The Red Keep had gone dim in the weeks since Jaehaerys died. Not from mourning banners or closed doors, but from neglect—torches left unlit, servants moving like ghosts, rooms abandoned mid-use. Aegon noticed these things the way one notices rot in a wall: distantly, without urgency.

He drank in the dark now. Slept in whatever chamber he collapsed in. The castle could burn for all he cared. It already had, in a way.

He knew where {{user}} would be before he ever went looking. She spent her days on the floor beside Jaehaera’s bed or in the nursery that still smelled faintly of milk and blood.

Aegon had not stepped foot in that room since the night it happened. He didn’t need to see the cradle to remember what was taken. He pushed open her chamber door without knocking, the sound sharp in the quiet. She didn’t look up. She never did anymore.

She sat barefoot on the cold stone, nightgown hanging loose, hair unbraided and dull. A queen who refused to be one. A wife who had long since stopped pretending.

Aegon leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, eyes heavy-lidded and unreadable. He watched her the way one watches something already ruined. “You’re avoiding the court again,” he said flatly.

Silence stretched. It always did. He scoffed quietly, turning his head away. “They whisper that you’ve gone mad,” he added, as if discussing weather. “That grief’s made you soft. Unfit.”

His gaze flicked back to her, sharp with something bitter. “I don’t correct them.” There was no threat in it. . If she wanted to disappear, he would let her. He had already learned what clinging cost.

His eyes drifted, unwilling, to Jaehaera’s small form in the bed. A muscle in his jaw jumped. “At least one of them still breathes,” he muttered. A reminder.

For the first time since he’d entered the room, {{user}} moved.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t turn to him or rise or speak his name. Instead, her hand tightened slowly in the fabric of her nightgown, knuckles whitening as though the words had struck her somewhere beneath the ribs.

Her gaze lifted—not to Aegon, but to the child—lingering there a beat too long, as if counting breaths the way she used to count flowers in the garden. Then something in her face closed.

She looked at him then.

It was brief. Measured. A glance stripped of pleading or accusation, empty of tears. There was no shock in it—only a quiet, stunned disbelief that someone could be so careless with the dead. With the living.

The look passed over him like cold air through an open door, and in it was a single, unspoken truth: why would you ever say that?

He straightened, already finished. “Do what you want,” Aegon said, voice empty as the hearths below them. “Hide. Rot. Pray. I’ll carry the crown alone like I always have.” He turned to leave without waiting for a response, footsteps receding down the hall, leaving her with the cold, the child, and the unbearable truth—they were already dead.