Chapter Text
Maekar did not dare leave Daeron's bedside, the same as how Baelor refused to leave Maekar alone to yield in his darker thoughts. The same immobility had seized Maekar at Redgrass then, when he'd stood motionless before the bodies of Daemon's children, unable to look away from the small bodies of Aegon and Aemon Blackfyre sprawled across blood soaked earth. Baelor could not leave him alone with that particular thought.
It was the cost of war, Baelor had told him then, months of gentleness worn thin by repetition. They were not your responsibility.
They were someone's, Maekar had insisted over and over again.
It had taken until the next spring for Maekar to believe that someone was Daemon, not himself. His brother didn't exactly fall into melancholy, with the help of Dyanna. Instead, Maekar was often stuck in a trance in moments of silence, and pulling him out of it was difficult.
On the brighter side, the maester is optimistic in Daeron’s recovery despite how the boy hasn't awoken yet. Baelor would be lying if he said that he didn't fear his nephew would ever wake when the trial ended. Seeing as Daeron's own blood matted his curls and how his chest lacked the rise and fall that it should.
Baelor found himself counting the breaths: one, two, three. The gaps between them lengthened like the spaces between heartbeats. Maekar only breathed like that when he was not allowing himself to scream.
No father could blame Maekar for his vigilance. If it was Baelor's own son then he doubts that their situation would be any different from this. Or maybe Baelor would never find the courage to even be in the same room as his son considering that that if it was his blow that…
It was cruel to think of such things, with Maekar already smothering himself with his guilt. His hand may have dealt the blow but it was Baelor's fault.
"You need to rest."
Maekar’s response was an immediate refusal that required no words. His shoulders drew tighter, a sharp clink of plate armor echoing in the dark room, as if Baelor had just suggested he abandon Daeron to die alone.
What arrogance, what spectacular hubris to think he could contain the volatile madness of his own house?
The best thing he would have done was not allow the trial in the first place. Lock Aerion in the castle, claim that he withdrew his accusation and suffer Aerion's fit and endure Maekar's scrutiny. Daeron would never have taken a blow meant for him in that way. Let no blood would further shed itself.
But Baelor had just needed the trial, didn't he? Had to prove that justice could be clean, that his family was not monstrous, that the grand Targaryen name still meant something beyond dragons and madness. Needed it so badly he'd walked into the field himself, stood there with a sword in the name of a hedgeknight's cause, as if his presence alone could hold back the tides violence.
"Maekar."
Look at me, Maekar, Baelor thought, his eyes tracking the candlelight reflecting off his brother's unyielding armor. Curse my clean justice. Tell me it is my fault.
Please just break
"I am resting," Maekar told him, though his voice did not hold the fury that Baelor had hoped. He hadn't moved his hand from Daeron's arm in hours.
"The maester said that he should wake within the fortnight," Baelor offered, step by step approaching the bed, desperate to offer a comfort his brother refused to receive. "It would only take you minutes to—"
"I know what the maester said." Maekar's voice was low, almost conversational in its deadness. "I'm staying."
"Then so am I," Baelor said simply.
For the first time, Maekar's eyes flickered toward him in acknowledgment that Baelor was still there. That he'd chosen to be. The moment passed as quickly as it came, and Maekar's gaze dropped back down to the ruin of his son's face.
"You should not." Maekar's thumb moved to stroke Daeron's wrist. "This is my doing."
"It is not."
"Yes it is." Maekar's jaw clenched. "My mace. My hand. My own fucking…." The last words seemed to be dragged from him, each one a stone dropping into a cup already brimming with his own atrocities.
No. Baelor's mind screamed at each word. No. When Maekar claimed the sins his to atone.
Had he not taken up Dunk's cause?
Had he not placed himself in the path of the blow that Daeron had stolen from him?
No. When he saw Maekar's eyes shone in the candlelight, lashes wet with tears unshed.
Baelor looked away. It would have been easier had Maekar raged. Easier had he cursed the gods, the trial, or even Baelor himself. Grief sat ill upon his brother.
This should never have been yours to bear. It's your brother's fault, sweet Maekar. It is his authority that has allowed every provocation go awry.
· · ─ ·˖᯽ ݁˖· ─ · ·
"He was supposed to wake days ago!" The voice was low and struck hard at its consonants. "Now he lies in the same bed without moving so much as an inch."
"A miscalculation." Softer, this one, careful around the first voice too. "Threatening to hang the maester changes nothing."
Both voices made his head ache and his heart pound. Opening his eyes was was heavier than he anticipated. He'd only managed to get a glimpse of the canopy above his head before the light punished him for it.
