Aerion Targaryen

The room smells of herbs, smoke, and something faintly metallic. Aerion lies still beneath the heavy furs, his body a map of bruises and bandages. The maesters move around him like quiet ghosts, whispering, adjusting, checking—always checking.

He hates it. The stillness. The weakness. The way his own breath feels borrowed rather than owned. He stares at the canopy above, jaw tight.

He remembers the Trial.

Steel clashing. Mud beneath his boots. The weight of eyes—so many eyes—watching him. Judging him. Waiting for him to prove something he has always insisted he already is.

He had not proven it. He had been struck down. Bloodied. Reduced. Humiliated.

His fingers twitch against the sheets now, as if they still search for a sword that is no longer there. Pain answers immediately, sharp and punishing. Good. It reminds him he is not dead.

Though perhaps death would have been simpler.

════════

Before all this, there had been another kind of war.

His marriage had never been gentle. From the beginning, it had been a binding of houses, not hearts. Duty dressed as union. He had taken you as one takes a burden—necessary, expected, and deeply resented.

And when no child came, that resentment had festered.

He had turned cold. Distant. Cruel in quiet ways that cut deeper than any blade. He had convinced himself it was your failing, your inadequacy, never once considering the possibility that the flaw might lie with him.

So he had tested it.

Not with tenderness. Not with hope. But with something closer to defiance.

Rumors had followed, as they always did—whispers of brothels, of nights spent in indulgence, of a prince proving his virility to the world rather than to his wife. And then there were the whispers about you. That you were lonely. That you smiled too easily at court. That your presence lingered too long beside Prince Valarr.

He had seen it once.

That had been enough.

Not because of what it was—but because of what it stirred in him.

Something sharp. Possessive. Unfamiliar.

So he had come to you that night not as a husband, but as something closer to a man trying to prove himself against an invisible rival.

And it had worked.

A child had come from it. His child. Now that child exists beyond rumor and pride.

A boy. Small. Fragile. With pale hair like spun silver and eyes that seem too aware for someone so young—every inch a Targaryen, a fact Aerion carries with a quiet, unspoken pride, all the more for the absence of his mother’s features. A dragon, he had called him once, though quietly. Almost as if the word itself might break. The boy is a year and some moons old now.

And Aerion is here. Broken.

════════

The door creaks softly.

He does not turn his head at first. Pride is a stubborn thing, even when a man is half-ruined. But he knows it is you. He has learned the sound of your steps, even in his absence from your life.

When he finally looks, his gaze is sharp despite the exhaustion weighing it down.

You stand at a distance at first, as you always do now. Careful. Measured. As if approaching a wounded beast that might still bite.

He almost laughs at that.

Almost.

“You come often,” he says, his voice rough, thinner than it should be.

It is not gratitude. It is not accusation. It simply is.

Because you do.

You visit. You stand. You watch. Sometimes you speak. Sometimes you do not.

You have every reason not to be here.

That thought lingers longer than he expects.

His father has been here too. Maekar watches him with a gaze carved from stone and expectation. There is no softness there. Not even now.

And there is the shadow of another presence that will never enter the room again.

A prince dead by a father’s hand.

Because of him.

Aerion exhales slowly, eyes drifting away from you again, back to the canopy, as if it might swallow him whole.

He does not feel guilt for Duncan. Nor for the uncle whose life ended in that chaos. Those are distant things, abstract, easily dismissed.

But this—

This is different.

You standing there. Alive. Bound to him still.

The child waiting somewhere beyond these walls, unaware of how close he came to being fatherless.

“What would he remember?” Aerion asks suddenly, his voice quieter now. “If I had died.”

It is not really a question meant for you. It is meant for himself.

A bitter thing settles in his chest.

He has spent so long proving he is a dragon—fierce, untouchable, above consequence—that he has never once considered what ashes he might leave behind.

His gaze flickers back to you, something unfamiliar in it. Not softness—not quite—but something less sharp than before.

“What kind of man leaves his son with nothing but his name?” he murmurs.

The room feels smaller now. Quieter.

And for the first time since the Trial, Aerion does not look like a prince demanding the world bend to him. He looks like a man forced to reckon with what remains when it does not.