Chapter Text
The first thing Maegor realized upon drawing breath was that the Stranger had played a very cruel, very elaborate joke on him.
His last memory was the cold, jagged steel of the Iron Throne tearing through his flesh. He remembered the taste of his own blood filling his mouth, the echoing silence of the Throne Room, and the bitter, final realization that he was dying alone, a tyrant despised by the very realm he had bled to hold together. He had closed his eyes and braced for the Seven Hells. He had expected to open them to a landscape of fire, brimstone, and the shrieking souls of the Faith Militant and his nephews pulling him down into eternal torment.
Instead, he was violently squeezed into existence, his lungs burning as he inhaled a lungful of cold air.
He awoke swaddled tightly in wool. The air did not smell of sulfur and ash. It smelled overwhelmingly of blood, sweat, and the unmistakable, heavy, earthy scent of a profoundly distressed omega.
Maegor tried to speak, to demand to know where his Kingsguard was, but what tore from his throat was a high, thin, pathetic wail. Panic gripped him. He could not move his arms. He could not lift his head.
When he finally managed to pry his blurry, wet eyes open, he found himself staring up at a colossus.
The man holding him was impossibly large, taking up the entirety of Maegor’s limited field of vision. He had a face that looked as though it had been carved from a block of granite by a mason—a squarish, heavily battered jaw, and thick, unruly blonde hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.
But it was the man's size that left the reincarnated King entirely stunned. The hands cradling Maegor were the size of dinner plates, thick with calluses and scarred from years of manual labor. His chest was broad wrapped in a sweat-soaked, linen tunic that looked ready to split at the seams from his sheer musculature.
Visenya was formidable, Maegor thought sluggishly, his newborn brain struggling to process the sight through the haze of infancy, but by the Fourteen Flames, my new dam is a giant. He could snap a destrier's neck with one hand.
Despite his terrifying size, the giant was holding Maegor with an agonizing, trembling gentleness. The man's eyes—a bright blue—were wide and dilated with the panicked, exhausted terror of an omega who had just endured the brutal ordeal of childbirth. The scent pouring off him was a chaotic storm of fresh rain, damp earth, and desperate, overwhelming protective instinct.
"He's… he's very red, isn't he?" the giant mumbled, his voice a deep, gravelly rumble that vibrated pleasantly through Maegor’s tiny bones. The giant awkwardly shifted a massive thumb to gently stroke Maegor’s cheek, his touch lighter than a feather. "Is he supposed to be breathing this fast? He's so small..."
"All babes are red, you great bumbling lout," came another voice from just outside Maegor's line of sight.
The new voice was entirely different. It was high, aristocratic, and arrogant, dripping with the unmistakable, haughty cadence of Old Valyria.
A face leaned into Maegor’s view, immediately crowding the giant's space.
If the giant was a rough-hewn boulder, this man was a polished, lethal dagger. He possessed razor-sharp cheekbones, a perfectly sculpted jaw, and short silver hair that gleamed in the dim candlelight. He was dressed in a doublet of impossibly fine scarlet velvet slashed with black silk, a stark, almost offensive contrast to the squalor of the birthing bed.
He smelled of fire-wine, expensive imported oils, and the sharp, territorial, suffocating musk of an alpha who believed he owned the entire world.
The man’s lilac eyes were burning with a feverish, almost manic intensity as he stared down at Maegor. It was a face that was undeniably, breathtakingly beautiful, but to Maegor's seasoned, cynical soul, it was also a face that was utterly, profoundly punchable.
"Look at him, Duncan," the silver-haired man breathed. Suddenly, the haughty, arrogant edge vanished from his voice, replaced by a desperate, pleading, almost pathetic pitch. The alpha leaned closer, his scent spiking with a toxic, consuming obsession as he looked from the baby to the giant holding him. "Look at the shape of his eyes, the silver on his brow. The blood of the dragon runs thick in him. Our son, my sweet omega."
The alpha reached out, a finely manicured hand adorned with heavy gold rings attempting to brush a lock of sweat-drenched blonde hair from the giant's forehead.
The giant—Duncan—flared his nostrils. His earthy scent soured instantly with a mixture of profound exhaustion, resignation, and a simmering, defensive anger. He turned his head away, rejecting the alpha's touch entirely, and shifted Maegor higher against his massive chest, instinctively pulling the babe further away from the silver-haired man.
"Don't touch me," Duncan said, his deep voice exhausted but firm. He didn't even look at the alpha. He kept his blue eyes fixed entirely on Maegor. "And he is just a babe. He needs feeding, Aerion. Open a window. Your perfume is making me sick."
Maegor blinked, his tiny, useless lungs pausing for a fraction of a second.
Aerion?
Maegor the Cruel, felt his newborn brain violently attempt to connect the dots. Silver hair. Lilac eyes. A manic, cruel vanity. A prince named Aerion. And a giant named Duncan the Tall.
Oh, you have got to be joking, Maegor thought, letting out another high, furious wail as the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of his new life crashed down upon him.
As the days bled into weeks, the reality of his situation took shape. He was at Summerhall, a Targaryen pleasure palace of white stone and sunlit galleries, but the atmosphere was anything but joyous.
