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High in the halls of the kings who are gone
Jenny would dance with her ghosts
The ones she had lost and the ones she had found
And the ones who had loved her the most
They spun her around on the damp old stone
Spun away all her sorrow and pain
And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave
-Florence + the Machine, Jenny of Oldstones
King’s Landing is full of ghosts.
Anyone who has ever lived in the Red Keep could tell you that. They could tell you of the drip of blood off of the edge of Visenya’s sword, spilling down to her son’s corpse on the throne, still rattling his last breath. They could tell you of the way that Alysanne Targaryen’s rage against her husband can still be heard, crackling against the stones like the dragonfire of a mount now dead in battle. They could tell you about Aemma Arryn and how her screams against her once husband echo with the strike of a smith's hammer against Viserys' skull.
But as for King Daeron, sitting the Iron Throne with his uncle as his Hand of the King, the ghosts are as much a comfort as they are a fear to everyone else.
Because it is here that Daeron finally gets to meet the siblings that he never got to meet before they died.
Daeron gets to see his sister with her needle-prick fingers, the iron spike wedged through her throat by the force of gravity as she fell to her death, the rattle of unlistened-to prophecy in a throat doomed to silence while she was alive, the brightness of her eyes as she gets to pull her daughter into her arms now that she is nothing but spirit and ache.
Daeron gets to see his brother, the side of his face glowing with streams of golden lava as the dragonfire burns for eternity, the way that the burns brighten when he laughs, gets to see his other brother, the sapphire-blue of spirits burning from his eye socket as a North Star for those looking for a light to guide them home.
(Aegon coaxes him to drink. Aemond coaxes him to study. Helaena coaxes him to dream, his sleep filled not with nightmares of the past but the dawn of the future.)
Daeron gets to see his half-sister with the crown of thorns growing down into her head, the religious mania that drove her to take the throne and then be devoured by it, the way that the blood drips from the places that the thorns pierce her scalp.
(Rhaenyra pulls Daeron into her cold, dead arms and tells him that no one prepared him for this, but no one prepared her for it, either.)
He gets to see his father rotting even in death, the gaping hole of his cheek and his eye socket slowly carving him open until his entire body is a field of maggots and wreckage.
Where Aemond, at least, still has stubborn fire to fill his eye socket, a jewel even in death, Daeron’s father is nothing but decomposition and decay. Nothing but the way that the body peels itself apart in death, threatening to spread infection and rot everywhere.
And he gets to sit on the Iron Throne, the point of blades threatening to dig into his back, and he gets to tell his father exactly what his decisions wrought on the realm that Daeron is now trying to hold together with blood and spit and the glue of a marriage between him and Daemon Targaryen’s daughter, the Blue Queen and the wild dragon, spiked like the throne that Daeron sits on, spiralling above King’s Landing, half-omen, half-hope.
Daeron gets to tell King Viserys that the reason why there are so many of his children drifting through the Red Keep, singing the songs of the dead, is because Viserys couldn’t make a decision to save his life. That the reason why Daeron takes flowers out to his mother’s grave, his siblings’ pyres, the dragonpit that now only hosts two dragons, is because Viserys cared more about fulfilling his own desires and his own guilts without ever making a single hard decision that he doomed the entire realm to being devoured by dragon war.
They say that King Daeron dances with his ghosts throughout the Red Keep. They say that the patch above one side of his skull is because he is as mad as Maegor, because every time a Targaryen is born the gods flip a coin, one side madness, one side wisdom, because a child born of dragonfire and stone was always destined to ruin himself.
But if you were to ask the King himself, no matter what ghosts he speaks with in the throne room, no matter what spirits might hug him and hold him close and call him brother, nephew, grandson, son, sweetling—
The living is what Daeron works towards, in the end of the day, no matter what the living might think of him.
Yes, Rhaena and Gwayne are the ones who go out into the world, who speak to the smallfolk, who gather up negotiations and marriage pacts and answers, while Daeron stays in the Red Keep with his sword and his dreams and his ghosts, but he does care. He does put in an effort to build the House of the Dragon to a place where his children won't have to turn to ghosts to get their answers.
The history books will remember him as Daeron the Dreamer. Daeron the Dizzying. Daeron, who never left the Red Keep save when the Blue Queen was spotted above the Crownlands, sailing towards Harrenhal, soaring towards the Hightower, flying towards Dragonstone to the seat of his ancestors.
Mother, do you remember me as I was? Do you remember holding me in your arms before sending me off, dooming me to never meet any of my family save the ones who might make a new family with me?
Daeron has daughters. Only daughters. At the end of the day, his sisters and his great-aunt and his great-great aunt and his great-grandmother laugh as they scoop their children into their arms, Jacaerys and Lucerys dripping seawater and blood wherever they step, Jaehaerys’ sewn neck bleeding against the stones as he giggles, Aerea shrieking in laughter even as her entire body burns with wildfire, Gael and Daella and Daenerys breathing cold air and mountain wind and blackwater against the walls of the Red Keep.
