Archive of Our Own

“Five years,” Masha grunted, the word punctuated by the wet thwack of the cloth against stone. “Five years he bides in Lys, only to trot back with a young boy already outgrowin’ his own boots. Aenar, they call him. A fine name for a sellsword’s get don’t you think?”

Her knuckles were red and swollen as she reached into the boiling water and hauled out a silken cloak. It laid heavy in her arms, dripping back into the vat.

The cloak in her hands was crimson red, and it was the royal color worn by the prince who had recently just come back from across the sea.

“He’s a beauty though ain’t he? You can’t deny it. Hair like spun moonlight, he has. They’re sayin’ he’s got the prince’s own face, like a portrait come to life, he is.” Ellyn, the younger servant, wiped sweat from her brow.

“He’s got the prince’s face, aye,” said the older woman as she spat into the wash. “Lad’s already five years old and he’s got the shoulders of a boy of eight. Saw him near the stables. That’s not Lysene blood, that’s common muscle. A man of the earth, that’s who fathered that one.”

As they worked in the lower laundry of the Red Keep, where steam from the lye vats clung thick to the air that had turned the walls wet and damp, their whispers carried easily through the shadows of the arched corridor of the Red Keep.

Ser Duncan the Tall felt the weight of every word.

He was there, lingering in the shadows of the arched corridor, listening. The man was nearly seven feet of meat-and-bone, yet in that moment, he felt small enough to vanish into the walls of the keep.

The gossip about Prince Aerion’s infamous bastard was a sharp edge to him, and it’d cut through a scab Dunk thought had long since hardened. When the washerwoman spat those words about common muscle, his palms automatically went damp.

He leaned back against the cool stone, and closed his eyes. The current man of five-and-twenty faded away, and in his place stood the same green boy again, shivering in the mud of Ashford Meadow with a hammering heart, waiting for the rain to fall.

. . .

He could still feel the heat of where his hand had clamped onto the prince’s arm. Dunk’d only meant to save Tanselle, to stop the prince from breaking the girl’s fingers for the crime of a slighted dragon but he’d done the unthinkable instead.

He’d laid hands on royal blood.

But the worst of it? He hadn’t known. He hadn't known the prince was an omega. Because he’d seen only seen the prince from afar. And in his haste to pull the girl away, Dunk had gripped the prince’s wrist with the full strength of a man of his size.

He hadn’t felt the shift in the air until the moment of contact, a sudden spike of pheromones that had cut through the smell of the tourney grounds.

When the contact happened, the prince didn’t snarl or strike back. Instead, he recoiled with a strangled gasp, his face paled as he clutched the arm Dunk had touched. The silence between them shattered as a sudden thick scent hit the puppet tent, turning every head in the crowd toward the prince, it had even made the passing onlookers drifting back, their nostrils flaring at the heavy pheromones.

Shame had practically reeked off Aerion , and he immediately fled the scene without a word, his guards scrambling to keep pace.

However, Dunk, as simple and thick-headed as ever, did the only thing he knew how to do: he went to prince’s tent in the dead of night to beg forgiveness.

‘She had been only a girl,’ he thought.

Perhaps, if he offered up his own life instead, the prince would forget her and turn his wrath on him.

Gods what a fool he was...

When night came and he pushed through the heavy hangings, and the heat inside had nearly driven him back.

It was a wet, cloying smell, so thick with the scent of sweet citrus and something more acrid, something that bit at the back of his throat. Wildfire.

It was the smell of Aerion’s heat.

Aerion was a ruin, the prince was seen huddled on a pile of furs, on his own nest made of pillows and blankets, his silver-gold hair tangled like a bird’s nest. Sweat glistened across his beautiful, delicate face, and his eyes are closed, as he shifted his weight and rubbed his lower half beneath the sleek of the nest he had so meticulously arranged to his liking.

At that moment, Dunk thought the princeling looked less like dragon royalty and more like a drowned cat, shivering despite the warmth.

“M-M’lord,” Dunk had finally rasped, his face flushing red at the sight as his voice cracked, completely snapping the prince from his daze. “I-I’ve come to seek forgiveness, and for the girl.”

Aerion looked up, and his eyes weren’t the soft, pale violet Dunk had first noted, they had sharpened into something darker, while his pupils were fully blown out.

He was completely drunk in his own heat, and his pale skin flushed a dark feverish pink.

“F-Forgive me,” Dunk stammered, as his eyes darted toward the exit.

The realization of what he had interrupted hit him immediately after. “I... I hadn't known, I should not have barged in. I’ll return when your grace is... when the fever has passed.”

He began to back away, his hand already reaching for the heavy tent flap. But before he could retreat, a panicked hiss cut through the tent.

“Stay!” Aerion commanded, while his voice sounded breathless. One hand shot out from the furs, clawing at the air as if to catch Dunk. “You do not... you do not leave until I permit it...  ser.”

“You...,” the prince continued, while his voice sounded eerily quiet.

“... You lay your hands on me, you bruise the dragon’s skin with your common filth, and then have the audacity to barge into my nest without permission,”

“I should have you flayed for that... I should watch the skin peeled from your back for even looking at me like this.”

Dunk felt the blood drain from his face and his knees nearly gave away. “M-m’lord, I crave your pardon!” he stammered while bowing his head so low he could only see the prince’s discarded silks.

“I meant no insult, I... I did not know. Please, m’lord. I’ve come to offer whatever you require. My life for the girl’s, if that is what it takes. Do with me what you will, only let the puppeteer go.”

Then, Aerion’s anger seemed to shift, as if something else took over his sense, and it’d curdled into something predatory as he watched the giant of a man grovel below him.

His eyes slowly traced the exceptionally tall and huge alpha's frame, his gaze traveling from the thick of Dunk’s neck, down the expanse of his heavy shoulders, and finally to his powerful legs. As he measured the giant’s sheer size against his current position, a predatory idea took hold, and his mouth pulled into a faint and cruel curve.

“Hah, the giant,” the prince had whispered, a laugh catching in his throat. “the big, heroic knight comes to save his little toy.” He leaned forward, his eyes tracking the line of Dunk’s stature. “You offer your life? How very... noble.

The silence that followed was heavy.

Aerion leaned back into the furs, his gaze returning to the thick line of Dunk's shoulders. “Now,” he said, as his voice dropped low, “What exactly are you willing to sacrifice, Ser Duncan?”

Suddenly, the tent flap was jerked aside. A beta guard stepped in, hand on his sword hilt as he scanned the dim interior. “My prince? We heard the commotion. Is this man bothering—”

“Get out!” Aerion barked, the command immediately cutting through the air inside the tent.

He didn't even look back at the soldier, because his eyes remained fixed on Dunk’s bowed head. “Leave us and post yourself at the entrance. If anyone— anyone at all, tries to enter before I say otherwise, kill them. Do you understand?”

“B-but your grace... he laid hands on you,” the guard stammered, confused by the lack of a cry for help. “The law says—”

“The law says you do not enter my presence without an invitation when the fever is upon me,” Aerion countered.

“...And, he is not bothering me. He is... penance. My father sent for a septon, did he not? To pray for my humors?”

The guard blinked as a drop of sweat was seen rolling down his temple. “Yes, your grace, but he is not...”

“This is he,” Aerion lied, the words sliding off his tongue with practiced ease and composure. Even though, he hadn’t look composed a few seconds ago.

His grip tightened on the sheets, and his knuckles white. “A– hedge-septon. Of the warrior. He stays to administer the rites.”

He paused for a moment, then sighed.

“If you speak a word of his presence to the Prince of Dragonstone or my father before the sun rises, I will have your tongue served to the hounds.” Aerion finally muttered, and Dunk’d noted the threat in the prince’s voice while his head still held low.

The guard looked at Dunk, nearly seven feet of common muscle with no tonsure and a face that screamed more of a stable boy rather than a holy man, and then back at the prince’s bared, sharp teeth.

But a prince’s whim was more dangerous than the truth.

“As you command, your grace,” the guard finally whispered, bowing low and backing out.

As the heavy flap fell shut, plunging them back into the dimness, the silence returned, heavier than before.

Aerion sighed and rose then, swaying and unsteady on his feet and struggling to even stay upright. When he moved closer, the scent of him finally struck Dunk in full. Gone was the masked fragrance Dunk had first encountered; now, Aerion reeked of a pungent musk that signaled he was in heat.

Dunk should have left immediately.

A smarter man would have turned and run back to the safety of his cold campfire.

Alas, he was slow and stupid, as Ser Arlan would often call him, thick as a castle wall.

When Aerion stumbled onto him, Dunk had reached out to steady him. His huge, scarred hand had closed around the prince’s narrow shoulder. It was meant to be a knightly gesture, but the moment the skin touched skin, the air in the pavilion seemed to catch fire.

Aerion let out a choked gasp at the contact, his body jerking as if he’d been burned by his own blood. He leaned into Dunk’s strength even as he bared his teeth in a snarl.

“You... no one—” Aerion wheezed, his voice rasped against the silence of the tent. The violet color in his eyes as he looked up was almost gone, drowned out by pupils so large they made him look like some feral animal. And it made Dunk’s own skin crawl.

“I-I should have your eyes for this, you giant... you stupid, clumsy oaf,” he spat, though his hand was already curling into the fabric of Dunk’s tunic, pulling him even closer. “For seeing me like this... for daring to even touch me with these rough, common hands.”

He let out a shaky, breathless laugh, his forehead dropping against Dunk’s chest. “But since you are so eager to offer your life for your puppet girl... perhaps I shall let you spend it here, serving a real dragon.”

But as Dunk tried to retreat, the Prince didn’t strike him. He surged. Aerion lunged at the alpha with surprising strength, slender hands already digging into the rough wool of the hedge knight’s tunic like talons.

Before the knight could find his footing, Aerion hauled the seven-foot alpha down into the soft, but messy nest he had made. No words passed between them, for the command came from instinct alone, the call of an omega in heat, as his scent pressed insistently against Dunk until the alpha could no more ignore it than he could ignore his own pulse.

The stripling princeling climbed over him immediately, knees locking around Dunk’s massive hips as he settled atop the alpha. His movements were quick and almost feral like an animal, driven by the need to bury himself in the deep scent that clung to Dunk’s skin. He pressed himself close, flattening against the larger body, and dove for the crook of the man’s neck, breathing in sharp, uneven gasps as he chased the warmth he had been craving.

Dunk’s common blood turned to liquid.

His hands, scarred by the plow and the lance, felt large as they found the delicate silk of Aerion’s tunic.

“M-my prince, the guards- they will— ” Dunk started, his voice panicking.

Aerion said nothing as he ground down into Dunk’s lap, chasing relief from the heat coiling just beneath his belly.

He leaned closer, his teeth grazing the bigger man’s nape, drawn helplessly to the irresistible musk, while scenting and marking Duncan, simultaneously being marked in return, blurring the lines between their scents until they were almost indistinguishable.

Then he had pulled away, if only for a moment, to kiss the alpha, and then went back to assaulting the man’s neck.

Dunk was lost.

Lunkish as he is, and still a green boy in such matters, with no notion of what was wanted of him, nor how to answer it.

“Help me… gods, just give it to me,… I can’t—” Aerion’s plea broke apart as searing heat flooded through his entire body.

Dunk then realised, that it was the prince’s first heat. And it was a pretty bad one. All at once, it finally sank into him.

Of all the alphas who might have found him, it had to be him. And of all omegas, it had to be Aerion Targaryen.

Dunk prided himself on his honor, but he was also a young alpha who had never felt a pull this violent.

