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When he births his first babe, Lucerys has no dignity.
He wails, cries out, screams for his Mother. He is alone, and afraid, and bleeding, alone even when surrounded by sheep-faced maids and an omega crone midwife that stinks of long past menopause, locked deep inside the fortress of Dragonstone.
To keep you safe, they had all said, away from King’s Landing and the court and Driftmark and the War.
As if it wasn’t too late for that.
And his child will be no heir, not one they wish to safeguard, no dragon egg placed in their crib, unless something terrible happens. With all that has happened, perhaps tragedy is likely after all. Better to prepare in case it strikes. It already has.
But nothing prepared him for the labor.
The blood rushes out, and the pain, and Lucerys thinks, with a clarity that stops his heart, I am going to die.
And then Aemond tears into the room like a storm, shoving aside whatever guards his Mother could not only spare but that could stomach the wailing.
“I am his alpha,” Aemond snarls, scent flaring, and Lucerys shocks himself by laughing.
They are married, that much is true.
But Lucerys’ body bears no mating bite, for that he thanks the Mother every day, and the babe struggling to push its way free into the world isn’t Aemond’s.
Isn’t anyone who’s name is known, and whichever one it was, in the end, they are long dead under dragon flame and claw.
Aemond had killed them all. To a man. For that he is grateful too, though he will never say it.
Lucerys had thought the worst was behind, that the way the child was put in him had been the worst trial.
Even worse than the looks from his brothers, the grim-faced maesters, the solemn funereal wedding to Aemond, because of course it had been Aemond. There was no other it could be.
All those things were washed away in the tide when his waters broke, and Lucerys realized just how deep the pain could go.
Until Aemond’s scent is a raft, because he might not really be Lucerys’ alpha, but he is family and familiar and climbing into the birthing bed like a man gone mad.
Lucerys lets him, sagging into his lean and solid frame, where he braces behind Lucerys like he is a dragon to be ridden, his thighs a hard seat under Lucerys’ own.
That’s familiar too, now.
He even imagines, for a moment, that he can smell Vhagar, the sun on her scales.
But the pain rolls back, and he pushes, hurts, and mewls. Like a child, Lucerys tucks his too-hot, wet from sweat and tears, face into Aemond’s cool neck, his reptile musk, both like alpha and a venomous serpent coiled in rotting undergrowth, waiting.
He never thought it would be his comfort in a bed of blood. Not that he should be here.
It flies in the face of it all, for any alpha to be in the birthing chamber, much less the husband who is not the father, and it is so very Aemond.
Ensuring Lucerys does not give up or die. It would not please him, after all.
Lucerys knows that much.
They’ve both been waiting for the babe, for their own reasons. It cannot end in death, not now.
Lucerys is not ready to meet the Stranger. His child has not even met the world.
“I have always had reason to call you strong,” Aemond hisses in his ear, bringing him back to himself, because he can only be kind if he is cruel in the same measure, “and yet this unmakes you?”
Lucerys moans, because he wants to give up, go to sleep, stop suffering almost as much as he wants to bite Aemond, there where it hurts, to hit him, prove him wrong. To fight.
“This? A simple birth? Something baseborn whores do in the gutters every day?”
It flares in him.
Whore.
It had been whispered in his ears while they- he swats are Aemond with his hand, weaker than he would like, then harder. And harder.
“Shut it,” he grits out, as another wave of pain and pushing washes over him.
“There it is, fire and blood,” Aemond croons and Lucerys pushes again, hard, ramming an elbow into Aemond’s side to make the pain worth it.
Aemond chuckles, because he’s demented.
“There he is,” he says, pleased and Lucerys hears the next words in his head before Aemond whispers them, proud and possessive in a way Lucerys is too tired to be scared of.
In a way, they hearten him. They’re expected. They’re the heart of his marriage.
“There’s the boy that cut my eye out,” and with a final screaming push, Lucerys delivers a son into the world.
