(Another Daeron Targaryen fic, I suppose I have a thing for somewhat pathetic and melancholy men)
They called him many things.
But the name that followed him most faithfully was the cruelest one.
It was easier for men to laugh at him than to understand him.
A drunk was a simple thing. A drunk was a fool. A drunk was a man who lacked discipline.
But Daeron had never been simple.
He was a prince born into a house that believed it had been chosen by the gods themselves, yet he had never felt chosen by anything.
The dragons of old had burned cities.
The kings of his bloodline had worn crowns.
The knights of Westeros sang of glory.
Daeron only ever wanted somewhere quiet enough to hear himself think.
The first time he saw y/n, he thought she looked like the moon.
Not because she was untouchable.
But because she was the only thing in the darkness that made him want to look upward.
She did not look at him as the world did.
She did not see the prince who stumbled through feasts with wine on his breath.
She did not see the Targaryen name.
She saw the boy beneath it.
The boy who loved old stories.
The boy who wished he could be brave without needing a sword.
The boy who carried sadness far older than his years.
“You hide yourself behind laughter,” y/n once told him.
Daeron smiled lazily, raising his cup.
“And you think you know what is behind it?”
She looked at him with that infuriating gentleness.
“I think you hope nobody tries to find out.”
For once, Daeron had no clever answer.
People spoke of love as though it was a grand thing.
A declaration before thousands.
But Daeron learned that love was often quieter.
It was her waiting for him after another night lost to wine.
It was her brushing his hair away from his eyes while telling him he looked like he had fought a battle with a barrel and lost.
It was the way she laughed when he told ridiculous stories.
It was the way he slept easier when she was near.
And he became a man who was always trying to find his way back home.
But moons cannot chase men.
And eventually, she grew tired of waiting for a dragon who kept flying away
Daeron knew what people said.
He drinks because he is weak.
But none of them knew the truth.
The wine was not what destroyed him.
The wine was what he reached for after everything else already hurt.
Every Targaryen carried something.
And sorrow was a heavy thing for a young man to hold.
“I do not know how to become what they want,” he confessed one night.
The moon hung above them, pale and distant.
“Perhaps you were never meant to.”
“You still believe there is something good in me?”
“I believe there is something good you keep trying to drown.”
Those words followed him longer than any insult.
There came a day when she stopped waiting.
Not because she stopped loving him.
That would have been easier.
She stopped because loving Daeron meant constantly losing him.
She had spent years reaching for him.
And every time she thought she had him, he slipped away like water between her fingers.
When she left, Daeron did not rage.
Because some losses arrive before the person actually leaves.
He had felt her slipping away for years.
The tragedy was that he had loved her enough to notice.
But not enough to save himself.
The songs became crueler.
Daeron the Drunken became a tale told by knights who had never known him.
They laughed about the prince who wasted his life.
They never spoke about the girl who had once made him want to live differently.
They never spoke about how, even in his worst moments, he kept a small token she had given him.
A piece of a life he could never return to.
Sometimes, when the nights were quiet and the wine had finally stopped burning his throat, Daeron would look toward the sky.
Did she ever look at it too?
Did she remember the boy before the drinking?
Before the disappointment?
Before the world convinced him he was already lost?
That was the cruelty of love.
You could spend your whole life carrying someone in your heart, while they carried only a memory of you.
The maesters would write of kings.
The singers would write of warriors.
The histories would remember dragons and wars.
But somewhere, hidden between pages, there would be another story.
The story of a prince who was never meant to be a conqueror.
A prince who found his moon.
A prince who loved her so deeply that even when he lost himself, some part of him was still searching for her light.
Daeron Targaryen was called the Drunken.
But she had known another name.
A name no history would record.
A name only whispered beneath the moon.
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