#team black

Fire danced with a horrific, erratic grace across the blackened waters of the Gullet, transforming the vital shipping lane into a sprawling, floating graveyard. Flames leapt from ship to ship in hungry arcs, feeding on timber and pitch and the desperate prayers of drowning men. Beneath the merciless onslaught of Team Black’s dragons, mighty Triarchy war-galleys splintered like kindling, their hulls cracking open to swallow their crews whole. Great masts toppled into the waves with the slow, theatrical finality of falling monuments. And yet, this was no easy victory. No clean triumph etched into the history books with golden ink. Below, Lord Corlys Velaryon’s fleet fought with everything it had, attempting to trap the armada in the narrow, choking passage, buying time in blood and smoke and screaming iron.

The atmosphere was a living thing, a suffocating shroud woven from the sharp salt tang of brine, the acrid bite of billowing smoke, the unmistakable iron-sweetness of fresh blood, and the sickening, almost honeyed stench of burning pitch. It coated the throat and burned the eyes.

High above the carnage, roaring through the roiling tempest of fire and ash, rode Prince Jacaerys Velaryon.

He sat astride Vermax like a man born to the sky because he was. The great emerald dragon cut through the smoke-choked air like a gleaming blade, his scales catching the hellish firelight below, wings spread wide. Jace’s riding leathers were already dark with spray and soot. His dark curls whipped against his face. He did not notice. His eyes were fixed on the battle, calculating and measuring, feeling the terrible weight of command settle across his shoulders with the intimacy of something he had worn all his life.

He had locked his mother in her chambers at Dragonstone before leaving. Had stood outside the door and listened to her pound against it, her voice cracking on his name. The sound had nearly unmade him entirely. But she was the queen. She was the cause. She could not be lost, and Jacaerys Velaryon had long since made peace with the arithmetic of that.

She lives. Therefore, I go.

Beside him, Baela streaked across the smoke on Moondancer fierce and brilliant, her silver hair streaming behind her like a war banner. And then, piercing through the mist like something half-imagined, a new silhouette emerged. Jace’s eyes snapped to it. His stomach lurched with shock before his heart swelled with a pride so fierce it nearly hurt.

Rhaena. Flying the wild dragon Sheepstealer.

Of course she was.

Together they were three dragons raining hell from the heavens, and for one blazing, exhilarating moment, Jace believed they might actually win this despite Sheepstealer almost knocking him out. He watched their collective fire devastate Admiral Lohar’s vanguard below, great tongues of flame consuming the armada’s leading ships, sending men screaming into the sea. He felt the savage triumph of it. The rightness.

Then the heavy, rhythmic thrum of scorpions began.

Massive iron bolts tore through the clouds around them. The Triarchy fleet was enormous, he had known this, had known it academically the way one knows a thing from maps and reports but knowing it and watching it materialize below him in all its terrible scale were entirely different experiences.

He pressed Vermax into a steep, dangerously low dive.

Below, through the roiling chaos, Jace had spotted Lord Corlys’s flagship being violently rammed by Lohar’s vessel. The silver-haired sea snake, his grandfather by every measure that mattered, surrounded and struggling. Jace made his decision in the space of half a breath. He would break the enemy lines. He would fly low. He would end this.

He flew too close to the water.

His focus had narrowed to a single burning point, the ships, the threat, the duty and so he did not hear the volley until it was already too late.

A heavy iron shaft sliced violently through the membrane of Vermax’s right wing with a sound like tearing cloth and screaming metal fused together. Another slammed directly into the dragon’s chest with a concussive, world-shaking force that Jace felt through every bone in his body.

Vermax screamed.

The sound ripped through Jace like a physical blade. Not a roar, not the magnificent, terrible declaration of a dragon in battle. A scream. Raw and agonizing and so deeply personal that Jace felt his own lungs seize in sympathy, as though the bolt had pierced him too. The great emerald body shuddered beneath him. The massive wings faltered, losing the steady rhythm that held them aloft. The world tilted.

They were falling.

“No-”

Jace yanked desperately on the reins, his boots straining hard against the stirrups, body thrown forward as the sea rushed upward to meet them with terrifying speed. Wind screamed past his ears. The fire and the smoke and the battle became a chaotic blur of sensation.

“Vermax, fly!”

The dragon fought. Even now, even broken and burning, Vermax fought. A beast born of fire, refusing absolutely to yield to the water. One wing beat heavily, then another. The torn membrane fluttered uselessly, a tattered rag of what it had been, but still Vermax tried, and something in Jace’s chest shattered at the sight of it.

“Soves!” His voice broke on the word, all royal dignity stripped away, reduced to something raw and helpless and very young. “Soves, Vermax! Please-”

One final, agonizing beat of the wings.

It was not enough.

Freezing, brine-heavy water swallowed Jacaerys Velaryon whole. It was not like diving, it was like being struck by the earth itself, like the sea had become solid in the last instant before collision, and he felt the shock travel up through his ankles, his knees, his spine, rattling his teeth in his skull. The sheer velocity of the crash tore his fingers from the saddle. The weight of his armor dragged at him immediately, a slow, patient, lethal pull downward into the dark.

Primal instinct flared.

He unhooked himself and practically clawed upward. His lungs burned. The cold was absolute, the kind that doesn’t feel cold at all but rather feels like being unmade, like the sea was simply erasing him a layer at a time. He could see nothing, only dark water and distant fire and the enormous bulk of Vermax somewhere below him, a shadow become a nightmare. He burst through the surface with a gasp so violent it tore his throat.

“Vermax!”

He spun in the churning water, hair plastered to his face, salt burning his eyes. The battle raged on around him, ships groaning and splitting, men screaming, iron raining from all directions. The world had not paused for him.

“Vermax!”

Through the haze of cresting waves, he found him. His dragon, his Vermax, who had carried him since boyhood, who had grown as he had grown, who had been as much a part of him as his own heartbeat was desperately trying to swim. The damaged wings beat uselessly to try to swim up. His great neck was straining upward. His eyes, when they met Jace’s from below the water, held something that a person with less grief in them might have dismissed as imagination. They did not look like the eyes of an animal.

