Its only a dream…

Aerion was drowning. He was drowning while breathing air and on dry land. He was drowning in emotion; things he’d never had time for before. Things that seemed to take too much time, too much energy. Too much thinking.

He preferred to drink. 

Drinking was easier, getting lost in the bottle of whiskey, the burn on the back of his throat that signalled the loss of everything for just a little bit of time. Sometimes, he did harder stuff, sometimes he chose to snort various powders with whoever was around, women who fawned over him, men who intimidated him. 

He didn’t remember what he did after those nights, but he figured it was better than drowning while being dry. 

He’s been drowning since Rafe died, since she was there one moment, smiling and pretty and happy and dead the next. He’s been drowning since he watched her die, watched the way she twitched before falling back into the water. 

It was quite pretty the way the waves washed over her, the way the foam caught in the locks of her hair, the way her gown draped over her, wet and sheer and shining. But it meant that she was dead. Gone. 

Never coming back. 

He’s been drowning ever since, trying not to remember the way her hand had twitched for his help, the way her pretty brown eyes had glimmered not with mirth of a joke, but helplessness and loss. Fear. She knew she was dying, couldn’t speak and he ignored her. 

And he has to live himself now. He has to live with guilt where a heart used to be, a heart that used to like to fish and laugh and tease his younger siblings, read and argue diplomatically with his cousin. A heart that meant he was a normal person. But now…nobody looks at him unless it’s to reprimand him, thinking that will do anything at all. 

His father looks through him rather than at him, his older brother isn’t even around enough to notice anything, never staying long before leaving for the road, for clean air and open spaces away from the temptation. You got clean, good for you, Daeron, but I’m still here is what he says to himself, imagining conversations that he’ll never have. Conversations that will never come to pass. 

His cousin doesn’t look at him, avoids any room he’s in and leaves if they were even in the area together. His uncle offers platitudes before disappearing, unable to stomach the sight of him. His younger brothers thought of him as drugged out fool and his sisters only used him for his credit card. 

It’s why he’s on the balcony, the very edge, his lungs burning and skin drawn too tight, far too tight. He has no room to breathe even in his own skin, the feeling only having gotten worse since his grandfather died. Since he died and the games stopped. 

Except for the one he left behind. 

Aerion,

You are perhaps the grandson I have failed the most. The one I expected the least of. The one I didn’t think had that much to offer because you were not extraordinary like your brothers. Not strong like Daeron, not a planner like Valarr and not a genius like young Aegon. You were the one I saw like myself, hungry and full of pain that you didn’t know how to feel. 

And I am sorry. 

I am sorry that I have failed you. That we have all failed you. That we never gave you better chances. 

So, that’s what I’m giving you now. A better chance, a way to make things right. A way to win a final game if you will, my boy. 

There’s a girl. She’s the one I’ve ruined the worst of all, the one I need to make amends too. She’s the one I’m leaving everything too. 

She is your burden and perhaps your saving grace. She is your charge. You have to protect her; you know the greed that runs in our blood. It does not run in hers. 

The game will begin when she arrives. 

Just know, my boy, she is the key to everything.

Love,

Your Grandad.

He holds the letter in one hand, his joint in the other, lit earlier. He lifts it to his mouth now, his knee drawn up to his chest, other leg dangling as he takes a drag, deep bitter smoke filling his lungs as he blows it out, watching the small cloud lift and tilt and swirl, ash falling onto the letter. 

He doesn’t care. 

He doesn’t care because the letter is just another way of his grandfather to control him, to try to set him right. There’s no one he hurt worse than his family. There can’t be. 

How could someone else have endured the hatred and the bitterness and the cruelty? How could the wonderful Daeron Targaryen have fucked up someone else worse than the grandsons he tried to mold into better men?

“Bullshit, old man,” he whispers now, crumpling the letter in his fist before slipping it into his back pocket, lifting the joint back to his lips, taking in another shaky, burning breath, made slightly less burning by the effects of the drug. 