And it didn’t help that the prince’s scent had curdled into something sweet— a sweetness so enticing that it threatened to drag Duncan headlong into a rut.

His own instincts was already begging him to knot the prince, to bury the ache and to finally ease the heat consuming the writhing man in his arms.

Dunk’s knuckles turned white as he tried to shove himself back, his boots dragging through the dirt, but Aerion let out a sound, a broken, high-pitched whimper that bypassed Dunk’s reason and went straight to his marrow.

The sound that left him was raw, something too close to desperation. He tried to look away, but Aerion’s hands, clawed at Dunk's tunic.

The prince then arched, as he grinded the wetness of his trousers against the alpha's growing ache beneath his breeches, his fevered skin searing through the thin wool of Dunk's clothes.

But the final thread snapped when the Aerion’s teeth had grazed the pulse point at Dunk’s neck, and it’d hit his scent glands, it was a desperate, clumsy claim that sent a jolt down on Duncan’s spine.

And that honorable part of his brain — the part that remembered his knightly oaths and consequences — simply turned off.

His restraint finally snapped.

He didn’t unlace the silk tunic; he simply ripped it, the fabric parting like easily like parchment to reveal the pale, unblemished skin of the omegan prince.

It all happened too fast,

One second he was laying flat on his back, frozen, watching through hooded eyes as the prince ground his wetness against the alpha’s rigid cum-slicked trousers, and then the next he was already on top of the prince, pinning him down the silken sheets.

The contrast was a profanity: the moonlight-pale skin of the Targaryen bloodline pressed against the rough, sweat-stained wool of a lowly hedge knight.

Things moved in a haze of heat.

Dunk had already stripped down, spurred on by the the prince’s desperate clawing for skin-to-skin contact. Then, his heavy body finally crashed down, his weight alone pinning Aerion into the bedding and stealing his breath. Instead of struggling, the little princeling let out a moan so shameful, yielding entirely to the man looming over him.

At that same moment, his own pride flared, as he opened his mouth to spit a fresh insult or a curse, the words were suddenly, swallowed by a gasp of relief.

“You—oh,”

The sound immediately died in his throat, the moment he felt the Duncan’s massive, burning cock pressing between his folds, before sliding effortlessly into his dripping wet cunt.

The prince let out a broken, high-pitched keen, “A-ah... I-It’s too—” he stammered, stupidly.

Duncan said no words, he only pushed in slowly and deeply.

“O-Oh—”

It’s too big... thought Aerion, but he had none the care in the world because it’d also felt fulfilling, as if some missing piece had at last been set in place. For a fleeting moment, he felt… whole, complete.

In that state, Aerion only knew and needed the relief of the alpha’s knot and the end of the ache.

As soon as he adjusted to the massive size, “More... ” he whined.

His slender arms immediately wrapped around the bigger man’s neck, pulling that scent in, and mixing with his own.

Duncan obeyed his prince’s word and pulled back, then sank in once more.

“A-ah…,” the prince whimpered as his cunt was slowly, stretched wide, the size of Duncan too immense for him, and his pride immediately forgotten as the bigger man slowly drove in deep, then, finally deep enough and bottomed out, connecting the tip of his cock with the prince’s womb.

Aerion’s eyes rolled back in pleasure, his spine snapping into an arch as he was driven back into the nest of pillows. “Oh...” he managed, barely.

“G-Good...?” Duncan murmured in his ears.

“...Y— Yes...” he whimpered. Then Duncan made an understanding sound and pulled back his cock, and slammed deep once more.

“—Please,” He choked, he was desperate for the knot, and Duncan was so perfect for him.

Then, said man, didn’t hold back, as his hips had already began hitting fast, pounding and fucking into Aerion with a brutal pace.

Now, Aerion was too busy moaning, sweating and aching.

“Hngh—! H-hah… D-Duncan…” he wailed, his fingers locking around Dunk’s wrist as if it were his only lifeline. While above him, Duncan’s hands were knotted into the sheets on either side of his head, pinning him down.

With every deep, bottoming-out thrust, Duncan’s cock slapped continuously against Aerion’s backside, causing searing heat spreading through the Aerion’s body, making the omega leak even more with his own slick. It’d sent shockwaves through Aerion’s system, melting his royal pride into a mess of high-pitched kitten-like whimpers.

Meanwhile, every thought of the puppeteer, Ashford, or the mud vanished for Dunk. The discipline he’d practiced his whole life failed, directed entirely by his rawest impulses. He felt the prince’s nails raked across Dunk’s spine, carving into his skin.

“Don’t...” Aerion whined, his voice cracking as he marked the commoner’s flesh as his own.

“D-Don’t you dare pull away...” He was being physically conquered, yet he still find it in himself to mutter a few words, while clawing at Dunk, as if trying to merge their skin.

The prince’s legs, pale and trembling, locked around Dunk’s massive waist, and pulled the alpha deeper, his breath coming in heavy against Dunk's ear. “...Do it,” he whined more, his pride finally snapping.

“Fill me... now... breed me, fill me with your pups! D- Damn you, just— do it... please, please— please!”

Dunk didn't—couldn't—answer.

His thick, scarred fingers gripped Aerion’s hips with enough pressure to leave dark purple marks on the prince’s pale skin. He pressed his body into the omega with heavy force as he continued to fuck in and out of the prince’s tight wet cunt, while the wooden frame of the bed creaked and cracked under their combined weight.

He let out a ragged moan — more so like a half-grunt, half-prayer — as he tried to find his footing in the midst of it. But every time he moved back to pull away, Aerion’s legs only tightened, locking him there.

The air in the pavilion grew even thicker, heavy with the scent of Dunk’s musk mingling with the sweetness of Aerion’s slick.

Breathing it felt like inhaling liquid.

Clouded by the haze of his rut, Dunk lost himself in the rhythm, pounding into the prince’s weeping wet flesh. Then, his pace turned frantic, and a growl started deep in the his chest, a sound that even Aerion felt in his own bones.

“Yes... oh god—” Aerion breathed, his eyes rolling back as his voice trailed off into a whimper.

“A-ah... there... just like that— h-hah!” he was mess now, leaking absolutely everywhere while Duncan continued his relentless assault on him.

“G-gods…” Dunk’s voice was a wreck now, absolutely lost, while his hand was against the frame of the bed, his fingers dug into the wood so hard until it groaned and splintered. He was trapped. His hips stuttered in short, uncontrollable jerks as his knot began to swell, a final warning screaming through his mind.

Dunk’s panic spiked as he reached the point of no return. He tried bracing his massive arms against the headboard, frantically trying to wrench himself back to avoid the looming disaster of accidentally permanently marking a Targaryen prince.

A choked, desperate “No—” tore from his throat as he struggled to retreat, but Aerion’s legs snapped shut like a vice around his waist. And the prince’d hooked his ankles tightly, yanking the alpha back down.

“No... m-my prince, I-I cannot hold back... p-please let go...”

“H-hah, aah...!” Aerion moaned as he pulled Dunk tighter, purposefully locking his ankles behind the alpha’s back. He hauled Dunk closer, refusing to let him retreat, desperate for the knot to claim him. The alpha’s girth monstrously large — filled him so completely perfect, it blurred the line between pleasure and pain.

Then, Dunk’s head thrashed back and a deep moan erupted from within his chest. He finally spilled his seed deep inside the warmth of the omega's womb, his body buckled under violent tremors as he finally surrendered. Any hope of escape vanished as the knot was fully formed, fusing the pair together.

Just beneath him, Aerion’s entire frame was shaking to the brim. 

The knight felt the intense, involuntary contractions of the prince's internal muscles clamping down, molding to the girth of his own swelling cock. Whil his back arched sharply, his body finally locking in place as the final, spasming waves of the orgasm took hold.

They laid together for a moment , knot locking them in place, while Duncan breathed heavily atop the prince, as the prince tried to regain his composure. Somehow, Aerion didn’t seem like he had recovered, 'stead, it was very obvious that only one knot did little to sate his hunger, if anything, it’d only made him more feral.

Even before the knot had fully receded, he was already breathless, “More,” he slurred.

He clawed on Duncan’s back while begging the alpha to fill him again.

“More,” said Aerion again, insistent and reflective, and dug his feet into the mattress and tilted his hips ups, as if inviting Duncan.

Duncan could not resist the prince’s request. He’d even made a pleased noise, while waiting for the knot to ease.

As soon as the tension eased enough to slip free from the prince's hole, Dunk’s logic has long since burned away. His hands immediately snatched the prince’s hips, and hauled him up.

Then, he flipped the prince effortlessly, immediately shoving him face-down into the tangled nest of sheets that Aerion had made awhile ago to take him again.

“Please... inside me...” Aerion was a wreck, his voice muffled as his cheek pressed into the sheets. While his hips were forced high by Duncan into the air.

Dunk didn’t wait. He loomed over him, his shadow swallowing Aerion whole, while positioning himself— his tip pressing against the wet, heated opening of the little princeling’s dripping cum-slicked cunt, feeling the wetness coat him instantly.

Then, he pushed deep inside, one immediate thrust that bottomed out his cock fully inside the prince’s hole again.

“Mmgff—!”, Aerion panted for a lack of name, fingers clawed blindly at the furs, with muffled moans as his royal composure was completely annihilated.

Dunk responded with a snarl, as his self-control vanished. He leaned down, burying his face in the curve of Aerion’s neck, his teeth lightly grazing the sensitive scent gland there. 

The pair continued with a feverish desperation that didn’t break until the sun rose, leaving them both knotted and exhausted in the morning light.

By the time the moon began to dip,

The prince lay limp against the Myrish carpets, looking hollowed out and fragile in the cooling air. He was heavy with the evidence of the encounter, the alpha’s seed spilled inside of him and everywhere, slicking his pale skin and pooling onto the dark, matted furs beneath them.

The haze in the prince’s eyes had finally cleared, leaving him staring blankly at the silk canopy, his chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven hitches. When the knot finally released inside him and Dunk was able to pull away, the silence of the tent felt louder than a battlefield.

Aerion immediately rolled onto his side, his skin flushed and slicked.

He looked like a dragon that had been dragged through the mire, humiliated, broken, though utterly satiated by the lowly alpha he despised.

The transition was instant.

When the heat began to ebb, it gave way to something colder, loathing even. Aerion did not so much as glance his way.

The prince pulled a discarded sheet over his bruised hips, his trembling hands the only sign of the night’s affairs.

“Get out,” Aerion whispered, his voice cutting through the humid, salt-slicked darkness. He had immediately retreated into the shadows of the hangings after regaining his senses, his pale body trembling not with heat, but with a burgeoning but murderous shame.

“Put on your rags and crawl back to your hole, hedge knight. If you ever look at me again— if you so much as breathe a word of this to the stableboys you call kin, I will see you flayed. I will watch the crows eat your eyes while you’re still screaming.”

Dunk hadn’t answered; there was no breath left in him for words. With his head bowed and his heart feeling like a cold weight of lead, he gathered his discarded clothes and fled into the morning mist of Ashford, the scent of the prince still clinging to his skin like a brand.

. . .

In the harsh clarity of the dawn, the weight of their folly felt absolute.

They had been young, Dunk was barely a man grown and still wearing a dead man’s armor while Aerion was a prince blinded by his own brittle brilliance and arrogance

And, profoundly stupid, they were, playing with the fire of their own blood without understanding that it burned the high-born and the low-born all just the same. But course, Duncan had been too thick-headed to see the trap, and Aerion too arrogant to realize that even a dragon could be anchored to the earth by a single mistake.

The aftermath lingered, leaving damage that couldn’t be ignored.

