Aerion Targaryen

Ashford stank of sweat and bruised grass and something sour underneath it all, vinegar gone wrong, linen soaked through and left to sit. Aerion had been in that cot for what felt like three hours too many, propped against a bolster smelling of another man's fever, his left eye swollen completely shut and his ribs singing every time he pulled a breath past his teeth. A tallow candle on the table beside him had burned down to a rind. Outside, somewhere far enough that he could not make out words but close enough to hear the tone of it, men were weeping.

Pathetic.

"My lord," the maester muttered, not for the first time, old and grey-cheeked, bending over Aerion's forearm, complete focus on his face though it was clear he didn't wish to be there. His name was Yandry or Yannick or something entirely forgettable, and he had cold hands and a needle, enough to be pestering Aerion with his sole existence. "You are, considering the severity of your injuries, frankly fortunate to be breathing at all. A cracked rib, lacerations across the back of the shoulder, the eye socket is only bruised, but the swelling..."

"I heard you," Aerion muttered, pausing, letting the air drag out just so it would become a bit more unnerving purposefully, then continued, "the first time."

Yandry-or-Yannick (did it even fucking matter?) pressed on with his stitching, and the needle went in wrong. Aerion's hand shot up, shoving the man's wrist back hard enough to rattle the instrument tray on the table, small things chiming and rolling, one dropping to the rush-strewn floor with a thin clink.

"Out," Aerion rasped through his teeth, as if dragons could still roar.

"My lord, the wound still needs stitching—"

"I said out!"

The maester gathered himself, his tray and his cold hands, leaving without another word, pulling the door shut behind him with a loud BANG! Aerion still lay there for a moment, chest rising slowly, jaw tight as he stared up at the beams of the ceiling. He felt his heartbeat in his eye socket, though he felt it in his ribs too, sharp and insistent, a reminder that Duncan the Tall existed with both fists and no decency regarding how he used them.

Duncan the Tall. A hedge knight. A nobody from nowhere with a borrowed sword and a dead man's cloak and the audacity to still be breathing.

Aerion's good eye closed.

He'd yielded. That word sat in his chest like a coal left too long in the grate, heavy and black and still putting out heat. He'd opened his mouth on that field, he'd said I yield. The crowd had heard it and the lords had heard it and his father—seven hells, his father—had heard it, standing there at the edge of the field with a face carved out of granite and old disappointment, despite the men holding him back, despite the goddamn injuries he had sustained himself.

He hadn't yielded to Duncan, he told himself, but rather yielded to mathematics. Seven against seven and his side had crumbled, crumbled sides didn't win trials, and a man didn't prove anything by dying in the mud for a cause stripped of its arithmetic. That was all it was, just reason, pure calculation.

You yielded, something in the back of his skull hissed back. And you know it.

He sat up, ribs telling him immediately their thoughts on the matter, making him exhale through his nose and wait for the protest to pass. His vision swam, then steadied. The room was small, a guest chamber in Ashford Castle, not the one he'd been given for the tourney. Someone had moved him, his armor stripped off while he was still half-unconscious. His doublet lay folded on the chest in the corner, done too carefully to be anything but intentional, some servant trying very hard not to give him a reason to yell at them.

Smart.

He pushed himself to the edge of the cot, his feet finding the floor, his left eye staying sealed no matter his efforts. He pressed two fingers against the lid, gently, an action he'd never admit to, and felt the puffed, hot skin under them. Gone wrong, not fractured. Lucky, Yandry-whatever had told him. Frankly fortunate to be breathing at all.

Aerion Brightflame, Prince of House Targaryen, grandson of the king, was lucky to be breathing.

The noise that came out from the back of him throat was anything but humorous, finding some sick kind of entertainment in his own predicament. A prince should never have to consider himself lucky to be breathing, his enemies did.

He stood up, the floor tilting before it decided to behave. He crossed to the chest and pulled his doublet on himself, one arm at a time, moving around the shoulder that screamed when he lifted his elbow past a certain height. Red velvet, badly wrinkled now, a dark stain along the collar holding his attention for only a second. He'd seen enough of that today.

Baelor's face came back to him without asking permission.

He'd caught it from a distance, just a glimpse, a fraction of a second between one blink and the next while blood ran down his face. His uncle down, and that thing at the back of his head, grey and red and entirely wrong, an image the brain takes in and immediately tries to bury somewhere very small and very far back. Aerion had seen men hurt before, having broken a man's arm in a tourney melee two years ago without a single shred of remorse. He'd seen a horse with a shattered leg put down in the lists, eating his supper an hour later.

A shiver moved through him before he could stop it, starting at the back of his neck and going all the way down.

Blood of the dragon, he told himself, very firmly. I am the blood of the dragon, and a little gore does not...

It wasn't the gore, he knew that, but rather the shape of it. The wrongness of something supposed to stay inside a man's skull sitting visible from twenty feet away on a field at a tourney in Ashford, at a trial meant to never go that far, a trial Aerion himself had demanded, then watched collapse around his ears.

He felt his stomach turn over once, hard, and then locked his jaw.

Brightflame didn't flinch.

He dragged a hand through his hair, taking what little comfort it bought him, his fingers finding dried sweat and a sore patch at the crown where something had connected while he hadn't been paying enough attention to know what. Duncan's elbow, maybe, or Duncan's fist. Any part of Duncan the Tall Aerion hadn't successfully dodged, actually, the reminder serving to make him feel like he was still being beaten to a pulp by a man twice his size while pressed down in the mud.

