Chapter Text
King’s Landing, 213 A.C.
The door closed softly behind them. No servants were called. No fires stoked.
Kiera walked towards the bath room, to find a still steaming tub. She sent a silent thanks to Noraina and quietly walked back out. Daeron was standing still in the middle of the room, staring at his boots. She slowly walked over to him and turned her back to him.
“I wish to get a bath,” she said.
It took Daeron a few moments to snap out of his daze. He didn’t say anything. He just softly undid the fastenings of her dress and stays, not all the way, just enough for her to finish on her own and then walked away.
She scrubbed herself with some force. Some violence even. As if by cleaning her skin she could rid herself of the memory. Of the questions, of the accusations, the omens, the threats. She would not. She knew it. It would live in her mind like Valarr’s green complexion. Like the green smoke rising from the Dragon Pitt.
When she walked out was relieved to find her expectations fulfilled. She was alone and able to spend some time in silence. Able to spend that first awful night back in that keeps full of memories on her own. Without intruders. To have a conversation with her ghosts. To have Valarr gentle voice and gentle questions fill her mind and lead her to read herself of the… fear? Disgust? Shock?
She didn’t really know.
“Oh, Valarr, I think I should run away,” she whispered.
“Maybe you should,”
The answer came too quickly. Not shaped like a memory. Not her own voice. Not gentle enough. An actual voice. A man’s voice. Daeron’s.
“Aplogies, I didn’t know you were there,” Kiera said drily.
He was still completely dressed. The only difference was the bottle of wine he held in his hand. Kiera sighed in, she didn’t know why. She didn’t care what he did or didn’t do with his life. But she did. It disappointed her.
He seemed to notice, but didn’t acknowledge it. He just walked towards one of the cupboards, pulled out two goblets and walked out onto the terrace.
Kiera considered going to bed. But curiosity and the need to unwind won over. So she followed him.
“You didn’t drink tonight,” Kiera commented as she sat next to him.
“I haven´t drank tonight. Yet,” he said, pouring for the two of them.
Kiera hummed in response and studied his face as he drank. His face didn’t look less distressed. He didn’t even look like he enjoyed it. She took a sip of her own wine, it was quite lovely. Quite sharp. Dornish wine.
“It helps,” Daeron said after a long moment of silence.
He was staring at his hands, they were trembling slightly less. Kiera followed his line of sight.
“Not with the shaking… That's my own doing,” Daeron continued, as if to himself.
Kiera did know that. There were drunks all over Westeros. All over the Free Cities. Amongst the rich, the noble and the common folk. There was nothing special about Daeron.
“With the dreams,”
But there was. There apparently was something very special about him.
“If I drink enough… I don’t… dream…” Daeron said wistfully.
Earlier that day she had given him the grace of considering he might be a man unable to cope instead of a drunk with an excuse. If he were only a drunk, he would be easy. If he were only burdened, he would be tragic. He was both. And that made him… difficult.
Men like Bloodraven spoke of sorcery as a prize. But it was no prize, it had a price. And the price Daeron had to pay seemed to be his own sanity. Either to live with the terrors of his dreams. Or drown them in alcohol like they lived in his stomach, until it made him embarrassing to crown and realm.
“Valarr never dran-” She started.
“Valarr didn’t dream,” Daeron interrupted her.
It wasn’t an accusation, nor an indictment. Just a fact Kiera knew to be true. Valarr rarely had nightmares, he barely had dreams either. He certainly didn’t dream of an all consuming darkness or droughts or dragons returnings. She turned her face away, lifting her chin slightly. As if something had been slighted. She did not name what.
“You think he would’ve handled it better,” Daeron said, this time it did carry some hints of an accusation.
“You didn’t know him as I did,” she wasn’t quite sure who she was defending.
“You didn’t know him as I did either,” Daeron huffed a laugh.
He finished his goblet in one long swallow and poured himself another. Kiera looked at his hands, they trembled less. They were not cured, just manageable. He drank at Summerhall and he still woke up screaming - he’d woken her once. He didn’t drink on the road - he didn’t sleep either. The drinking did not cure him. It only… managed it.
When she did not answer, he added, quieter.
“He was just as shit a knight as I am.”
There was some fondness to his voice, so Kiera let him go on. She wanted stories. She wanted something she could keep. Something more of a man she thought she knew entirely. At least in every way that mattered. Maybe Daeron would offer stories of their shared childhood, stories that maybe Valarr had forgotten to tell her.
“But when he mounted his horse, men pretended they didn’t know how to aim,” It wasn’t what she expected.
It wasn’t cruel. It still stung.
“Who would dare humiliate the perfect son of the perfect Prince of Dragonstone and Hand of the King?” He asked, he sounded hurt, not angry.
“Who would dare humiliate -” Kiera began to retort.
“Me?” He cut in with a humorless laugh.
He looked at her over his goblet, like she was a child. Kiera felt heat rise to her face.
“I am the drunken son of a fourth son,” he said, rolling his eyes, “The uncharismatic fourth son they always kept beside my uncle so that Baelor looked like the better man to stand behind,”
That wasn't true. Maekar was a famed battle commander. Everybody knew that.