They looked like the eyes of someone saying goodbye. A massive anchor, or debris, Jace could not tell which, tangled around Vermax’s exhausted body. The sea accepted its offering. With a final, sorrowful look that Jacaerys Velaryon would carry with him for the rest of his life.

He never resurfaced.

Something inside Jace broke. Not cracked. Not bent. Broke, the way an old bone breaks, the kind that doesn’t ever quite knit back the same way. He hauled his upper body onto a large piece of floating wreckage with the determination of a body that had not yet received the message from his mind that none of this mattered anymore. His chest heaved in ragged, desperate gasps. He was shaking. He was exhausted in a way that reached all the way down into whatever part of him had believed, until this moment, that he might survive this.

He had not brought enough of that belief. He saw that now.

He thought of his mother.

The image of her face, proud and terrified and trying not to show either rose unbidden. He had done this for her. Had done all of it for her. He hoped she would understand, someday, that locking her in her chambers had been the most love he had ever offered anyone.

He thought of Baela. Of Rhaena.

He thought of-

A sharp, dull impact struck his upper back.

Jace lurched forward with a sound that was almost nothing, barely a breath. Confused, of all things, not yet understanding, he glanced over his shoulder. A heavy crossbow bolt protruded from his shoulder blade at an angle that his mind catalogued with strange, distant calm, the way one notices a detail in a painting.

Slowly, numbly, he turned his head toward the source. A Triarchy war-galley drifted just yards away. Lined along the wooden railing stood a row of Admiral Lohar’s soldiers, unhurried, methodical, their crossbows leveled at the figure in the water.

They knew exactly who he was. There was no urgency in their posture, no battlefield fever. This was an execution.

The heir to the Iron Throne, stranded and defenseless. A second bolt flew. It slammed into his chest. He heard it before he felt it.

Then a third...straight to the neck.

A strange, sudden calm washed over him.

The deafening roar of the battle receded, becoming muffled, distant, the way sounds narrow when one goes underwater. The sea rocked him gently now, almost tenderly, as if it had been waiting all along to offer this small mercy at the end. He had not expected kindness. He was grateful for it.

He thought of his mother, safe on Dragonstone.

He thought of Baela’s laughter.

He thought of his brothers.

And he thought with a softness that surprised him, with something that might have been the very last warmth his body could generate, of you. Of a future that would not be built. Of a promise he was not sure, now, that he had ever been given the chance to make.

The last image to imprint itself on the fading mind of Jacaerys Velaryon was that reflection.

A burning sky, mirrored in the water.

Beautiful.

Tragic.

Then everything went black.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

Jacaerys bolted upright with a gasp that felt like surfacing.

His eyes flew open. His hand flew to his chest and then to his neck, pressing hard against his sternum, feeling for something, a wound, an absence, a bolt buried in bone and found nothing but the soft cotton of his t-shirt and the solid, living rhythm of his own heart. He sat there for a long moment, chest heaving, and simply stared at the ceiling.

White plaster. Crown moulding. A small water stain shaped vaguely like a continent.

No smoke.

No dragon.

No sea.

No battle.

Just a bedroom. His bedroom.

Morning sunlight filtered through floor-to-ceiling windows in long, clean shafts, illuminating the warm disorder of his life: the desk buried under business textbooks and notebooks with pages dog-eared and margins crowded with his handwriting, his laptop open from the night before with a lecture slide still visible on the screen, a hoodie slung over the back of his desk chair. Outside the windows, King’s Landing stretched endlessly in the early light, the city already stirring, glass towers catching the sun.

His alarm clock flashed 7:00 AM.

No swords or the banners of House Targaryen. Jace pressed the heels of both palms against his eyes and breathed.

The memories were still there. That was the wrong word for them, memories. They did not feel like the soft, dissolving stuff of ordinary dreams that faded on the edges as soon as you tried to examine them. They felt like the other kind of remembering, the kind that lives in the body rather than the mind. He could still feel the cold of the Gullet in his fingers. He could still smell the smoke. He could still feel the weight of dragon-riding leathers across his shoulders, the particular pull of Vermax’s movement through the air, the way the saddle had sat against the backs of his thighs.

He could still feel the bolts.

Just a dream, he told himself. The words felt inadequate in his own mouth, like trying to describe a storm with the word weather. He muttered them anyway, pressing his face harder into his palms.

“Just a dream.”

A dream where he had been a prince.

A prince who had died.

His stomach dropped with a physical lurch. The alarm was still beeping. He silenced it with a slap and sat on the edge of the bed for one more moment, just one, breathing in the ordinary scent of his ordinary room.. Then his brain supplied the information he had been avoiding.

Classes.

Shit.

He was already late.

He moved through his morning routine with the efficiency of someone running on instinct rather than thought, shower, clothes, a cursory battle with his curls that ended, as it always did, in a draw. He emerged from the bathroom in jeans and sneakers and his favorite dark hoodie, his hair doing exactly what it wanted. There wasn’t time to argue with it. There was rarely ever time.

The smell of coffee reached him in the hallway. It pulled at something in his chest and he followed it through the penthouse to the kitchen.

His steps halted in the doorway.

Rhaenyra stood at the island counter, reading something on her tablet with the focused, slightly stern expression she wore when she was processing information she found annoying. A coffee mug steamed beside her elbow, forgotten. She was already dressed soft grey, elegant, effortlessly so in the way that had always seemed to come naturally to her and she looked exactly as she always looked in the morning, tired by all the corporate bullshit.

CEO of Targaryen Corporation. One of the most influential women in King’s Landing. The most formidable person he had ever known.

His mother.

The word hit him somewhere unsteady. Something twisted painfully in his chest, relief so acute it nearly hurt, threaded through with the dreaming grief of a boy who had watched her face in his mind as the water closed over him, who had spent his last conscious moment believing she was safe, needing her to be safe, and had been right without ever knowing he was right. He crossed the room before he had consciously decided to.

He wrapped his arms around her.

Rhaenyra nearly dropped her coffee.

“Jacaerys-”

She caught herself, setting the mug down with a firm clink on the marble countertop, and then without hesitation, because she had always been this, whatever else she was, she wrapped her arms around him and held him back.

