POV-MC
There was pressure.
That was the first thing. Not pain exactly, more like the memory of pain, a crushing, grinding squeeze that came in waves and didn't stop. He had no word for it yet. He had no words for anything yet. But somewhere behind where his eyes should have been, something older than instinct was already watching, already trying to make sense of it.
Something was wrong, not wrong in the sense of wrongness he could explain. Just the feeling of a shape that didn't fit. Like wearing a coat three sizes too small. Like reaching for something and finding your arm shorter than you remembered.
He remembered arms. He was almost sure of that.
He remembered something. Fragments of memories. The feeling of cold air and cement floors and the particular exhaustion that came at the end of a very long day when you still weren't finished. A screen's light in a dark room. Numbers. Deadlines. The specific weight of knowing you were behind and would stay behind no matter how early you woke up.
He had been someone who worked. That much he was certain of.
And then there was nothing. And then this.
The pressure came again, worse, and whatever he was got shoved forward into cold and noise and light that hit like a fist even through closed eyelids. He tried to make sense of it. He tried to reason through it the way he would reason through a problem, step by step, because that was what he did, that was what he had always done.
He was very small, that was obvious. He couldn't see properly, everything was blur and brightness and shadow, shapes without edges and forms but he could feel his own hands and they were tiny, curled up against his chest, and his legs were kicking against nothing and he couldn't stop them from kicking.
A voice. Female. Sharp with effort and relief at the same time.
"Gods, look at the hair ..."
More voices, overlapping. He couldn't sort them. Everything was too loud. He was crying, he realized distantly, because air had just entered his lungs for the first time and his body had made that decision before he had any say in the matter. His whole chest hurt with it. He screamed because screaming was what the body wanted to do and he had no leverage to stop it yet.
Hands. He passed through several pairs of them. Each time he was jostled he screamed louder, not out of fear exactly, more out of objection. He was cold and confused and nothing about this was explained.
They kept moving him from hand to hand. He caught pieces of what the voices were saying. Not all of it. Some of the words were slightly wrong, pitched in a way he half-recognized and half didn't, like a song played in the wrong key.
"Those are Targaryen features...."
"Send for the Maester, the mother is..."
The voices flied away. He didn't know what to do with it yet but they flied away because that was what his body could do.
Something happened to me.
He thought that very clearly in the middle of the crying and the cold and the hands passing him around like something fragile and precious. Something had happened to him. He had been a person, a real person, with a name and a job and a floor under his feet and then something had happened and now he was this. Whatever this was.
The voice above him was saying his name.
Not his name. A name. Someone else's name, maybe, or a name they were giving him, the syllables still wet and uncertain like they weren't sure it would stick.
He turned the sound over in whatever passed for his mind. It didn't mean anything to him. Nothing here meant anything to him yet.
That's fine, he thought, still crying, still cold, still furious about all of it. I'll learn.
The last pair of hands that took him were different.
Steadier. Older. They knew how to hold something small without gripping too tight, which none of the other hands had fully managed. He stopped crying, not because he wanted to, but because some animal part of him recognized the competence and went quiet in response to it.
He felt himself being cradled, properly cradled, weight distributed just right and the cold eased a little because warmth was being pressed against him from above, cloth and body heat, deliberate.
He blinked. He couldn't focus on anything. But he tried, because he had always been the type to try.
A face, blurred, looking down at him. White hair. He thought it was white.
And then a voice, clear and close:
"Oh."
Just that. Just the one word, soft, with something in it that wasn't surprise exactly but wasn't quite certainty either. Something in between. He would understand it later, when he had words for things, when he had context. For now, he just lay there and breathed and tried to work out what he had been dropped into.
He had questions. He had a great many questions.
He suspected it would be a long time before anyone could answer them.
POV-QUEEN ALYSANNE
She had seen stranger things than silver-gold hair on a bastard.
She told herself that while she looked down at the boy, because something in her chest was doing something inconvenient and she needed to be sensible. He was an infant. He was small and furious and still damp from birth and his mouth was already closing after the crying had stopped, which meant he was either calm by nature or exhausted, and at one minute old she had no way to tell which.
But those eyes.
They were open. Most newborns kept theirs shut but this one had them open and they were looking up at her with something that she could only describe, absurdly, as attention. Not the unfocused blur that newborns usually showed. He was looking at her. Or at least making an effort to.
The eyes were amethyst. Purple so deep it was almost bruised. She had seen that shade before. She had been married to a man with eyes that colour for over forty years.
She turned her head toward the room.
The room was crowded and nobody was comfortable. That was her fault, partially — she had sent for them when the woman's labour had come on sudden and she had needed witnesses, had insisted on witnesses, because she knew how men like Aemon dealt with inconvenient situations when no one was watching. She was not angry at Aemon. He was nineteen and had made a stupid choice while drunk in a port city and had spent the subsequent months hoping it would go away on its own. She understood stupidity. She did not excuse it, but she understood it.
She looked at her son.