When the maesters confirmed the scent of a developing knot-seed within the prince a month later, his father, Maekar, had burned hotter than any dragonfire.

The prince was immediately disinherited, his name struck from the immediate succession, and cast out across the Narrow Sea to the Free Cities; for he had no use of a tainted scion, an omega whose worth had withered before any alpha lordling could claim him.

Dunk had spent those months in a daze of hollow terror, waking every dawn expecting the iron bite of the headsman’s axe.

Yet, the summons never came. It was then when he’d realised that Aerion had kept the secret, though not out of mercy. So, on the day of the exile, Duncan had risked everything to stand on the salt-slicked docks of King’s Landing.

He had begged the prince, to follow, to be the shield for the omega whose body he had known, tainted, and whose burden he had sired.

But Aerion had turned to him, his violet eyes polished to a hatred so pure and spat out,

“You are a mistake in the blood,” Aerion hissed, the wind whipping his silver hair across his face. “If you follow me, I will tell my father the truth, and I will watch him rip your heart out with his bare hands. Stay in your mud, Duncan. I never want to see your face again.”

. . .

But the gods were fond of cruel jests, and five years was a short time for a dragon to stay in the dark.

A few years had gone by and the line of the dragon had grown dangerously thin; a summer spring sickness and a structural losses in the family had left King Maekar, the recently crowned ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, looking at his remaining sons with a desperate, pragmatic eye.

In the end, disgrace could be washed away by a simple royal decree when the survival of the dynasty was at stake. So the King had relented, calling his son home not out of love, but out of a grim need for heirs by his side.

And so, the prince had returned from exile, with him, the evidence of that night had taken shape.

Duncan recalled the feast in the Great Hall as a blur of silver and gold.

He stood behind the chair of Prince Aegon, Egg, who was now a young man, though he still looked up at his knight with that same wide-eyed devotion.

Duncan’s armor was now polished, his shield re-painted with the elm and the shooting star, but he still felt like a fraud among the high borns and the dragons.

Across the hall, Aerion sat on the High Table, near the King.

He looked thinner, Dunk recalled, and his edges were sharper, his violet eyes hooded, tired, if one could say, but he remained beautiful, Dunk thought.

Beside him sat the boy. Aenar.

He was exactly as the maids described, the look of a perfect Targaryen royalty to the casual observer. His hair was a shimmering veil of silver, and his eyes, a piercing violet.

The hedge knight watched the way the boy sat. The lad didn’t slouch, but sat with his back straight as a spear, his chest puffed out, his large hands resting flat on the table like two heavy stones.

Aerion’s hand was never far from the child, and it was a strange, restless vigilance.

Because every time Aenar reached for a cup with a heavy, swinging arm, Aerion’s fingers would immediately snap out, catching the boy’s wrist. He didn’t shake him, but his grip was firm, a silent reminder.

Dunk caught the movement of Aerion’s lips, a muted reprimand drowned in the hall’s thunder — the private scolding of a parent to a child.

The prince then leaned in, his silver hair brushing the boy’s cheek as he adjusted the high, stiff collar of Aenar’s doublet. He tugged the fabric tight, masking the breadth of the boy’s neck, his fingers working with a frantic, nervous precision. He looked like a mother trying to keep a lid on a secret that was growing too large for its box.

For a moment, the boy’s gaze wandered. While his mother remained fixated on him, he let his eyes drift over the crowd, passing over the Kingsguard in their enameled finery before settling on the giant at the back of the room.

Duncan’s breath hitched. My son.

As if driven by pure instinct, Aenar’s brow furrowed, and it was exactly the same deep, confused furrow that Dunk would often saw in the mirror every morning. The boy continued staring at him, tilting his head as if trying to remember the familiar looking man.

This, of course, had not gone unnoticed, for Aerion’s head snapped around at once, his eyes finding Dunk across the sea of feasting lords and ladies in the hall. Then his mouth twisted into a familiar sneer.

But beneath all that malice, Dunk recognized the truth. It was there in the way Aerion immediately shifted his chair, pulling the boy closer to his side and draping a protective arm across the back of Aenar’s seat.

He was shielding him.

Because Aerion had not told the King, he feared people would begin to recognize the child’s oddly similar resemblance to Duncan.

To confess would be to sign Duncan’s death warrant for tainting the royal line, and perhaps his own as well.

However, it’d baffled Dunk that an omega like Aerion, defined by his ego and arrogance, had chosen to keep the child alive, nursing the “mistake” in Lys, and caring for a bastard child.

“He’s a big lad,”

Egg whispered, pulling Duncan from his thoughts as he leaned back toward him. “Aerion’s boy. Strong, too. Nearly broke my hand when we shook.”

“Aye,” Duncan managed to say, his voice sounding distant. “He looks… strong, m’lord.”

Duncan remained at his post, a silent knight in the back of the room.

He watched as Aenar fumbled with a delicate plum. The boy’s large fingers were clumsy with the small fruit. Aerion didn’t snap at him; instead, he took the fruit, sliced it into neat, manageable pieces with a silver fruit knife, and placed them on the boy’s plate. And he did it with a sharp, defensive sort of care, the way a man might polish a tarnished blade before showing it to his captain.

The sight made Duncan feel the familiar, dull ache of longing, yearning to have a family of his own. But alas, he was a hedge knight after all, a man of no account, permitted only to guard such families, but never to belong to one.

. . .

Then, a high, trilling giggle snapped him back to the present.

“I’m tellin’ you, ‘twas a pirate!” Jeyne giggled, leaning over a basket of steaming linens. “A Lysene corsair with rings in his ears and a ship made of cedar. My brother works the docks, and he says the Prince spent half his exile in the stews of the Ragman’s Harbor. He says the omegas there go mad for the sea-salt scent of an alpha captain.”

“A pirate?” Masha snorted, the sound echoing off the ceiling. “Use your head, girl. If ‘twere a pirate, the lad would be lean and quick, built for the rigging. Have you seen the boy? Five namedays old and he’s got thighs like tree trunks, he does.”

“Maybe a blacksmith then,” Ellyn, piped up from the corner, scrubbing a stained tunic. “A master smith from the Street of Steel who followed him across the water? They say the Prince always had a taste for the… well, the rougher sort of alpha.”

“A smith wouldn’t have the coin to keep Aerion in silks for five years,” Masha countered, wringing out the heavy cloak with a vicious twist. “No, I’ll tell you what it was. It was definitely a sellsword, plain as day. One of those giants from the Golden Company. A man who stands seven feet tall and eats a whole pig for breakfast. Look at the boy’s jaw, he didn’t get that from some perfumed Lysene magister.”

“I heard a different story,” whispered a girl who had been quiet until now. “I heard from a page in the Queen’s ballroom that the Prince met a Northman on the ship. A man with the blood of the First Men. That’s why the boy is so quiet, I reckon. Because he’s got the cold wildling blood in his bones.”

Outside the doorway, Dunk felt a bead of sweat roll down the back of his neck. He stood in the corridor, supposedly on his way to the halls of the Red Keep, but every word from the laundry room pressed against him. Those gossips had spread through King’s Landing, rumors no one knew he had a part in.

So, he stared straight ahead, hands folded over the pommel of his sword, his face calm, though a heaviness settled in his chest that no one could see.

A pirate. A smith. A giant from the Golden Company.

He thought of it, his mind flashing to the reality, the cramped cabin on the ship to Lys, the journey out of Ashford, and the way Aerion had looked at him with a mixture of predatory hunger and absolute disgust.

But the sharpest sting was the scent that had followed.

It was the smell of Duncan’s own blood taking root, a slow-blooming sweetness that signaled the babe growing within the prince. He could smell his own son in every breath he took, a primal tether that turned his heart into a hollow, aching weight.

He felt a cold sweat prickle his neck at Masha’s words, the idea that he had fundamentally changed the prince, dragging a dragon down into the dirt, was a weight heavier than any armor.

Then, the world suddenly narrowed.

Duncan’s pulse thrummed in his ears, a frantic rhythm that drowned out the chatter. He looked down the long, torch-lit hall and his heart leaped.

There, emerging from the shadows, was the boy. His boy, Aenar.

The child was barely five winters old, and was walking with a heavy, deliberate gait that seemed too weary for his small frame.

His silver hair, the unmistakable hallmark of dragon-blood, was bright even in the dim light, though tangled all to seven hells of wells, sticking out every which way like he had crawled through a sewer. Though the sight itself twisted something deep in Dunk’s chest.

He stopped three paces from Duncan and looked up, his violet eyes was much like his father Aerion’s, yet lacking his cruelty and only innocence’s. The prince’s eyes had always held a fire in them that made a man like Dunk uneasy, however, this boy’s eyes held only questions.

Seven save me, Dunk thought. It was like looking into a mirror.

The boy didn’t say a word, but he immediately adjusted his posture, pulling his shoulders back and planting his feet wide, an exact mimicry of the tall knight currently roaming the halls of the keep. Though, it was a clumsy little stance, adorable even, but it was near enough to make a man smile. Dunk knew it well enough.

“Ser knight?” the boy asked, his voice surprisingly deep for a lad his age. “Have you seen my mother?“

Dunk felt the world tilt beneath his feet. The boy meant the prince, he knew. The prince was the only parent the lad had ever known. Even so, the words rose in Dunk’s throat, thick and choking, before he could force them back down.

“...The prince is in the solar, your grace,” he managed to say.

The boy beamed as he nodded, turned and stomped away toward the heavy doors.

Duncan watched the back of his head, the broadness of his small shoulders, and heard the laundry girls burst into a fresh peal of laughter about a “Dothraki Khal” being the secret sire.

He closed his eyes and prayed to the crone for the wisdom to stay silent, and to the warrior for the strength not to weep.

As King Maekar’s reign grew long and gray, the atmosphere of the Red Keep shifted. The fire of the dragon was cooling, replaced by a grim silent duty. It was in this aging court that the gossip found new life that no longer whispered in the halls of the keep, but down in the dirt and straw where the real work was done.

The stables were a sanctuary of sorts, mostly because the noblemen were too busy drowning themselves in the King’s arbor gold to bother the men who actually worked for a living.

Wat, the head groom, was picking a stone out of a mare’s hoof, his breathing heavy in the cool autumn air, when the news of a second bastard babe’s birth finally trickled down from the buttery.

Pate leaned against a stall door, his eyes dancing with the malicious glee. He lowered his voice, drawing Wat and the stableboy into a conspiratorial circle.

“I’d wager my favorite spurs it was the Dornishman,” Pate hissed, the words tasting like copper. “They’ve got that dark hair and intense, brooding ways. It’s a different kind of alpha heat, isn’t it? Not like the cold fire of the North or the golden bluster of the Reach. My brother serves in the kitchens, and he says the Prince’s chambers smelled of jasmine and sun-baked sand for three days after the Feast of the Virgin. He says you could hear the Prince’s pride being broken right through his chambers during the night— low moans, just the sounds of a princeling getting his world turned upside down.”

Wat grunted, his interest piqued despite himself. “But the girl’s hair… brown is a common color, Pate. Dornish hair is black as a raven’s wing, usually. A sack of grain, the boy said.”

“Aye, but under the torchlight? It’s got a reddish glint, they say,” Pate countered, weaving the lie with the skill of a master tapster. “Like the red sands of the Greenblood. And the babe’s skin isn’t pale as milk like the boy Aenar’s, it’s got a flush to it, a sturdiness. Ser Qyle is a man of the desert, all lean muscle and dark, with hungry eyes. The pretty princeling probably found himself a bit of rough trade to scratch an itch that a ‘civilized’ alpha couldn’t reach. Imagine it: a Prince of the Blood, sprawled in the dirt of the godswood, being worked over by a Dornishman who smells of spices and sweat. It’s enough to make a Septon faint.”

