Chapter Text
(301 AC)
Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, the last of her house, and Stannis of the House Baratheon, the last of his, had entered the throne room of the Red Keep together as Drogon flew high above King's Landing and the banners that flew for one side or the other in the Rebellion waged by their respective brothers dipped low to the ground, declaring for neither. Declaring for both.
The War for Westeros, or so the last stand against the Others was now being called in the maesters' books, ended in victory and thousands of lost lives. King's Landing was rid of Lannisters because of Lannisters, the Kingslayer captured in the Red Keep, unresisting where he knelt by the bed that bore Queen Cersei's corpse.
The bones of their remaining children separated by leagues of bloodshed between them. Myrcella deep in the Dornish Marches, accidentally killed in a skirmish that meant to secret her away from Doran Martell's clout. Tommen the Boy-King along the Goldroad; swarmed by the angry smallfolk--that only months before witnessed the shame of his mother--in his flight to Casterly Rock after the death of Kevan Lannister woke the so-feared rats in the walls of the Red Keep.
Dragon and stag alike kept the Iron Throne empty for nearly a fortnight as they rested and shook the winter cold from their bones.
The liberation of the North had freed ten thousand swords to Stannis' command, equipped with dragonglass swords and arrows smithed at White Harbor, the ores farmed from the belly of Dragonstone. They fought Winter for a month and a day, aswarm with impossible odds as the Wall fell to the Other and the war came to Brandon's Gift.
Even as they stood their ground, the Long Night threatened to engulf them all, and the cold had seeped deeper and deeper south. Until a brief break from winter and the undead saw the wings of a dragon as black and as large as Balerion himself breathed fire upon their enemies.
The legendary Great Other was not found among the burning corpses but mayhap they just didn't know what to look for. The wights carried the faces of their loved ones. The Others the frozen skull-masks of death, all of them looking as similarly gaunt and haunted as the next that if one were the Great Other then all of them must be the Great Other.
The Long Night clutched the North to its bosom, and all of the North's sons and daughters struggled to piece their lives back together in the shadow of the thickest winter they had ever faced.
Yet no one knew if the worst was over, or if they'd only weathered through the first gust of the cold winds. As Drogon burned the corpses, Stannis' men flushed the Wall free of its enemies. Daenerys didn't dare wander so close to it, afraid that dragonfire would destroy the Wall completely.
The war among men was over, but the war against winter was only beginning. They have survived each other, but they had yet to survive destruction. It was with this chilling notion that Baratheon and Targaryen descended from the North to retake the Iron Throne, only to seize it easily, bloodlessly. A hollow gasp of victory at the end of all things.
"I would call you a traitor, a usurper," Daenerys said, as they sat across from each other in the council room. "But I don't know the laws of Westeros well. Mayhap I'm wrong." She met his eyes. "Am I?" It was not a question, but a challenge.
They met alone, Drogon perched upon the ruins of the Dragonpit. Stannis' soldiers camped outside the walls, save for Davos Seaworth who remained at Winterfell, reluctant to leave the boy Rickon Stark until Winterfell was once again whole.
Stannis watched her, this queen, or khaleesi, or whatever she called herself. The Last Dragon, truly, wresting that title from her brother Rhaegar. Rhaegar had no dragons.
"I would call you usurper as well," Stannis replied. "After my brother took the Iron Throne--"
"From my father," Daenerys pointed out, her voice sharp.
Stannis nodded. "From your father, by right of conquest, the crown passed to House Baratheon and I am its rightful heir."
Daenerys' lips thinned. "Its only heir," she said, but not unkindly much to Stannis' surprise. Her gaze grew sad as a quiet swayed between them. "As much as I am the only heir to House Targaryen."
"We," Stannis corrected.
Daenerys frowned in confusion
"My grandmother was a Targaryen," Stannis replied, surprised that Daenerys did not know this. "Rhaelle, her name was. Daughter of King Aegon V." It felt odd saying so, his claim to the Targaryen name that echoed the very words of Oldtown during the prelude of Robert’s secession from the Mad King. Stannis had always been a Baratheon, never a Targaryen. Aerys was king, not kin, and if the Lord Steffon ever called him cousin he did so with the weight of formality, not unkindly but not with warmth either. Even as Stannis had vague recollection of Aerys embracing Steffon with his gaunt arms and the talons of his unclipped nails, during the tourney that marked Renly’s birth. Aerys called him cousin as though that was everything that Steffon was and not Lord of Storm’s End.
