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It’s a cursed thing, and it’s Maekar who wills it in the world. It’s Maekar who tries to silence the shadows of his shame and guilt by cursing his brother to such an existence.
Baelor, stubbornly wheezing breaths that the maesters thought would be his last and with only half a skull to cover his head, had no chance of voicing his opinion on the matter.
To this day, he remembers very little of it, if anything at all.
He has no recollection of the creature that Maekar let inside his rooms, nor any image of his figure as he bent over his bed to do its cursed job.
He remembers tasting iron, though. And pain. The feeling of his blood boiling in his veins, his limbs cramping and his head splitting as if still under his brother’s mace.
It went on for a full night and a full day, before he could catch his breath from the torment. Bone and flesh healed, wits and memory still his, his energy restored.
And yet - a hunger he could not sate, aching in his stomach. A sensitivity to light that was new, the sight of the sun a torture to his eyes.
The maesters didn’t find that aversion to sunlight too uncommon, busy as they were trying to understand how the skull could heal that neatly, that quickly. They bent before him murmuring of a miracle, reverence in their voices.
They didn’t know any better.
Months pass as he learns and tests the limits and novelties of his condition.
Direct daylight will burn his skin, he discovers, blisters forming as quickly as they fade once he moves back into the shade. He avoids it entirely, building a routine that keeps him inside the halls of the Red Keep during the day and taking walks in the gardens through the evenings.
Few people notice and the only one that mentions it is Matarys, loudly complaining and pulling his father by his sleeve, trying to push him outside to see him spar with his cousin Aelor.
Valarr watches the two of them silently, eventually rising to his feet to pry his brother off of him. If his eldest son has any thoughts about his father’s new reclusivity, he will not speak them.
That’s the least of Baelor’s troubles, however. A distaste for daylight he can explain away, ruefully pointing to the scar on the back of his head.
What happened in the kingswoods it’s a whole other thing.
It was a few weeks after returning from Ashford. A night where he felt restless and hungry, always hungry, craving something that he could not define. He commanded the Kingsguard to leave him be for the night and asked Maekar to go hunting with him, all but ordered him really, and his little brother, all tense silences and guilt on his shoulders, complied.
They managed striking a deer.
Little of it was left for them to take back to the Red Keep.
Maekar’s eyes follow him.
Attentive. Concerned.
Guilty. Always guilty.
They do not talk about it. Maekar tried once, starting to speak about Ashford and the excruciating wait to know whether his brother would die or survive.
Baelor stopped him, demanding silence. Curt, with more strength than he intended, and that focus in Maekar’s eyes, that stubborn guilt he had been carrying around, just fell suddenly. He stayed silent, absently staring at the wall as Baelor walked out of the room.
So they don’t talk about it. They never mention the details of what Maekar did to keep him alive. Nor the extent of Baelor’s cravings, the way he could not take his eyes away from his father after he picked a piece of parchment the wrong way and shallowly cut his finger.
Nor the way he cannot stop thinking about the feeling of blood down his throat, warm and thick and so filling, and if a deer’s tasted so good then what would a man’s taste like?
They keep silent.
Baelor makes sure the cooks know he now wishes for his meat rare.
The Great Spring Sickness crawls in King’s Landing slowly and yet inexorably.
Their father the King falls sick first. He is long in the dying, spending weeks abed surrounded by maesters.
Matarys takes shorter: he feels wan in the evening, swaying slightly as he rises from the dining table, his skin feeling warmer that it should when Baelor sets a hand to his brow. He is gone by the following afternoon.
Baelor kneels by his bedside, mindless with grief, calling his name and begging for him to come back, only vaguely aware that Valarr is right behind him, paralysed and mute with horror.
He should not be there. The maesters told them so. Neither of them should be in the young prince’s rooms, let alone reaching for him and touching the hands he coughed in. The heir to the throne and his last remaining son risking their health and their lives when His Majesty the King may be drawing his last breaths in his apartments.
Baelor ordered the maesters out. If they could not save his boy, they had no reason to stand there and order him or Valarr around.
He could not explain how he knew his life was not at risk, the inner certainty that whatever dragged him back to life after the trial would protect him for the rest of his existence. He could not put it into words, nor could he find the energy to do so in the last hours of Matarys’s life, shushing his fevered weeping and promising that his father was there, that everything would be alright.
And because he could not explain why he could stay so close to his sick son, Valarr found himself justified in staying as well. In laying a hand to his brother’s fevered brow. In silently witnessing the loss, sharing it with his father.
Matarys’s body is laid on its pyre and burnt that same evening.
The following morning, the King is pronounced dead.
By nightfall, Valarr collapses to the floor on the way back to his rooms like a puppet with its strings cut.
The same sickness that struck down the King and that stole Matarys away came for Valarr too, Maester Yormwell tells him, pain and resignation in his voice.
The boy is panting under the covers, burning from the fever, not aware of his surroundings and yet not asleep, tossing and turning and whining at the cool cloth on his brow.
“Baelor,” Yormwell says, leaving the formalities behind to plead with him, his voice sodden with desperation. “We will watch him. We will care for him and see to his needs. But you need to leave and return to your rooms.”