"He stirred." One of the voices declared, he could barely differentiate it for it proved harder still to open his eyes. Then there was movement. Footsteps. Two sets, one heavier than the other, one slower than the other.
His eyes finally fluttered, against all better judgment. The light remained unkind. Turning his head, he found two men standing over him. A sun and moon.
"Thank the fucking gods." The man with hair as pale as snow exhaled.
Why?
"Daeron." The other man behind him called.
Is that me?
"What?" His own voice was scratchy.
· · ─ ·˖᯽ ݁˖· ─ · ·
The maester assured them that Daeron was merely dazed. Such confusion was to be expected after a blow to the head. There was no cause for alarm.
Even so, Maekar did not like the way his son kept looking from face to face. Daeron had worn many expressions in his life, Maekar knew them all. The sullen looks, the frightened ones, the stubborn ones he mistook for courage. This one was blank as new ground.
The confusion is expected from such an injury, my prince. Therefore Daeron's behavior is normal, and yet such creeping unease remained in Maekar's chest.
"I… where am I?" Daeron spoke again at last.
"Ashford." Maekar simply answered.
"Ashford…" He repeated with a slight frown, nodding his head. "How long have I slept for?"
"Some days, my dear nephew." Baelor's smile had come easy, taking the chair nearest the bed with the easy grace of relief that had already resolved itself into certainty. He laid a hand over Daeron's wrist. "Do you remember what happened?"
A small pause. Daeron's gaze dropped to Baelor's hand on his wrist.
"I don't believe so," Daeron admitted. "No."
Maekar shot the maester a look, the old man answered the look before it could become a question.. A prince who cannot remember recent events after a head wound isn't impossible. We need to be patient with him.
Maekar's jaw tightened. He said nothing, because what he wanted to say wasn't a question the maester could answer. What he wanted to say was that his son had never in his life looked at Baelor Breakspear's hand on his wrist as if it were a stranger's.
"Do you remember the trial, Daeron?" It was Maekar who spoke this time.
"Trial for what?"
· · ─ ·˖᯽ ݁˖· ─ · ·
"He can read, write, and speak. He remembers how to ride a horse." Maekar's voice had taken on a hard edge. "How can a man recall all that and yet forget his own life?"
Baelor disliked that they were having this conversation before Daeron. His nephew sat upon the bed, turning his attention from one face to the next, worrying at a ragged fingernail.
"You heard the maester, brother." Baelor spoke. "Such things are not unknown after a wound to the head. His memories may yet return, we need not dwell on what cannot be fixed. Patience is what remains to us."
"Did it go right through your ears when he said perhaps?" His gaze flicked toward Daeron before returning to Baelor. "Or did that sound like certainty to you? Coming from the same man that claimed my son would wake within a day and did not."
When did his brother lack such faith?
"The maester can only offer his best judgment."
"And his best judgment has been wrong already."
· · ─ ·˖᯽ ݁˖· ─ · ·
They were careful not to burden him with too much at once, although he wished that they did. Every answer seemed to birth three new questions, and his own thoughts had become an unruly thing, multiplying in the silence.
They were careful with him. Too careful. They handled his mind like a piece of cracked porcelain, feeding him small, bloodless scraps of information as if a whole meal might choke him.
He hated it. He wanted to be choked. He wanted to be overwhelmed, broken over the knee of the truth. Anything but this slow, suffocating starvation in the dark. In the quiet hours between the maester's foul-smelling poultices and his supposed family's agonizing visits, his mind became an unruly, parasitic thing, breeding fresh questions in the sickroom.
What he knew of himself could be recited in less than a minute.
He was (or is?) Daeron Targaryen, a prince of House Targaryen, named for the king himself.
He was the eldest son of Prince Maekar, therefore making him heir to Summerhall.
Prince Baelor Breakspear, Hand of the King and heir to the Iron Throne, was his uncle.
During a trial of seven at Ashford Meadow, he had saved that uncle's life. Which had led to how he's lost his very identity.
The facts sat neatly in his head, each in its proper place, and they meant less than nothing.
You are Daeron Targaryen.
Very well.
He knew the name, knew it belonged to him. Yet every time someone spoke it, he felt as though they were addressing another man. A dead man, perhaps.
Given the faces that surrounded him when they said it. Perhaps, Daeron thought, they were right to do so for he did not even know what needed mending.
How could he hope to fix it?
He was the eldest son of Prince Maekar, therefore making him heir to Summerhall.
That makes who his mother? Had she visited whilst he slept? Where is she? Does she know what's happened to her son? Did eldest mean he had siblings? Where is Summerhall, and why are they in Ashford?
Prince Baelor Breakspear, Hand of the King and heir to the Iron Throne, was his uncle.