Baelon stood near the window, arms folded, the particular expression on his face that meant he was working very hard to seem unreadable. Beside him Alyssa had her hand on his arm, not gripping, just present. They had spoken before coming here and whatever they had said to each other had settled something between them, because they were standing close in the way they only stood when they had agreed.
Rhaenys was in Alyssa's other arm, 2 name day old and deeply uninterested in proceedings, trying to put her own fist in her mouth.
Jocelyn Baratheon stood further back, near the door.
She was a Baratheon of Storm's End and she had been born with the face that house produced. The strong jaw, dark eyes that didn't give much away. She had married Aemon 6 years gone and she had not said a single word since arriving in this room, not when the labouring woman had been pointed out to her, not when the woman's contractions had grown worse, not when the maester had begun to look worried. She simply stood and watched and kept her expression the way a shield was kept facing out, covering the inside.
Queen Alysanne had respected Jocelyn Baratheon before this. She respected her more now.
And Aemon.
Aemon was standing beside his wife, and he was looking at the floor.
He was a good boy in the ways that mattered. He was her son and she loved him and he had her husband's jaw and his father's colouring, and he had been foolish in exactly the way a one and twenty old princes were foolish when they were away from court for a while and someone put enough wine in them. She knew all of this.
She also knew he had denied the child for seven months.
He had sent money. She would give him that. When the woman had come south from White Harbour with her impossible claim and her swelling belly, Aemon had sent coin through intermediaries and called it charity and written no letters that anyone could use against him, and for seven months the woman had kept coming south because coin was not what she had come for.
She had come for her child to have a name.
Queen Alysanne looked at the boy in her arms.
Silver-gold hair that caught the torchlight like something out of the tales. Purple eyes open and watching. A face that hadn't settled yet into anything permanent, but the bones of it, the particular set of the nose and brow. She had seen that face in the mirror for four decades, had seen it on her children, had seen it on her grandchildren. She knew that face. She would have known it in the dark.
She walked toward her grandson.
"Aemon."
He looked up. He was pale, which was saying something for a Targaryen. He had the look of a man who had known this moment was coming and had not prepared for it properly anyway.
"Look at him," she said. It was not a gentle request.
He looked. She watched him look, watched the moment land, watched something in his face that had been held clenched for months come loose all at once. He looked like a boy. She supposed he was still a boy. That was the trouble with boys — you let them carry a sword and call them men and then something real happened and you could see exactly how much distance there still was.
"The hair," someone said. Baelon, quietly, not cruelly.
Aemon said nothing. He was still looking at the infant in her arms.
The infant was looking back. Still with that strange quality of attention that made no sense at one minute old. She could see his small hands opening and closing against the cloth she had wrapped him in.
"He has your colouring," Alysanne said. "He has your father's colouring and his fathers before him" She paused. "What is he, Aemon?"
A long silence. The fire in the hearth popped.
From the bed, the woman made a sound that wasn't quite a voice anymore. The maester shifted. No one looked at the bed except Jocelyn, briefly, and then back.
"Mine," Aemon said. The word came out rough, like it had been pulled out of something. "He's mine."
No one spoke for a moment.
"His name," Alysanne said.
Another pause, shorter.
"Aerion." He said it the way he would say something he was still deciding whether he owned. "Aerion Water."
"He'll be raised at the Red Keep." Her husband's voice, from behind her. She hadn't heard King Jaehaerys move but he was there, closer than she'd expected. His hand touched her shoulder briefly and then he was looking at Aemon the way he looked at problems he was determining the shape of. "He'll be housed and taught and given what he needs. Not as a prince but a bastard, no inheritance and no claim"
"Yes," Aemon said.
"Look at your son when you say so."
Aemon looked at the boy. "Yes," he said again, and this time it was different, heavier, the kind of yes that settles into the ground rather than floating off.
Jocelyn Baratheon turned and walked out of the room. Quietly. No door slamming, no theatrics. She simply left, and the space where she had been standing was just empty.
Nobody blamed her.
Queen Alysanne adjusted her hold on the boy. He had started squirming again, small and imperious, clearly wanting something she wasn't equipped to give him. She looked down at that silver-gold hair and those open purple eyes and thought about what it cost to travel an entire realm pregnant and alone to get your child a name, knowing the man you were going to face could simply refuse.
The woman had known he might refuse. She had come anyway.
She looked at the bed.
The maester was speaking very quietly to one of the attendants. The woman's breathing had changed. Alysanne had been present at enough bedsides to know what that change meant.
"Give her the boy," she said to the attendant. "Before she goes. Give her the boy."
The attendant moved. Aerion went back across the room in careful hands and was placed briefly and gently against his mother's chest. The woman's arm came up by instinct even though her eyes didn't open all the way. Her fingers found his hair.
The room was very quiet.
After a while the maester straightened up and said the words that needed to be said, and the attendant took the boy back, and Alysanne stood with her husband and did not look at Aemon again for a long time.
Aerion Water cried.
That was fair, she thought. That was entirely fair.