Yormwell saw Valarr coming into the world, Baelor distantly thinks. He’s been in the service of his family for so long, ever since he was a child of ten. The pain in his voice is not a lie nor a performance - it’s honest and raw, and yet it doesn’t touch him.
“I cannot,” he mutters back.
He stays there, kneeling at Valarr’s bedside and praying whatever God might be listening to spare his son.
He’s good, he pleads. He’s good and he’s young. Let him reach twenty. Let him hold a breathing, living child of his own in his arms. Let me keep him and teach him, let him follow me as my heir.
Hours pass. Days pass. Not one God in seven answers his prayers. Valarr grows weaker and weaker, his breaths coming so labored and far in between Baelor fears to hear their rattled sound.
Maesters come and go. They soak a cloth and bring it to the boy’s lips, dripping water or broth in his mouth, anything more than that risking to choke him if he can no longer swallow steadily, they tell Baelor. They change the linens and his clothes when they get too damp with sweat. They cool down his brow, his wrists and his ankles.
“They should not be that swollen,” Baelor remarks once, as they pull the covers over his legs. He knows what that means, has seen the same thing happening to his grandfather as a boy and to his own mother just ten years ago.
And yet he rejects its sight, screaming at the young maester that dares try to explain it.
Valarr remains insensate through it all, less agitated now. Calmer. Slowly fading away. His hand stays in Baelor’s.
Baelor stares at the web of veins in his slender wrist. The blue stark against the pale skin.
It is not a thought. It is not a plan. It’s impulse, raw and animal.
He turns to the guard standing at the door.
“Ser Donnel?”
“Your Grace.”
“Leave us. Now,” he says, and he feels the power in his voice, the same strength he had felt ordering Maekar into silence just weeks ago. “You will not come back to these rooms unless commanded. You will not let anyone enter, regardless of what they may hear, until I ask you to do so.”
Even from a distance, he can see the guard’s eyes glaze over, his arms falling limp to his sides.
“Yes, Your Grace,” he mumbles somewhat dreamily before turning away.
He turns back to his son, then. Takes a look at his pale face and the dark rings under his eyes, his open mouth struggling to get enough air.
Valarr is dying. That is now undeniable, regardless of how much time he has spent trying to avoid it. He will follow his grandsire, his mother and his brother in the afterlife if Baelor doesn’t do anything, and what there will be left in the world for Baelor but darkness and hunger and solitude?
He is barely aware of bending over his bed, setting a soft hand to his cheek and moving his head to the side. The movement seems to wake the boy from his slumber, eyes fluttering open, weak and uncomprehending.
“Father…”
“Everything is fine, Valarr,” Baelor shushes him. “You are dreaming, go back to sleep.”
His son closes his eyes again, his breathing evening out quickly, entirely depleted of energy. He will not last the night, Baelor knows.
There’s no other way. A cursed existence, perhaps, but a shared one. A selfish wish, to keep him close and deny the Gods what they are entitled to, but how have the Gods shown him mercy after he let them take Matarys? How have the Gods been generous to him? How could he survive this on his own?
The vein in Valarr’s neck pulses with the little life force left to him. He bends over it, letting his instinct drive him.
It’s all a blur.
Latching onto it. Piercing the skin. A soft hum from Valarr, the only reaction he could muster. And then - sucking.
The warmth of the blood down his throat. The thickness of it. The taste of it on his tongue, some sickly sweetness to it that may be from the fever eating away at his son.
And yet. The rightness of it. The deep, instinctual knowledge that this is how it should always be. Warm human blood and nothing else to satisfy his hunger.
It’s the dull sound of Valarr’s heart, slow and so much weaker than he’s ever heard before, that snaps him out of his trance. When he raises his head back up, the warm taste of his son’s blood still in his mouth, he finds him looking dead already: ashen and clammy, barely breathing, eyes closed but for a white, empty slit.
“No,” he whispers, somewhat hysterically. “No, no, no, no.”
The blood Baelor took, his son could not spare. The two punctures in his son’s neck are barely bleeding.
He needs blood. The boy needs blood.
And Baelor has taken it, has stolen it away from him, Baelor…
A thought emerges in the panic. If Baelor has blood, he could give it back to his son.
He doesn’t know the details of the ritual that brought him back to life but…but he remembers tasting iron. Tasting blood, he realises.
He brings his own wrist to his mouth, finding his skin warmer than it has been ever since he woke back up in Ashford, and bites. Rough and unsmooth, needing for the skin to break enough for the blood to flow freely, two small holes will not be enough for a dying boy.
He shudders when the skin gives but moves quickly as soon as the blood starts flowing, pushing his son on his back and patting his cheek.
“Valarr? Valarr, wake up. Please.”
The boy does not rouse. He stays immobile, barely breathing, his skin feeling cold, too cold after the days of fever. He is halfway gone already, Baelor realises.
He grabs his chin, then, forcing his mouth open and before he can think twice about it he sets his wrist against it. He feels the blood dripping inside.
“Have it,” he whispers. “It’s yours. Drink, Valarr. I beg you. Drink.”