The stableboy nodded eagerly, his eyes wide. “They say the Prince didn’t even call for the Grand Maester’s moon tea up until the very end. He wanted the ‘savage’ blood to take root, some are saying. That he’s trying to spit in King Maekar’s eye by bringing a brood of half-breeds into the Red Keep.”

“He’s bringing a brood of monsters into the Keep... creatures what’ll turn out just like them unruly Blackfyre pretenders...,” Wat muttered, looking back at the mare’s hoof. “First the boy and now a girl with the hair of a peasant. It’s like the dragon is trying to turn himself into a dray horse. It’s unnatural. An omega of his standing should be mated to a Lord Paramount, not some wandering spearman from the south.”

“Unless,” Pate added, his voice dropping to a whisper, “the Prince isn’t being ‘mated’ at all. Maybe he’s just being used. Maybe he likes the weight of a common man. They say some omegas crave the dirt after they’ve spent too long in the clouds. They crave an alpha who doesn’t care about their crown, only about the knot.”

Wat grunted, letting the mare’s hoof drop with a heavy thud that echoed through the stable. “The girl’s small, they say. Not a giant like the boy, Aenar. But she’s sturdy. The midwife told the cook she’s made of ironwood. All thick bone and heavy muscle, even for a babe. Born with a full head of dark brown curls and a scream that shook the rafters, like a war-horn sounding in the night. That’s definitely no delicate dragon-hatchling.”

The air in the stables seemed to grow heavier, thick because of the dirty thrill of the gossip.

The stableboys picked at the Prince’s dignity like crows on a carcass, dissecting the “miracle” of his child whilst spinning a narrative of Dornishmen sires and garden trysts, pinning the deed on some imaginary man who had likely never even shared a word with Aerion, all the while oblivious to the irony that the actual man they were inventing — the one who had actually felt the prince’s nails rake his back — was standing close enough to hear their very heartbeats.

Wat then paused, wiping his grease-stained hands on a rag as he looked toward the end of the stables.

There, standing in the flickering amber light of a single torch, was a horse that seemed better suited for a giant than a man was a massive, slab-sided horse with a neck like a tree trunk and hooves the size of dinner plates. It was a beast that looked more like a war-elephant than a destrier, a nightmare of muscle and raw power.

And standing beside it, dwarfing even the great horse, was the man who had become a permanent fixture in the prince’s shadow.

The white cloak of the Kingsguard was supposed to be the highest honor a knight could achieve, yet as Duncan stood in the dim stable, it felt like a shroud.

By some twisted, cruel irony of the Gods, King Maekar had assigned the former hedge knight to the prince’s door the very second the pregnancy had been confirmed.

The King was an older man now, his once-fierce fire dampened by the relentless weariness of his duty to the crown and the Iron Throne. Maekar’s face had become a map of grim lines, a testament to the realization that his son, Aerion, was a lost cause to the Targaryen name.

So, he had simply washed his hands of the scandal with a heavy, final sigh.

“Let the former hedge knight guard him,” the King had muttered in the council chambers, his voice thick with a father’s exhaustion. “No alpha lord in the Seven Kingdoms would ever deign to claim a brood of base-born bastards, nor the omega who birthed them. Let Aerion rot in his own disgrace with a stone for a shadow.”

It was a perfect arrangement for a King who wanted to forget, but a slow death for the man in the white cloak.

To the world, Duncan was the perfect guard: too simple to judge, too loyal to whisper, and too large to bypass.

Duncan’s hand paused on the horse’s flank, his knuckles white.

He stood with his back to them, his movements deliberate and slow. He worked the comb over the horse’s flank with a rhythmic, hypnotic force, the metal shh-shh sound cutting through the air like a blacksmith’s file.

He looked exactly like a statue carved from the very ironwood Wat had spoken of, unmoving and unblinking.

“Look at him,” Pate whispered, nodding toward the towering silhouette.

“The King’s and Prince Aegon’s favorite sentinel. Imagine standing at the door while the Prince brings in his ‘guests,’ and trying to pretend he doesn’t see a thing. He’s got the strength of ten men and the wits of a turnip.”

“He acts like stone statue,” Wat muttered, watching the way Duncan’s shoulder blades rippled under his skin. “And statues don’t gossip. That’s why he’s still got his head. If he had half the brain for scandal that you do, Pate, he’d have been shortened by a foot years ago.”

Duncan’s hand faltered for the briefest of seconds, the currycomb stuttering against the horse’s hide.

The gossip was a lie. It was all a lie.

His mind drifted back to how Aelyn had actually come to be.

It hadn’t been a “dornish knight” or a “feast-night accident.” It had been a night of another secret affair between the Prince and the Knight, months after Aerion’s return from exile.

. . .

Duncan had seen him in the torchlit gallery, Aerion— beautiful as he always was, though, more mature now than when Duncan had last seen him five years ago in Ashford — was swaying slightly from the wine of a long council dinner as a young Stormlander lord cornered him.

The alpha had been too close, his hand resting on the small of Aerion’s back, a sight that’d made Duncan’s vision turn red at the edges. Dunk was merely a kingsguard, of course, a man of no lineage, but the protective instinct in him had flared violently.

So he had intervened under the guise of “duty,” his tall and massive shadow falling over the pair like a mountain.

The Stormlander had blustered, but one look at Duncan’s face had sent the lordling scurrying back to the Great Hall.

“I could have handled him,” Aerion had spat, though his knees had buckled.

He was drunk, his defenses lowered by the arbor gold, and his scent a confused, erratic pulse of need-fear-want.

Duncan had tried to call for a page, for a servant, for anyone else to take the prince.

For he knew the danger of being alone with the princeling. He knew the way his own blood hammered in his ears when he was near Aerion.

But the omega had immediately clung to his arm, his fingers digging through the wool of Duncan’s surcoat.

“No,” Aerion had hissed, his eyes was wide and unfocused. “You. You take me, oaf. I won’t have those vultures touching me.”

It had been a hard walk to the chambers. Duncan could feel the heat of Aerion’s body even through his clothes, and the slow shift of the prince’s scent as it deepened into something more primal and inviting.

Once the doors to the prince’s chambers were shut, the pretense of “duty” had shattered.

There was no “sers” and no “princes” in the dark of the foyer.

A few seconds after Dunk had closed the door to the prince’s chanber, the prince’d immediately cornered him to the door, and his fingers — slender, trembling, and frantic — clawed at the heavy leather of Duncan’s belt.

Duncan’s breath hitched, a jagged, ragged sound that seemed to echo off the cold stone walls. He tried to pull back, his hands catching Aerion’s wrists with enough force to bruise, but the prince only laughed, a low and sly melodic sound.

“My lord, stop,” Duncan managed to choke out, though his own body was already betraying him. The heat radiating from Aerion was too much for him to bear, the thick sweetness that made the knight’s head swim. “The wine, you’ve had too much. I’ll call for your servants—”

“I don’t want a servant!” Aerion hissed, wrenching his hands free from Duncan’s grasp, only to grab the front of Duncan’s surcoat, pulling the giant down to his level. “And don’t you dare lie to me, you heavy-footed oaf. I see the way you look at me. I’ve felt your eyes on my back since the day I stepped off that ship.”

Then he leaned in closer, his nose brushing Duncan’s jaw, a mocking smirk playing on his lips. “Did you think I was blind to it? You practically salivate every time I walk past. It’s pathetic, really… a great, hulking beast like you, brought to his knees by a mere scent.”

Duncan’s jaw tightened, his voice was a low warning, “I’m not on my knees yet, my prince.”

“Oh, but you will be,” Aerion hissed, his eyes flashing. “Before the night is out, you’ll be begging to serve me in ways your ‘kingsguard’ vow had never mentioned.”

The prince began to work at the buckles of Duncan’s armor with a frantic but practiced desperation.

Backed against the heavy oak door, Dunk found himself paralyzed, his heart hammering against his ribs and his breath hitching as the prince’s hands moved over him, deftly unbuckling the straps and sliding through the gaps in his armor.

Clack. The sword-belt hit the floor. Thud. A pauldron followed, the cold steel ringing against the stone.

“My prince, stop it,” Duncan breathed, his voice a jagged ruin. “You won’t… you won’t feel the same once the sun rises.”

“Shh, the wine only burned away the lies, Duncan...” Aerion whispered. He shushed the knight as he tore at the fastenings of Duncan’s breeches.

Duncan stood like a man at the edge of a cliff, eyes squeezed shut, muscles locked in agonizing tension. Then, he felt the heat of the prince’s thumb brushing against his aching cock. The alpha immediately let out a low, pained groan, his head falling back against the oak door with a heavy thump.

“Aerion… please…” Dunk pleaded, trying his best not to submit to his instincts.

“Is this what the White Cloaks demand…?” Aerion purred, his thumb tracing the sensitive curve of the head, stroking with a slow, agonising deliberation.

He looked up, his violet eyes hooded and dark with hunger.

He leaned in, his breath hot against Duncan’s ear. “Do you think I don’t know…? I’ve seen you watching me from the shadows of the hall. I’ve felt your scent spike every time I stand too close. You’ve been starving for this since the day you left me on that dock.”

He increased the pressure, his palm slicking with the evidence of Duncan’s pre-cum. He moved his hand, up and down, with a rhythmic, torturous pace, his eyes never leaving Duncan’s pained face.

“Does it feel like a sin, Duncan…? Or does it feel like coming home? I want to see you break. I want to see the ‘true knight’ crumble into the animal I know you are.”

Aerion purred as he knelt, his tongue darted out to lick a slow, wet stripe across the pulse point of Duncan’s already aching cock. The friction was a white-hot needle, sewing Duncan’s soul to the prince’s heat.

Aerion’s tongue continued its slow, torturous ascent, trailing heat up and down the sensitive underside of the shaft until he reached the very peak. He swiped across the slit with a deliberate, wet pressure, catching the bead of friction-slicked heat gathered there.

Duncan’s hips bucked instinctively, a broken, guttural moan escaping his throat. It was a sound of pure undoing, the stoic mask finally cracking as his head fell back.

“Gods… Aerion, stop—” Duncan gasped, his was a voice wreck, “Nnh… fuck…”

“No... claim me,” Aerion murmured against the sensitive skin, his lips barely grazing the tip as he spoke, sending jolts of electricity straight to Duncan’s core. “Fuck me… take what you’ve wanted all along, Duncan.”

To emphasize the command, he took the alpha deep, his throat tightening around Duncan's cock, as the wet slurping sounds echoed in the quiet of the room while he sucked Duncan thoroughly, drawing strangled moans from the knight.

Then Aerion pulled back just enough to breathe, the air catching in his chest, while his mouth remained slick with saliva and pre-cum, as he hovered inches away from the alpha’s length, the sound of their shared breath mingled with the lingering dampness of their sweats between them.

“Stop playing stoic Duncan...” he murmured, his breath hot and damp against the straining pulse of the vein. He leaned back in, and began to slowly swirl his tongue around the tip in a circular motion, before taking Dunk’s cock back into the heat of his mouth.

Duncan’s fingers tangled into the prince’s silver hair, his knuckles white. “Mmgh… fuck… please s-stop it… please...” he groaned, his body trembling under the onslaught.

Between hungry, wet drags, Aerion continued sucking on the poor knight, his head bobbing up and down while Duncan writhed.