Through eavesdropping on the servants and the gossiping of the maesters, Maegor pieced together the politics of his new life. There had been a tourney at Ashford. A trial of seven. Baelor Breakspear, the Crown Prince, had taken a mace to the head that should have killed him. Instead of a funeral pyre, Baelor was currently confined to a darkened bedchamber in the eastern wing, slowly recovering from a fractured skull. He was entirely at the mercy of the obsessive, snarling care of his younger brother—and lover—Prince Maekar.
Maegor had found that dynamic particularly amusing, even from his crib. Maekar was an omega. And right now, the Anvil of the Realm was fiercely guarding his alpha’s sickbed, literally hissing and baring his teeth at any maester who dared approach with the wrong tincture or who stepped too loudly on the floorboards. The eastern wing constantly smelled of sharp cloves, medicinal herbs, and lethal territoriality.
But as entertaining as Baelor and Maekar’s dynamic was, it paled in comparison to the absolute tragicomedy of Maegor’s own parents.
In his first life, Maegor’s father, the Conqueror, had been a distant, stoic god who barely registered his existence. His mother, Visenya, had been a suffocating storm of dark magic, ambition, and toxic devotion.
Now? The roles were entirely inverted, and utterly baffling.
Duncan—or "Dunk," as he insisted on being called—was an omega of Flea Bottom, the poorest part of King’s Landing. He was nearly seven feet tall, awkward and so emotionally grounded it made Maegor dizzy. He didn't scheme. He didn't dabble in blood magic. He just made sure Maegor was warm, fed, and burped, carrying the infant around the sweltering halls of Summerhall in a linen sling.
After the chaos of Ashford, it had been discovered that the giant hedge knight had been pupped by Prince Aerion, how the two of them even had time for it, no one knew, and both the knight and the prince refused to say anything else about the matter. It was the reason Maekar and Baelor had absolutely forbidden Dunk from leaving. They had dragged him to the safety of Summerhall to carry the royal pup in peace, and to try and make up for the whole disaster at Ashford in some way.
To Maegor’s immense humiliation—and eventual, profound comfort—Dunk did not hand him off to a wet nurse. As an omega, Dunk's massive body produced rich, sweet milk, and he was entirely dedicated to the task. To the ancient soul of Maegor the Cruel, nursing from the chest of a seven-foot-tall, blond, blue-eyed hedge knight was a deeply surreal experience. But Dunk would hold him with gentle hands, humming a low, tuneless song from Flea Bottom, his scent washing over Maegor in a thick, soothing wave of rain, damp earth, and warm milk. In those moments, Maegor wasn't a tyrant or a monster. He was just a pup, utterly safe, wrapped in a linen sling against a chest that could stop a battering ram.
And then there was Aerion Brightflame.
Gods, Maegor thought one afternoon, sitting in Dunk’s lap in the courtyards as Aerion approached for the fifth time that day. He is so… embarrassing.
"Duncan," Aerion crooned, stepping into the sunlight. He was dressed in a doublet of spun gold and scarlet silk, entirely inappropriate for a casual day in the Dornish Marches. In his hands, he held a remarkably ugly, jewel-encrusted rattle. "I had the smiths forge this from the finest Lysene silver. For our little dragon."
Aerion scented the air, puffing out his chest, desperately trying to project alpha dominance. Yet, his lilac eyes kept darting to Dunk’s stoic face, practically begging for a crumb of validation.
Dunk looked at the rattle, then at Aerion. "He’s four months old, my prince. He’s going to hit himself in the face with it, and those rubies look sharp. No thank you."
"But it is a princely gift!" Aerion protested, his alpha pride immediately wounded. He took a step closer, his voice pitching higher in frustration. "You cannot deny the boy his birthright! I am his sire! Duncan... just let me sit with you. I command it."
Dunk let out a heavy sigh. He casually turned his broad back, shifting Maegor higher on his knee so the infant’s face was pressed into his tunic, shielding him from the alpha.
"I was asked by Prince Baelor to stay in Summerhall, Aerion," Dunk replied flatly. "I ain't commanded to sit with you. Come along, Egg. We need to check the horses before the sun goes down."
From the shadows emerged a skinny, bald child. He couldn't have been older than ten. He scurried forward.
"Yes, Ser!" the boy piped up, his large, purple eyes completely ignoring his royal brother in favor of the giant hedge knight.
Maegor stared at the bald child from the safety of Dunk's arms. Dunk called him Egg. But Maegor, having listened to the whispers of the castle, knew his real name. Aegon.
The irony tasted like ash in his small mouth. The name of the greatest king in history, the man who had shaped a continent, the Conqueror who had sired him in his first miserable life... that name now belonged to this scrawny, bald squire who practically worshipped an oversized, blond hedge knight.
Yet, as Dunk hoisted Maegor up with one massive arm—supporting the pup's weight as if he were lighter than a feather—and affectionately patted Egg’s bald head with his other hand, entirely ignoring Aerion’s frustrated, whining demands echoing behind them in the courtyard, Maegor felt a strange, alien sensation bloom in his tiny chest.
It wasn't the fiery ambition of his past. It wasn't the cold paranoia of the Iron Throne.
As Dunk carried him away, the scent of rain and earth entirely drowning out the arrogant, desperate smell of the alpha prince, Maegor closed his eyes and leaned his silver-haired head against his mother's collarbone.
It was peace.