Things I Should Have Said
Aerion Targaryen x wife!reader—in which the reader dies of the Spring Sickness and Aerion consumes wildfire to join her. TW: death of the reader and Aerion. Some possession and faint abuse. I mean, Aerion is a little OOC but at the same time, still a warning on his own.
You were Aerion’s everything. You were what he built his life around, the calm in the centre of his storm, the crown jewel of his dragon treasure. You were something that only he laid claim to, only his hands had touched you, only his eyes had seen all of you. You were the one whom he sought out time after time, for every wound and scrape and insult, taking comfort in your embrace, pleasure in your touch because your soft words and gentle touch was only for him. Only he had this, you.
You were his dragon’s flame, always there and always ready. You were the mother to his children, Maegor and the others, the six small dragons which you had brought forth. Which you had borne with no complaint save on your birthing bed when, every time, you cursed him. You cursed him every time because he was the one who did this to you and he was never angry at your words; simply let you squeeze his hand and curse him if it would bring you forth from labour unscathed.
You always did.
You were the only one he was gentle with, the only one he could be gentle with. The one whose hand he kissed, the one he escorted down the stairs, the one he laughed with, the one whose hair he brushed back, the one he loved.
You were his everything and yet you were dying. You were dying and he was not, the Great Spring Sickness having found you, even hidden away in the stone palace. You were dying, every breath a rattle and a wheeze and Aerion…Aerion was falling apart, never leaving your side, his hand always in yours.
Every time you tried to argue, to tell him to go to the children, to leave you alone he snapped. He told you he would never leave your side for you were his. You were his in a way that nothing ever had been in his life. You were the one he loved, who loved him. You were his life and he would not leave you. He told you that only he, the dragon, would be able to help you survive and so he stayed. He told you that he’d burn the world down just to have you whole and hale. He told you he’d rather all your children perished, if only so that you would survive.
He told you that if you went, then so would he.
That you were the only thing keeping him tethered to this plane.
That you had been since he saw you for the first time, years ago.
***
Aerion saw a glimpse of braided hair, just around the bend, the adornments that of suns—the Dornish symbol and it drew him. He didn’t understand why, but he followed the glimpse, followed the image of the braid and the suns, curiosity winning out.
“Where do you go, Aerion?” Maeker called out, voice powerful and strong and royal. Ever so royal. Ever so blood of the dragon. Ever so much like his son.
“A walk,” he answered, dipping out of the Targaryen stands, the tourney no longer interesting him, instead his dragon nature wanted that whom the braid belonged to. Whether or not they wanted him. And so, he walked along the path, along the grounds, stopping only once he saw the braid—the braid which happened to belong to the Dornish princess.
To you.
“Come out of the shadows, my follower,” you called, voice lilting and rising in a sweet way, but with an undercurrent of iron. “It is not polite to linger in the shadows.”
“How did I know I followed?” Aerion asked you, stepping forth, behind you, your body turning to face him, the sight of you stealing his breath away. He hates the fact that he’s attracted to you for you are not the blood of the dragon, you do not have the silver hair, you will only dilute his line. Yet, he is.
“You are not quiet, Dragon Prince,” you answered, crossing your arms over your chest, gold sleeves hanging low, low enough to reach the belt done across your hips. “In fact, you are quite loud. Although…I suppose dragons need not be quiet as they’re the strongest in all the land, but still…” You shrugged, raising one eyebrow at him, a smile blooming on your face, lips curving in a way that he always wants to see, a way that makes him want to say again, again. But he didn’t.
“Why is Dorne here for a tourney?” he asked you, the cruel voice returning, the metal-edged voice meant to draw blood or weaken, but you simply smiled, the movement crinkling the skin around your eyes. In a way that made him want to reach out, to smooth the crinkles in your brow away.
“Why not?” you asked and then you turned on your heel, walking away, arms still crossed as you called over your shoulder to him, “I look forward to seeing you again, my prince.”
He found that he was too. He found that looking at you, thinking of you made his chest warm and tingle, palms sweat. Love is weakness.
And it seemed you were his.
***
You were dying, breaths more laboured as you lay prone on the bed in Aerion’s chamber, the one he made you move into when you married, denying you the right to privacy, calling you, his property. He’d expected you to chafe against his restraints, but you didn’t.
You never did.
It didn’t matter if he was cruel, if he called you whore or pathetic or weak. It didn’t matter if he prevented you from talking to anyone else. It didn’t matter if he slapped you. Nothing he did in those early days mattered for you bore it all without complaint, simply responding with tenderness and faith.
Things no one had ever had in him.
He found that once he knew how true you were, that he never again wanted to let you down.
He wanted to show you that you had placed your faith in the proper prince.
***
“Why do you not cry?! I have hit you; I have hurt you! Why do you not cower from me?! Why do you not do anything but stare at me like that, incessantly!” he roared at you, rage spilling over while you simply held your red-marked cheek, earned he’d said because you’d smiled at Valarr.