When they place him in Lucerys’ trembling arms, born with a cap of hair as black as Lucerys’ own, eyes as green as rivers, Aemond is the one that has decided what they call him.
*
“You should name him Orys,” Aemond says from where he looks out of the window at the sky, so straight-backed, posture perfected in him by Alicent and Criston Cole, that Lucerys’ own back hurts, hunched around his belly.
Everything hurts, lately.
The babe cannot come fast enough, and yet Lucerys thinks he will never be ready.
The rest of the table, who had been half-heartedly discussing names, gamely trying to pretend all was well and failing miserably, with Mother swirling her wine glass and Jace trying to smile and Baela and Rhaena not able to look at him, freezes.
Lucerys surprises himself with a smile, unfamiliar on his face these days.
“It’s a good Targaryen name,” Aemond continues, as if he can’t feel the tension, still staring at the clouds, and it is true and not true, the name of the most famous Targaryen bastard, so it’s aid and insult all in one, and Lucerys relaxes despite himself because Aemond is the one thing that has not changed after everything came crashing down.
Lucerys’ mouth still tastes of sand, his head still feels the iron grip forcing it down, and there is comfort in Aemond’s animosity, its familiar sting.
In knowing he fought Aemond off and won when it counted, years ago. That much he did.
“And for a girl?” Lucerys says, baiting him, rubbing absently at his back, which won’t stop aching.
Wondering what will come out of Aemond’s mouth next is a welcome distraction.
So is the way Jace breathes, at last, and after a moment the others do too.
“Alys,” Aemond says, turning at last, his living eye fixed on Lucerys, and Lucerys alone.
“Why Alys?” Lucerys says, because he can’t remember if that should mean something to him, for good or for ill, his brain fogged with the work of building a babe inside him, eating and drinking and sleeping for them both, the little swimming sea serpent moving behind his skin. His child. No one else’s.
Even if they’ll be Aemond’s in name. And named by, as it appears.
They’re the best suggestions he’s heard, certainly. Newer. Freer. Not held by seven generations of Targaryens and too many in each.
“I’ve always liked the name Alys,” Aemond says, not blinking, not teasing.
There is no hidden cruelty there, no trap Lucerys can spot. He means it.
And, Lucerys realizes, it also sounds like Alicent, from his Mother’s fleeting little half-smile, hiding in the corner of her mouth, bitter, bittersweet, and gone almost as quickly as it comes with any mention of the Oldtown Dowager, her old friend and rival and once Queen and stepmother.
“Orys and Alys,” Lucerys says and likes how it sounds.
Good names. Strong names, he thinks with the ghost of a smile.
“Perhaps it’ll be twins,” Rhaena says, kindly, and Lucerys’ smile dies when he aches suddenly for their betrothal that wasn’t.
It had been over when he presented, long before this mess, but some part had held out hope until it had died on the shores of war.
“Perhaps not,” Aemond snaps at her and Lucerys comes back to himself, to the here and the now.
Aemond is his husband, not by choice. Either of theirs.
His Mother is his Queen, and he loves her almost for the same reason that he hates her, for the war and what happened to him in it. For loving Daemon despite it, through it, for it, and for how he will never have that for his own. She risked her fragile, hollow crown, newly given and already blood soaked to secure the marriage and with it Lucerys’ child’s future. Lucerys’ own.
And he still wants, with some greedy corner of his heart, for all of them to die.
He is so angry he could bite a hole in the world.
He is so sad he could drown it in tears.
“Maester Orys,” Aemond says, and Lucerys realizes with a start he has not taken his eyes off Lucerys’ face while he lost time to himself. It happens less now, than it did at the start.
And Aemond watches him, catching it. Always. Then and now.
Jace makes a faint sound, his gaze flickering between them.
“Or Lord Commander of-” and he’s cut off by the scrape of Lucerys’ chair as he pushes away from the table.