“Sweet boy.” Her voice was softer now. Her fingers found their way into his curls the way they had when he was very small. “What’s the matter?”

Jace swallowed against the tightness in his throat. The dream came rushing back through him like a tide, the war, the weight of a crown his mother should have inherited without blood, the desperate, bone-deep need to protect her. The image of her face as he had walked away from Dragonstone, toward the dragon, toward the battle, toward the Gullet. The way he had looked back.

He shook his head against her shoulder.

“I’m fine.”

“You are clearly not fine.”

Her hand moved in slow, soothing circles against his back. Despite himself, despite everything, Jace felt something in him begin to loosen.

He laughed. A weak, slightly broken sound, but genuine. “I just…” His voice cracked on the nothing he was trying to say.

Rhaenyra pulled back slightly to look at him. Not the way she looked at her board of directors, or at rivals across conference tables, or at the city from thirty floors up. The other way. The private way, that only he and his brothers ever saw.

“What happened?”

He wiped his eyes quickly, hoping she wouldn’t comment on it and took a breath.

“I had the most vivid dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

He hesitated. There was something strange about saying it. As though speaking about it aloud would make it either more real or less, and he wasn’t sure which outcome he wanted.

“I was a prince,” he said.

Rhaenyra blinked. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not that.

“A prince?”

“Yeah.” A small smile found its way onto his face, unwilling, almost involuntary. “You were a queen.” Something passed across her expression something soft, something she would never have allowed in a meeting room. “Oh?”

“I died fighting a battle for you.”

Silence.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached up and brushed a curl from his forehead with the gentleness that had no performance in it, something she reserved for the three of them and no one else.

“Well,” she said finally, her smile warming to something that was almost, almost teasing. “That sounds exhausting.”

Jace stared. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“You are standing in my kitchen wearing yesterday’s hoodie and telling me about dragon wars, Jacaerys.”

He opened his mouth to protest then closed it. “Fair.” She squeezed his shoulder. “It was only a dream.”

“You know,” said a new voice from the doorway, “some families start their mornings with good morning.”

Luke wandered in carrying a cereal box like a trophy, nineteen years old and permanently, professionally smug. He surveyed the scene with the cheerful heartlessness of a younger brother who had found ammunition and intended to use it.

“Did Jace finally lose his mind?”

Behind him, Joffrey, fourteen and grinning with the particular delight of someone who had been waiting for this squeezed past into the kitchen. “About time.” Jace rolled his eyes so hard it was almost an athletic achievement. “There he is.”

“Dreaming about being a prince?” Luke plucked a bowl from the cupboard with casual ease. “That’s because you’re already treated like one.”

The napkin Jace threw hit him square in the face. Luke threw it back. Rhaenyra sighed with the air of a woman who had calculated exactly how many more years of this lay before her and found the number disheartening.

“My sons,” she said, picking up her coffee. “Truly intellectual giants.”

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

Breakfast passed with the comfortable velocity of mornings that had been rehearsed through repetition until they ran themselves. Luke complaining about something, Joffrey eating cereal in quantities that defied his size, Rhaenyra reading from her tablet while simultaneously tracking all three of them with the peripheral attention of someone who had never once been entirely off duty.

Jace was reaching for his coffee when Rhaenyra glanced up.

“Are you still picking up your girlfriend?”

He froze.

The coffee cup remained halfway to his face, arrested in mid-air.

“…My what?”

Luke’s head snapped up. The expression that crossed his face was one of pure, unalloyed joy. He looked like he had been handed a gift.

Rhaenyra stared at her eldest with the patient, faintly incredulous expression of a woman who had not expected to be performing this particular reality check on a Tuesday morning.

“Your girlfriend.”

“Oh.” Jace set the cup down carefully. “Right.”

You.

He had a girlfriend.

A beautiful girlfriend, and she was his girlfriend, and she had been his girlfriend for- he was briefly lost in the arithmetic of it, which was itself a kind of answer and she was wonderful, she was brilliant, she made him laugh, and somehow in the space between waking up with the sea in his lungs and standing in his mother’s kitchen in yesterday’s hoodie, he had momentarily forgotten she existed.

And then, because his brain was apparently in full catastrophic mode this morning: betrothed. Not yet. Not technically. But the word had been sitting in the back of his mind ever since he woke up from his dream.

Heat flooded his face with spectacular completeness. Luke nearly choked on his cereal.

“Oh my God.”

“Shut up.”

“You forgot your girlfriend.”

“Only briefly.”

“Only” Luke dissolved entirely, shoulders shaking. Across the table, Joffrey watched with the dignified appreciation of a connoisseur.

Rhaenyra shook her head slowly. “Honestly, Jace.” “It was a very intense dream,” he said, with as much dignity as one can muster while slowly turning the color of a sunset.

“You forgot your girlfriend.”

“The dream had dragons, Mum.”

She gave him the look. The specific look, the one that had been making him feel twelve years old since he was actually twelve years old. “She’s a lovely girl. I wish you’d bring her home more often.”

Jace stood from the table with the decisive energy of a man drawing a conversation to a close. “I was planning to.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Today?”

“…Possibly.”

“Good.” Rhaenyra returned to her tablet, the slight smile at the corner of her mouth saying everything she was too dignified to say aloud.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The underground parking garage was cool and dim, smelling of concrete and oil and the expensive quiet of a building where people took the lift rather than the stairs. Jace’s Porsche sat in its usual spot, Oak Green Metallic, catching the fluorescent light.

Vermax.

He had named the car Vermax which now sounded so ironic to him.

He stood beside the driver’s door for a moment, hand on the handle, the thought arriving fully formed and then sitting there in his chest with an odd weight. He had named his car Vermax years ago. He had thought it was because he liked the sound of it, or because it was the name of a character in a book he’d read, or because of some half-remembered reason that had never quite solidified into anything coherent.

He looked at the car. The deep green of it. The long, low lines of it, built for speed, built for the sky-

Built for the sky.

A strange feeling settled over him, the kind of not-quite-vertigo that comes with recognizing something without being able to name what it is you’re recognizing. Like seeing an old friend across a crowd before you’ve registered their face.