All of a sudden, Daenerys laughed. Laughed, and laughed, a deep tremor from her belly. Her laughter filled the council room, echoing in the darker corners of the hall where only years ago it had been full of Renly's.
Stannis cringed; he mistrusted laughter but the sound was not unpleasant, and it had been a while since he last heard genuine delight. He waited for it to pass.
"I didn't know that we're cousins," Daenerys said after a while, a smile lingering on her lips. "If we hadn't lost so much for all the good our kinship did for us, I would laugh for years and years until they come to know me as the Dragon Who Laughed."
"I fail to see the jape, my lady," Stannis said, annoyed.
"My brother Viserys spat on the name of your brother and your House as though you were born of The Stranger himself. Yet you are a dragon as well. We ran from your brother's hired swords all our lives," Daenerys continued, her smile gone. She did not grow angry, but the light seemed to have winked out of her violet eyes. "In the end, it was a dragon that chased us to the ends of the earth. Not The Stranger's own heir."
"Robert was not a god, but in his youth many thought him godly," Stannis said. "He was beloved, as much as your own brother had been."
"Viserys was not beloved," Daenerys corrected him.
Stannis shook his head. "I refer to Rhaegar. The Last Dragon, until you came along, my lady."
"We fly in the shadow of our godly brothers, then, you and I. Brothers who left us a war to finish," Daenerys mused. "And I'm no lady."
"As I am no lord. I am the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms," Stannis said, and the fragile peace between them shook at the cracks webbing the thin ice of courtesy they had mustered longer than expected.
"And I am the Mother of Dragons," Daenerys retorted. "I've been many things, Lord Stannis--a khaleesi to the largest khalasar that roamed the Dothraki Sea, the Queen of Meereen, mhysa to my children in the Free Cities--all of these just as much as I am the rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms."
Stannis pursed his lips, his hands tightening on the arm rests of his chair. The very same chair that would have been his had Robert named him Hand of the King instead of Eddard Stark. "You think to usurp me? Daenerys Stormborn, Mother of Dragons, usurper of a usurper."
"One word, my lord of Baratheon, and Drogon will take wing and torch your entire army in their sleep," Daenerys said, a statement of fact more so than a threat.
Stannis held his tongue. She had the truth of it. He was helpless to stop such a power. He could not slay a dragon, and even if he had a naked blade in his hand he was not so brutal as to strike down Daenerys Targaryen where she sat.
"We can marry and rule as king and queen, unite our houses as our forebears once did. There will be peace in this realm," Daenerys said.
It was not a suggestion, spoken as it was with the exhausted wisdom of someone who had married and remarried as need dictated.
I have a wife, Stannis was prepared to say. A wife he left at Winterfell to nurse the frostbite that claimed her toes in the icy cells of Castle Black as her guards were slain in the courtyard during the mutiny of the Night's Watch that struck down its Lord Commander.
Jon Snow, breathed back to life by Melisandre herself, who stood beside his wolf at the frontlines of battle against the Others when, by all the laws of gods and men, he should have already been a corpse, his life's blood spilling from the wounds that marred his body.
Jon Snow, who gasped back into life in the godswood outside the Wall, as Selyse pleaded for her daughter's life and watched as she burned for the name of yet another god.
Stannis could never forget his wife's crazed screams when she clutched at his cloak with frozen fingers. She saved him, she'd said, her shrewd eyes glazed over in the fever dreams of Shireen's death. She saved him and not our daughter.
He shuddered as the memory rattled the noxious, unrelenting grief in his throat.
“But I’m already wed to another," Daenerys continued after a while. She eyed him, her gaze aged beyond her years. "I thought I was coming home, when I flew across the Narrow Sea. I returned to Dragonstone but found nobody there. A garrison--yours, so they say. They quivered at the sight of Drogon perched where the Stone Dragons have stood watch for hundreds of years."
Stannis knew the tale. It was as though Aegon the Conqueror had come again, his men had said.
