The wine tasted sour that evening. Daeron knew it before the cup even touched his lips. Some wines came alive in the mouth, arbor reds singing of sun and summer, but this one lay flat and bitter, like rainwater caught in an old helm. Still, he drank it. He always drank it.
Because sometimes the taste did not matter. Sometimes only the silence afterward did.
The chamber given to him in the Red Keep was too warm. Fires crackled in the hearth though the spring night beyond the shutters carried only a gentle chill. Sweat clung faintly beneath his collar. His dreams had been worse in warmth.
They were always worse in warmth.
Daeron Targaryen, called drunkard, wastrel, failure, dreamer, leaned against the stone embrasure and closed his violet eyes. Behind them still lingered the image from sleep, Fire...
He swallowed more wine.
“Dreams again?” The voice came soft from the doorway.
Daeron did not turn at once. He knew that voice. Had known it through too many nights, too many cups, too many wordless silences shared over bottles emptied together.
Only then did he glance back. “Always,” he said quietly. “They don’t stop simply because I ask politely.”
{{user}} stood there, There was always something guarded in him, Daeron thought. Something tightly held behind the eyes, like a door barred from the inside.
A different sort of haunted. Not by prophecy. By something quieter. Something that whispered. Daeron understood whispers.
That was familiar between them. No grand greetings. No princely courtesies. Just the weary recognition of two men who met most often at the bottom of a bottle.
{{user}} crossed the chamber slowly and took the second cup without asking. He never asked anymore.
They drank in silence first. They always did.
At court they were cousins. In the night they were something stranger. Not friends, precisely. Friendship required lightness. Ease. Shared laughter.
They had shared laughter, yes, but the brittle kind, the kind that came after the third cup and died quickly. What they shared instead was understanding. Daeron dreamed of burning futures he could not change.
{{user}} fought thoughts that came crawling unbidden through the dark corridors of his mind. Two broken branches of the same dragon tree. And so they drank. Together.
Daeron found himself studying {{user}} in the firelight, the tiredness beneath the composure, the tension that never quite left his shoulders, the way he held the cup as though it were less indulgence and more medicine.
“You ever think,” {{user}} said quietly, eyes still on the wine, “…maybe it would be easier if our heads were simply empty?”
Daeron let out a long breath.
“Yes.” A pause. “Every day.” Another silence stretched. Not awkward. Never awkward.
A hand touched his sleeve. Lightly. Hesitantly. As though expecting rejection. Daeron froze.
Touch-starved, Daeron thought suddenly. The realization came sharp and unwanted.
Because the truth was, So was he.
Something in the air shifted then. Not sudden. Not dramatic. Just the slow, dangerous softening of two defenses worn thin by loneliness.
“You know,” Daeron whispered, voice rough, “everyone thinks I drink because I’m weak.”
“…Why do you?”
“So the dreams blur at the edges.”
A breath.
“…Why do you?”
A longer pause this time.
“So the whispers do the same.”
Their eyes met. Understanding. Not pity. Never pity. Something deeper. Something far more dangerous.
It happened slowly. So slowly neither could later say who moved first.
The distance between them closed, not with urgency, not with hunger, but with the fragile caution of men unused to being held at all.
When Daeron’s forehead finally rested against {{user}}’s, the contact felt almost unbearably gentle.
“I never kiss a man before-” Daeron started.
“Me neither,” {{user}} admitted.
The kiss, when it came, was uncertain. Careful. Like stepping onto ice not knowing if it would hold.
But it did. It held. And for one small, impossible stretch of time, the dreams quieted. The whispers too. The fire burned low. The wine sat forgotten.