He shook it off. Got in and drove.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The street outside your house was quiet in the way that Tuesday mornings in King’s Landing occasionally managed to be, with the morning light that made ordinary things seem briefly considered. Jace pulled to the curb and sat for a moment with the engine idling, window down.

Then the front door opened and you stepped out. He got out of the car.

The morning light caught your hair the way it always did, making you look almost angelic in Jace’s eyes in that moment. You were still in the act of adjusting the strap of your bag when you spotted him, and the smile that crossed your face. Happy just to see him.

And for one strange, suspended moment, another image overlapped the morning like a transparency laid over a photograph. A figure standing on the cliffs of Dragonstone. The sea grey below and the wind pulling at dark fabric. Watching him leave. The expression on her face, your face, heartbroken and resolute and trying to be neither.

Waiting for him to come back.

The image dissolved as quickly as it had arrived. The morning reasserted itself. You were walking toward the car, your bag settled on your shoulder now, your smile still in place, and Jace found himself already stepping forward already moving toward with certainty that was less decision than gravity.

Before you could say a word, he took your hand and raised it, and pressed a kiss against your knuckles. Deliberatea and unhurried. Like he’d done it a thousand times before, in other rooms, in other centuries.

“How are you, my beloved?”

You stopped.

Looked at the hand.

Looked at him.

And then, because you were you, you laughed, the bright, surprised sound of someone caught genuinely off guard. “What has gotten into you this morning?” you questioned him.

Jace grinned, and the grin felt more like him than anything else had all morning. “I genuinely have no idea.”

“You’re being sooo weird.” You studied him with the narrowed eyes trying to grasp his words and actions. “How weird is this going to get?”

“I had the wildest dream.”

“Oh?” Already your expression was shifting into the one you wore when you were preparing to be entertained. He leaned forward and kissed you softly quick, warm and certain.

“In it,” he said against your smile, “you were my princess too.”

Your cheeks went pink with entirely gratifying speed. “Oh my God.”

“You asked.”

“I asked what was wrong with you, not-”

“Details.”

“Jacaerys Velaryon, I am going to need you to be normal for the next five minutes-”

“I make no promises.”

He opened the passenger door for you, still grinning, and the morning felt lighter than it had when he’d left the penthouse.

The dream wasn’t entirely terrible, he thought, settling behind the wheel. If nothing else, it had done this, sharpened his vision, made ordinary things brilliant again. Made you more vivid than you’d already been, which was saying something considerable. He found himself smiling the entire drive to university.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

University should have felt normal.

Instead, Jace spent the entire morning convinced he was losing his mind by degrees as new details of his dream would hit him.

The dream lingered with a persistence that ordinary dreams did not have, the kind he usually forgot by the time he reached the kitchen. This one clung. Every corridor he walked reminded him of castle hallways, the echo of footsteps on stone, and the smell of torch smoke. Every crowded lecture hall conjured the geometry of noble courts; the subtle theatre of power performed through proximity. His Strategic Management lecture had an entire section on resource allocation that kept pulling his thoughts sideways, toward councils and war rooms and Dragonstone. He stared at his notebook.

He had written, in the margin: Corlys was right about the Gullet.

He had no idea when.

“You’re disassociating again.”

Jace blinked.

Across the seminar table sat Cregan Stark, regarding him with the expression he used on everything: tall, dark-haired, slow-blinking, fundamentally and constitutionally unimpressed by the world and all its events. He was from Winterfell like genuinely, actually from Winterfell, which Jace had always found slightly funny without ever quite being able to explain why.

They’d been best friends since secondary school, the friendship that had calcified into something so much more. They were like brothers in every sense. Also, he looked almost exactly like the Cregan from the dream.

Same jaw. Same eyes. Same expression, the one that said I am listening to you and I find you exhausting. Same, in other words, as he always looked well except his had slightly shorter hair.

“What?” Jace managed.

Cregan raised one eyebrow. “You’ve been staring at me for ten seconds with an expressionless face.”

“Sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I had a strange dream. I feel like I keep repeating these words over and over again.”

“You texted me at four in the morning.”

Jace went very still.

“I did?”

Cregan reached for his phone with the patience of a man who had long since resigned himself to the chaos of being Jace Velaryon’s closest friend. He scrolled briefly, then began reading aloud in the flat, informational tone of a news anchor delivering a weather report.

“‘Brother, imagine if we were medieval nobles.’”

“Oh, God.”

“‘You would have loved Winterfell.’”

“Cregan-”

“‘You were Lord of the North.’” He glanced up briefly. “I’m from Winterfell, Jace. I grew up in Winterfell. I know what Winterfell is.”

“Please stop-”

‘I miss Vermax.’

Cregan lowered the phone.

“I don’t know what Vermax is, if its not talking about your car.” he said.

Jace buried his face in both hands and made a sound that was less a word than a comprehensive statement. “You were never meant to read those.”

“You sent them to me.”

“I was apparently not fully conscious at four in the morning. I don’t remember doing this at all.”

“That’s concerning.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

The question arrived without ceremony, Cregan always asked things he actually wanted to know, dropped into a conversation like a stone dropped into water, watching to see what it displaced. Jace hesitated for long enough that the silence became its own answer.

“Yeah,” he said. Then, quietly: “Not entirely.”

Cregan nodded. He didn’t push. This was something Jace had always valued about him, the Stark capacity to hold space without filling it.

“Tell me later,” Cregan said, and turned back to his laptop.

Mostly, Jace thought. He was mostly okay. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

You found him outside the business building at noon, materializing from the flow of students and your smile arrived before you did.

Jace felt the thing in his chest that had been clenched since 7 AM ease, slowly, like a hand opening. There was something about you that operated on him this way, had always operated on him this way, since the beginning. A quality of presence that grounded him, that made the world’s coordinates make sense again. He’d never found quite the right words for it. He’d stopped trying.

You slipped your hand into his without ceremony.

“Better than this morning?”

“A little.”

“Still thinking about your prince dream?”

He laughed, the sound freer than he expected. “Unfortunately.”

“You are such a nerd.”

“I was literally fighting a war.”

