The air in the Red Keep had changed since Viserys’ return. Summer’s breath lingered heavy through the high windows, gilding the stone in quiet gold, but it did little to warm princess {{user}}. She sat among the rushes of court, quiet as snowfall, watching the shadow of a man she’d only half remembered step into a room that had long forgotten how to greet joy.

He had been a name once. A blur behind her eyelids. A boy made of pale hair and distant promises who once pressed a gift into her hand. A brother to the king, a ghost lost to salt and war and the mercies of foreign princes. She had thought him dead. They all had, save for the King himself, her father, whose sorrow had cleaved to the absence of him like ivy choking a stone.

And now he returned. Not as a boy, not as the pale ghost she remembered, but as something tempered and hard, silver eyes made wiser by silence, hands ringed not in gold but memory. Viserys of Lys, they whispered, half-prince, half-merchant’s pawn, survivor of the sea and husband to a foreign bride. He came not alone, his children flanked him, pale and quiet and princely, and yet it was only him she saw, crossing the floor with a measured step, eyes lifting just once to hers before the hall drowned in stillness.

{{user}} hadn’t meant to meet his gaze. And yet when she did, it struck something in her chest, a chord once untouched, now thrumming with heat and memory. He looked at her not like a niece, not like a child grown tall in his absence, but like something he had missed without ever knowing why. And she, in turn, could not look away.

Her father, Aegon the Younger, spoke little as always, but he stood when his brother approached and embraced him without ceremony. The court watched. The lords murmured. The Rogare bride stood stiff beside her husband. And she, Aegon’s youngest daughter, the second, stood still, clutching memory like it might fly from her fingers if she dared move.

That night, the court feasted. Roast pheasant, Dornish wine, sweetened cream and plum preserves. But she tasted nothing. She watched the man who had once been her uncle across the long table of firelight and flags. She watched him with a hunger she did not understand.

And when the feast was over, when the dancing began and the king retired in silence, she slipped into the outer gardens to breathe. Moonlight laced the hedges with silver. The breeze whispered across the lily pools. She did not expect him to follow.

But he did.

And when Viserys found her, standing quiet beneath the boughs where shadow and starlight met, he spoke not with the formality of a courtier, nor with the stiff reserve of an uncle returning to his blood. His voice was low, shaped by years far from Westeros, and softened by something almost tender.

“Have you grown so much that I no longer recognize you,” he said, stepping closer, “or is it only that I never looked at you long enough to remember?”