You have another choice. Whether it is a better one or a worse, I cannot say. And so, I ask you again, Ser Duncan the Tall, how good a knight are you, truly?
“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find — if it’s a good novel — that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”
I've been host to a brainworm that's telling me I should start a French Mistake style dunkbaelor AU. Here's a preview! Let me know if you think I should run with it! Fair warning, there are graphic descriptions of gore and injury under the cut.
“A queer troubled look passed across Baelor Breakspear’s face, like a cloud passing before a sun. He raised his hand and touched the back of his head with two fingers, oh so lightly. And then he fell.”
- George R. R. Martin, The Hedge Knight, p. 182
Dunk caught Baelor, just barely fast enough to cup his torn and bloody shield hand around the back of the dying prince’s head before it could hit the ground.
One broken thing holding another, he thought morbidly.
Dunk's many wounds throbbed anew at the weight of a tall man covered in plate and chainmail landing limp in his lap.
“Up,” he cried desperately as his blood slowed in his own veins, icy with pain and grief. “Up, up.”
As the prince’s body stilled in Dunk’s arms, two-toned eyes fixed sightless upward and mouth agape, the light around them suddenly swelled so bright that Dunk had to raise his free hand to shade his eyes.
A strange clamor arose, the din of many voices and footsteps. No screaming or wailing, as there should be with the heir apparent to the Iron Throne lying dead in a hedge knight’s arms with only half a skull. There came sounds of clicking and snapping, wheels rolling, and questions being thrown back and forth. There was a loud snap and someone called out sharply, "Cut!"
Cut what, Dunk wondered. What new trickery is this?
Stunned and confused, Dunk lowered his hand to see what queer occasion made such light and sound. At first, he could not believe his eyes. This was not the place he was before.
Rather, it was the same breezeway, the entry to the stables, but everything else was changed. An army dressed in strange, unmatching cloth swarmed around him. Some hoisted devices of unknown purpose, while others packed and removed black, glossy contraptions from a great number of bags and trunks. Odd stands were propped up everywhere, holding aloft lanterns that seemed to burn with no flame, and shiny silver sheets. He'd only just begun to look around when the head in his hand moved.
No, he thought with dread, it cannot be. This isn’t real.
Baelor’s skull had been shattered, falling away in grisly pieces when Steely Pate and Raymun removed his helm, and Dunk’s gory hand had been desperately cupped over a place where pale, soft matter was trying to push outward. Now he felt a hard, unbroken curve beneath his torn glove, and the small movements of life returning to the body in his arms.
Baelor’s wide eyes blinked once and his chest rose with a breath of air. As Dunk watched in mute horror, Baelor’s eyebrows pinched together, slowly forming an expression of confusion. “Your Grace?” Dunk asked tremulously. Baelor’s gauntleted shield hand slowly and clumsily rose to tap against Dunk’s arm.
“Guys, hate to interrupt - that take was great, but we’ve got to go again.” A stranger crouched down in front of them, one hand pressed to their ear. Dunk couldn’t see them clearly for his swollen eye and the blood running down his face. “Ira wants to see if you can be more demonstrative with your grief, Peter. And he asked that you to keep to the script this time,” they continued curtly. “We all agreed that the book lines won’t land with the viewers as well.”
Baelor interrupted with an awful rough and panicked noise, not unlike the one that Dunk made when his agonizing got the best of him. He’d made it a minute prior to the gods-be-damned trial, in fact, just before he'd vomited over the side of Thunder’s neck. Watching a dead prince wake in his arms, he felt about ready to make it again.
Dunk attempted to haul Baelor into a more upright position, crying out hoarsely at the strain on his injuries. Try as he might, he could not move swiftly enough to keep the man from retching all over the both of them. Dunk numbly noticed that there was blood mixed in with the thin bile. “Oh shit,” someone gasped from behind them, “Bertie’s just been sick everywhere. What the fuck, is he vomiting blood? Hey you, get the paramedics on set. Go! Hurry!”
Bertie, Dunk thought deliriously. Peter? I might be a lunk, but I know those aren’t the names we had at the start of this accursed day.
He did his best to hold Baelor up so he wouldn’t choke on his own gorge, resting his weight higher on Dunk’s chest. The change in position pressed the sharp edge of Baelor’s pauldron into Dunk’s lance wound, and the strange scene around him turned first yellow and then grey at the edges.
“Your Grace,” he said again, his voice coming out thin and shaking with agony. “Prince Baelor, can you hear me? Are you truly awake, m’lord?” He couldn’t keep his hands from clutching at him, trying to feel the warmth of life through dented armor.
The man in his arms gave a rattling cough and long groan, trying and failing to wipe the back of his gauntlet across his mouth. Miraculously, Baelor replied with great strain. “Ser- ," his head wobbled weakly as he tried to turn and look up at Dunk. He heard Baelor’s throat click as he swallowed hard. "Ser Duncan,” he rasped, “What happened – what is this place?”
That was the last he remembered before his wits left him, pain and confusion fading as he was dragged down under the unyielding weight of unconsciousness.
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