Jace means well. Lucerys could go for his eyes.
He does not want to give his son a sword. Does not want his child out of his body at all, into the cruel world where he cannot protect them, cannot fold himself around them.
The world that says they will have a bastard's lot, and limits.
A maester is the best thing he can be, if he’s born a boy. A girl might be married. That might be worse even as it is better.
“My lord husband,” Lucerys says, reaching out his hand to Aemond, “I need the privy.”
Aemond chuckles, low. Not entirely laughing at his wife. He can see the humor, after all.
Lucerys spends half the day there, making fits and spurts of water, because his child takes up so much room.
Please he prays, let it not be twins.
Rhaena means well. Aemond knows him well, and his husband pulls him up out of his seat as he does so often now, and they move through the halls together.
It’s funny, in a grim way, that Aemond knows the keep of King’s Landing so much better, and it is no longer his home.
Soon they will fly to Dragonstone, or Lucerys will be too heavy to fly at all. Even then, it will be both of them on Vhagar, Arrax’s ghost following behind Lucerys.
Aemond’s arm around his waist the way it is now.
His touch of the few he can tolerate, and with deliberate effort to make it almost effortless, now.
They have been married nearly three moons and shared a bed almost that long.
“That was not for your benefit,” Lucerys says, for no reason at all, beyond the low snappish irritation he feels all day and night.
“And yet, to my benefit it was,” Aemond grins, mean, the way he usually does.
He hates the little lunches as much as Lucerys does. More.
It must remind him of things as they were, before his widowed, crownless mother was sent to Oldtown, and his siblings scattered across the kingdoms.
His brother killed in the same war that put a new life inside Lucerys.
That last loss he might not mourn so deeply. But perhaps it makes him afraid.
It would be fair, equivalent, from the way his hand on Lucerys’ hip makes him shiver in awful memory, of a touch that was not Aemond’s.
*
They do not share a bed at the start, Lucerys and his husband.
Not even on their wedding night, which Lucerys spent in Jace’s chambers, his Mother watching over them both, and Daemon outside the doors. As if Aemond were to tear them down, as if he cared.
There had been no bedding ceremony, hardly any song.
Both of them silent, unsmiling, and solemn.
The only laughter had been Aegon’s, well into his cups, and Maelor’s where Aemond bounced him for Helaena, her belly swollen in a way that made Lucerys nervous.
He had not been showing much at all, yet, and the wedding gown had been generously cut, but it made his stomach turn anyway. What would it feel like, to be that far along?
The quickening had nearly knocked Lucerys over, the sharp, protective feeling, the fact that there was life inside him. He does not know he can manage more of it.
He looked away from his aunt and goodsister, and did not speak to his husband during the grim feast.
They had remained on opposite sides of the room, as if the crown really had fractured into civil war in the wake of his grandfather’s death, if the seeds had been blooming instead of stillborn.
Lucerys could almost picture it, from the Aemond had stuck by his sister, his mother, Ser Criston Cole behind them glaring like they were on a battlefield, not at a wedding.
Still in his white cloak for the sake of peace, because the Queen did not trust him, no more did her consort. He was Alicent’s man, through and through, and stood by her as if he was Aemond’s father for the ceremony.
Another time, that would have struck him as funny. Made him laugh until he was sick.
He hasn’t laughed in a long time.
As it was, the joke was elsewhere.
Anyone would mistake the brothers for each other, Aemond for the loyal husband and father, Aegon for the giggling newlywed.
And Lucerys the widow giving away her last chance at happiness.
But in a way, it is Aegon Lucerys feels sorry for.
The next morning, Aegon and Daemon’s dragons are gone, back to rain down blood and fire and pray to the Seven that they will not be paid back in kind. Aemond and Lucerys get to stay.
It is not until a fortnight has passed, and Alicent, Cole, Helaena and her children have departed that Lucerys goes to his husband’s quarters.