"Dragonstone's doors are not red," Daenerys said, with a deep sadness Stannis didn't understand. "From the tales Viserys told me, I expected a grand keep that would feel welcoming for anyone that bore blood of the dragon, however much they've strayed from home."
Stannis watched as tears swam in her eyes. She let them fall on her cheeks with the stubborn dignity of someone who'd suffered too much to be afraid of pain.
"But Dragonstone is not my home. Its doors are carved from black stone. Drogon feels the dragonfire that once molded them from molten rock, but I do not." She wiped her cheeks and took a deep breath. "This is not my home, Lord Stannis."
Resolve stilled the shiver of stifled sobs in her throat. "If I look back, I'm lost," Daenerys said, more to herself than Stannis, yet her gaze locked with his. "I've come so far, but I feel as lost as ever. I return from the brink of ruin but return to where, I don't know."
Stannis doesn't either, and not for the first time he sat in silence in the presence of this Targaryen, this Aegon the Conqueror that claimed no lands, and killed no living man for the name of her House, who saved the realm rather than brought it to heel.
He felt a deep, resounding respect for her. "If you take the throne, I will not bend the knee," Stannis said. "The throne is mine by right, ever since the dragon bowed to the stag on the Trident, but I'm tired of war, and so is the realm."
It was Daenerys' turn to listen, and she did so bracing for the worst.
"If I call my banners, I know that barely half of them will fight against a Targaryen. I took Dragonstone in Robert's name even as your father's allies surrounded me. Velaryon, Bar Emmon, Sunglass," his lips twisted. "I was Lord of Dragonstone for almost fifteen years, but they never loved me. But even if they did and fought in my name instead of Targaryen, I know that I will be defeated."
Stannis spoke emotionlessly, with the steady beat of rationality as the only source of strength in his words. He spoke as though hollow, and he was; a king made cold by winter, made hollow at the thaw of war's end.
He had spent many years fighting a war that ended with this; he had fought his own brother, fought the Boltons, fought the Others. He had lost his own heir and, with her, the hope of continuing the Baratheon name through his line. He was tired of fighting, he who was hailed unbending, stubborn and defiant. He will be unbending to the last.
"I will take the black," Stannis said, "If you could spare House Baratheon this small mercy."
Daenerys frowned. "But the Others have been vanquished."
Stannis nodded. "For now. The Great Other still roams free, if such a thing truly exists, and the Long Night is upon us, or so the maesters at Oldtown proclaim. I will do my duty to the realm, even if the throne eludes me yet again."
Daenerys mustered a smile. "Yet again."
Stannis grimaced. "I curse the day Robert ever thought to rebel. If he hadn't, then the crown would not have fallen on me. I curse Cersei Lannister, for not begetting trueborn Baratheons to take up the crown after my brother. I curse many things, but the gods no longer listen to me, as I have not listened to them."
"We can only live with what we have been given," Daenerys agreed.
"Indeed, my lady." Your Grace, Stannis knew he should have said. But the sting of defeat was still sharp, and he couldn't bring himself to say it just yet.
"I thank you for honor," Daenerys said, "but I'm afraid I must prove you wrong. Yet again."
Stannis' frown deepened in surprise.
"This is not my home, my lord," Daenerys sighed. "And I too am tired. Tired of living in places where I am not welcome."
"You are not without allies," Stannis sighed. He loathed to admit the truth but he could never truly hide from it. "The Crownlands--"
Daenerys held up a hand, and Stannis fell silent, albeit bristling at the interruption.
"I have made Meereen mine," Daenerys continued. "And there I will stay and rule as a proper queen should."
Stannis sat uncomprehending.
"We can only live with what we have been given," Daenerys said again. "I was given Meereen and I will finish what I started there." She smiled. "The Iron Throne is yours."
By right, Stannis thought on instinct, only to shake his head when he realized that that wasn't the case anymore.
"Do your duty, my lord, and I will do mine." She rose, the heavy chair scratching on stone. The very same chair once sat by Robert and the Targaryen kings and pretenders that once sat across from their Hands in the three hundred years of their rule over the Seven Kingdoms.
"But never forget that dragons fly in the east," she said, a threat wrapped in farewell. And dragons will never fear to cross the Narrow Sea.