“Because I love you,” you told him, voice quiet and gentle but no less strong than the first time he had heard it. “Because I love you and you do not believe I do. You believe that I am unfaithful and crying and cowering will only prove to your twisted sensibilities that I am. And I’m not. I do not want to endure this abuse, but I love you and it will be my undoing.” In your words, Aerion heard everything he’d never heard in his life.
Love. That was what you gave him, simply and proudly.
“You…love me?” he asked, stepping towards you, rage simmering away replaced by confusion. “Even after all I’ve done to you? After all I’ve said and done and thought? How?”
You met him in the middle of the room, your hands taking his face, him nuzzling your hand, a sigh of contentedness escaping him. “I cannot stop loving you because of what you’ve done. I fell for you the instant you stepped out of the shadows, shocked that I knew you were there. And just because you’re cruel and bitter doesn’t mean I’ll stop. It means I hurt, it means I cry where you cannot see me, it means that sometimes I wish I could escape, but it doesn’t mean that I stop loving you. I could no more stop loving you than I could command the sun to stop shining, the sea to stop moving, the fires to stop burning. My love for you is not something that I can stop. It is a part of me, it is a part of the earth and the air and I can’t stop. I can’t stop loving you, Aerion. It’s impossible. Believe me…I’ve tried.”
It’s the last bit that undid him, the idea that you tried to stop loving him, the idea that you tried to exorcise him from your heart. He didn’t like it, the idea that you’d been so hurt, so fed up as to try to stop the emotions within you just to make it hurt less. All his life, he’s been the dragon prince famed for his brutality, his uncaring nature. All your life, you’ve been known as a gentle soul, one who forgives rather than hates, one who feels for others.
And now, he found himself quite unmoored because he feels, for the first time, ashamed of his nature. Ashamed of the hurt he has dealt you, ashamed so much that it drove a confession from his lips, one he intended to uphold.
“I will never hurt you again,” he vowed. “I will do my best to be worthy of this…impossible love you have for me.”
***
“Promise me,” you whisper now, your hand tight in Aerion’s but not of the tightness of your grip, but rather his for he holds himself to you, anchored as if you keep him tethered to the ground. It’s like he believes that the tighter he holds you, the more chance you have to survive.
“Anything,” he vows, the words falling like a plea and a prayer at the same time despite his abhorrence for the Andal faith.
“You…y-you have not…even…h-heard the…p-promise,” you wheeze, every inhale and exhale, every word taking its toll on you.
“Then tell it to me, my flame,” he whispers, his free hand brushing hair back from your forehead, the one covered in sweat, enflamed by fever.
“Promise…me…t-that when…I d-die…you will…remain…for the…c-children,” you breathe and he clutches your hand tighter, so hard that for a moment he fears he’s cracked the delicate bones in your hand and he stills his movement on your forehead, pain slicing through him sharp and deep.
He doesn’t want to think about you dead. You were not dying, not dying, not dying. You would live. You had to. He needed you. He would always need you and that would mean that you needed to outlast him, to make sure that his death was proper and not a result of him and his brashness.
“If,” he says, voice fierce and not so much breaking as already broken. “If you die, my darling.” You smile at him, the smile of sadness and pity and fear, tinged with the blood leaking from your gums.
“Promise,” you breathe and he nods, once, sharp and fast.
“I promise,” he says and you nod, your face becoming serene despite the pain the sickness brings, despite the looming figure of Death over you. The inevitability of your demise. You believe you’ve only held on this long because of Aerion, because of how he needs you so.
And Aerion is thinking of everything with you.
Everything of you.
***
“AH! Fuck you, Aeri—OW! Get this damn thing out of me!” you screamed, your hand twined with Aerion’s squeezing so hard that he could no longer feel his fingers, but he did not care. He cared about you, about your survival and the child. With a final scream, the baby appeared, the midwife praising the infant as a beautiful boy, taking him and wiping him before swaddling him tightly in the red and gold blanket Aerion had commissioned just for this moment.
The midwife walked over to Aerion, handing him the child, her voice going lower as she spoke to you, something about cleaning up, but Aerion was enchanted with the young babe in his arms, this physical proof of your love, the joining of the sun and the dragon. The heat and the fire.
The boy had your eyes when they opened, but the Targaryen hair and Aerion couldn’t help thinking that he was the most precious child in all the seven kingdoms. In all the world both known and unknown. If only because he had your eyes, those eyes that Aerion had seen burn like fire and gleam like the sun.
He looked up from the boy, to you, his eyes catching the midwife preparing to clean you, the materials having passed and he snapped, “no one touches my wife but me!”
“But my prince,” the midwife said, bowing her head in submission, “the princess needs to be cleaned.”
“And I will do it!” he yelled, his face contorting in rage one moment and then awe the next as the babe in his arms started to cry and you simply reached for him, whispered “he’s hungry” and Aerion obeyed, shocked by how fast you knew what the babe needed.
But he needn’t be surprised for you had known just what he needed right away as well.