Aemond is alone in King’s Landing, which makes him dangerous and docile, unchecked and crushed under the weight of being his family’s only link to the crown and its favor.
If he tries to fuck Lucerys, he’ll have Aemond’s other eye.
But he needs the alpha scent, the grounding, the help for the babe growing in him.
The first brick of work for the future his Mother has begged of him, and his proven fertility, to bear the trueborn children they cannot seem to produce.
An heir that, for the first time in generations, cannot be denied.
Lucerys cannot tell if she’s just anxious, paranoid about Alicent’s children. Or if there is something about Jace, her own current heir, that Lucerys does not know.
There was a time when they knew everything about each other, but now there is silence and secrets.
There are screaming nightmares he refuses to explain. And mornings his brother will not look him in the eye.
Aemond always does, unblinking.
Like he does, dagger in hand, half-dressed, when Lucerys first pushes open the door to the chambers that are supposed to be theirs. After a moment, he puts down the blade.
And joins Lucerys in bed where he’s crawled in, luxuriating in an alpha scent that seems to cradle instead of choking him.
The last thing Aemond takes off before climbing in is the eyepatch, both of them looking away. They do not touch.
It will be years, most likely.
Lucerys won’t have heats while nursing, and even then the first few will be false as the child is weaned. Last a night, a day, there and gone, no chance of a babe.
It feels like eons from now. It feels too soon.
The scent of Aemond’s bed is comforting and nauseating, the spice of it mixed with stale sweat and old blood. Lucerys burrows into it deeper.
“I’ll love them too,” he says bitterly into the warm, too close air of the room, where they have both been lying and pretending to sleep, “your babes.”
Knows the words are true as soon as he says them, the revelation hiding in wait for this moment.
Knows that Aemond will not love the one in Lucerys now, growing strong. Likely won’t love his own, like Viserys and Aegon before him.
Lucerys will have to love them enough for them both. His lot, his punishment. His redemption.
“I know,” Aemond says, and for once it does not sound like revenge, simply fact, even if it is, Lucerys knows, the culmination of his long-held, long-nursed plans.
He had told Lucerys as much.
He tries to rise, and cannot, unused to the older bedding, softer than his own, to Aemond’s body so warm, close, and smelling of alpha, danger and safety all in one.
“Help me to the privy,” he snarls, and Aemond does so without complaint.
He has already won, after all.
His hands do not wander, and when they climb back into his bed, Lucerys already aware he will wake Aemond before morning for the same, he realizes he is not afraid.
Not even of the dead, sapphire eye looking blindly at the back of his skull from where Aemond is sleeping.
Except, perhaps, at the half-asleep idea that maybe, one day, he might love Aemond too.
And at the fact that it is not the horror it should have been.
*
It is not Alicent who gasps but Jace, when Mother makes the announcement.
Aemond looks steadily ahead at the stone of the chamber, as if he simply isn’t there.
It is only the five of them. Six, if you count the life growing, swift, and unstoppable inside of Lucerys.
It’s begun to move, and Lucerys keeps finding his hand cradled over the swell of it, wider by the day.
The maesters had examined him, the best in the land, in service of the crown, when they had flown into King’s Landing.
Lucerys had known by then.
Known even before they had gotten him back to the war camp, some cuts still bleeding, the ragged battlefield bonesetters and barbers seeing to him and seeing what was to be seen.
Far too late for moon tea, or anything that might not kill him along with the start of the babe in his womb.
But they had done what they could, set what needed setting, bandaged what needed bandaging, and gave him rest in his own tent, even if he kept shaking awake, looking around like a wild thing.
There were guards at the door, and no one in his bed.
After a while, he could sleep.
But he could always hear them, too, outside the canvas walls, discussing him. They had whispered it, what had happened to him and what had begun to grow in him because of it, but they might as well have shouted.
Everyone could guess.
He had been gone long enough, he was pretty enough, he was an omega. His scent had changed.
