Work Text:
We,
the generation of fighters
who inherited our fathers' war.
(Easy to call all that holy trivial,
all that survival self-indulgent,
from the parapet of a castle already built,
while you unmake the new one brick by brick.)
-Ashe Vernon, Dionysus In Skinny Jeans
There is a boy in the dungeons, with copper hair, with Rhaenyra’s eyes, with a dragon too far away who roars a protest at her rider dying, but Tessarion is just one dragon, no matter the moniker attached to her scales.
Rhaenyra’s boys are dead, buried in the salt and the sea, ended in fire and blood. Why should she have any sympathy for a brother she has never met?
Except—
The letters pour in, from Oldtown, from her own castle, from squires.
Please don’t kill him, Your Grace, come the letters, come the pleas and the prayers.
They number many pages, many slips of parchment, too many ravens that the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms shouldn’t have to read, and yet, here Rhaenyra is, paging through them all, scraping information about a boy whose head is on the executioner’s block, a boy who she has never met before.
From the maesters in Oldtown: He’s good. Learned his numbers. Prayed everyday.
He never rode his dragon against you, says Lord Tyrell.
He stood up for a girl who was importuned by a Hightower soldier, says Lady Footly, who takes the time out of rebuilding her town from dragonfire to send in a sort slip of parchment in Daeron’s defense. And while his uncle ruled with an iron fist, I witnessed Daeron urging the servants out of the room so that they would not experience Lord Hightower’s anger.
Some are not written in their own hand, pleas and prayers transcribed by maesters, from serving girls and handmaidens and a man-at-arms who helped with the boy’s training in the Oldtown sparring grounds.
A mummer’s farce of a prince with false silver hair writes to her from Oldtown, where she had him sent off to return to his mother: I was his whipping boy, and yet, I rarely felt the pain of Ormund’s punishments, because Daeron knew it would come to me and he didn’t want me to suffer for his mistakes.
He’s my son, Alicent pleads, the despair of a mother who has already lost too many children, who had to see her daughter’s body impaled on spikes, and who now only has one child left. He was sent off to Oldtown as a boy and I beg of you not to visit the sins of my cousin on a boy not yet grown.
But from Rhaenyra’s dungeons, the greatest prayer of all, from an uncle who is set to be executed himself on the morrow: he’s a boy. Just a boy, who has suffered enough, and you can kill me if you’d like, but if you have any mercy in your heart, Your Grace—give him a chance to live.
But why should she listen? Why should her brother not bleed for what happened to her son?
A son for a son, is that not the answer? Is that not the way? One son bleeds and thus the realm does as well, to pay the price of ghosts.
But the parchments are filling her chambers, raven after raven, letter after letter, handed to her by the Grand Maester, and Rhaenyra swallows, bites her lip, cuts it open until she tastes blood.
She has already taken Otto Hightower’s head. Ormund Hightower is dead. Daemon and Aemond killed each other over the God’s Eye. Aegon and Baela slew each other. She has no idea where Rhaena is, nor her youngest two sons.
Ulf, Hugh, Addam—they all killed each other in Tumbleton.
What is left? What of the House of the Dragon remains, burning alive?
There are so few Targaryens left. Of her own sons, the only one close is Joffrey.
How many deaths must be taken before a debt is paid? How many souls must die for this gods-damned war?
The throne was hers, by right, by conquest, but if she kills everyone else—if she has no family left—
What is left of the fire in the song of ice and fire? What is left of her family?
Rhaenyra remembers that final dinner, all of them together before her father died and the world ended. She remembers the eating, the dancing, the children laughing.
Gone they all are. Helaena, Aegon, Aemond, Lucerys, Jacaerys, Daemon, Otto, Baela, all the rest.
The only sibling left alive is the one that she is set to execute for treason—the boy who all of these letters are pleading with her to save the life of.
The iron in Rhaenyra’s mouth is begging her to end his life. To pay with fire and blood the price that she has already had to pay for her own boys.
But the blood in her veins, the memory of laughter, the tears staining Alicent Hightower’s letter from her tower cell, the begging of uncles and friends and servants and those that know Daeron not as a prince but as a boy—
Rhaenyra can’t take it anymore. She heads down to the dungeons to look in the eyes the boy that was brought to her from Tumbleton.
There is a burn up the side of his face. He matches Aegon, according to the stories. There are people who wish to make him king over her.
But the letters did not plead with her for the life of a king. They did not plead with her for the life of a usurper.
They pled with her for a boy. A boy with kindness in his heart, who did his best with what he had, who was forced into a role that he did not wish for when he was too young.
(An echo of a mother that he has never met.)
And that is exactly what Rhaenyra sees in the cell in front of her: not a prince, not a king, but a boy. A boy, the same age as Jace, whose neck is slumped over the knees pulled tight to his chest, because he has surrendered, because he is doomed by the blood in his veins.
Daeron is as tall as Jace was, but in this moment, he looks so small, his pale face smeared with ash and grime, familiar braids woven and half-tangled into auburn hair.
An entire war, fought over a throne. Over a melted hunk of swords.
All of their siblings and so many children dead.
Here they are, the last children of Viserys Targaryen.
And this is the first time that Rhaenyra is even laying eyes on her brother.
It would be so easy to send him to the gallows. To see his head chopped from his shoulders, to cut out the only threat to her reign.