“I will clean my wife, you are no longer needed,” he said to the midwife who ran from the room, fear of the Dragon Prince hastening her movements and then he knelt on the ground before you, cleaning you slowly, ever so slowly, as he watched you nurse his child.
His sun, his flame had brought forth his child.
Nothing had ever been so miraculous as that.
***
“I…l-love…y-you…A-aer-r-rion,” you wheeze, head lolling to the side, life leaving your body with the exhalation and Aerion is frozen.
He holds your hand and pulls it up to his heart, plea after plea leaving his lips, begging you not to be gone, begging you to come back, to please just come back. To come back and be with him for eternity for what is fire without heat, a dragon without the sun which with to fly through. What is he without you?
He is nothing, he is nothing and no one and worthless. He needs you and you have left him and this is when the rage fills him, when he erupts. When he pulls the shelves from off the walls, when he smashes every breakable, tears every tapestry, throws every book into the flames of the hearth and shatters every window.
When he yells and screams and rages, curses every god every known. Curses everyone he’s ever known, curses his sons and his daughters. Curses everyone who lives while do you not.
He yells and rages even while the maester walks in, checks your pulse and prepares to take you away and that is when Aerion loses it more. It is when he cries “DO NOT TOUCH HER!” and places a dagger to the throat of the maester, warning him to leave or die and so he leaves, leaving Aerion alone with your body which he falls upon weeping.
He falls weeping onto your body, cursing the sickness and the gods and the dragons and anyone he can think to blame for losing you.
For taking you from him.
And then he apologises to you, for this will be the only promise which he breaks.
***
“You cannot consume wildfire, Aerion,” you said, the needle stilling in your hand, the embroidery settling against the swell of your belly, Maegor and his sister Daena at your feet. “It will kill you, not put you in your dragon form.”
“What do you know about it?” he snapped, irritated at your insolence, daring to contradict him but it melted at the expression on your face.
“I know enough that I do not want to bury my husband in an early grave,” you said, frown rising and shifting when Daena stirred, her chubby hands grasping at your skirt, Maegor still slumped against you asleep.
“I promise I shall not do it as long as you live,” he said. “Happy now, wife?”
“Immensely, my dragon.”
***
You were gone from the body in his arms, disappeared long ago. He doesn’t know how long he has been holding you, only that it has been long enough for the sun to go down and rise again. Long enough that your body has stiffened and night has become day and night again. Long enough that every beat of his heart is just a hollow sound that bleeds your absence, a hollow beat from something gone for you were his heart and now he has lost you.
Before you, he was the Dragon Prince cold and cruel and sadistic but with you, he was a prince and a lover and a father, your husband. He was everything you needed him to be because in you, in he found that he didn’t have to be anything he wasn’t, simply what he was.
Before you, he had not known love. With you, he did.
Before you, he had been willing to be consumed by the blaze. With you, he was prepared to use it to protect you.
Before you, he loved no one. With you, he loved you alone.
And there will be no, after you.
***
“What would you do if I died?” you asked him one night, your head resting on his bare chest. He didn’t like this train of thought, this idea of you being gone, reaching a place he’d never find you. He didn’t like thinking of you ever not there, beside him.
“I would burn the whole world down, burn it all to the ground and let it consume me as well,” he whispered, voice tinted with anger and sadness and love for without you, he knew none.
“Let us hope it never comes to that then,” you said and then your hand found his and pulled it up to his chest, not far from your cheek, the tenderness of your touch enough to calm him, to lull him to sleep along with you.
***
He carries you with him, both the idea of you and your stiff corpse. He carries you with him while he searches for the wildfire, his promise not broken but bent for you are not alive and he can consume it now without breaking two promises.
Instead, he’ll just break one.
He promised you once that he would burn the world down if you died, let himself burn in the flames with it, but this is more direct. This way your children will live on, your eyes still shining in the world, burning like fire and gleaming like the sun.
He promised you that he would remain for the children, but he must break it for he has never loved them. He loves that they are of him, of you, of his flame, more dragon blood in the world, but you…you were his treasure, his obsession and seeing them without you is not something he can handle.
He promised you once that he would never hurt, but he never once told you just how much he loved you.
He never once told you for it was weakness to admit so instead, he showed it through actions, but now you were gone. You were gone before he could ever tell you how much he loved you and so now, he lays your body beside him and consumes that which he promised you he would not while you were alive.
He consumes it, regretting it all the things he never said and lets it burn him from the inside out. Lets it kill him, rend him apart.
Lets it destroy him so that he may join you.
***
I “I thought you didn’t want to marry anyone not of dragon blood,” you said to him, your hand laced with his, dancing the night of your wedding. He looked at you, violet eyes smouldering with desire and something akin to possession.
“I lied.”
***
And as his body burns, as his soul departs, he fears that you will never forgive him. He fears that he will spend eternity without your soul and your love.
But he should have known better.
For you have always known the things he should have said. You’ve always known and you’ve been waiting.
You’ve been waiting for him to find you and when he finally does, he tells you all the things he should have told you long ago.