It had darkened Daemon’s eyes the moment he had seen Lucerys, helping off the dragon where he was slipping, hands too sore to grip the scales.
But it was the excuse they needed to send him to King’s Landing, send them both, pretending it is because it is best to ask the royal maesters to look him over.
To be sure of his wounds. To be safe.
To meet his brother, who is no longer his best friend but the Crown Prince, and his Mother and Queen.
He tries to bend the knee when they get there, legs sore and weak and heartsick because he did not ride on his own dragon saddle or dragon.
He had sunk down to both knees instead, and been carried inside, feet grazing the floor in an attempt to protect a dignity he no longer had.
It was Lucerys, in the end, who had given his mother the news, the maesters too prim and proper and scared of the Queen to say the words.
That her bastard would bear a bastard, an unwanted child that was pushed into him by more alphas than he could count. Or wanted to.
He does not cry. And she does not hold him.
A Queen cannot spare the time, or the warmth.
Lucerys might never be able to spare tears again.
He left them behind, in the stony cove, mixed with the wet, briny sand, and the blood and spend and slick that got him here.
Unmarried, unmated, unvirginal and growing heavy with child.
And growing pale in his rooms, watching the moon turn and his body change, avoiding them all, turning them from his door.
Knowing by the third cycle in the night sky that he won’t lose the babe, unless the labor is difficult. It is all he knows for certain.
Until his Mother calls them into a room and just by looking at each other it, they know what is to happen. The betrothal to be announced.
“You can’t!” Jace bursts out, surprising them all.
Lucerys was expecting Aemond to thunder, Alicent to rage, his Mother to have chosen anyone but him. Even as he knows there is no other one it could be.
No one else would take him, no one else is of age, no one else has a family of status and a noose around their neck as much as his Mother’s brother.
The worst has already happened, and it is not Aemond Targaryen. Not anymore.
“He-”
“He is an alpha of royal blood, and our family. It is a show of unity,” the Queen snarls, and the Dowager nods, and Lucerys feels the snare close tight.
Alicent must have jumped at the chance to tie her children to the crown. Even if it meant marrying her son to the one that mutilated the other, the lamb and the knife.
“You agree to this?!” Jace screams and Lucerys loves his brother and hates him in the same measure.
He hasn’t even looked at Lucerys, and isn’t asking him.
Aemond’s jaw twitches and he nods, looking at the grooves of the stone, somewhere behind Lucerys’ head.
And then he looks down, his one violet eye staring right into Lucerys.
“I would have a moment alone with my betrothed,” Lucerys says, speaking for the first time in their little farce, sending them into silence.
And, for what he suspects is the last time, the order of a second son, bastard, despoiled omega is followed without question by his elders, superiors, and alphas. Aemond doesn’t look away from him for even a moment.
“Why?” Lucerys asks.
It is all he wants to know.
Aemond’s not stupid.
He understands the question.
“Because you love it,” he says, sharp, and Lucerys flinches, then considers launching himself across the table, remembering the men who said that to him, the alphas that-
“Your babe,” Aemond says, and Lucerys sags back into the seat, like a dragon without wind under his wings.
Aemond is the first to use the word. To call it Lucerys’.
Because with his dead eye, Aemond sees him plain.
Lucerys does.
He had felt it move, inside him, his child. It was a love so consuming it scared him and remade him. And he would do anything for the babe, which was his and his alone.
Even marry Aemond, to give his child a name he did not need to be ashamed of.
“That doesn’t answer-”
“Doesn’t it?” Aemond says, that cat’s bow mouth twitching with a hint of a gruesome smile.
Lucerys goes still.
His child will be vulnerable, a bastard, and Aemond will only be his father in name and in deed there is no telling what he might do.
“You wanted my eye,” Lucerys baits, because there is no way he will have it now, much less the child’s.
Not if Aemond minds losing his head and everyone remaining to his side of the family alongside it.