“You were dreaming about fighting a war.”

“Details.”

“Jacaerys Velaryon, if this dream becomes your entire personality, I want it on the record that I tried to prevent it-”

“Noted and rejected.”

You rolled your eyes with magnificent feeling. “I make no promises about what I tell your mother.”

Together you walked toward the café nearby. A small, overcrowded place called something Jace could never quite remember but it had had excellent coffee and terrible lighting and was perpetually full of students and professors who had clearly rather be somewhere else. The place that existed to absorb the ambient anxiety of a university and convert it, through caffeine, into something marginally more functional.

You had barely settled into your seats when a familiar voice arrived from approximately two tables away, belonging to someone who had apparently been watching for them.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite nephew.”

Aegon Targaryen dropped into the empty chair beside Jace with the comfortable confidence of a man who owned, and this was literally true, approximately half the building they were sitting in. Twenty-six, blond, expensive, reliably catastrophic. His jacket probably cost more than Jace’s car maintenance for the year, and he wore it with the carelessness never once considering the cost of anything.

He was nothing like the monster from the dream. The dream-Aegon had been something Jace couldn’t fully bring himself to examine yet. Jealous and bitter and capable of terrible things. This Aegon was mostly known for throwing parties that became local legend and mysteriously managing to avoid all professional consequences for anything he did, ever. Jacaerys supposed that has something to do with his mother and his uncle Aemond keeping these things contained.

“To what do we owe the honor?” Jace asked.

Aegon’s attention had already moved to you.

“And how are you?”

“Good,” you said politely.

“Still putting up with him?”

You smiled. “Barely.”

“Excellent answer.”

Jace groaned. Aegon looked absolutely delighted. “You’re blushing,” Aegon observed, with the tone of someone reporting a natural phenomenon.

“I’m not.”

“You absolutely are.”

You leaned over the table, and Jace recognized the look on your face immediately. The collaborative look. The look that meant you had identified an ally.

“He was calling me his beloved this morning.”

Aegon’s chair nearly lost him. He grabbed the table.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“In what context?”

“He kissed my hand. In the street. Before nine in the morning.”

Aegon looked at Jace the way someone looks at an archaeological discovery with facination, slightly appalled, deeply pleased. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened.”

Jace contemplated his options. Leaving. Changing his name and moving to Braavos. Committing entirely to the persona of someone who had never been caught calling his girlfriend my beloved at eight forty-five on a Tuesday.

None of these were practical.

He reached for his coffee and said nothing, which Aegon correctly interpreted as total defeat.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

After Aegon eventually wandered off, ostensibly to a meeting, credibly to cause chaos somewhere else and so the café settled back into its ordinary rhythms. Students came and went. Espresso machines hissed. The ambient noise absorbed itself.

You and Jace remained at your table, and the laughter faded naturally, the way good laughter does, not dying but simply becoming something quieter.

He was staring into his coffee again.

You watched him for a moment.

“You never told me the whole dream, since it has you in a weird mindset today.” you said quietly.

His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around the cup. He was aware of you looking at him, with your full attention, which had always been more like listening than looking, patient and genuine and without agenda.

“To put it simply, there was a war,” he said.

You didn’t ask him to explain. You waited.

“A civil war.” He looked up briefly, then back at the table. “A war over who would rule over Westeros. My mother was supposed to inherit as was the rightful heir to the throne but there were those who didn’t accept it. Didn’t accept her.”

“And you fought for her.”

“Of course.”

The images came without invitation, Dragonstone’s grey halls, the council table, the maps spreading the whole kingdom out before them like a wound. The feeling of duty that had lived in his chest since childhood, not as a burden but as a definition. This is who you are. This is what you do.

You reached across the table and took his hand. He continued.

“I flew a dragon. I know this sounds no so scary but-” Despite everything, he heard the ghost of wonder in his own voice. “Vermax. He was- he was mine. Since I was a boy. He knew me.” The wonder curdled, softened into something heavier. “He died with me.”

Your thumb moved in a slow arc across his knuckles. “The last thing I remember,” he said quietly, “was dying. Floating in the sea, after everything.” He paused.

“It was strange. It wasn’t- it wasn’t the way I would have imagined. It wasn’t terrifying.”

“What was it?”

He thought about it honestly.

“It was sad,” he said. “But calm.”

You were quiet for a moment. Then you reached up, and the gesture was so unexpected that he went still, your hand cupping his cheek, steady and warm, thumb tracing a line beneath his eye.

He leaned into it without thinking.

“I’m glad it was only a dream,” you said softly trying to calm his anxieties that he didn’t want to confess out loud.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

The tightness in his chest released, not all at once but in stages, like a knot worked loose over time. He turned his head slightly, pressing his lips briefly to your palm, and you let him, and neither of you made anything of it. She’s right, he thought. Whatever that was. Whatever it meant.

He was here. Alive. With his family, with his best friend, with his girl.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was, actually, everything.

The afternoon passed.

Classes ended. The university slowly emptied like it did every day at dusk, students and professors releasing themselves back into the city like a pressure valve opening. The parking lot filled briefly with the usual chaos and then thinned.

“My mother wants you over more often,” Jace mentioned, as they walked toward the Porsche.

“Apparently she likes you.”

You brightened immediately. “Really?”

“She said so unprompted. First thing this morning.”

“Good.” You smiled with satisfaction. “I’m charming.”

Jace looked at you sideways. “You are deeply smug about this.”

“I’m charming,” you repeated, pleasantly. He laughed. “Come over tonight?”

You looked at him, with that look you had, the one he’d never found a word for, the one that made him feel simultaneously seen and unsteady in the best possible way. Made him feel a bit giddy.

“I’d love to,” you said.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The penthouse was unusually quiet when they arrived. Rhaenyra was visible through the glass of her home office, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, reading from a document with the focused intensity and it was clear that the woman needed a break from everything. Luke had evaporated somewhere. Joffrey was reportedly studying, a claim no one in the household had ever been successfully able to verify.

You and Jace settled at the dining table with laptops and scattered notes and the collective fiction of productivity.