There’s nothing at first that Baelor can hear, other than the sound of his own panicked breathing as he stares down at Valarr’s face, trying to catch the slightest change.
And then - the smallest contraction. His eyelids twitching minutely, his eyebrows moving slightly. His tongue, then, against the skin of his wrist.
Relief floods Baelor, as warm as the blood had been.
“Yes, Valarr,” he says, soft and encouraging. “Go on, son. Drink. Drink.”
It takes a few seconds before Valarr truly rouses: he sighs, deep and soft, as a hand clumsily reaches to hold his father’s arm still against his mouth. His eyes stay closed, brows furrowed with the effort as if in great concentration.
He’s drinking now, truly drinking, sucking and swallowing one mouthful after the other and Baelor starts to feel the effect of it, can almost see the blood flowing from one body to the other. It makes him dizzy and he does wonder what will happen if it doesn’t stop.
“Valarr,” he tries. “It’s enough, now.”
But it doesn’t seem to be enough, never quite enough: Valarr keeps sucking, both hands now holding his arm, fingers clawing into the skin of his wrists, feet pushing against the bedding to hold himself up, eyes open but sightless, dark with animal hunger.
Baelor forces his other arm to move despite the numbness he’s starting to feel, sets it against his son’s shoulder.
“I said that’s enough, son.”
He tries to push him away, mindful of the boy after days of fever and weakness, when Valarr suddenly lifts his head, tearing his bloodied mouth away from his father’s skin to hiss and snarl at him like a feral creature.
It’s repulsive. It’s obscene. It’s horrifying beyond what Baelor can rationalise at the moment.
“I said ENOUGH,” he shouts, tearing his arm away, pushing Valarr back against his pillows. The boy falls back as Baelor stands, holding his wrist close to his chest: the wound closes before his eyes as if stitched back, the smear of blood the only trace left of what just transpired.
He turns back, then. Rushes towards the bed.
Valarr’s eyes are open, clearer. Blindly staring at the ceiling, panting like he’s ran miles.
Baelor knows what is coming as soon as he hears the first moan, soft and scared. The same torture he went through: one day and one night, if it’s going to last as it did for him.
“Valarr,” he says, bending over and laying a hand over his son’s hair, over his cheeks. His face is cooler to the touch, now. Feverless. “Valarr, it’s alright. I am here. Your father is here.”
Valarr’s gaze snaps to his face as he writhes and lets out a terrified, helpless noise.
“Father…” Valarr gasps, his hands clutching at the bedding. “Something…something is wrong…my h-heart…”
He cannot manage any further. The pain starts right there and then and his son all but howls with it, screaming with a force he never heard from him before.
Baelor kneels by his bedside, bringing one of his hands to his lips.
“Forgive me,” he whispers against the spasming fingers. “Gods, forgive me.”
There is a small gathering of maesters outside the Prince’s rooms: the situation did not look promising two days ago, when the King had asked Ser Donnel to keep everyone out.
To grieve alone, they had thought. A son and a kingly father already lost, His Grace would’ve surely wanted some peace and quiet to brace for the loss of his heir.
They had not expected the sounds that came from the room. The Prince, who they had left unconscious and weak and dying, suddenly screaming in pain like they had never heard him before. The King at his side, begging and pleading.
They had asked to be let in, then, for something truly horrible was clearly happening to the boy. Ser Donnel would not let them.
“It is cruelty for us to let the Prince suffer so,” they had insisted. “Let us in, if only to give him milk of the poppy.”
“I cannot,” the guard had said simply, not looking at them, keeping them all away from the doors.
“Ser Donnel,” Maester Yormwell had tried, then. “You have known the Prince since he was a babe. You cannot wish for him to die in such pain.”
Something had crossed Ser Donnel’s face, then. A doubt, or its shadow. Some kind of uncertainty. But it faded quickly.
“I will not let anyone enter until His Majesty asks me to do so,” he said, tone calm and decided, his hand resting lightly on the pommel of his sword.
They are waiting. There has been almost perfect silence for a while, the only sound breaking their stupor being the King’s voice, feeble and exhausted, calling for Ser Donnel.
They expect the worst. They should have a Silent Sister with them, ready to start her work and prepare the Prince for the pyre.
What they do not expect is for Ser Donnel to exit the Prince’s rooms, looking shocked and yet immensely relieved.
“He lives,” he tells them all with a smile. “They both do.”
Baelor of House Targaryen, the Second of his Name, gets crowned in a dimly lit Great Sept, his son and heir Valarr standing tall behind him.
All the lords in the room hail him. All swear their oaths and bend to their knees. Some speak of a good omen, in both King and son still being alive despite the horrors striking them, how clear that is a sign of how beloved of the Gods they are. Long may they both live.
Prince Maekar stares, surrounded by his children and his brothers.
He stares at Baelor’s pale, serene face. At Valarr’s cloak, high around his neck.
“What did you do,” he had asked his brother, staring at the mess around them in horror. “What did you do, Baelor?”
“What I had to,” his eldest brother the King had calmly answered, watching his son bite through the flesh of the boar he had just killed with nothing but his hands.
He mutters his own prayer to the Gods.