“I wanted to pay you back in kind, nephew. There is not a single day I do not think of you, and the gift you gave me. And now…” Aemond lets the thought hang.
There would not be a single day, a single moment, when Lucerys would not be thinking of Aemond, of wondering about his child’s safety, about an accident, about a lost eye.
Thanking Aemond if he is kind, fretting if he is cruel. Hoping he will be a father to a child with no claim on him, reminded of the anger that burned in both of Aemond’s eyes at Harwin Strong’s tutelage of Lucerys and his brother, even as Criston Cole moved Aemond’s then-small fingers on his sword grip.
There will not be a moment when they are not thinking of each other and the constellation of pain and obligations between them.
Exactly what Aemond has always wanted, a repayment so perfect he could not have planned it if he tried.
“You now know something of what my mother felt,” Aemond says, smiling now, at what he sees in Lucerys’ face.
“And you never will,” Lucerys spits and there’s a flicker in Aemond’s eye, a sort of sadness that surfaced and vanished like a dolphin on the waves.
Aemond was not just heartless, he knew that he was. It was pitiable. It was repulsive. It was something Lucerys saw clearly, as he did all of Aemond, like he did with no one else.
“Then we know each other’s measure, now,” Aemond says, as if that hadn’t always been true. They had always known each other best. Exactly of what they were capable.
“Do not worry, you will not come to harm. Where would the fun in that be? I have thought of you for years. You owe me that many, at least,” Aemond says and Lucerys almost smiles back at his cat’s grin.
Aemond might be a monster, but it was one Lucerys had helped make. One that shared his blood, and his family.
And his next child, because a next child there would be, and would be grown from Aemond’s seed. And for a time, be heir to the Iron Throne.
That was something Lucerys’ husband and uncle, a second son, striving and sharp and overlooked and alone in defending his mother and siblings from the wrath of the crown and the other great houses, vying for power and baying for blood, would defend with fire and fury.
Lucerys could not deny his hand, and all that meant, not without casting himself and his child into the fire.
A perfect match.
“I’ll tell Mother to start planning the wedding,” Lucerys says, with a steel he does not feel.
Aemond laughs, the same way he has since they were boys, and Lucerys knows he would recognize it anywhere.
Even blind, even deaf. He has known Aemond too long, too well, too intimately to forget it. Even if he cannot remember when he heard it last.
“Start? She and my mother began preparations almost at the very the moment you set foot in the Keep,” Aemond says, death’s head grin mocking them both.
“That’s all it took to unite them, then?” Lucerys says, and cannot help the laughter, mad and convulsive, that bubbles up.
All it took was Lucerys descending to the Seven Hells themselves and coming back with a little piece of them growing inside him.
“Nothing less,” Aemond says, quietly above him, and perhaps their marriage will not be too bad of one.
They understand each other, after all.
*
Lucerys does not let himself remember the screaming of the wind, the feeling of falling, Arrax shot out from under him with a black arrow as thick as a man’s thigh.
He closes his eyes when they hit the water, the salt burning him like fire, and he lives.
They drag him from the surf, from his dragon’s sinking body into the caves, throw him into the sludge of sand and algae, rotting seaweed and blood spilled on the shore and the sea.
They can smell him, they know who he is, laugh at how the omega princeling was so sure his dragon would keep him safe in the skies and not under an alpha and a knot as is his place.
The men promise him he will live, and regret it.
And they wait, for the war and the men to push his heat to the surface of the skin.
And then they come for him, in the day and the dark, in the brackish water, in their muddy, bloody clothes.
After the second day, Lucerys no longer screams. He prays.
By the fifth it is not to the Seven, not to the Mother, not to his Mother.
He prays to the Gods of old Valyria, offering his blood, the back tooth knocked loose, the nails torn free.
He prays to Vhagar, their Goddess of War and Retribution.
On the thirteenth day, she answers his prayer with fire and blood and Aemond astride her back to bear him home.