Work Text:
1.
Daeron usually wasn’t around during council (despite how much Valarr would rather have him every single time), but this one he chose to sit in, a perfect picture of a consort’s grace, humming in assent at the right moment if needed. Valarr would have thought it a performance—he knew very well that Daeron preferred to be anywhere else than within hearing range of Lord Velaryon’s droning voice—until Daeron began asking questions relevant to the discussion.
It was amusing, for a while, to hear an old man go on and on as to why an omega would be inefficient with ruling from an ancestral seat, but it stopped being funny when the old lord kept bringing up, in his version of delicate grace, his early days where omegas knew their place.
The Master of Coin, Lord Hightower, an alpha who was a product of Hightower's own religious conservative upbringing himself, was doing a spectacular way of listening—or sleeping, really—where he did so with both eyes open. Aegon, meanwhile, looked appropriately regretful for having Lord Velaryon speak in the first place.
The foot that touched Valarr’s leg was a subtle thing, though enough to cause a glance to his left. Daeron’s mien hardly flickered, his attention keen on the old alpha. He was the only one listening at that point.
Valarr ought to be listening too, he supposed; Father did say that you had to listen to anyone even if you’d rather have nothing to do with that person’s words. Some people merely wanted to be listened to, and making them not feel dismissed would go a long way.
Valarr promptly forgot that lesson the moment Daeron’s foot climbed up to the bottom of his knees—a delicate spot that Daeron had taken advantage of to no end once he had discovered it for himself. It remained a weakness on their bed then, and it remained a weakness now.
“Is something wrong, Your Grace?” the Lord Commander asked when Valarr unceremoniously jerked his leg and hit the table.
Daeron looked perfectly innocent when he asked, “My King?”
Valarr almost threw him a dirty scowl but held himself back and hoped he wasn’t flushing like a young boy. He was almost forty, for gods’ sake.
He cleared his throat. “It’s nothing. Where are we?”
“Lord Celtigar has been enlightening us on the virtues of tradition and preserving values,” Daeron said readily. “But he’s been explaining the reasoning to us as to why Lord Massey chose to keep his eldest child, an omega, his heir.”
“Yes, but as I’ve said, he has an alpha son who’s of the same age—”
“—and who you’ve been enlightening us to be an unfit replacement for his whoring and squandering of his family’s wealth. Lord Velaryon has been the most… generous of his opinions. The council agrees with Lord Velaryon’s insight, I believe.”
Daeron’s smile was one of those that would keep Valarr in his seat and would make anyone listen. His consort was never one to raise his volume, nor was he in the habit of getting himself in a verbal conflict, but he had a peculiar way of making one listen and brook no argument.
“Indeed,” Aegon was quick to say. “If His Grace has any objections, might we move to the next concern? A new regulation on our sanitation must needs be addressed.”
“No objections,” Valarr replied, eyeing Lord Velaryon as if daring him to speak. “Shall we proceed?”
He pointedly ignored the twitch of a smirk at the corner of Daeron’s mouth.
2.
Their apartments smelled different.
Orchids, Daeron sniffed, his newly-discovered favorite kind. The one he knew wasn’t tended in the royal gardens but something he’d caught a smell of in their recent visit to the Reach. It had been the smell that settled his stomach. His child was the most sensitive to any odors from flowers and had given Daeron no reprieve, kicking up a fuss inside him unless it was a neutral smell.
The flowers that their unborn babe had taken a liking to were not native to Westeros, he knew, and it was something exclusively tended in Highgarden. And yet it was here now in his rooms.
There was a bouquet of black flowers in the vase sitting by the window near Daeron’s bed when he entered his chamber. A maid went to place another one within his study and said that she would be placing another in his receiving room as per the Crown Prince’s orders.
Daeron trailed a finger on the dark satin-like petals and smiled. His husband deserved a special reward for these.
3.
It was during his late childhood when it first occurred to Valarr that people found his mismatched eyes uncanny.
“You stare a lot, it’s all,” one of his early companions had said long ago. “Like, a lot.”
Valarr had ignored it then. He liked to observe people. You learn more about them this way, Father had told him. You can make out how they truly feel or think without words if you observe.
Father never told him that it was rude to stare for too long, or that one might find it odd. It wasn’t until another boy, a son of Lord Beesbury who was meant to be one of his companions and who was as tall as him, scrunched his face as if frightened and said with a quivering voice, “Please don’t curse me.”
“What?”