What is the heir, and hand doing in Ashford?
During a trial of seven at Ashford Meadow, he had saved that uncle's life. Which had led to how he's lost his very identity.
What is a trial of seven? Why is there a trial of seven? Who did they fight against? And what had they been fighting for? What did he save his uncle from? Why did he need saving? If Baelor was the Hand and the heir, what was he doing in a place called Ashford? Why were any of them here, miles away from the king's court, huddled in a sickroom?
Everything sounded important, crucial to his very existence. Yet when the pieces were arranged together, they formed a picture everyone else seemed able to see and he could not.
"You ought to stop before that bleeds." Prince Baelor's voice was gentle enough that Daeron did not realize at first he was being addressed.
"Hm?" Daeron blinked, pulling himself out of the gray fog of his own thoughts.
"Your hand."
Daeron looked down. His right hand was resting on the heavy wool blanket, but his fingers hadn't been resting at all. The skin around his thumbnails had been picked completely raw, peeled back until angry, weeping red crescents ringed the neat cuticles. A tiny bead of bright crimson was just beginning to well up against the white of his skin.
He stared at the blood, feeling a detached sort of fascination. He couldn’t remember when he had begun the habit. Then again, he couldn't remember beginning any habit. His body simply moved through these small, violent loops without his mind’s permission, as if his hands were trying to carve comfort into his own flesh.
"Right…." Daeron murmured, pulling his hand away and tucking it beneath the fold of the sheet, out of sight.
The maester had stepped outside some time ago with Prince Maekar. His father. The word still felt strange.
They had gone to continue some discussion beyond his hearing, not for the first time. Daeron suspected they thought they were protecting him, or perhaps protecting themselves.
In their absence, Baelor had remained. The crown prince sat beside the window, bent over a sheet of parchment. The scratching of his quill filled the room. Daeron had spent enough hours watching him to form some impression of the man.
Baelor was patient, absurdly so. He spoke to the servants with the same soft-spoken courtesy he used with the grand lords who peeked through the door. Everyone in this place deferred to him without a single command being shouted. It was easy to see why people followed him.
Perhaps it was not so poor a choice to save him, Daeron thought, his mind tracking the steady rise and fall of Baelor's shoulders. Assuming, of course, that he truly had.
The monotonous scritch-scratch of the quill began to grate against the raw edge of Daeron’s nerves. Curiosity won out.
"What are you writing?" The question escaped before he could decide whether it was an intrusion. Baelor set down his quill and looked up.
"A letter."
"To whom?"
"The king."
Daeron blinked.
"My…grandfather?"
A faint smile touched Baelor's face.
"Aye. Your grandfather." He glanced down at the wet ink on the parchment, his expression turning distant. "He ought to know his grandson has awakened."
Daeron hesitated a moment. He swallowed hard, his picked fingers stinging against the coarse linen of the sheets. There was a question burning in the back of his throat, a small, pathetic thing that felt entirely too ridiculous and too fragile for a prince of the blood to ask. But he couldn't stop it.
"And is he pleased?" Daeron asked. "That I saved… That I lived?"
Baelor let out a sudden chuckle, the instinctive sound of a man who assumed the answer was so blindingly obvious, that the question itself must be a joke. He must have forgotten that the boy in the bed was completely hollowed out. It is not his nephew.
The sound hurt like a slap to Daeron. He shrank back into his pillows with a sudden and hot flush of shame coloring his cheeks. He felt like an idiot. A child who had asked a ridiculous thing in front of the grandest man in the realm.
But thankfully the chuckle died instantly in Baelor's throat.
The prince froze, his gaze locking onto Daeron’s face. He saw it then. The terror in the boy's eyes, the total lack of certainty, the horrifying realization that Daeron truly didn't know if his existence was valued or merely cast aside so easily. Baelor’s expression transformed in an instant.
He looked at the boy who had traded his entire identity, his memories, and his mind just so Baelor could keep breathing.
"Very much so," Baelor vowed to him.
· · ─ ·˖᯽ ݁˖· ─ · ·
He waited until the following morning before seeking Daeron out again. Dawn was only beginning to creep through the windows, pale gold spilling across the stone floor. Maekar was not accustomed to seeing his eldest awake at such an hour. Ordinarily, Daeron would still be abed; sleeping off a night's drinking or else he would have vanished entirely, leaving servants and kin alike to wonder where he had gone.
He would be lying if he claimed he had hoped to find him awake. Yesterday, perhaps he had. Today, he was not so certain.