For forty minutes, it was remarkably functional. Jace had his economics module open. You were working through something, he didn’t ask, didn’t need to and the sound of quiet typing and the occasional turn of a page created a kind of companionable silence that he had always thought of as the specific luxury of being comfortable with someone. presence. You could simply be in it.

He was reading about capital allocation.

“Jace.”

He looked up.

“You’re getting lost in your mind again.”

“I’m not what are you talking about?” he said automatically. Then, because honesty was something he’d apparently committed to today: “I was thinking about- uhhh. Economics?”

“That is not better.”

“You look pretty,” he said simply.

The silence that followed had a distinct texture. You looked at him for a long moment. Then you slowly, deliberately, closed your laptop.

“No,” you said.

“What?”

“You don’t get to say things like that when I’m trying to study.”

“I was simply making an observation.”

“You are impossible.”

He was very pleased with himself. He did not bother hiding it.

An hour later, the economics module had not progressed. The textbooks had been consolidated into a single pile and pushed to the far end of the table, a gesture that meant these exist and will eventually be addressed, which was as much as either of you were willing to commit to. A film had been agreed upon via negotiation.

Blankets appeared.

The overhead lights went off.

And somehow, as these things always somehow managed, you ended up curled against his chest on the enormous sectional, his arm around your waist, the film playing distantly while neither of you particularly watched it. Your breathing slowed first. His heartbeat was steady and familiar beneath your ear.

The city moved quietly outside the windows.

You didn’t remember falling asleep.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The prince stood before you.

The wind came off the sea like a cold hand, whipping through his dark, curling hair, pressing his black riding coat against his frame. Behind him, Dragonstone rose in its glory against a steel-grey sky, all sharp towers and dark stone, magnificent and terrible, built by people who had never believed in half measures. The sea crashed against the rocks far below. Dark clouds gathered on the horizon with the patient, deliberate advance of something inevitable.

“No.”

Your voice came out broken.

“No, please.”

He looked at you the way he always looked at you as if you were the clearest thing in a world that had lately become very unclear, like looking at you was the one thing he could do without effort in a life that had demanded extraordinary effort from him since the moment he was old enough to understand what he was.

“I have to go.”

“You don’t,” you said, even though you knew it wasn’t true. Even though somewhere beneath the desperate present tense of the argument, the truer, older part of you already knew exactly what was coming. Already knew the shape of this farewell.

His hands found yours.

They were warm. Strong and real, so real that makes their loss so much more brutal than the loss of things you never fully believed in.

“You can stay,” you said. Your voice was steadier than you felt. “You can let someone else-”

“I cannot.” His voice was gentle but stern. He was stubborn and so if he made peace with this decisions, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tears burned behind your eyes. The fear inside you was almost unbearable and burning, it was twisted and layered, because you knew. You already knew. This was not a premonition, not a vague presentiment. It was knowledge, carried somewhere beneath language, beneath memory, in whatever part of you had been this person before.

You knew what awaited him at the Gullet.

Fire.

Water.

“You promised.” The words escaped before you could decide to say them.

His expression shifted. Something moved across it, grief, tenderness, the ache of a man who loves something too well to pretend it isn’t breaking. “And I will keep that promise but this is a battle I must fight for both myself and my mother.”

He stepped closer, and you let him, and he pressed a kiss to your forehead so gently it barely qualified as a touch at all.

Then he rested his brow against yours. His eyes never left yours.

“If I do not return- which I intend to,”

The world seemed to hold its breath.

“I will find you.”

A tear escaped. Traced the line of your cheek. He watched it with eyes that were very dark and very steady.

“In every lifetime if not this one. I promise.”

The words landed somewhere deep in you, somewhere wordless, somewhere older than the language you used to think with. A promise that had the weight of truth rather than intention.

You memorized his face. The curls. The strong jaw. The eyes, brown and earnest and alive, so alive.

He smiled.

Then he stepped away.

He turned toward the waiting dragon.

Toward the dark water below.

Toward a destiny that was also a death.

And all you could do was watch him leave. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

You woke with a gasp that tore itself from somewhere past your chest.

For several seconds, you could not find the room. Could not find yourself in it. There was only the dream...the cliffs, the wind, his forehead against yours, the sound of his footsteps retreating and the grief of it, which was specific and devastating and nothing at all like the vague emotional residue of ordinary sleep.

Tears burned behind your eyes. Your heart was pounding.

You pushed yourself upright. A blanket tangled around your legs. The room was dim, the film long since ended, the television showing a menu screen. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, King’s Landing glittered in the full dark of night, the city’s lights reflected upward in a warm wash against the low clouds. Jace must have moved you to his room when you fell asleep.

The bedroom door opened.

Jace stepped in carrying two mugs, steam rising from both. He had apparently, at some point during your sleep, been productive.

The moment he saw your face, he froze.

“Hey.”

The concern in his voice was immediate, the shift from normal to careful happening in the space of a single syllable.

“What’s wrong?”

You didn’t answer. The words were somewhere on the way, but in the meantime your body had already decided what it needed, and what it needed was to close the distance between you and him as quickly as possible.

You stood.

Crossed the room.

The mugs barely survived. He caught them against the edge of the side table with an impressive reflex, setting them down quickly before his arms came around your waist, and you buried your face against the side of his neck, and breathed him in.

“Sweetheart?” Low and careful. His chin came to rest on top of your head.

You stayed there for a moment just letting the reality of him replace the dream of him. The warmth of him. The solidness.

Then you pulled back. Not far. Your forehead came to rest against his, which put you close enough to feel his breath and see the small crease of worry between his brows.

“I had a dream,” you said. It seems it was your turn to utter those words.

Something moved across his face. He went very still in the way that meant he was paying every variety of attention he had.

“What kind of dream?”

“I saw a prince.”

His breath caught. You felt it.

“I saw him leaving for a battle. He was going to fight-”

Your voice faltered, then steadied. “He knew he might not come back. And he said-” You stopped.

Jace’s arms tightened around you, almost involuntarily. “He said he would find me,” you continued. “That if he didn’t return-” Your eyes met his, and something in your chest recognized something in his. “He would find me in every lifetime.”

Silence.

Complete, absolute silence.

Jace stared at you.