But Daeron’s comment about himself startled her. He was a Prince of The Blood, drunk or sober.
“Humiliating me made Valarr look better,”
She understood. She had done it herself sometimes. She did it when they married. When they slept side by side in the inns. Everytime he did something kind.
Daeron was what people needed him to be. A stepping stone. A cautionary tale. Not a man.
Maybe only in his family’s eyes. Maybe even only in his siblings’ eyes.
It was a sad thing to be, but Kiera believed he had earned it. With his drinking and his whoring. And his never ending list of stupid choices.
“People think I’m too drunk to notice such things,” he said staring into his wine like he could find solutions in it, “But I know a great deal more than people give me credit for,”
Like the future, Kiera thought.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Daeron said with a melancholic smile, “I don’t think Valarr noticed. He had too much on his shoulders to worry about his older cousin,”
He didn’t sound resentful. Not of him.
Daeron refilled his goblet and sighed. He finally looked at her and he looked exhausted. Like a man carrying far more than his years. And maybe he was. He was carrying things that had happened, and things that would happen.
“He was only allowed to fail in private. I am expected to do so in public,”
Kiera felt tears climb onto her eyes. She held them back. She would sooner jump off the terrace rather than let him see her cry. She didn’t remember Valarr failing. Had she forgotten? Or was she not part of his privacy? Did he hide from her?
Then Daeron added something so earnest. So true. So hurtful.
“He was a good man,” He said with a nod and once again refilled his goblet.
Daeron didn’t speak again. He just stared up at the stars as he drank.
She would have preferred he tried to tear Valarr down. That would have been easier. Easier to dismiss. Easier to ignore. But he didn’t. He wasn’t bitter at Valarr. Only at the part he had been made to play.
He had not destroyed Valarr. He had just expanded his image. He was a boy too watched. Too protected. Too burdened. And somehow - better for it. A man more complex than she had painted for herself after his death. Something constricted in her chest. He’d been so weighed down by what he needed to be, that he rarely showed who he truly was. More a prince than a boy. More a prince than a person.
But undeniably a good man.
Every man is just that. A man. A half-forgotten echo of an overheard conversation, years ago - one she had not meant to hear, and had never quite managed to forget.
Just a man, sometimes Kiera forgot that Valarr was that. Just a man. But he wasn't. He was good. Oh so good. He was better than most men. And she would hold that in her heart forever.
They stayed side by side. Silent. Way into the night. Daeron stared at the stars, while he emptied and refilled his goblet, without savoring it. Like a man drinking medicine instead of indulging in a vice.
Kiera, instead, stared at her hand, at the beautiful ruby ring Valarr had placed on her finger, as a promise to her and his gods. Not admiring the piece, beautiful as it was. But as if might show her the future that had died with him.
Kiera was pulled out of her thoughts when Daeron hummed a laugh. She turned her head to look at him. He was pointing at the sky.
“Falling stars are good omens,” he said, simply.
Kiera only stared at him.
Dayne.
The word came unbidden. Falling stars, bright and brief. She wondered if he knew—or if, like so many things, it lived in him without his leave.
Like the dreams.
Daeron’s eyes then fell on her goblet, still almost entirely full from the first time. Daeron pointed at it with his hand, a question in his expression. Kiera nodded absentmindedly. Daeron knocked back her goblet in a single swallow and then stood.
“That’s my cue to retire to bed,” he said and walked in.
Kiera stayed a few hours longer. She stayed a while longer. Speaking to Valarr as if he might answer. Asking questions that had no answers. It was useless. He was not a ghost. Only a memory she dressed as one.
Eventually the cold drove her inside.
Daeron was asleep - or passed out - she couldn’t really tell on the bed. Over the covers, half undressed. His boots were scattered about, his doublet lay almost falling off the bed. He lay face down… if he vomited in his sleep - he would drown in it. He did not seem concerned with the possibility.
Kiera divested herself of her nightgown and climbed onto bed. After a few hours she stopped trying to fall asleep and sat up. Her knees pressed to her chest. She stared at Daeron’s sleeping form. That night she had realized that she hadn’t known Valarr completely, and equally jarring she realized that what she did not know of her husband could prove dangerous.
She knew very little of him, and for the first time since she agreed to elope with him, it bothered her.
She decided to list what she knew of him. The things that a commoner wouldn’t know from his reputation. Things a wife should know.
One: he drank to avoid dreaming.
Two: he loved his family fiercely - enough to let them see him at his worst.
Three: he did not sleep without a fight.
Four: he saw more than he ever said.
Five: something spoke to him in the dark - and he feared it.
She didn’t count that she thought that his mother died in an accident… maybe protecting someone? She was probably the only noblewoman in the realm who didn't know. And she was sure if she should count her fifth item. She did not believe it entirely. She’d have to ask about his dreams and see what happened. She might believe in prophecy, but she needed some proof.
She was disappointed in herself. She did not need two hands to count what she knew of him. And every answer only made him harder to understand. Not clearer. Not whole. Just… more.
And she had married him all the same.