name him?” Aemond asks.
“I will not. You will.”
“He’s your heir.” Aemond is little better than consort. A little better, yes, given his own work and much of it, but still. Only a little better.
“And he is your son.” Luke looks down at the child. “Even if you would wish it otherwise.”
Aemond comes a scant step closer. “How could I wish it otherwise? But I know nothing of naming children.”
“Then we’ll choose a name together.” Luke looks at the baby still, moving his curls, touching his cheek. “He looks so much like you… You do not want to hold him? Even for a moment?”
His green eyes are wet. Aemond cannot explain his reasoning because the thing rising from his chest is caught in his throat now, and the distance between him and the baby is impassable. Luke looks away again. “Fine,” he mutters, almost to himself.
“I will hurt him,” Aemond chokes out. “I don’t know how to hold him.”
Luke’s expression settles into something placid. “Oh, Aemond. No, you will not hurt him. You’re hardly the first man to not know how to hold a baby. Come here. Come, sit.”
Aemond comes as ordered and takes a seat as ordered, on the very edge of the bed. Gently, Luke hands over the baby, so slowly that for a moment they are both holding him. “There, keep your hand beneath his head. He can’t hold it up himself yet.”
“Is he weak?” He feels weak. He feels tiny. No thing so important could weigh so little, be so small.
“No,” Luke says patiently. “It’s how all babies are. Or did you think they came out crawling?” Luke laughs at the weak joke; Aemond has to remind himself it’s not an actual comment on his intelligence. Of course he knows they cannot crawl. It can’t do anything. If Aemond were to move his hand, the baby’s head might fall, its neck might crack. He might drop it, crush its head on the cruel stone. Many of them die of nothing. Of their own weakness, of being left in a crib wrong, of a simple refusal to live. Fevers, of course, take them by the dozens, and they’re not far out of the last round of illness.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so scared,” Luke murmurs. “And of your own child.”
“I am not scared.” But he is, and how could he be otherwise? “I’ve never held one before. I might drop him.” As soon as he thinks it, he’s sure he will, or grip too tight, or—
“You won’t. Anyway, I dropped Joff loads of times when he was a baby. He came out all right.” Luke touches the baby’s hand and it curls reflexively around his finger. “Hmm. What will we call you?”
A weight comes to rest against Aemond’s shoulder as Luke tips into him as if he’s a pillow, so Aemond is then holding not one part of his family but the whole of it. The weight is so great that again, his throat goes tight, and he is choking now on the same thing he was when Luke first told him he was pregnant and again when his labors started, when the first cries came.
He presses a kiss to Luke’s hair to get rid of some of it. Luke tenses at the gesture, and then presses in closer. “Will you stay? Please.”
“Of course,” Aemond says thickly.
“I know you did not want this, but I’m glad for it.”
Neither of them wanted it, really, but they are not the first or last to be marched into a loveless marriage. Aemond cursed it, and then cursed his father, cursed Luke, cursed Rhaenyra and his fate and his lot in life, and did his duty all the same. He could not curse anyone when it bore fruit, for he’d known it would. He watched Luke grow each moon, watched his feet grow sore, watched him lose his breakfast to the bedpan five mornings out of ten, and learned it would not be amiss if he held Luke’s hair for him or sent for lemon tea. Aemond saw them as two decrepits locked together in their own hell.
And if the sunrises over the eastern sea were pleasant, if the pale stone of High Tide was warm in the evenings, if Luke’s body was soft and his hair silk and his scent sweet—well, no man would blame him for thinking so.
“When will he be able to hold his head up?” Aemond asks.
Luke stirs. “I don’t know. Some moons. He’ll get stronger every day.”
“And when will he walk?”
“Next year. And you will wish you’d never asked once he starts to run.”
He can see it so clearly—a white haired boy running down halls, hanging off his mother’s arm, tugging their hair.
“Aemond?” Luke asks in the silence.
Aemond does not answer. His face is wet on both sides now, and he cannot wipe it with his arms so full. Luke stares up at him like he’s watching the crumbling of something.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Do you… Do you not like him?” Luke reaches to take their son back but Aemond turns from him in the bed.
“No,” he says quickly, the only word he can manage.
“Do you hate that he’s mine?”
“No, damn you.”
“Then—”
It’s difficult to speak. “I am not angry or sad,” he says, and mostly gets it out. “He’s small. That’s all.”
“He’s a baby, Aemond.”
He knows that, but how to explain? No one told him it would be so small, or contain so much. So many of them die before their first name day. Many more after. A chill passes over him. “We ought to order the fires built up, at least. And if you’re going to insist on feeding him, you ought to eat more.”
A hand comes over his where he holds the baby’s head. “It’s warm enough in here, and I have been eating well. Look at me.” He does. Luke’s eyes are wide and guileless. “We will keep him safe, you and I.”
“We will,” Aemond agrees.