A moment passed and Aerion broke his assault on the alpha’s length; his voice was raw and breathless. “...Be a man. Give me the knot... I want to feel you fill me until there is nothing left of this ache.” He punctuated the demand with a sharp, vacuum-like tug on Duncan’s cock, that made the man’s heels dig into the floor. “For you are mine… you stupid brute. That is a command. An order… from your prince—”

The last thread of Duncan’s restraint snapped. He didn’t let Aerion finish; his massive frame dipped down, closing the distance as he silenced the prince’s frantic desperate commands with his own bruising, desperate kiss.

The “statue” was now gone, completely replaced by a man who finally intended to take exactly what had been offered.

The shift was immediate. Duncan’s hands slammed into Aerion’s hips, fingers digging into the pale flesh. He spun Aerion around, slamming him back-first against the heavy oak.

The door groaned and the iron bolts strained.

The prince let out a surprised gasp as Duncan’s bore down on him, crushing the breath from his lungs.

“You want to play at the dirt?” Duncan growled, his voice was deep, vibrating the very door they leaned against. “Then let’s see if a prince can handle the weight of it.”

As Dunk’s hands hiked Aerion’s thighs up, Aerion let out a gasp, his fingers digging into Dunk’s massive shoulders. “Watch your grip, you clumsy ox! You’re—” he cut himself off with a strangled moan as Dunk’s hips pressed against his. “You’re going to… ruin this silk.”

Duncan didn’t say a word, he remembered the way his fingers had hooked into the waistband of Aerion’s fine silk breeches, the fabric feeling flimsy and insignificant under his calloused grip. With a single, powerful yank, he’d torn them down; he could still hear the ghost of that expensive silk snagging and ripping against the rough wood of the door. He hadn’t waited for help. Instead, he'd simply stripped the silk away, leaving the prince's pale, trembling legs bare to the cool draft of the foyer.

The bed was too far, he didn’t bother with it.

He recalled the ease of catching Aerion by the thighs, hoisting him upward. The prince had felt weightless, almost fragile, in his arms. Duncan’s hands had spanned nearly the entire width of those thighs, and as he’d pulled the prince flush against his chest, his own massive frame felt as though it were swallowing the smaller man whole.

Aerion’s legs immediately locked around his waist, the pressure of those heels digging into the small of his back, urging his own heavy hips closer.

From his vantage point, the prince looked pitifully slight.

His hands had nearly met around Aerion’s narrow waist. As he pressed closer, Duncan felt the demanding pulse of his own body straining against the prince’s entrance. The familiar slick sweetness of Aerion’s wet cunt had already begun to coat his tip, and he began to ground his aching cock forward in a slow and agonising circle.

Aerion let out a high, broken whimper. Though pinned and half-naked, Aerion’s eyes had flashed with that familiar, haughty fire.

He’d tangled his fingers in Duncan’s hair, tugging it with an impatient look on his face. “Don’t just stand there staring like a fool, Duncan,” Aerion panted, his voice was trembling despite the command. “You’ve made a mess of me. Now do your job and finish it…”

Then Duncan finally made his move.

He watched as the prince’s back arched from the intensity, his body straining as Duncan’s sheer girth began to stretch his cunt open... slowly.

Then without warning, Duncan suddenly drove himself into the prince’s slicked wetness with an intensity that'd immediately knocked the remaining air from Aerion’s lungs.

The impact sent a shudder through the doors, a dull thud that probably echoed into the hollow silence of the hallway. Followed by a stuttering, helpless moan that vibrated directly against the column of Duncan’s throat.

“F-fuck...” Aerion voice muffled on the crook of Duncan’s neck.

The stillness lasted only as long as it took for the initial shock to melt into a white-hot, agonizing need.

Duncan’s breath hitched, a low, guttural growl vibrating deep in his chest as he felt the omega’s internal muscles already begin to milk him, a rhythmic, desperate pulsing that pleaded for movement.

He withdrew slowly, the friction of the exit nearly as intense as the entry, the slick, cloying heat of Aerion’s core clinging to him, dragging against him like a heavy velvet glove.

Aerion’s eyes rolled back, his mouth falling open in a silent, but wrecked O as he felt that terrifying mass retreat, only to be replaced by a hollow ache that was a thousand times worse than the stretch. “Don’t—” he gasped, his voice a ruined shred of its former regal self. “Duncan, please…”

The alpha didn’t offer comfort; he offered a forceful, driving answer. He slammed back home, the wet, slapping sound of their hips colliding echoing like a crack of thunder in the small space. Aerion’s entire body jolted, his toes curling into the floor as the knight began a grueling, relentless pace, pounding in and out of the prince.

Each stroke was a blunt-force trauma of pleasure, Duncan’s thick length bottoming out against the sensitive opening of Aerion’s womb, hitting a spot so deep and so raw it made the prince’s vision fracture into sparks.

He was a man possessed, his hands moving from Aerion’s hair to grip his hips, his fingers digging into the pale skin with bruising force to anchor him for the assault. He watched with hunger and rut-filled sense as Aerion’s head thrashed against the wood, the prince’s face flushed red , his high-born features twisted in pleasure.

“Look at you,” Duncan hissed, his voice thick with a mix of reverence and malice as he drove in the prince's wet cunt again, earning a moan from the prince, as he felt the way Aerion’s inner walls wept more slick to accommodate the intrusion. “A Prince of the Blood, begging for a lowly alpha to split him open.”

“S-shut it…” Aerion couldn’t even find the breath to retort properly.

He’s fingers clawed at Dunk’s back, leaving marks in the skin. “I am not… begging,” he wheezed as he continued, even as his hips bucked uncontrollably against Dunk’s. “I am… allowing this. There is a difference, you… stupid oaf— ah!”

Every time the alpha drove forward, he felt the base of the knot slowly beginning to swell.

Aerion arched his back, pushing his crotch back against Duncan’s, seeking more of the friction, and more of Duncan. “O-oh… Gods yes, right there,” Aerion wheezed, his fingers knotting into Duncan’s hair, his knuckles white as he forced the alpha’s face into the crook of his neck.

Duncan responded to him by slamming his hips forward, his pelvis hitting Aerion’s with a wet, heavy thud. The thick head of his cock shoved past the tight ring of Aerion’s entrance, stretching the skin to its limit as he buried himself to the base.

“Does this feel like the dirt you mocked, my lord? H-Hah… it deep enough for you to finally roll in the mud with me?” Duncan rumbled, his voice a dark, primal vibration that shook Aerion’s chest.

“Shut it—ah!—or I’ll have your tongue… nnh… for that…” Aerion hissed, his words cut off as Duncan pulled out almost entirely and then drove back in. The Prince’s hips bucked upward, his legs shaking where they were pinned wide.

Duncan didn’t slow down instead, he stepped into the thrusts, his weight pinning Aerion against the door as he hammered his length into the Prince’s core.

“You can have whatever you want, my lord,” Dunk whispered against his lips. “My tongue, my life, my name… it’s all yours. J-just keep looking at me like that.”

As he spoke, his large hand moved from Aerion’s hip, sliding around to the front to grip the prince’s cock. He began to jerk Aerion off with a hard, fast motion that matched the heavy, driving pace of his own hips.

“A-ah— don’t you dare stop…, ngh… don’t you dare…” Aerion cried out, his voice cracking.

Duncan let out a low, grounding huff of a laugh against Aerion’s skin, his lips brushing the Prince’s ear. “...D-do you like it...? My prince...?”

“Y-yes… h-haa… m-more!” Aerion sobbed, his head tossing. The impact was solid and direct, the alpha’s thick length grinding against that one sensitive spot deep inside. Duncan didn’t offer any grace; he just kept fucking him, his cock plowing through the slicked mess of Aerion’s tight cunt over and over.

“I have you,” Duncan whispered, his tone suddenly thick with a fierce, protective tenderness. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Then he changed the rhythm, taking long, heavy strokes that dragged the full length of his cock against Aerion’s nerves.

“You’re built so perfectly, my prince,” Dunk growled, his voice thick with the hunger he was barely holding back. He kept fucking the omega with a heavy, steady power, watching as the beautiful prince’s voice broke into a high, keening sound.

Aerion couldn’t think.

Duncan then leaned his full weight into him, using his bulk to keep Aerion pinned on the door. He shifted his angle, and with a hard surge, he drove his cock all the way in again, the blunt head slamming against the sensitive spot.

Aerion’s scream was muffled against Duncan’s shoulder, his back arching in a hard line as he finally broke.

Tears spilled over his pretty face, building up as the pleasure became too much for him to bear.His internal walls clamped down on the alpha’s shaft in a series of tight, milking spasms that pulled at Duncan’s own release.

Without warning, in the heat of the moment, the prince did the unthinkable.

The omega sank his teeth deep into the junction of Duncan’s neck and shoulder, clamping down as his jaw locked with a frantic, desperate strength. And he felt the skin break, the hot, copper rush of blood blooming against his tongue.

Dunk let out a sharp, guttural “Fff—!”—a sound caught between a shout of pain and a pained moan.

His entire frame jolted, his muscles bunching like iron under Aerion’s touch, but he didn’t pull back. If anything, he surged forward harder, burying himself to the hilt as if trying to merge their bodies at the wound.

“F-Fuck, hah…” Dunk panted, his voice a ruined, gravelly wreck. He didn’t sound angry; he sounded devoured.

“Take it then, a-ah… mark me, then. Eat me alive, Aerion… whatever you want, gods…”

He continued his delirious rutfucking, the omega now lapping at his neck and marking him with a feverish intensity.

“...M-mhm… it feels good… d-don’t stop please— mh—!”

He caught Aerion’s stuttering gasps in his own mouth, kissing him with a deep, consuming heat. As their lips crashed together, the kiss was smeared with the metallic tang of copper; Aerion’s mouth still wet and bloodied from where he had savaged Duncan’s neck.

Suddenly, the door behind them rattled on its hinges, the iron bolts straining against the frame with every punishing thrust.

Aerion’s eyes flew open in a brief flash of panic— the sound was loud enough to summon the entire Kingsguard, and the wood felt as if it might give way under the sheer blunt force of Duncan.

“T-the door,” Aerion gasped, his voice a ragged mess of pleasure and fear. “Duncan, the door is going to break… take me to the bed. Carry me there, you dumb brute, just… don’t stop.”

Dunk let out a low, rough huff of a laugh — a sound thick with possessive heat. “As you wish, my prince,” he rasped against Aerion’s skin, not pausing for a single second.

He then hooked his massive arms deeper under Aerion’s thighs, hauling the prince’s legs up around his waist without losing an inch of his depth, causing the omega to let out a strangled, wet cry as the change in angle forced Duncan even deeper, the knight’s thick length bottoming out with a blunt force that made Aerion’s toes curl into the air.

He surged away from the door, crossing the chamber in three long, predatory strides.

Duncan’s muscles bunched and rippled under his sweat-slicked skin, the sheer power of the man carrying the prince as if he weighed nothing at all.

He then dropped Aerion onto the chaotic pile of silks and fur, the mattress dipping under the sudden impact.

Before Aerion could even draw a breath, the weight of Duncan’s massive body followed him down instantly, pinning him into the furs.

With one heavy, deliberate surge of his hips, Duncan slid his aching thick cock right back into the omega’s warm wetness. The sensation of being refilled again, so completely made Aerion’s back arch off the bed, his fingers knotting into the silk sheets until they tore.

From that moment, the pretense of the royal court was burned away in the furnace of their friction.

The Prince didn’t care about the consequences anymore.

He didn’t care if King Maekar heard his cries from the hallway, or if the servants whispered about the Prince being systematically ruined by his own guard. The shame that usually fueled his malice had been incinerated by Duncan’s heat.