Maekar had imagined many reunions. One where Daeron awoke in anger in which Maekar could absolve himself through. Once, in his darkest moments beside the sickbed, he had imagined Daeron waking afraid of him. He had thought that the cruelest possibility.
Seven hells had he been wrong because this one struck him right through his very heart.
Daeron sat propped against a mound of pillows, staring out the window. Morning light caught the bruising along the left side of his jaw and the healing cut upon his cheek.
At the sound of the door, he turned. Not a sign of recognition in those lilac eyes when he met them. The sight unsettled Maekar more than he cared to admit.
"You are awake."
A foolish thing to say.
One corner of Daeron's mouth twitched.
"So I've gathered." The voice was his son's, the man was not.
Maekar crossed the room. The chair beside the bed remained empty, though he remained standing.
"Forgive me, there was no need for that." Daeron shook his head with a faint smile before it died.
"You must feel…" The thought died unfinished.
After a moment, Daeron tried again.
"I am told you are my father."
Am I?
Was I ever?
Was it not evident in the way he was already acting? Or was this another of Maekar's failures? Was his failures as a parent not completely laid bare by that single question? Had he been such a distant, unyielding tyrant in the boy's life that even a shattered mind couldn't find a trace of him left behind? Did Baelor or the maester force himself sit at Daeron's side and explain the basic mechanics of his own lineage because Maekar had been too much of a coward to do it himself?
Maekar looked away, his gaze snapping violently toward the narrow window at the far side of the room. He looked anywhere but at those unfamiliar, ghostly eyes that seemed destined to haunt him until his dying day.
"Do you remember me at all?" He loathed himself the exact instant the query left his lips. It was a pathetic, selfish plea for reassurance from a man who deserved no such grace.
Daeron didn't look away; he was entirely unafraid to meet the prince’s heavy, brooding stare. A small, incredibly weary laugh escaped the boy’s chest. "I am not certain how many times I can confirm that before people stop asking."
When Maekar stubbornly refused to meet his eyes, Daeron finally dropped his gaze back down to his own lap.
"But no." The fleeting, polite smile vanished entirely. "I do not, and I am sorry."
Daeron rubbed at his thumb with his forefinger.
"I have tried. Truly," Daeron murmured, his brow furrowed in a deep, agonizing line of concentration as he stared at his hands. "Every time they ask, I try."
A moment of silence followed.
"Nothing comes." Daeron eventually whispered. "No matter how much I try… or how much I should."
That word triggered a series of thoughts in Maekar, because it was unbearable to both. He closed his eyes.
You should remember the hawk you begged me to let you keep. You should remember the wooden sword Aerion broke over your shoulder. You should remember your mother. You should remember me.
The memory of her smile had already faded enough for the rest of them. It should not fade for you. You should remember Summerhall.
But he can't, Maekar thought, his throat tightening to the point of physical pain. 'Because you took it from him.
Yielding completely to his own monstrous selfishness, Maekar turned on his heel and fled the room altogether, unable to spend another single second looking at the living ghost he had created.
· · ─ ·˖᯽ ݁˖· ─ · ·
"They tell me your father was here." From the heavy sigh Daeron let out, Baelor gathered that the visit had not gone well.
He looked at the bedside table, noting the entirely untouched tray of food—the thin layer of cold grease already congealing over the surface of the beef broth.
"Did you not enjoy his company?"
"It was rather fleeting." Daeron abandoned any pretense of composure, lifting an arm and laying his forearm bluntly across his eyes, blotting out the world. "I fear he is cross with me."
Baelor stopped short, his hand freezing an inch above his own belt.
"Oh?"
"Is that not the word for it?" He lowered his arm just enough to peer at Baelor.
A faint, wry smile touched Baelor’s lips, though it was instantly smothered by the crushing weight of a hundred past exhaustion-lined memories. Pulling Maekar out of the dark, cavernous recesses of his own mind had always been a miserable, thankless chore; pulling Maekar’s sons out of whatever self-destructive trouble they had manufactured was a permanent state of existence. But usually, there was wine involved. Usually, there was a biting retort from Daeron to cut the tension. To see his nephew like this—stripped of his armor of sarcasm, reduced to a fragile thing trying to read the volatile weather of a father he couldn't remember? It was an entirely different kind of hell.
He crossed the room and drew the curtain across the window. The afternoon sun had been falling directly across the bed, rudely exposing Daeron’s pale face and the linen bandages still matted to his curls.
"And what did you do to warrant such thing?" Baelor asked "You have known him all of two days. And already, you think him cross."
"Am I wrong?" Daeron challenged, crossing his arms over his chest in a protective, instinctual huddle.
A breathy laugh escaped Baelor before he could stop it. "Very, my nephew. Incredibly so."
