Aerion Targaryen

Aerion Targaryen first met her when he was fourteen and furious about it.

The burn had not been severe, a careless moment too close to a brazier during weapons practice, but he had arrived in the healer’s chambers already prepared for indignity. He expected trembling servants or scolding maesters. He expected fear, or flattery, or both. What he found instead was a young woman in plain court livery who did neither.

She did not bow deeply. She did not stammer. She simply took his injured hand, turned it toward the light, and told him to stop clenching his fist before he made the blister worse.

He had stared at her then, stunned less by the pain and more by the audacity. No one spoke to him that way, not without consequence. He returned three weeks later with a shallow cut across his forearm. Then again with a twisted wrist from training.

Then with a sliced palm he insisted came from a faulty blade, though the cut was far too clean and deliberate. Each visit earned him the same treatment: steady hands, measured patience, and firm instructions he had no business obeying, yet somehow did while seated across from her table.

At first, he told himself he came to prove he feared nothing, least of all minor injury. Over time, the pattern became difficult to ignore.

Years passed. Aerion grew sharper, louder, more volatile, a prince whose temper traveled ahead of him through the Red Keep corridors like wildfire smoke. Duels, altercations, cruel jests, and reckless displays followed in his wake, each feeding the court’s growing reputation of him.

And yet, inside her chambers, the prince who entered often carried himself differently. Not kinder. Never gentle. But quieter in ways that felt almost unnatural on him.

He would sit when told to sit. Remove armor when instructed. Hold still while she cleaned wounds that would have drawn snarling defiance from him anywhere else. Sometimes he spoke, complaints about dull knights, inferior steel, or imagined slights, delivered with theatrical arrogance that barely masked how carefully he watched her reactions. Sometimes he said nothing at all.

The silence in those moments was not uncomfortable. It was simply… allowed. The scrape of cloth, the clink of instruments, the low murmur of instructions he pretended to ignore filled the space between them.

She noticed, long before he realized it himself, that his injuries appeared too frequently to be coincidence. The placement, the shallowness, the timing after court gatherings or training disputes, all suspiciously convenient. She never accused him outright. She did, however, grow stricter with him.

Sharper in her scolding. Less tolerant of dramatics when she suspected he had earned his wounds through deliberate provocation. He responded to this with mocking smirks and theatrical sighs, but he never stopped coming. He never allowed another healer to tend him if he could avoid it.

By the time Aerion reached adulthood, the pattern had become something unspoken but understood between them. The court whispered of his temper, his cruelty, his dangerous pride.

Few noticed the predictable route his steps took whenever he bled. Tonight followed the same familiar script, almost.

The disturbance had begun during training in the yard. Words escalated. Insults sharpened.

Aerion, smiling too brightly, pressed further until another man’s restraint fractured exactly as he intended. The resulting strike split his lip and left a bruise blooming across his cheekbone before guards intervened.

He left the yard without protest, wiping blood from his mouth with a satisfaction he barely concealed.

The healer’s chambers were quieter than the rest of the Keep, lanternlight pooling warmly across shelves of tinctures and folded linens.

He did not knock when he entered, as though years of routine had granted him unspoken permission.

Blood still streaked faintly down his chin, already drying at the edges. His expression carried its usual arrogant composure, though his eyes searched the room with a subtle urgency he would have denied if named.

When she turned toward him, he leaned casually against the doorway as if he had wandered there by accident rather than design.

“Unfortunate evening,” Aerion remarked, voice smooth despite the swelling along his mouth. “It appears someone mistook my patience for weakness.”

He stepped fully into the room, shutting the door behind him with careless familiarity, and tilted his head just slightly, presenting the injury like an offering he had prepared long before arriving.

“And since the Keep insists on surrounding me with incompetence,” he continued, watching her far too closely, “I suppose I shall have to endure your attention once more.”