He threw his head back and cried out, his voice ringing through the rafters, a raw, honest sound of a dragon finally finding its anchor as they locked in a feverish, tireless loop.

Duncan moved with a tireless, agonizingly slow precision now, his large hands reaching up to lace his fingers with Aerion’s, pinning the Prince’s hands to the pillow. He watched Aerion’s face, the way his lips were swollen, his cheeks flushed, and his eyes blown wide with a hazy, drugged-like ecstasy.

“Y-You’re mine,” the alpha rasped, his voice a low, possessive rumble as he drove home again and again, feeling the internal tremors of omega’s second climax beginning to build like a rising tide. “Every bit of you, my prince...”

“H-hah, s-shut your insolent mouth you oaf—ah…!”

Then Duncan remembered the aftermath:

Aerion lying in the silks, his pale skin marked with purple bruises where Duncan’s hands had anchored him, as his exhaustion won out and his heavy lids fluttering shut as he drifted into a deep sleep.

His cheek pressed against Duncan’s broad, scarred chest, just inches away from the raw, jagged bite marks Aerion had torn into the knight’s shoulder and his fingers loosely curled into Duncan’s arm.

He looked almost fragile and soft, unlike his usual self, save for the unmistakable quickening deep within the prince — a seed taking root in him.

And the knight stared at the ceiling with glazed, quiet eyes as the first gray light of dawn bled through the velvet curtains.

. . .

Aelyn arrived nine months later.

A middle-aged nursemaid, was adjusting the swaddling in the solar. She looked down at the babe and, with a fool’s boldness, let out a small, clicking sound of her tongue.

“A striking shade, my prince,” Harys, her name, murmured, her voice carrying that oily, feigned sweetness of a court gossip. “Quite… striking. I recall the Prince Valarr had hair of a similar darkness, though his was streaked with a streak of silver. This little one seems to have missed it entirely. It’s almost a common brown, isn’t it? Strange how the blood works.”

The air in the room turned cold.

Aerion, who had been staring out the window, a rare moment of stillness in his posture, snapped his eyes open to the sound of the woman’s voice, the peace shattering. He turned slowly, his violet eyes weren’t just bright; they were dilated until they looked like twin pools of ink.

Then he approached the servant without a word, closing the distance until he stood inches from her. He didn’t lay a hand on her, yet the force of his presence drove her back, breath hitching, shoulders pressing hard into stone.

“Common?” Aerion whispered, his voice a razor-thin blade. “You find my daughter’s hair… strikingly common, do you?”

The nursemaid’s smile faltered. She felt the shift in the air, that acrid, burning scent of an omega pushing her into a corner. “N-no I-I only meant, my prince—”

“Oh no, you clearly did meant to mock her,” Aerion hissed. He leaned in closer, his shadow swallowing her whole. He didn’t lay a finger on her, yet his hand hovered near his belt, where a small, ornate dagger rested, a sight that immediatelymade the woman’s knees buckle.

“You look at a dragon’s hatchling and you see a jest. You think just because I have been kind enough to let you breathe my air, you have the right to weigh my daughter’s blood against the gutter? I could have that tongue of yours pulled out and cured like a piece of salt beef. And I would ensure that you never speak another ‘striking’ word as long as you rot in the black cells.”

The woman paled, her breath coming in short, terrified gasps. She was paralyzed, staring into the violet fire of a man who looked ready to incinerate her where she stood.

“My prince…”

Duncan’s voice was a low, grounding warning.

Aerion froze. His head snapped toward the shadow where Duncan stood.

For a fleeting second, the mask of the “Brightflame” — the mad, cruel prince — cracked wide open. The woman was already cowering, blind with her own terror, but Duncan caught it. He saw the way Aerion’s pupils shrank, the way his gaze softened with unusual vulnerability.

But as quickly as the softness appeared, it was hidden before the maid could even blink.

Aerion turned back to the woman, his face returning to its cold, aristocratic bite. “Get out,” he snapped.

“Before I decide that speaking too much is a crime punishable by a slow fire. If I see your face in this wing again, you’ll find out exactly how ‘common’ your throat feels under a blade.”

The woman fled immediately, her footsteps frantic in the hall.

Silence settled over the nursery, Aerion stood by the cradle for a long moment, his shoulders trembling beneath his silks. Finally, he straightened, wrapping a fur robe around his thin shoulders as if the very air had turned to ice. Then he walked to Duncan’s side.

He didn’t look at the knight; he looked at the daughter they had made in that drunken, desperate heat.

“You’re thinking of it, aren’t you?” Aerion asked, his voice now hollow of one that had just threatened a maid off.

He didn’t look at the knight, he looked at the daughter they had made in that drunken and desperate heat.

“She doesn’t have the silver,” Duncan said, his voice was low. “Most of the servants… they say she’s a Dornishman’s get. They say you’re angry at her for the insult to your blood.”

Aerion let out a laugh, which sounded almost mocking. He reached into the cradle and smoothed the girl’s brown curls. His touch was unexpectedly tender, a secret softness he saved only for his children.

“Let them talk,” Aerion whispered. “Let them name every lord from Sunspear to Storm’s End. As long as it keeps them from looking at you. It keeps her safe.” He finally turned, his violet eyes was hollowed out, stripped of fire and drink.

Aelyn stirred in her sleep, a small, grunting sound that was so like the way Duncan sounded when he woke up.

Dunk felt a tear prick at his eye and blinked it away fiercely. He was a knight. He was a guard.

With a trembling breath, Aerion did something he had never done: he reached into the cradle and lifted the small, warm bundle, turning to face Duncan.

“Hold her,” Aerion whispered, his voice cracking. “Feel the weight of what we’ve done.”

Duncan’s hands shook as he took the child. Aelyn was so small against his plate armor, a tiny spark of life against a wall of white steel. As she stirred, letting out a small, grunting huff that was a perfect mirror of Duncan’s own stubborn sighs, the knight felt his throat tighten.

“She’s… she’s perfect, my lord,” Duncan managed to choke out.

Aerion stepped into the knight’s space, pressing his palm flat against the white silk of Duncan’s surcoat, right over his thudding heart. “She is the evidence of every vow you’ve broken and every secret I’ve kept.”

He pulled back, his fingers twitching as he began to pace the narrow confines of the chamber, his shadow flickering tall against the stone. “But when I hold her as I held Aenar when he was just a babe, I don’t feel like a monster. For a moment, the screaming in my head stops.” He looked up, his gaze was intense and searching.

“Is that what it is to be a common man? To care more for a life than a throne?”

“It’s what it is to be a mother,” Duncan replied softly.

“Well, she’s a disaster,” Aerion corrected sharply, though he leaned his forehead against Duncan’s massive arm for just a fleeting second, a rare fracture in his icy composure. He straightened, his eyes darting toward the heavy oak door as if the entire Red Keep were already leaning against it, listening.

“Look at her,“ his voice dropping to a whisper. “A brown-haired ghost in a house of silver. My father will look for the dragon in her eyes and find only the mud of the Flea Bottom gutters. And those prickly, lordling and ladies... they will peel her apart like fruit just to find a reason to belittle and discard her.”

Aerion’s gaze flickered towards him. “With Aenar, I didn’t have to say a word. I just brought him back and most of the people around us cared less, because they saw the silver hair and the violet eyes.”

He gestured to the babe with a hand that trembled slightly. “But her? They’ll look at her hair, then sooner or later they’ll look at you, and they’ll see a low born bastard.”

“Too high-born to be a peasant and too ‘plain’ to be a princess. Just stuck in the middle. And they’ll want to crush her just for looking like she doesn’t belong.”

Aerion stepped back, his face hardening into the mask of the usual cruel prince that everyone knew of him once more, though his voice remained brittle.

“Which is why you will stand at that door, Ser Duncan..., you will stand there until your legs fail and your hair turns white and be the shield between her and the wolves around us. Do you understand?”

Duncan looked down at the small, brown-haired babe in his arms. He knew the prince was right; in this house, her looks was already a confession. But as her secret sire, the primal alpha instinct pulled at him more than anything else, the fierce, protective drive to shield his own pups from the world.

“With my life,” Duncan promised, the words a vow deeper than any he had given to a King.

Aerion pulled away, the mask of the haughty prince sliding back into place as a floorboard creaked in the hall outside. “Go then. The guard is changing. And take that scent of rain with you, it lingers too long in the drapes.”

Duncan bowed, his heart feeling like an over-filled wineskin.

He walked out of the room, his boots thudding heavy on the stone, leaving his heart and his daughter behind the closed oak doors.

The years that followed were measured not in moons, but in inches added to a doorframe in the nursery.

The scandal of the 'Dornish bastard girl' eventually faded into the background noise of the court, replaced by the mundane rhythm of peace. Spring rains washed the scent of the nursery from the stones, and autumn winds brought the smell of woodsmoke and aging parchment.

Duncan watched from behind his white mask as the toddler who smelled of hi became a girl who ran with the stride of a hunter, and the silver-haired boy grew broad enough to outgrow his father’s old doublets.

The secret didn’t change, it simply aged, hardening like wine in a cellar until the sting of shame turned into a permanent ache of devotion.

The air atop the balcony was cold. Aerion stood at the railing, his silver hair pulled back tight.

At one and forty years, his youthful malice had hardened into a more, disciplined sternness. And just behind him, Duncan stood three paces, a mountain in white armor. He was two and forty now, while his face was a map of hidden history.

“They look like oxen, ser,” Aerion remarked. He looked down at Aenar, now eight and ten, stood massive and towering, while Maelor, ten and sturdy, practicing their footwork below. “Look at them. Planting their feet like they’re trying to grow roots. A dragon should be lithe, not… stationary.”

“They have a solid base, my lord,” Duncan replied formally. “In a real battle, it is the man who cannot be moved who keeps his head.”

Aerion turned his head just slightly, to look at the knight behind him.

“Certainty is for statues, ser. A prince should strike like lightning, not endure like a boulder. I have spent years trying to sharpen Aenar’s technique, yet he insists on fighting like a certain oaf trying to kill the ground beneath him. He has presented as an alpha now, and the court expects the most of him.”

“Lightning is gone in a heartbeat, my lord,” Duncan countered gently.

He knew Aerion’s sternness was merely the armor he wore to protect the children from being seen as weak or “lesser” Targaryens. “The boulder is still there when the storm passes. Aenar has your focus, but he has the strength to back it up. And he is trying to please you, in his own way.”

Aerion huffed, a sound of frustrated pride, though the rigidness in his posture eased.

Below in the yard, Maelor tripped, caught himself, and reset his stance. Aerion watched the boys with a critic’s eye, but his gaze softened when it drifted to Aelyn.

And he looks uncharacteristically vulnerable as he looked away from the yard.

“That madness fever… the voices that I once carried… it still whispers in the back of my mind, but it is quiet now.” Aerion whispered, his voice unusually quiet.

“And my children are the only things in this world I truly love. They are my heart, and I would burn the Seven Kingdoms to ash before I let them be shamed.”

“They aren’t shamed, Aerion,” Duncan said, stepping just an inch closer– close enough for the white scales of his armor to brush against the fine velvet of the Prince’s sleeve. He offered his support not with a grand gesture, but with that steady, grounding presence that had become Aerion’s only true relief.

Duncan looked at the prince with a sidelong glance, his eyes softened. Then he continued, “Aenar comes to me after every lesson,” said Duncan.