Because those were the exact words. Not a version of them, not a paraphrase but the exact promise, the exact phrasing, the exact scene, the stone of Dragonstone under grey skies and wind coming off the sea. He had lived it from one side and you had lived it from the other, and here you both were, in a penthouse above a city that did not have dragons, with the memory of them living in your bones.

His throat moved.

You smiled softly with tears still bright at the corners of your eyes. Your hand lifted, your fingers moving gently through his curls, the same gesture that felt simultaneously new and ancient.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” you said.

“Neither do I.”

“But if it was real-”

His forehead pressed more firmly against yours.

“You kept your promise,” you whispered.

He felt his throat close.

And for the first time since he had woken to the sound of an alarm clock and a bedroom that wasn’t the sea, he stopped wondering whether the dream had been real. He stopped wondering whether he was grieving something imagined or something true. He stopped needing to know.

Because you knew.

You had been there.

You rose onto your toes.

Your lips met his.

It was slow and gentle. He kissed you back like someone returning to something, like a navigator finding a landmark in familiar water.

Like he had been waiting centuries and perhaps his soul had waited for this moment. The moment to return to her. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The knock was soft.

They both startled apart with the excellent reflexes of guilty consciences, then immediately demonstrated the dignity of two people pretending they hadn’t. Jace cleared his throat. Rested his forehead against yours for one final second. His breath was unsteady in the best way.

Another knock.

“Jacaerys?”

Rhaenyra’s voice, measured, carrying through the door with the easy authority of a woman who managed board rooms and board members and the shenanigans of three sons as a single uninterrupted professional skill.

“Dinner is ready.” They heard the muffled voice of his mother.

Jace answered at a volume calibrated for normalcy “We’ll be there in a minute!”

A pause that had weight.

“Five minutes,” his mother’s voice returned, drier than a desert, and entirely aware of everything and perhaps making a wrong assumption of you two being alone in his room.

You laughed, pressing your face briefly against his shoulder to muffle it. He was already smiling.

“Your mother doesn’t trust you.”

“She absolutely does not.”

“And honestly?” You poked his chest. “I don’t blame her.”

“You wound me.”

“Good.” You pulled your hand back, but he caught it, quick and easy, and pressed a kiss to your knuckles again. The same gesture as that morning. The echo of it traveled through both of you clearly.

Your cheeks went pink.

He watched it happen with a feeling in his chest that was too large and too simple to require any examination at all.

There she is, he thought. My girl.

My princess.

He took your hand properly, fingers laced and led you toward the dining room.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈ They heard the argument before they reached the dinner table.

Luke and Joffrey, seated across from each other in the arrangement that the family had collectively accepted as a flaw, were conducting a debate with the commitment of two people who had come to win.

“No, because you’re objectively wrong-”

“I’m objectively right-”

“You don’t even know what objectively means.”

“I literally do.”

“You used it wrong.”

Joffrey groaned with his whole body. “I hate this family.”

“You are this family,” Luke pointed out.

Joffrey considered this. “Exactly.”

Rhaenyra, at the head of the table, was pinching the bridge of her nose with annoyance. This was her normal and yet it was tiring.

The moment she saw you, her face entirely changed.

“There she is.”

You smiled. “Hi.”

She stood and pulled you into a hug with a warmth that was, Jace thought privately, rather more enthusiastic than his own homecoming greeting most mornings. “I was beginning to think my son had invented you.”

“Mum.”

“What? He never brings you over.”

“That’s his fault,” you said.

“Traitor,” Jace said.

“You’re literally my boyfriend.”

“Exactly.”

You smiled sweetly. “I’m allowed.”

Rhaenyra looked delighted in the specific way she allowed herself to look delighted when she was genuinely pleased, a rarity outside this apartment. Luke immediately leaned toward you.

“See? This is why she’s my favorite.”

“I’m sitting right here.”

“Unfortunately.”

Jace threw a bread roll at him.

Luke threw one back.

The war began immediately, and lasted approximately five seconds before Rhaenyra’s single sharp look ended it. She had a look for this. It was very effective.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, settling back into her chair and accepting a bread roll from the basket with the serenity of someone who had already mentally exited the building, “if I raised wolves.”

“That’s insulting,” Joffrey said.

Everyone looked at him.

The fourteen-year-old shrugged with the composure of someone who had thought this through. “Wolves are smarter.”

The silence held for two seconds before Luke’s expression cracked. Jace looked at the ceiling. Rhaenyra’s attempt at severity collapsed at its foundations.

You sat beside Jace with your hand warm against his under the table, and you were already laughing, and the sound of it filled the room the way laughter does when a room is already full of people who are glad to be there.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

Dinner found its rhythm.

Conversation moved in the easy, overlapping way it does with people who have logged enough hours together that they no longer need to manage it consciously. Luke complained about a group project with the vivid resentment of having decided the problem was everyone else.

Joffrey explained something about a game or a film or a historical period but the audience could not quite keep up, but that seemed to be part of the experience. Rhaenyra complained, with great economy, about company politics, and then told a story about a colleague that had everyone at the table paying full attention (It was Aemond who everytone is afraid of in their company).

You listened to all of it.

Jace, mostly, watched.

He had not expected this. Had woken this morning in the sea, or the memory of it. Had spent the drive to university with the dream still active in his body, had sat through lectures half-present, had carried the weight of Vermax’s last look in his chest all day like a stone.

And now.

He watched his mother smile at something you said. He watched Luke do the thing he did when he was actually amused, which was different from when he is pretending. Watched Joffrey explain something to you directly, having apparently determined that you were worth the effort, and watched your face do the thing it did when you were genuinely interested in something, slightly forward, slightly bright, entirely present.

You fit here. Not as a guest, not as someone being accommodated. As someone who belonged. He thought of the dream again.

Remembered standing at the dragonpit of Dragonstone with his armor on and the dragon saddled and the sea grey behind him, and looking back at everything he was leaving, his mother, his brothers, you, the stone halls and the cold salt wind and the ordinary miracle of a morning that didn’t require a king’s son to die for it.

He had wondered, in those last seconds at Dragonstone, if he would ever see any of them again. He had his answer now.