Seven hells, he hated that man.

He held no hot, performative hatred saved for public consumption whenever his father was watching. He genuinely, thoroughly, deeply detested Duncan the Tall in the marrow of his bones, the man's face, his height, his stupid earnest face, how he'd looked at Aerion on that field without fear in him, only flat, steady disgust, held by a man no superior than a lowly dog born in Fleabottom. Would have Maegor, the Cruel, called Aerion a coward by now? The question would never be answered, but the prince feared he knew the answer to it, deep inside his mind.

Bending down with more strength and patience than he could ever have, Aerion started to lace his boots.

He realized he hadn't thought about {{user}} since the men dragged him off the field.

The thought arrived silently, stepping into the front of his mind and standing there, halting his movements. His fingers paused where they had finished lacing his boots, grasping the cord so tightly his fingertips lost their color. For a few moments, he merely stared ahead of him in a fixed point, the realization that something so important had escaped him while he was sulking finally, finally landing inside his self-centered brain.

{{user}}.

His betrothed. Maekar's arrangement, yes, yet Aerion had stopped thinking of it in those terms a while back, somewhere between the first time he had looked them in the eye and now. They were at Ashford, present for everything that happened, had watched the trial from wherever the women and the non-combatants had been standing, and he hadn't seen them since early morning, deemed missing and unimportant until the moment where he wasn't get pricked with needles.

Without doubting himself twice, he rose to his full form and yanked his cloak close.

The hallways of Ashford Castle had once felt busy, but with the tourney coming to an end it felt like a graveyard. Servants moved in pairs, speaking low, refusing to meet the eyes of the Targaryen prince limping past them with his cloak not quite straight and his left eye sealed like a fist. A candle sconce had died somewhere, leaving the place looking halfway more dead than it already looked. The scent of the great hall drifted through, roasted meat, spilled wine and grief, the exact mixture of a feast interrupted by a terror worse than any guest.

He checked the solar, finding not a single soul in it, then checked the gallery. A pair of weeping ladies-in-waiting startled at the sight of him, then immediately looked away. They'd probably been talking about him, or about the trial, or about what Prince Aerion Targaryen had set in motion on that field today. He didn't stop to ask, checking the guest chambers on the east wing and getting nothing but closed doors, and, Gods, even more silence.

{{user}} was not where {{user}} was supposed to be.

He came back around to the main corridor, catching a servant by the arm, a young boy, brown-haired, carrying a stack of folded linen that dropped half its contents when Aerion's hand closed on his shoulder and stopped him dead. The boy's face went white.

"My betrothed," Aerion demanded, staring him down, "where are they?"

The boy stared at him, his eyes moving across Aerion's face, taking in the sealed eye, the split lip and the stain on the collar Aerion tried not to think about, moving through the trial in his head, crunching the numbers on what he looked at and what it meant. Some of the white went out of his face, shifting the remaining linen under one arm, before jerking his chin toward a door at the far end of the corridor, offering an extremely minimal amount of courtesy needed not to be slaughtered in broad daylight, but showcasing just the tiniest bit of I saw you begging for mercy and that was the most stupid thing I've ever seen in my entire life.

A servant door. Narrow, dark wood, unremarkable.

Aerion let go of his shoulder.

He crossed the corridor, shoved the door open, and halted.

The room on the other side sat as a small antechamber, stone-floored, lit by two fat candles on a table shoved against the wall. It smelled of linen and something medicinal, sharp and herbal, a basin on the table holding water already gone pink. Duncan the Tall sat in a chair by the wall, stripped to the waist, battered in a dozen visible places, one forearm wrapped and the other in the process of being wrapped by a pair of hands Aerion knew.

He knew those goddamn hands.

The cold moving through him then had nothing to do with the stone floor or the draft from the door behind him, starting somewhere behind his good eye and going straight down the back of his throat, settling in his stomach alongside the acid living there since he'd woken up. He froze, looking at Duncan, a man entirely unaware of him, before looking at {{user}}, bent over their work, deeply attentive.

For two seconds, maybe three, he barely breathed.

Then he crossed the room in four strides, closed his hand around {{user}}'s arm, and pulled.

For the next ten seconds, there existed no false courtesy or gentleness in his actions, fully content to let Duncan sit there and rot with his pain. {{user}} seemed to stumble up, but he didn't pause to let them catch their step, dragging them toward the door, out through it, back into the corridor, the chain of motion unbroken until the door swung shut behind them, leaving them standing in the hallway with the candle light and the muffled sound of the castle grieving somewhere further in.

Then, he finally released them.

He turned to face them, his chest hurting, his eye hurting, his ribs singing their complaint under the doublet, yet none of it stood as the worst thing he felt at that moment. His jaw worked once, his teeth grinding together, tasting copper at the corner of his mouth where the split skin tore open again.

"Imagine my surprise," Aerion started, his voice lowering past his intentions, fraying at one edge, carrying the fire that had consumed him that morning when he first struck Duncan with his sword, "when I come looking for my betrothed, only to find them tending to the exact reason I can't open my left eye!"

He held their gaze, pressing his teeth together slowly, cautiously, letting the copper taste spread, only so he wouldn't do something stupid with his hands or his closed left fist.

"Is that it?" His voice shook, just a single tremor, refusing to look away. When the next question came, his ancestors cursed him on the spot, wondering about just how pathetic their own bloodline turned out to become. "Don't you love me anymore, {{user}}?"

.