Chapter Text
Centuries passed between his death and his rebirth, but for Jacaerys, it was nothing more than the brief instant it look to exchange his oceanic grave for unfamiliar waters. He is forced to find his place in the world again before he can even begin to inderstand it.
Jace was reborn, that much was true, and with that, he was denied his greatest wish: to be reunitad with his family, with his brother Luke, his parents, and the rest of his siblings in the life beyond.
Jacaerys is born on a cold winter night in 1959, snow falling beyond the window and covering the ground in a thick blanket of icy white. It takes Jacaerys five years to realize that he is not dreaming. No dream could ever fell so vivid.
Throughtout the first years of his second life, Jace spends most of his time screaming and crying, calling out for his real family. He cries, curses, and sobs until he can no longer breathe. He cursos whoever decided to bring hism back so far away frorm them, whin they were alredy dead, unable to help them, inable to comfort them, unable to prevent thir deadths or the drak and horrifying date that awaited them.
His soul is burdened by fifteen years of memories, haunted bay the phantom agony of arrowes piercing his body, threatening to tear him apart.
His new parent, his new family, for after five years he has reluctantly accepted that they are exactly that, grow incresingly worriend. Thay believe he has intherited the madness that plagued their closest relatives: the Blacks.
Jace's first five years are a blur to him; he remembers almost nothing of them. The rest os his family, however, remembers a solemn, expressionless child who never played, never smiled, never laughted. A boy who remained silend, his gaze forever lost in an endless void.
The change is so dramatic when he turns six and finally accepts his new life that his relative take him to St. Mungo's, convinced something must be terribly wrong. Once the Healers assure them that Jace is perfectly healthy, they retunr home no closer to inderstanding the sudden transformation in his personality. Eventually, they choose to let it go after seeing their eldest son beahve like a normal child at last. He spent time with his siblings, played with them, and no longer looked at them with what had once seemed like disgust, or even hatred.
Because once Jace understood what had happened, and accepted that he would not be retuning to his true family anytime soon, after relasing at least a fraction of the grief that still lingered within him, he decided that he would live rather than merely survive. He would make use of this senseless opportunity the gods had granted him, even if he could not understand why he had been reborn. The gods had to have had a reason for sending him back.
Jacaerys retains most of the cognitive and physical abilities from his previous life. He learns at an astonishing pace during his private lessons, quickly surpassing both his classmates and his siblings. He learns to read at the age of three and to write shortly afterword. He sing, dance, playes several musical instruments, his favorites being the violin and the piano, and recites poetry with ease.
His new parents are immensely proud of his intelligence and talent. Everyone around them constantly remarks that they wish their own heirs were just like him—especially a black-haired, curly-haired harpy named Walburga Black, who seems deeply disappointed in her eldest son.
One evening, after Jace and his siblings had gone to bed, his new parents spoke quietly together in the drawing room of Ashes Manor.
"He simply needed time to adjust. His mind was far too mature for such a small child."
"He just needed activities worthy of keeping him occupied."
At the age of six, Jace sneaks into his family's library and discovers the terrible price paid during the war known as the Dance of the Dragons. Every dragon had perished. The Targaryens never truly recovered. They clung to traditions that became chains and to madness that became their legacy. The few Targaryens who were wise, capable, and hailed as the perfect heirs never reached the Iron Throne. They died young or were murdered before they ever had the chance.
Then, a century later, a Targaryen princess brought dragons back into the world, only to die at the hands of a man named Snow, believed to be the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. According to the chronicles, he was the last true Stark, alongside his elder brother, Robb Stark, to honor both his oaths and House Stark's ancient words: The North Remembers.
The knowledge crushes him. Learning what became of his family after his death, how his mother was betrayed by her own people, how Jason Lannister stole the crown's gold to sabotage her reign, and how that same vile traitor later became the Hand of his younger brother, fills him with quiet despair.
The only comfort he finds is in knowing that Aegon III and Viserys II lived long lives and found happiness in their later years, though he wishes he could have been there to shield them from every danger, just as any older brother should.
But the Targaryens are gone now.
They have become nothing more than legends, names preserved in history books.
He is an Ashes now.
He has a new family.
And he intends to protect them with every fiber of his being.