The loosening of his limbs, the freedom of his mind. The blessed silence. 

The sky is just at dusk, the time of day when the sky is turning purple, darker at the bottom, lighter pink at the top, the sun still holding onto its power while the moon tries to elbow in. 

He hears the crunch of gravel, sees the town car pull into the driveway, Valarr stepping out and offering his hand to someone in the back, some gangly redhead with cigarette burns on her arms. Valarr and his saviour complex, he thinks, lifting the joint again, but pausing when Valarr reaches his hand back, the hand slapped away by someone else. 

“I don’t need your help, rich boy,” echoes an angry voice. A harsh voice. One brittle and breaking and perfect in every way. “I’ve never needed anyone’s help.”

That’s when he sees you, watches as you step out, a sneaker placed upon the gravel, jeans with holes worn at the knees, not designed that way, but having become that way. He sees your eyes as they flick up, taking note of him, narrowing just slightly, a shrewd glint in them before they roll, flicking back down. 

“Welcome to the Keep,” Valarr says, his voice deeper than normal, the kind of voice he’s always put on when he’s trying to impress, when he’s crushing. Aerion leans forwards despite himself, catching the whispered edges of the last sentence. “We can read the will now.”

You’re the girl. The one he’s meant to protect, the one he thought didn’t exist. 

He knows what they’ll find when they read the will, knows they’ll find that Daeron left everything to you, every last cent, every last property and holding and everything the last name has ever meant. 

And as he watches the way your gaze trails over the front of the house, the way it takes in the opulence, the elegance, the centuries old façade, he can see in you something he’s never seen in anyone not Targaryen borne, bred and bled. 

He sees a player. 

“You look lost,” he calls out, his voice bouncing off the cold stone walls, echoing to you, carrying across the divide of the richly carpeted hallways. “Are you perhaps lost, little lamb?”

“Why do you care if I am?” you return. He can see the muscles in your back go rigid, tense beneath your skin, beneath your shirt. It’s fascinating, truly, just how much your own body gives you away. Just how much it reveals. 

He scares you and yet you will not turn to face him. You will not face the demon behind you. 

“Because I am the…dragon of the halls,” he whispers, projecting that whisper through the walls, watching as you tense again at the way it surrounds you so completely. “And I don’t like lost little lambs in them.”

“I’m no lamb,” you whisper in reply, your own voice returning across the curve, carried through the cracks in the bricks, surrounding him just like his did yours. “And you are no dragon.” You turn then, arms crossed, biceps flexing and he doesn’t even think you realize it. Doesn’t even think you know you’re doing it. 

“No,” he agrees, tone brightening as he takes in all of, every inch of your body. Quite a nice body, truly, he reasons. “But I am one of the Targaryens.”

“That was obvious,” you tell him, lips pursing in a way that gives him the strangest urge to lean forwards and press his lips against yours, press away that expression with every movement of his lips against yours. “Now, what do you want with me?”

“I just have a question for you, little lamb,” he says, lips curving in that mocking smile he has, the one that drives his family insane. 

“What is it, Targaryen?” Your hips shift, asymmetrical, one stretched out ahead of itself. 

“Are you a player in this game,” he whispers, stepping closer, closer, closer until his lips are just inches from yours, his eyes able to track every movement of your face, every miniscule press of your features, every small hardening of your jaw, “or are you a game piece?”

“There is no game,” you whisper, your finger jabbing into his chest, his skin now too tight in all new way, one that only you have been able to bring forth, “where I am a piece to be used by others, jackass. Now, get out of my way.”

And he does, stepping aside while you step around him, disappearing down the corridors as if you were never there at all. 

“Well played, Grandad,” he whispers, pressing a brick on the wall, a panel moving, shifting, rearranging to showcase the passage. “Well played.”

Because he’s no game piece either. He’s a player and you’re on his team.