“Asking for help with his footwork, his grip, always looking for the edge. He wants to be a knight of the book, so he says. To have the honor of the cloak,”

“Gods, don’t remind me,” the Prince muttered, his voice sounded blunt with a weary sort of affection. “He is obsessed with you. It is a sickness. Every evening meal is a lecture on the ‘virtues of the road’ and the ‘nobility of the hedge.’ He rambles on and on until my ears bleed about how he’ll forgo his inheritance to sleep in ditches and eat salt beef, just like his favourite ‘hedge knight’.”

Aerion turned his gaze back to Aenar, his lip curling in a mix of pride and mock-disgust.

“He told me, with that same stubborn look you get, that a crown is just a circle of metal, but a sword earned is a life lived. He actually told me he wished to be a hedge knight when he was ten. A Targaryen Prince, dreaming of mud and rusty mail! I had to remind him that dragons do not live in hedges, but the boy just stared at me with those big, quiet eyes— and I knew I’d already lost the argument. He doesn’t want to be a Prince, he wants to roll in the dirt.”

Duncan couldn’t suppress a small, huffing laugh. “The mud has a way of staying with you, my lord.”

“Clearly…,” Aerion snapped, though he stepped closer, his shoulder now firmly pressed against the Lord Commander’s arm.

“He sees a saint in you while I see a bumbling oaf who has stolen my son’s common sense. It’s your fault for having four pages in that damnable book. You’ve made being a ‘hedge knight’ look far too appealing for a boy whose only concern should be tax levies and Dornish treaties…”

He then let out a sharp sigh, his gaze flickering to the King’s solar. “And it doesn’t help that fool of a brother encourages this madness.”

“Aegon spends half his time filling the boy’s head with tales of your ‘glory days’ on the road, treating Aenar like his own squire and speaking of the smallfolk and the ‘plight of the common man’ as if all of us were born in a haystack.”

When Egg, now King Aegon V had finally taken his seat as ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, the atmosphere of the Red Keep underwent a fundamental shift.

The boy who once traveled with the hedge knight — who had seen the world from the back of a mule and the floor of a hayloft — had no patience for the cruel courtly games that had once defined his older brother’s life.

So one of his first acts was to settle the matter of Aerion’s brood with a finality that stunned the Small Council.

He decreed that the three children were to be recognized fully as Princes and Princesses of the Blood. And that they were to own their Targaryen names without question or caveat.

The decree which turned the vibrant gossip of the Red Keep into a kingdom of hushed silences.

Servants who had once laughed over lye-steam and horse-brush now spoke in frantic, low-voiced whispers, terrified that a stray word like “bastard” might reach the King’s ears and be named treason.

Aegon made it clear: to insult the children was to insult the Crown.

But behind the closed doors of the Small Hall, the King’s iron-willed protection came from a place of painful clarity. Because Egg knew.

Aerion’s exile had been a frozen winter, but the his return to the Keep brought with it a frantic, second spring.

Just within a year of the prince’s return to the Red Keep, the Lord Commander’s shadow was rarely far from his door, and the nursery began to fill once more. And as the years slipped quietly into one another, a strange and undeniable gravity settled over the wing.

It’d started with the way Aenar would only stop his high, drunning tantrums during the first few months after his arrival in the Red Keep.

The boy, born to the salt and grit of the Free Cities, most probably found the heavy air of the King’s Landing stifling. He would only ever stop his wailing if the prince or Duncan had stepped into the room; if it was the latter, the boy’s hand would instinctively fist in the wool of Duncan’s cloak.

And by the time Aelyn was a toddler and Maelor was in swaddles, Prince Aerion’s “brood” had fully imprinted themselves on the giant knight.

They began to follow him through the corridors of the Red Keep like a trail of ducklings, their internal compasses tuned to the deep, grounding thrum of his alpha scent, a frequency that hummed beneath the clatter of his plate armor.

Duncan often stood in the quiet of the night, watching them sleep, his heart a confused ache of duty and instinct. He wasn’t sure if it was his own blood calling out to them, a primal tether pulling his children to their sire, or if it was merely his own desperate desire as an alpha who wanted- more than life itself, to raise and care for the pups as his own.

Regardless of the “why,” the result was the same: the Lord Commander had become the sun around which the Prince’s children orbited.

The servants, ever watchful and quick to label what they saw, had long ago made their own peace with the sight. In the kitchens and the stables, the gossip had shifted.

They no longer speculated on the “sire” with malice, instead, they spoke of the Lord Commander with a hushed, reverent awe.

They deemed him the father by choice, a man of such immense honor that he had taken a disgraced prince’s bastards and made them his own heart.

Duncan never corrected them.

Nevertheless, he was happy, a quiet, dangerous kind of happy that made him the most formidable knight in the Seven Kingdoms.

The current King — Egg, as Dunk would often call him, however had spent too many years on the road with the knight, watching the way Duncan breathed, the way he stood, and how he weathered the world.

When the young man looked at his nephews and niece, he didn’t see the cruelty of Aerion, the brother he had spent his life despising, instead, he saw the curve of a shoulder and a steady, stubborn gaze that could only belong to the very man who had raised him.

And he loved them anyways because they were the best parts of his best friend, born into the silver skin of his own family.

So it was a miracle of the blood that he guarded with a fierce, kingly protection.

“Of all the omegas in the Seven Kingdoms, Dunk,” Egg had whispered once, years ago, over a shared flagon in the solar.

The crown had looked heavy on his brow that night. “Of all the high-born beauties and sturdy tavern girls…”

Duncan had remained a silent mountain at the door, his hands folded over the pommel of his sword. He hadn’t defended the prince, nor had he offered a romantic excuse. He only stared straight ahead, his face a mask of duty that hid a well of unspoken but primal devotion.

Duncan kept quiet, and in that silence, Aegon found his answer.

Then, he never asked again. He simply ensured that while the world whispered about Dornishmen and pirate sires, the “mistakes” of the hedge knight and the dragon prince were given the titles and the safety they deserved.

“And now he’s a King who thinks like a common born, and he’s making sure my eldest son does the same.”

Aerion’s voice was a sudden hiss that sliced through Duncan’s reverie, pulling him back from the quiet depths of his own thoughts.

The Prince’s fingers twitched against the stone, restless and sharp.

“Between the two of you, it’s a wonder the boy even remembers he has a drop of royal blood. He’d rather be ‘Ser Nobody’ with a chipped shield than be the Prince of Red Keep. You’ve tainted my line with your damnable humility.”

Duncan didn’t look away from the yard, but his hand moved just enough to graze Aerion’s sleeve, a gentle solid touch.

“Humility is a heavy shield, Aerion. It’s what will keep him standing when the dragons start to tear at each other again. Aegon sees that. He loves these children because they have the one thing the rest of your kin lack: a heart that beats for more than just a throne.”

Aerion huffed, though he didn’t pull away. The sharp mask remained, but for a moment, the tension in his neck vanished.

“A heart that beats for the mud,” he whispered. “I suppose I should be grateful. At least if the world ends, my sons will know how to pitch a tent.”

Duncan smiled then, a rare, unguarded warmth lighting his eyes. Its a smile that only belonged to the prince and their children alone and to no one else.

“..Aelyn… she is a force of nature,” Duncan murmured, his gaze drifting to the girl sitting on the stone ledge below. “She wouldn’t go to the Sept or the gardens unless I am the one at her shoulder. Treats me like her own personal guard,”

“And I’ve never known a princess to be so fiercely protective of her guard.” Aerion’s continued, his mouth twitched, his expression shifting from a haughty mask to one of quiet, begrudging realization. He spent more time with Aelyn than anyone, he saw the way her eyes lit up when the heavy tread of white boots echoed in the hall.

“I hear of nothing else from her,” Aerion admitted, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Whenever we stroll through the Kingswood or the fields of blooms, she is restless until you are within sight. She told me yesterday that the flowers smell sweeter when ‘Ser Dunk’ is there to tell her which ones are poisonous and which ones are fit for a crown. Told me that she would often drag you to the library and made you sit on those tiny stools for hours while she reads histories she already knows by heart, just so she can lean against your arm.”

He looked at Duncan, a flicker of something soft in his violet eyes. Duncan ducked his head, a faint flush creeping up his neck. “She likes the stories of the smallfolks, my lord. She asks about the rains in the Reach and the way the stars look when you’re sleeping in a hayloft. I think… I think she finds peace in the simplicity of it.”

“No, she just wants to be close to you,” Aerion corrected sharply, though not unkindly.

“Even if she doesn’t have the words for it. She has claimed you, as surely as Aenar and Maelor has. It seems to me my children have decided that the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard is the only man worth their devotion.”

The air on the balcony shifted, the sharp chill of the coming storm suddenly grounded by the heavy, sandalwood warmth of the alpha standing behind him.

Seeing the coast was clear, Aerion stepped back, retreating fully into the massive, protective shadow Ser Duncan cast. To any distant eye, the Prince remained a portrait of stern, Targaryen coldness, but beneath the velvet and silk, his soul was reaching out.

Duncan’s heart stuttered, then softened, the muscle beneath his ribs easing as the Prince’s scent, a regal scent layered over a sweet, hidden honey bloomed in his senses. The omega was closing in, claiming the space that belonged to them.

The Lord Commander didn’t move, he simply let himself be a mountain for Aerion to lean against, as his own alpha scent, the scent of rain and forest flaring slightly in a silent, protective purr that vibrated through the air between them.

Aerion remained uncaring if a stray guard saw them standing far too close for the comfort of “protocol.”

“Maelor is a terror,”

Aerion then continued, his voice losing its public bite and dropping into the low, private register of a mate seeking comfort.

Duncan chuckled softly, a deep, resonant sound that vibrated through his chest and into Aerion’s very bones. “He is naughty, defiant, and looks so much like me that I fear the King’s Master of Coin will start charging the Lord Commander for his meals just to be certain of his lineage.”

“…well, he has that brown hair and that thick-headedness that I recognize all too well,” Aerion sighed, the sound catching in his throat as he finally let his guard slip. “I spend half my day lecturing him on patience– and he spends the other half testing mine. He is the most difficult of the three, but… he has the biggest heart.”

Aerion finally leaned his full weight almost imperceptibly against Duncan’s towering build, a rare view if any servants’d seen it “… and he is exactly like you,” the prince whispered, his voice finally losing its edge.

“A stubborn oaf— who doesn’t know when to quit. But I suppose I should be grateful. At least all of them are too thick-skulled to let the world break them apart.”

Then, he reached out, his slender, pale fingers settling against the white silk of Duncan’s surcoat, right over the steady, heavy thud of the alpha’s heart. He began a slow caress, his thumb tracing the line where the white fabric met the cold, polished steel of the breastplate.

“I am strict because someone has to be one, Duncan…,” Aerion whispered, his voice was low. “Someone has to be the fire that keeps them sharp and mindful of their place. But you… you give them the love and advice they actually need. Something that I lack.”

He looked up at the giant, his violet eyes scanning the Lord Commander, and deeply inhaled the heady, intoxicating musk of the alpha. The scent acted like a sedative to his frantic burning blood.

Then, he shifted, and buried his face against the crook of Duncan’s neck.

“Ashford was a disaster,” Aerion whispered against the white silk of Duncan’s surcoat, his voice muffled. “It was the night I planned to destroy you. Now, when I look back at that boy, I hardly even recognize him.”

He had his cheek rested against the steady, thrumming beat of Duncan’s heart, and it was a rhythm he had memorized over nearly two decades.

Then, Duncan’s hands came up, settling firmly and tenderly against the small of Aerion’s back, pulling the prince flush against his massive frame.

He didn’t say a word as he listened to the prince rambling confessions, letting his own scent flare in a response to Aerion’s surrender. The forest and rain deepened, wrapping around them like a heavy cloak.