Daeron raised a singular, elegant brow, gesturing with a tilt of his chin for his uncle to enlighten him.
"My brother is cross with himself." Baelor began, turning back to study the boy. In House Targaryen, guilt was not a passing emotion; it was an ancestral disease, a hereditary madness passed down through the bloodline as surely as the silver hair. Which was not always. "Your father is not an easy man, Daeron. He never has been."
"That much I gathered."
"Nor is he a man who speaks freely of what troubles him." Baelor continued, leaning his hands against the rough, splintering edge of the wooden table.
Daeron frowned.
"And I trouble him?"
"No, sweet boy." Baelor turned fully, looking directly into the pale purple of his nephew's gaze. "He is a prickly and miserable creature when he is afraid."
"He is afraid, then?"
"I believe so, yes." Baelor said to him. "Immensely."
"Do you suppose..." Daeron hesitated, his fingers nervously picking at the hem of his bedsheets, his voice dropping into a whisper that seemed to echo in the quiet room. "Do you suppose the fear is for me? Or of me?"
The question hung in the stagnant air.
Baelor froze, his breath hitching in his throat. In all his calculations, through all the hours he had spent managing his brother's dark moods since the trial, he had never looked at Maekar’s terror through that particular lens. He had assumed Maekar was merely terrified of losing his sons to the clutches of the Stranger.
But, even with his mind scrubbed entirely clean to the bone, Daeron had pierced straight to the rotten core of Maekar's soul.
Of you. Baelor realized with a wave of nausea hitting him. He is terrified of what he is to you.
He was terrified of the monstrous reality of his own heavy hands. He was terrified that every time he entered this room, he was standing before his own victim—and that the boy would look at him not as a father, but as the blunt instrument of his destruction.
And it was all Baelor's fault.
· · ─ ·˖᯽ ݁˖· ─ · ·
The silence of the room returned the moment the oak door clicked shut, but the phantom presence of his visitors lingered like thick smoke in the air.
Daeron didn’t move. He kept his forearm pinned firmly over his eyes, using the pressure of his own skin to combat the blinding, white-hot spike of vertigo that threatened to make him vomit every time he shifted his head. Underneath the clean linen bandages, his skull throbbed in time with his pulse. It was a dull, rhythmic ache that felt as though someone had driven an iron spike straight through his temple and left it there to rust.
They called him a prince. They told him he belonged to the ancient, sovereign blood of the dragon.
A prince, Daeron thought, his lips twisting into a bitter, hidden grimace beneath his arm. A useless, broken-headed bastard is more like it.
He slowly lowered his arm and opened his eyes to the dim, velvet shrouded twilight of the sickroom. He hated the light. The afternoon sun Baelor had so thoughtfully blocked out had felt like needles pressing directly into his retinas. He rolled his head to the side, his gaze tracking a single dust mote floating listlessly in the gloom, using it to anchor his vision until the room stopped tilting.
Beside him sat the food tray. The beef broth had completely congealed, a pale, nauseating film of grease hardening over the top. He had no appetite. The mere smell of the meat made his stomach churn with a violently modern rejection of the grand care they were wasting on him.
He lifted his right hand, holding it up into the fading light to inspect it.
It was a strange thing, looking at a part of your own body and feeling absolutely no ownership over it. The fingers were long, the skin pale, the nails neatly trimmed by some servant’s quiet diligence. His thumb automatically began to rub against his forefinger. A rhythmic, obsessive friction. He caught himself doing it and froze.
Why do I do that? his mind demanded, searching the dark, hollow caverns of his brain for an answer. Who taught me to do that?
Nothing came. The wall in his head remained completely unyielding, a massive, smooth expanse of black stone that refused to grant him a single scratch of text.
The man who claimed to be his father had looked at him with an intensity so intimidating it had felt like an assault. The prince had stood there like stone with suppressed fury, yet his eyes had been wet, shining with a devastating, unvarnished grief that Daeron had no idea what to do with.
And then Baelor had arrived, all gentle grace and warmth, treating Daeron like a fragile glass ornament that might shatter if he spoke too loudly.
They were both so terribly, monstrously heavy. They carried decades of history into this tiny room, expecting him to join them in a dance whose steps he had entirely forgotten.
Baelor had frozen as if Daeron had driven a dagger between his ribs when he'd asked about Maekar's true fear.
He’s afraid of me, Daeron realized. No. They are afraid of me.
They didn't see him. How could they? There was no "him" left inside this skull.
Daeron let his hand drop heavily back onto the sheets. The simple effort of thinking leaving him completely exhausted. He closed his eyes, letting his consciousness drift back toward the dark, painless void of sleep.