“Your eyes. They’re both different. You’ll not curse me, do you?”
“No, I’m not a witch,” Valarr told him, frowning.
“But your aunt is! And she has two-colored eyes.”
“But I’m not like her!”
The boy looked unconvinced at that but murmured his apology. It was something Valarr found insulting instead and promptly left him. Later, Father learned that he no longer had an interest in befriending him.
He wasn’t a witch. Everyone knew that, surely. He was the son of the Crown Prince and the Hand of the King after all. But something dawned on him eventually: no one else around his age was keen to hold his stare.
Because of his eyes, he concluded. Never mind that he inherited them from his father, whom everyone admired and wanted to be close to. Because he’s kind and strong and wise. I’m not.
Valarr avoided his peers for a while and planned to do the same to his cousins from Summerhall who were about to arrive within the fortnight. They would find him odd, too, if not a witch like their aunt, and he heard that one of his cousins, Aerion, was a spoiled brat who was mean.
He was sulking when Father asked him to meet them upon their arrival, but for Father’s sake, he sucked it up and did his best to muster an expression that didn’t look sour. His Uncle Maekar and Aunt Dyanna had more children than Father and Mother, and his aunt was already pregnant after the babe in his uncle’s arms.
Aerion had silver hair and purple eyes and a bright, wide smile that didn’t appear kind. He looked at Valarr, at his dark hair and eyes of different color, and decided that they weren’t of the same level when it came to inheriting the right Targaryen features.
“Don’t mind him,” said another cousin when he was left with them. “He just doesn’t know what to make of any boys he meets for the first time.”
It was Daeron, the cousin born within the same year as Valarr but in a different moon. Like Valarr, he had the wrong color of hair of their blood, but, unlike him, he had purple eyes that were lighter than his younger brother’s. He was a little taller than Valarr.
“We’ve met before,” he said quietly. “Father brought me here a long time ago, but you were ill. I visited you, but I don’t think you remember.”
Valarr remembered being ill when he was younger though didn’t recall Daeron at all.
“It’s alright,” Daeron said, continuing as if reading Valarr’s mind when he was yet to speak. He hummed. “They said you have odd eyes like Uncle Baelor’s, but I like them.”
“They only like it on Father,” Valarr grumbled at him.
“No, I mean, I like yours. They’re clearer than Uncle’s,” Daeron clarified. “And I dream of them, you see. So I know I love them.”
Valarr didn’t know if Daeron was lying about dreaming of his eyes—is that even possible, to dream of another person’s eyes?—but his cousin was smiling, his face bright and very, very pretty, Valarr came to find.
And when Valarr noticed Daeron’s eyes easily meeting his without fear, well… maybe he wasn’t lying about liking Valarr’s eyes after all.
4.
“Shh, we don’t disturb muña, remember?”
Daeron stirred at the low voice near his bed. He blinked with heavy eyelids and the bitter taste of milk of the poppy on his tongue. It was dark when he peered, though by the tall window where the moonlight seeped in was Valarr, and in his arms was their secondborn.
Another daughter, a beta who followed her elder omega sister, Vaella. The Crown had been expecting an alpha boy, and Daeron knew of the pressure on Valarr to secure the line of succession… something which Valarr kept Daeron from, even if the responsibility was on Daeron just as equally.
Valarr wouldn’t like it, Daeron had remembered thinking deliriously as he grappled with unconsciousness when the midwife told him that it was a girl. He gave their second daughter the name Dyanna in honor of his mother, all the while thinking she should have been a boy.
Dyanna began her sniffles and stopped just as soon as Valarr began rocking her in his arms. He hummed under his breath, occasionally leaning down on her face as if unable to resist placing kisses on her forehead and each cheek.
“I prayed for you,” he heard Valarr whispering reverently. “I prayed for you and your mother to be well. Remember that you are wanted, no matter what comes.”
Exhaustion eventually won over Daeron, but as he fell back to sleep, he thought of a pleasant morrow waiting for him.
+1
They caught each other this way:
Valarr, about to switch his goblet of lemon water with the watered-down wine they served Daeron.
Daeron, about to surreptitiously place the spoonful of peas to pass it on Valarr’s plate.
They stared at each other for a moment before breaking into a chuckle, to their dinner companions’ confusion.
When someone dared ask, they pretty much replied along the lines of: “He’s peculiar, that’s all.”
It’s for him because I love him, neither of them said.
It was already understood.
fin