“I outgrew that fire after the first one came,” Aerion continued, his eyes fluttering shut as he leaned into the warmth. “After I gave birth to Aenar… the madness I carried in me, that constant, frantic heat… it slowly gave way to a calmness I’d never known.”

“When I was in exiled, alone and discarded, that child was the only thing that kept me sane. He was my only source of happiness when the rest of our blood had abandoned me to the shadows… and he smelled just like you… Rain and damp earth.” He let out a soft, shuddering breath, his hands clutching at the white scale of Duncan’s armor. “He was my tether to you when I thought I’d never see you again. My only true blood. And I wanted to keep that blood close to me.”

Then, Duncan leaned his head down, the rough texture of his cheek a stark contrast to the silken silver of Aerion’s hair. He pressed his brow firmly against the Prince’s temple, his large hands anchoring Aerion’s frame.

“You were never alone, my prince,” Duncan murmured, his voice thick with the memory of years spent in agonizing distance. “My heart was in Lys with you every moment I spent wandering the Seven Kingdoms. Hell, there were nights on the road, staring into the campfire, where I feared the worst had come for you both. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, terrified that some sellsword or some sickness had taken you while you lived in the shadows of the Free Cities.”

His thumb was tracing a soothing circle into the small of the prince’s back, letting his scent completely drench and blanket the omega. “I prayed to the Seven who would listen to keep the both of you safe. And Gods be good, they heard me. To see you walk back through those gates, safe and sound, with such a strong, sturdy boy at your side… it was the first time I felt I could truly breathe again since Ashford.”

Aerion let out a soft, shuddering chuckle, his hands clutching the white scale of Duncan’s armor.

For a moment, the prince wasn’t a royal exile or a stern, strictfather, he was merely an omega finding his peace, surrendering to the quiet, steady strength of the only alpha who had ever truly stood by him.

And in the shadows of the arched doorway, Elira, a fresh-faced maid newly come to the service of the Red Keep froze. Her basket of laundry forgotten as they spilled silently onto the stone.

Her breath hitched in her throat, her eyes widening at the sight before her. The prince’s hand moved in a slow, intimate drag, his slender fingers tracing the Lord Commander’s heart before gliding upward to rest against the former hedge knight’s weathered face.

The touch was so tender it felt like a sacrilege to witness.

She watched as the normally untouchable, terrifying prince leaned his forehead against Duncan’s massive shoulder, his eyes fluttering shut as he let the giant’s strength take his weight. In that moment, the power dynamic of the Seven Kingdoms seemed to invert, the dragon wasn’t commanding his sworn knight, but an omega was seeking his alpha mate.

Elira didn’t wait to see more. Terrified of the scene she’d stumbled upon, she turned and scurried down the winding stone stairs to the safety of the lower kitchens..

“I saw them!” she hissed, her face flushed a deep red as she leaned over the flour-dusted table where Masha and Beric were working.

“On the North balcony! The Prince… he was touching Ser Duncan’s face! He was leaning into him like a tired bird, and the Lord Commander held him— Gods, he held him like a husband! The scent up there, it was like the whole Kingswood had moved into the castle!”

Masha, the older servant, stopped her kneading, her old hands dripping with dough as she burst into a sharp cackle. She didn’t even look up. “You’ve been breathing too much lye-steam and listening to too many singers, girl. Ser Duncan is a living saint! He’s the soul of honor, the King’s own right hand. A man like that wouldn’t touch a man as prickly and half-mad as Aerion. He’s a pillar of stone, he doesn’t have it in him to be a secret leman.”

“But I saw it!” Elira whispered, her voice trembling. “The way they looked and touched each other…”

“Enough,” Masha snapped, slamming her fist into the dough. “You’ve a wild head on your shoulders, girl, and that’s a quick way to lose it. If a knight of the Kingsguard heard you wagging your tongue about ‘lemans’ and ‘alphas,’ he wouldn’t just have you whipped— he’d have you flayed for treason.”

Beric shook his head firmly as he chopped the vegetables on the board, “Use your head, Elira. This is Ser Duncan the Tall! He’d sooner throw himself from the Spear Tower than stain that white cloak. He’s likely just letting the Prince lean on him because he had too much wine or another one of his spells. You know the Targaryen blood runs hot and dizzy. Duncan would never touch a man like the mad prince.. he’s far too good for that gutter. Now, get to those herbs before the cook returns and finds you standing idle.”

The harshness of their rejection stung as Elira looked from Masha’s face to Beric’s indifferent look. Their disbelief acted like a cold douse of water on her fire. But, perhaps they were right. Perhaps the twilight and the height of the balcony had played tricks on her eyes.

“I… I suppose,” she murmured, her face burning with shame. “I must have been mistaken.”

“Suppose less and work more,” Masha grunted, turning her back.

For ten minutes, the rhythm of the kitchen acted as a balm, and Elira had finally managed to steady her thoughts. After a while the heavy doors groaned on its hinges and the room fell into a deathly silence, and the sounf of the knives working on the board vanished as the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard walked in, his massive frame dwarfing the room.

He was looking for a specific vintage of hippocras the prince had requested, the servants immediately bowed, their faces full of profound respect. To them, he was the untouchable paragon of knighthood. Duncan nodded to them kindly, completely unaware that he had been the subject of their scandalous debate.

Just a few seconds after he entered, “Ser Duncan!” a high voice chirped.

Maelor burst into the kitchen, his tunic askew and his face streaked with a messy smear of courtyard dust.

He didn’t hesitate for a second, ignoring the bowing servants to dive straight for Duncan, throwing his sturdy arms around the knight’s massive, tree-trunk leg.

As the child swarmed the giant, the very air in the kitchen seemed to shift. The heavy, stagnant smell of flour and roasting meat was suddenly cut through by a scent.

It was like a scent of a summer storm – the mix of Aerion’s fire perfectly tempered pheromones, with Ser Duncan’s rain-soaked earth. And Elira breathed it in, and her head was spinning. It was the heavy scent of a pack, a singular, blended identity.

Elira watched from the shadows, from this angle, the resemblance wasn’t just a “passing likeness”, it was clearly an indictment. Maelor had the same wide, same honest set to his shoulders, the same stubborn squareness of the jaw, and that thick, unruly brown hair that refused to lay flat, exactly like the tall man he was currently clinging to.

She looked around at Masha and Beric, baffled. How can they not see it? she wondered, a chill running down her spine. The boy was a spitting image of the Lord Commander, a miniature mountain of a child who lacked every sharp, dragon-like look of the Targaryen line.

To her, it was as if the truth were screaming in the room, yet the servants kept their eyes stubbornly down, blinded by their own reverence for Duncan’s vows and “sainthood.”

“You promised!” Maelor looked up, pouting with a defiant lip that usually earned him a sharp lecture from Aerion, but only made Duncan’s mouth twitch with a hidden softness. “You said once the sun hit the West tower, you’d tell us if a knight could fight a shadow-cat in the rain without his shield slipping!”

Duncan’s large, calloused hand came down to rest on the boy’s head, his fingers disappearing into those thick brown curls with a tenderness that was far too natural for a mere bodyguard. “I believe I said if the practice was finished to satisfaction, little dragon,” Duncan rumbled, his voice like warm gravel, while his scent had shifted into something more protective and caring.

“It was! Aenar hit the quintain so hard it nearly spun off into the moat!” Maelor insisted, tugging at Duncan’s hand with all his might. “Come on! Aelyn is waiting by the well and she’s already started the story without you, and she’s getting the details all wrong!”

As if on cue, Aelyn appeared in the doorway. She was a streak of Targaryen beauty, but with the brown hair of the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, she looked at Duncan with an expression of such pure, uncomplicated admiration that the servant girl felt a lump in her throat.

She didn’t latch onto his leg like her brother, instead, standing beside him, she was a tiny figure against his towering frame, her head barely reaching the height of his elbow. She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, claiming him with the quiet confidence of a girl who knew her anchor would never drift.

“He’s telling the truth, Ser Duncan,” Aelyn said, her voice sounded like a sweet chime. “Aenar is sulking because he thinks he broke his favorite glove, and Duncan is trying to convince him it’s a sign of ‘warrior’s luck.’ We need you to settle it.”

The servants watched in a trance. They saw the way the Lord Commander was completely submerged in the affection of Prince Aerion’s children. Duncan looked down at them, his alpha scent softening into a hearth-fire warmth that seemed to fill the drafty kitchen.

“Very well,” Duncan conceded, letting himself be steered out by the two smallest children. “But if the story gets too long, you’ll have to explain to your mother why his wine is late.”

“Mama won’t mind,” Maelor chirped, skipping to keep up with Duncan’s long strides. “He always says you’re the only one who can talk sense into us anyway!”

As they disappeared toward the courtyard, the kitchen remained silent for a long beat. Elira turned to Masha, her voice trembling with the weight of what she knew. “Masha, look at the boy’s face. Look at his hair. He is the image of him!”

Masha sighed, turning back to her dough, her shoulders rigid. “Because it has to be, Elira,” she whispered, finally showing a crack in her resolve. “For all our sakes, it has to be kindness. Now, back to work before your tongue gets us all shortened by a head.”

Elira stood frozen, the realization hitting her like a physical blow.

Of cource, the older servants weren’t blind. They’d be fools to say that it was just coincidences, and they were deceived by the 'saintly' reputation of the Lord Commander. Masha, Beric, and the others who had been at Red Keep since the Prince’s return from exile had seen it long before Elira ever set foot in the kitchens.

They had seen the way the young boy Aenar had reached only for the tall hedgeknight.

They had learned to recognize the shift in the air whenever the prince and the knight stood in the same hall. His usual sharp scent would oft softened there, settling into something warmer and sweeter.

And they had also seen the way Maelor grow into a literal younger version of the man who supposedly only guarded him. But in the Red Keep, the truth was a fire that could burn a house down, silence was the only water they had. So they chose to believe the “saintly” lie because it allowed them to love the children and respect the knight without the burden of treason.

The whispers of the kitchen, however, could not keep pace with the reality of the training yard. While the servants debated bloodlines, the blood itself was busy asserting its truth.

High above, Aerion watched the small parade crossing the cobblestones. From the exterior, he remained a mask of silver and ice, the cruel, mad Targaryen Prince, haughty and remote. But internally, the omega in him was purring. And it was a deep, vibrating contentment that radiated from his chest to his fingertips.

He watched as Maelor jump, his small, dirt-caked hand straining to reach Duncan’s broad shoulder, while Aenar trailed just behind, mimicking the Knight’s long-legged stride with a serious, focused intensity. Then came Aelyn, a streak of dark-haired grace who moved to Duncan’s side with quiet confidence. She reached out, tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow; she was still so small that her head barely brushed his arm.

Aerion saw the way his alpha slowed that massive weary stride, tilting his head to catch the boys’ rambling while tucking his arm closer to keep Aelyn steady. At the sight, Aerion’s scent, usually the acrid tang of wildfire, had settled into a thick, honeyed sweetness.

His alpha was there, standing as the wall between his family and the world that had once tried to discard him.

Their blood was whole, thriving in the yard, and for once, the 'Brightflame' didn’t feel the need to burn. He felt at peace. As long as the his giant stood below, the dragon could finally afford to be still.

The laundry fires would eventually go out, and the stable gossip would shift to some new scandal or a different lord’s folly. Let the Keep whisper its secrets and weave its colorful lies; let them invent captains and smiths to fill the gaps in a story they were never meant to understand.

It didn’t matter because it changed nothing.

Because to the prince, only they mattered.