#dunkerion

For general audiences

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There it is, like clockwork,

The same type of gift, but always with a difference.

Dunk would return home, to find a gift basket on his doorstep. A huge cornflake coloured wicca basket wrapped in starry cellophane. It arrived once a week. With different contents each week. It could be fleeces and gloves one week, a luxury tablet with three different chargers the next. Each hamper contained a valentine card, always with an animal of some sort, as Dunk loved animals.

This time, he carried the large hamper in with a blustering amount of pride before bellowing out his boyfriend's name.

"Aer!"

"What?" The Prince comes down anyway, gripping his Huawei X7 phone with his right hand. "Babe I'm busy!"

"Never too busy for a weekly hamper it seems!" Dunk excitedly picks him up, throwing him up lightly and catching the shorter man under the armpits.

"Ah, the hamper" Aerion glares at it sharply.

"You're so good to me!" Dunk plants a sloppy kiss on the prince's cheek to let him know that he'll be thanked very robustly later. He excitedly unpacks the hamper. His boyfriend makes up a flimsy excuse to leave for a while.

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He obnoxiously knocks on the door, only to get greeted by staff.

"Fuck off! I know you're in there! Coward!" Aerion spits, pushing the staff aside.

Sure enough his cousin comes to the door.  Dressed in casual clothing in Targ colours. Heterochromia hidden in plain sight.

"Good Evening Cousin" Valarr greets him warily. "I'd invite you in, but Kiera and I are planning our duties for the first quarter" 

"Enough" Aerion said simply.

"Of what?" His cousin quirks up an eyebrow.

"The bloody hampers. Enough. They are bothersome and trite!" Aerion snorts. 

"Duncan loves them, so I hear" Valarr shrugs.

"What is this all for? Hundreds of pounds worth of gifts for a quick shag in a motel somewhere?" The Prince rambles. "Dunk doesn't want you"

"You know I'm not a one night stand person" Valarr tugs at his own crew neck. "Gifting one presents is never a bad thing"

"Cousin do not take me for a fool!" Aerion warns.

"I don't" Valarr rocks on his heels. "You're not a fool. Just a shitty boyfriend. You don't deserve Duncan. You never did"

"Have you no shame? Trying to court my boyfriend while engaged!" Aerion yells.

"I'm doing nothing of the sort" Valarr scratches the back of his neck. "Although Duncan may be happier, with Kiera and I" 

He smiles and Aerion bangs the door with the palm of his hand.

"I am warning you, cousin of delusion. Stay away from Dunk" Aerion threatens.

"Or what?" Valarr prods him away from the door with his middle and index finger.

"Or I will show you why our symbol is the dragon! I dare you to screw with me, Valarr!" Aerion roars.

Chapter 1: A Knights Rest

The rain had stopped by the time Duncan the Tall finished digging.

He worked in silence, the only sounds the scrape of his shovel against wet earth and the distant call of a rook somewhere in the trees. Ser Arlan of Pennytree lay wrapped in his faded cloak on the grass beside the shallow grave, his face easier in death than Dunk had ever seen it in life.

The old knight had never been a grand man—more often tired, or drunk, or chasing coin where he could find it. But he had been a knight all the same. To Dunk, he had been the knight.

And that had been enough.

Dunk drove the shovel deep one last time, then leaned on it, breathing hard. His shoulders ached; his hands were blistered raw. He was used to that. What he wasn’t used to was the emptiness that sat in his chest like a stone. Ser Arlan had been the closest thing he had to a father since the streets of Flea Bottom. The man who had taught him how to hold a sword, how to sleep in the saddle, how to be more than the gutter rat everyone saw when they looked at his height and his scars.

“You were a good knight,” Dunk said quietly. The words felt too small. He cleared his throat and tried again, the way Ser Arlan had taught him. “Ser Arlan of Pennytree. You served your lords faithfully. You never bent the knee to traitors. You… you took in a boy who had nothing and made him something.”

He lowered the body into the grave with careful hands, the way one might lower a child into a cradle and began to fill the hole, each spadeful heavier than the last. When the mound was smooth, Dunk knelt and pressed a flat stone into the dirt. He had no chisel, so he scratched the words with the tip of his dagger, slow and clumsy.

SER ARLAN OF PENNYTREE

A TRUE KNIGHT

He stayed there a long time, rain dripping from his hair, until the rook flew off and the woods grew quiet again. Only then did the other grief rise.

It always did when he was alone.

Dunk closed his eyes and saw it without wanting to: the soft gold light of a spring afternoon, in a tucked-away corner of Summerhall, years ago. Bare feet in the mud by the Blackwater, a bent pin for a hook, the prince’s laughter bright as new coin when he pulled up a wriggling silverfish no bigger than his palm.

“My knightly oaf,” Aerion had called him that day, voice low and warm against Dunk’s ear as they lay tangled in the long grass. “My sweet, tall knightly oaf. Stay with me. The court can keep its tourneys and its silks. I only want this.”

Dunk had believed him. Gods help him, he had.

He still remembered the way Aerion’s hair smelled of woodsmoke and myrrh, the way his fingers traced idle patterns on Dunk’s wrist like he was mapping new lands. The prince had been glad then—bright, laughing, untouched by the fire that lived in every Targaryen vein. They had stolen afternoons together, hidden from prying eyes, barefoot and simple and secret. Aerion had kissed him like he was starving, like Dunk was the only real thing in a world of silk and lies. He gathered the old knight’s armor—breastplate, greaves, the dented helm with its chipped wings—and lashed it to the swaybacked palfrey. Thunder rumbled once, far off, but the rain held. Dunk swung into the saddle, the weight of the armor and the weight of memory settling on his shoulders like twin cloaks.

“Rest easy, ser,” he murmured toward the fresh grave. “I’ll make you proud. One way or another.”

The road stretched ahead, muddy and empty. Dunk rode on alone, the silver chalice on the shield at his back catching what little sun broke through the clouds. He did not look back.

But in his chest the old ache stirred, quiet and patient as it had been for years.

Ashford was waiting.