The realization settled in his chest quietly, without drama. Not a revelation, something more like a confirmation. A peace he hadn’t known he was looking for, finding him here, at a dinner table with a bread roll dent in the tablecloth and Joffrey currently holding forth on something no one else understood.

No war. No dragons. No succession. No battles. Just family. Just love.

Just this.

Halfway through dessert, Joffrey’s phone lit up. “Oh!” He reached for it with the speed of receiving news they’d been waiting for. “Dad’s calling.”

Jace felt himself smile before the screen even showed Laenor’s face.

It appeared a moment later, that face, familiar and warm and slightly tanned by whatever sun was currently shining on whatever harbor on whatever coast he was sailing toward. Behind him, a bright blue sky suggested somewhere in Essos, probably. The man was perpetually in motion, perpetually somewhere else and yet found time for them. He was not their real father, but he might as well have been. After Harwin passed away, Rhaenyra had remarried Laenor as more of a deal since Laenor wasn’t interested in anything but he cared for Rhaenyra platonically and it seemed to have worked out great and that’s all that mattered.

“There are my favorite children.”

Luke snorted. “We’re your only children.”

“And yet somehow still my favorites.” Laenor’s gaze found you across the table, and his face smiled “There she is.”

You laughed. “Hello.”

“Good. Finally, someone sensible has arrived.”

“Hey!” Three voices, simultaneous.

Laenor continued as though he hadn’t heard. “How are you, darling?”

“I’m well, thank you.”

Jace groaned. “Why does everyone in my family like her more than me?”

“Because,” Laenor said, and the timing was beautiful, “she has manners.”

The table erupted. Even Rhaenyra, which was a significant achievement.

Laenor spent twenty minutes on the call, chatting about his route, trading insults with. He heard both Luke and Joffery’s rambling. He asked Rhaenyra about the board meeting she’d complained about, and listened to her answer. He asked you about your studies, and remembered something you’d mentioned three calls ago, and asked a follow-up question about it.

The man had walked into their lives years ago and simply decided, without announcement or conditions, that these were his sons. No performance of it. No documentation. Just- love, extended to fill the available space.

Dream Laenor had disappeared. The thought arrived gently, without bitterness. The dream-Laenor, who had been present mostly in his absence, who Jace had barely known, who had been lost before Jace could understand what losing someone meant. This version was here. This version showed up.

And Jace was, quietly and completely, grateful for that. The call ended. The dessert finished. The evening moved toward its natural conclusion with the comfortable inevitability of all good evenings. Luke vanished in the direction of his room. Joffrey disappeared with a quantity of snacks that could feed a whole army. Rhaenyra retreated to finish what she’d started, she always had something she was finishing, this was simply who she was and the penthouse settled into quiet

Which left you and Jace, alone on the balcony.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

King’s Landing stretched below them without end. The city was all light from up here, not the individual lights, not streets and windows and the moving points of cars, but the collective glow of it, the warmth of a few million people living their lives in proximity, translated upward into something that looked, from this height, almost like its own kind of fire.

A cool breeze moved through the dark, carrying the city’s particular nighttime mixture of warm pavement and distant food and the faint, improbable ghost of something floral from a rooftop garden somewhere below. It found its way into Jace’s curls and did what it wanted with them.

You stood beside him. Close enough that your shoulders touched.

Neither of you spoke. Neither of you needed to. The city was enough, for a while.

Then you broke the silence the way you often did when a thought entered your head.

“Do you think it was real?”

He didn’t ask what you meant.

The dreams. The prince and the princess. The battle. The promise made at the edge of the world on the morning of an ending. The specific weight of standing on Dragonstone and knowing.

“I don’t know,” he said.

You slipped your hand into his. Your fingers were cool from the night air. He closed his hand around yours.

“But it felt real,” you said.

“It did.”

Another silence, this one richer. Weighted, but not heavily, weighted the way a good book is heavy, in a way you want.

“If it was real…”

Jace looked toward you. The city’s light caught you from below, softening the angles, turning you luminous in the warm way of a portrait painted with care. The same thing he’d thought this morning returned, effortlessly, as though it had simply been waiting for the right lighting.

Radiant.

The same as the princess from the dream. The same, and also entirely herself.

“If it was real,” you continued, a smile finding the corner of your mouth, “I think she’d be happy.”

“Who?”

“The princess.”

Your fingers squeezed his.

“Because she got her prince back.”

Something moved in his chest and he felt a giddy sensation.

“And he got his princess,” he said quietly.

The smile you gave him in return was the specific, undone kind that he privately thought was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He doubted this would change.

“You know,” he said, after a moment, “I’ve spent all day thinking about the battle.”

“The Gullet?”

“Yeah.” He looked down at the city. “The part where I died.”

You were quiet beside him.

“And?” you said, finally.

He looked back through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse.

His mother, visible in her office, signing something. The small movement of her hand showing her actions. Luke in the hallway beyond, typing away at his phone aggressively with determinations of someone looking to win an argument even if he may be wrong.

Joffrey somewhere in his room planning a prank on his mother.

And all of it, all of this life, this ordinary, extraordinary life, glowing warm behind glass thirty floors above a city that had never known a dragon. His family.

“I think that prince would’ve liked this,” he said.

You followed his gaze.

You understood immediately. He could see it in the way your face softened, not with sadness but with tenderness that recognizes grief and holds it carefully.

A life without war. Without the weight of a crown.

Without sacrifice, the kind that swaps one beloved thing for another in an endless, devastating ledger.

Just family.

Just love.

Just peace.

You rested your head on his shoulder.

He turned his head and pressed a kiss to your hair, slow and quiet.

Neither of you saw it.

But just for a moment, a breath, almost a blink, the glass of the balcony door held a reflection that was not quite yours.

Two figures. Side by side. Dressed in black and red, the colours of a house that had once held the world.

Standing exactly as you were standing. Looking out at exactly what you were looking at.

Smiling.

At each other, and at this, and at everything that had managed, against all odds, to survive.

Then the image dissolved.

The glass held only the room behind it, warm and lit and full of the sound of Luke losing the argument.

And Jace, and you.

Exactly where you were always meant to be.

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