Chapter Text
The silence of the Red Keep was a liar.
After the war ended, it could pretend at peace all the time, but the only thing Aegon could hear were the ghosts of the past.
He could sit alone on this gods damned throne without bleeding, so unlike his father and elder sister everyone pointed it out, the weight of a crown he never wanted pressing down like a physical burden. Every jagged edge of that forsaken chair seemed to mock his broken body, pressing into the raw, ruined flesh of his thighs and back—the permanent, agonizing reminders of Rook’s Rest.
It was funny in a way.
He had fought a war for this fucking useless throne, burned his own kin for it and now he couldn’t even be bothered to sit on it.
Instead he preferred this small, dark chamber, with only a cup for company. Here, away from the judging eyes of his remaining council, he didn’t have to pretend to be a king. He could just be a shattered remnant of a man.
The king sat beneath high arches and cold stone, the flames in the hearth were hissing while dancing, casting flickers of gold upon carved dragons and the pale lines of a tired face. He held his goblet for a long time before lifting it, staring into the dark surface as if it might offer answers.
It didn’t. So he drank.
The Arbor Gold was supposed to burn away the memories. Instead, it only sharpened their edges.
Helaena was definitely haunting him.
His sister, his wife in all the same but her name felt like a shard of glass in his throat. He remembered her soft, confusing mind; she’d say meaningless whispers before they went to sleep together in their shared chambers.
Before the war, before their son was murdered. He felt like he could remember each night.
He had failed to protect her. He had failed to protect them all.
He was the eldest, he was the one who had to step up for them. But in the end, he failed. He couldn’t protect neither Helaena, Aemond, Daeron nor his sons Jaehaerys and Maelor.
They were gone, and sacrificed for what? For this? For the right to drink himself into a stupor in an empty castle?
He thought of Aemond, a brother forged in his own shadow, consumed by a duty Aegon himself had shirked; dead at the bottom of a lake. He thought of Daeron, the brother he barely knew; swallowed by a war Aegon partly had started.
He had won. He was the king, and he was the last one left.
But this didn’t feel like victory.
He reached for the cup, his hand shaking whether from the alcohol or his memories. He didn’t know, he only knew one single thing: he needed more. He just needed to stop thinking. His fingers were fumbling, the cup felt impossibly heavy, he thought.
He tried again, putting his whole arm into it, but the limb wouldn’t obey. A cold dread which was sharper than any grief, cut through his haze. His arm was numb. Not drunk-numb, but deadly numb.
What the fuck? What the fuck?
He looked down. The cup was still half full, he hadn’t drunk nearly enough for this, so there was only one explanation, and that was poison.
He was betrayed. Just like everyone who was part of this cursed family.
They couldn't kill him any other way, so they poisoned him—No, he let them poison him, because he was weak.
If there was one thing his mother has taught him in his life, it was that betrayal never came from an enemy.
The realization bloomed cold in his gut. After all the fire, after all this hurt, he was being undone by a sip of wine in a quiet room all alone. The irony was so bitter it almost made him cackle despite his circumstances.
Though instead of a laugh, a strangled cough ripped through his throat. He tasted it then, not the wine but his own blood’s hot and metallic taste.
All these years until the war, his only wish was to die so he could get rid of all that would happen from the very beginning. But now, the first clear thought in years formed in his mind was that he refused to die.
I refuse to die.
Because if he died, then all he lived through would be for fucking nothing. For nothing, he lost his sons, wife, and brothers.
I refuse, I refuse because I’m not ready.
But no one ever was, were they? Mankind didn’t get to choose their time. Death was what gave life meaning; to know your days are numbered, that your time is short compared to the gods most mortals worshipped.
Yet Aegon did not want offered meaning, he wanted vengeance. He wanted his family back. If he had known his prayers would be answered, he would have kneeled the very first second in reverence.
His first time praying to the Gods was with his mother in the Sept. He could still vaguely recall the suffocating scent of incense and melted wax, the way the Seven’s carved faces looked down blankly. He was so faithful, so devout, so little at the time. Because he believed, if he prayed to the gods for something heartfully, the gods would offer it.
He believed because his mother, the pious queen she was, taught him to do that way.
He wished he still felt that way. Growing up and seeing his father’s and mother’s flaws was like losing his belief in both sets of gods. Viserys, with his rotting body and blind eyes that forced everyone to pay for his impotence, and Alicent, with her desperate, tight lipped hypocrisies that cost them every single move—they were no gods.
A child’s parents were supposed to be their shield, but his had turned out to be nothing more than harbingers of ruin for them. In the end, he didn’t believe in any gods anymore, and hadn’t for years, just like he didn’t believe in his parents either.
If the gods both sides of his family believed in—whether it be the Seven or the Fourteen—were true, they must’ve laughed at him too.
If by some miracle, he was granted a chance or a last wish before his death, there was one thing he’d pray for.
If, somehow, there were any gods and they were listening to him as of this very moment, he’d promise them he’ll see that everyone who slighted him or his own, would answer for their wrongdoings. This time, he would weave their treachery into a noose and hang them with it.
Never again would he be so weak, never again would he be at someone’s mercy.
He’d never repeat the mistakes he made in this life. He’d cherish all the time he could spend with his siblings, because he never appreciated them when they were around him in the first place.
He would love them with all he had this time.
Because he didn’t until it was too late, because naively, he thought they’d have more time. More time to spend their time together, to live, to love. More time to just be children before the world tore them apart.
Oh familiar bones.
How he hated them, how he loved them. How he was—is—made of them and they of him. Just them four. Because in the end, it’ll always be just them four. No crowns, no dragons, no bloody thrones—just the four of them against the cruelty of the world.
A smile broke across his face, so faint it might’ve been imagined. It was not the smile of a king, but of a brother. Of a boy who, for the first time in a lifetime, felt loved even though the warmth belonged to a world already lost to him.
The bitter cold of the poison in his veins was suddenly replaced by a phantom heat, like the hearth fires of their shared youth. Tears welled in the corners of his eyes; though he could no longer feel his body, the last thing he did was close his eyes.
He let the darkness take him, surrendering to the numbness at last.
Mayhaps in another life, he would witness their births all over again, and this time their story would have a happy ending.
But surely, this was nothing but a useless prayer to the useless gods.
Or so he thought.
Death breeds new life, and life breeds new death, with one you cannot have the other. Because in the end, only the gods give, and so the gods take.