But she thinks—
My father killed and sliced open my mother in order to have a brother. He married my best friend and churned babes out of her and then didn’t even look at them twice, all for the sake of a son that he didn’t care about half as much as me—and I could never be quite sure if it was because he loved me for my own right, or because every time he looked at me, all he saw was my mother’s ghost and he couldn’t live with the guilt that soured his tongue.
“I wonder if, during those few hours my brother lived, my father finally found happiness.”
Rhaenyra remembers the birth of her boys, what it took to have each of them bleed their ways out of her body, what it felt to cradle their corpses—or what was left of them.
Daeron’s gaze turns upward to her. His eyes are bright, the sort of bright of her younger sons, the sort of bright that matches her own, but his hair is rust-red, as bright as Alicent Hightower’s was all of those afternoons in the godswood, before emerald green bled across the Red Keep, when Alicent dressed in the sky blues of her mother’s house, when Rhaenyra’s mother was alive and the world was just a little bit kinder.
He looks at her, and he is her brother, and she has every right to kill him, but—
“Do I get to see my mother or my uncle before I die?” Daeron asks, and it’s clear that he’s trying to put on a brave face, but his voice is cracking like Jace’s did as he was reaching towards manhood, as Luke’s never got to do.
Daeron is her brother.
He is her brother, and she is about to send him to his death just as their father did her mother, just as Daemon did his nephew, just as Rhaenyra did his grandsire.
There is parchment clenched between her fingers. Ache carved into her fingers by fingernails. Blood, threatening to drown her and smother her whole.
And the answer is as simple as it is going to cause her problems, but at the end of the day—
He's a boy, just as she was once a girl.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if she should kill him or not. If she should preserve her reign from usurpers.
Because at the end of the day, she is tired. She is so fucking tired of all of this death. Of all of this kinslaying and childslaying and she cannot bear to put one more child of her family into the pyre.
And so Rhaenyra gestures to her guards. They yank forward a copper-haired knight in chains, who used his last request not to ask for a sword for his own head or a last meal, but parchment and ink to write a letter—not for reinforcements, not to beg allies for aid, but one last request for his nephew’s head.
Please, Gwayne Hightower had written, the longest letter of them all, I remember raising that boy. I remember telling him stories in order to soothe his nightmares. He dreamed of fire so often that it nearly burned him alive.
I remember a night when he couldn’t stop crying, and so I snuck him out of the Hightower to see his dragon. Tessarion was about the size of a horse, and Ormund already had her chained and imprisoned in the Sept, but I remember—that night, Daeron couldn't stop laughing as he nuzzled his face into her side. As he told her that one day, they would get to fly.
The first time that he got to fly was only because Ormund required him to do so as a weapon, all while telling him that the blood in his veins was tainted.
Daeron never wanted to fight. The only reason he was even at war was because Ormund convinced him that he had to in order to save the lives of all of the Hightower soldiers, and Daeron has always had a kinder heart than was ever good for him.
I do not care if I go free, Your Grace. Kill me if you need to. Have my head as proof that you have cut down your Hightower enemies.
As a wise man once said, I have no fear of insignificance.
But when it comes to my nephew—he deserves to fly.
Please—just give him one chance to be with his dragon without chains.
And Daeron leaps to his feet, eyes going wide, face breaking open in a sort of hope so sharp and painful that it nearly slices Rhaenyra clean in two.
“Neither of you is going to die today,” Rhaenyra says, “Bend the knee, and I shall see you set up with apartments here in the Red Keep. You shall have no chance at inheriting, but you shall keep your dragon, and you shall be able to live and fly."
They both already surrendered—bending the knee is no real request, she knows. It’s just an affirmation of what they have already done.
But it is the excuse that she needs to be able to go forward with what she wants to be done—and by the letters in her hands, what others want, as well.
"You are my brother, Daeron. I do not—” Her voice cracks, and she is the Queen, she is not supposed to show any weakness, she is supposed to be strong, but in this moment, she is fourteen again, her mother burning on a pyre, wondering if there is anyone in the world that might understand that she never wanted this, not like this, that all she wanted was to get on the back of her dragon and fly forever, just her and Syrax and the sky—and perhaps Alicent Hightower with her. "I want you to be able to live, too. For us to get to know each other. For you to get to know your nephews. For you to be able to fly. So—Daeron Targaryen, Gwayne Hightower—tell me that you shall bend the knee, and that this family might have just a couple fewer ghosts."
It is as much a prayer as any words that Alicent or Gwayne Hightower wrote to Rhaenyra, and Rhaenyra hopes more than anything that her prayer is answered.
For a moment, there is a beat of silence, a beat of staring, an uncle and nephew staring at her—
And then Gwayne falls to one knee, then both, bowing his head. "I bend the knee to you, Your Grace," he says, voice quick, voice a plea.
And a moment later, his gaze fixed on his uncle, Daeron follows, something bright and shining in his eyes. "I bend the knee to you, sister," he says, and there is something hopeful in the word sister, for a boy that never got to meet any of his other siblings.
Rhaenyra nods at her guards, who step forward to unlock the cuffs around both of their hands, and before Daeron has a chance to climb to his feet, Rhaenyra reaches out a hand to her brother.
Daeron reaches out and takes it, stepping up and forward into a new chance at life—and perhaps a relationship between the two of them.