The next ruler of the Seven Kingdoms will be a Queen. Everyone else is dead. All of the children that the queens ever died to birth are naught but ghosts now.
All that is left is Daeron and Rhaena and Gwayne, who most of the ghosts overlook save one.
Alicent Hightower is the queen in chains. She wanders the walls of the Red Keep, a crown of gold and green stone still alight in her blood-red curls, rattling her golden chains as she goes.
But when Viserys (and Otto, and Maegor, and Jaehaerys I, and Daemon, and Visenya, and every other monarch who ever wished to conquer and devour the realm whole) reaches out to touch Daeron, to pull him in close, to speak whispers into his ears to turn his head—
“He is my son,” Alicent says, and the rage that boils through her is enough to send stones rattling from the edges of the Red Keep. The living are rarely affected, but the dead?
The dead tremble before her.
Alicent Hightower might not have the blood of Targaryens in her veins. She might not have dragonfire in her spirit.
But Alicent is of the Hightower. She is of the enduring black stone. She is of the green beacon that has guided the banners of the Reach for millenia, before the Targaryens, before the Tyrells, before the Andals, before the First Men, before everything.
The Hightower lasted this long, and not just because it is strong, not because it is too large to fall; it has endured because there is magic and rage and light in the veins of its children.
Alicent Hightower, a queen, a mother, a ghost, a woman who spent her entire adulthood clawing for the things that she was denied for far too long, screams, dredges up the walls between her own ghost and her living son, and Viserys Targaryen is flung back against his own half-carved statue on the edge of the throne room, bound against the stone.
“You spent my entire life touching me,” Alicent hisses, seethes, rages. “Taking from me. And you will not take the one last life that is left to me.”
The other ghosts—the Maegors, the Jaehaeryses, the Daemons, the Visenyas—are kept from hurting Daeron by the other ghosts that look at him and Rhaena and see a chance at renewal. A chance that the Targaryen legacy won’t burn down to dead dragons and decaying babes, that flesh might just manage to outpace scale.
And Daeron can start a new chance at life, the weight of the ghosts of their ancestors on his shoulders, the weight only able to be lifted when he flies on Tessarion’s back, the warm of her body beneath him, the wind buffeting his body, the sound of Rhaena’s teasing and Gwayne’s reassurances and his daughters' laughter in his ears.
So Daeron is King. He drifts through the hallways and he bites his tongue on the blood of his ancestors and he dances with his uncle and his wife and his daughters, each named new, each named old, Princesses Laena and Daenys and Shaera and Alyrie, girls who dream of dragonfire and dawn and the chance that they might just stop the doom of their family.
And he does his best. He does his best to create instead of to destroy, to be kind instead cruel but still willing to make the hard decisions, because he won't become his father, he won't become his grandsire, he won't become—
Well, at the end of the day, there is one ghost that doesn’t haunt. One ghost that Alicent doesn’t have to stop, because Daeron did it first.
---
One day, when Daeron left Tumbleton, when Gwayne helped pull both Daeron and Tessarion out of the wreckage of dragonfire and ash and cinder, when Daeron’s head and eye was cracked by the stone and the ghosts began to spill through him, to whisper their aches, to beg him to release them from their Hightower overlords, from the way that the dragonfire reduced them to naught but screams—
Daeron hunted down Ormund’s ghost among the wreckage before he left. He could handle the ghosts of strangers clinging to him, because he did not know them, because they had no true hold on him, but Ormund?
Daeron could still feel Ormund’s hands pressing down on his shoulders. Could still feel Ormund’s fingers curling around his jaw, pulling him tight, pulling him close, seeking to devour him whole.
And when he saw Ormund’s ghost standing there above his burned corpse, when Ormund reached out to consume him, when Ormund screamed and raged and then cajoled, coaxed, fingers lingering against Daeron's shoulders, pulling him in close, close, closer—
Daeron took the witch’s brew of forget-me-nots and dragon-ash and threads from Gwayne’s gambeson, all christened in his own tears, and he’d woven them into a noose, into a lock, as Ormund’s ghost had leaned forward and Ormund’s voice had dripped into his ears, dragonfire and blood and syrup, too sweet, too ready to drown Daeron in its poisoned-honey-sweetness—
And Daeron wrapped the garland around the throat of his cousin Ormund’s corpse just as Ormund once wrapped his fingers around Daeron’s jaw and Daeron had murmured, “I know I’ll have to see them all, but you? You will not come with me. I won’t let you haunt me.”
Ormund’s ghost had dissolved, melting into the ash with a silent scream of protest that Daeron couldn’t hear.
Then Daeron had stood and headed back to Gwayne, who had wrapped Daeron in his arms, warm with life instead of death, and they’d headed toward King’s Landing. Towards the last of Daeron’s family, the last of the dragons, and a chance to make things right. For the dragons to dance even after death doomed them all.