#losing all my marbles over this tourney

[crow-talks-hockey]

genuinely cannot explain how crazy i am about 1) connor being my everything and being so happy 2) sid in a way passing the torch with that and leading this team again and again 3) cale adding yet another accomplishment to his resume and 4) nate dogg mvp AGAINNNNNNN and always hell yeah 🔥

[samwpmarleau]

Can you please do a Aegon and Rhaenys vs Jon fic about them hating, tolerating and then growing fond of each other as siblings? I love your fics, they're amazing.

Another anon asked: You’re an amazing writer! I love all your AU’s with rhaenys. Could you do one with Jon Snow and rhaenys? Kinda angsty but not too sad

His whole life, the fact that he has half-siblings is little more than a nebulous idea to to him. That those half-siblings are royals, that one of them sits the Iron Throne while he’s a bastard in Winterfell is nearly impossible to wrap his head around. He knows who his parents were, and he knows that he shares one of them with the king and princess, and he knows that there must be thousands of people with royal blood in Westeros, yet still he thinks surely there must be a mistake. Lyanna Stark being his mother he can comprehend; he has her look, Uncle Ned says so all the time. Crown Prince Rhaegar Targaryen being his father, however…

For fourteen years, he more or less tries to pretend they don’t exist. It’s easier that way. And then one day Ned tells them all that he received a letter, one sealed with a three-headed dragon.

“King Aegon will be making a progress to the North,” he says. Normally stoic, Jon can see the uncertainty in his uncle’s face and knows he’s remembering the war he so rarely talks about. “He says he has made progresses elsewhere in the realm but as he reaches his age of majority a year hence, he wishes to have seen every kingdom before he becomes sovereign over them all. Princess Rhaenys will be accompanying him.”

“The queen?” Aunt Catelyn asks.

Ned skims the text again and shakes his head. “It makes no mention of her.”

Jon can’t tell whether Catelyn is relieved or disappointed. Queen Elia had allowed Ned to live, but she had also executed Catelyn’s father. Though Jon does not doubt she would have been the pinnacle of politeness had the queen chosen to come along, he wonders what her internal feelings would have been.

Sansa begins effusing about how exciting it will all be, and then the rest of his cousins chime in with comments of their own, but Jon stays silent. Will he be expected to keep himself out of sight during their visit? Probably. He’s still a bastard, after all, never mind who his kin are. He wonders if this is how the illegitimate children of previous kings had felt. Caught between wanting to be included, and wanting to be ignored.

He ultimately refrains from being in the crowd that greets them, but it turns out not to matter. After the feast, Princess Rhaenys corners him in the yard, appraising him much like she might a pebble in her shoe.

“So you’re the bastard,” she sneers. “You don’t look like much.”

It’s true enough. He’s no Robb or, so he’s heard, his uncle Brandon who’d died before he was born. He searches his half-sister for any resemblance, but there is little to be found. Not in her Martell coloring nor her undeniable beauty, nor the imperious way she holds herself, not even the slope of her nose or the thickness of her hair. They are as different as the earth from the sky. Not that he’d resembles King Aegon either.

“It’s said I have Lord Eddard’s look.”

“Your mother’s, you mean,” says the princess. “Hard to believe my father set off a civil war for you.”

The anger in him rises enough to want to fire off a retort, but then he notices something in her voice that he hadn’t before. There isn’t just disdain for him, although that’s there too, but hurt. It’s not Jon she’s furious with. It’s a revelation that nearly knocks him off his feet. He could never say it to her face, of course, but realizing that he’s the primary object of her resentment not only because of his existence but because their sire is long dead, it’s a heady feeling.

“Yes, Your Grace,” he answers. “I could not say why.”

“I know why,” she says, but she doesn’t elaborate. Honestly, he doesn’t much care. If she knew anything about his mother, he would beg her for information, no matter how cruelly she said it, but Prince Rhaegar he would rather forget. She looks him up and down once more, scoffs, then strides off with a swish of her skirts. She doesn’t say another word to him for the rest of the trip.

The wedding is in King’s Landing, though he’s heard there would be another, much smaller, ceremony in the godswood later as well. He had almost decided to stay behind–he has little interest in the capital–but Robb has been as close as a brother their entire lives, and he can’t miss something like this.

And…well. Rhaenys may despise him, but she’s still his sister, and is about to become his good-cousin on top of that.

Uncle Ned initially wants to do the same as Jon, as he had when they went south for King Aegon’s wedding (the others, that is; Jon had elected to not darken their doorsteps), but both Robb and Aunt Catelyn had coerced him out of that decision. He doesn’t speak much on the way down, and so it is Aunt Catelyn who takes control.

(Robb is a nervous bundle of energy the entire way, but a happy one.)

The capital is expansive, and the architecture much different from the North’s, but the smell is awful and altogether it’s about what he expected. It is Ser Jaime Lannister of the Kingsguard who greets them at the gates; he’s unequivocally the most handsome man Jon’s ever seen, and beside him he hears Sansa breathe in an audible gasp. Bran stares up at him in awe, not for his appearance but for his position, and Jon’s reminded of how much his cousin has always desired to be a member of the realm’s most prestigious order of knights.

“Come,” says Ser Jaime genially.

As Robb’s family, they’ve been given rooms in Maegor’s Holdfast–even Jon. He wonders whose decision that had been. Probably Robb’s. Perhaps even the king’s, who has been neutrally cordial to him.

It’s a beautiful ceremony, he has to admit, and he is pleased to see Rhaenys giddy, something she certainly hadn’t been the last time he saw her. It is surprising to all when Robb is approached with a golden coronet not by the High Septon, but by the queen.

“This was my father’s crown,” she says. “You will be not only the consort to a princess of the realm, but a princess of Dorne. So long as you treat my daughter with the same regard as my father did for my mother, it is yours.”

Robb swears to do just that, and Queen Elia reverently places the crown on his head. It is bizarre to see Robb with such an adornment, but he knows that Rhaenys’s status matters not to him.

Afterwards, they stand on the marble plaza of the Great Sept to accept congratulations from all the courtiers, and although Jon is hesitant, the voice in his head convinces him to join them. Robb is your blood, and so is Rhaenys.

Robb hugs him like a brother, and Jon next moves to Rhaenys. “I wish you both well.”

He had thought they’d turned over a new leaf at the tourney a few years back when he’d crowned Queen Elia, but her face falls nonetheless. He starts to move on, figuring she intends to say nothing, but then she touches his arm, ever so briefly. “Thank you,” she says. She glances at Robb and her smile reappears. “I have found happiness.”

“I am pleased to hear it, Your Grace.”

She pauses a moment, then replies, “Rhaenys. It seems we are cousins now, you may as well call me by my name.”

We’re siblings, too, he almost says, but doesn’t. The concession–for he knows that’s what it is–is what he has longed for since he was a child. “Yes, it seems we are.”

They never become…close, exactly, but between her own softening and Robb being their shared kin, there grows a tenuous truce between them. He has been on good terms with Aegon for a long while now, but Rhaenys had always been a tougher nut to crack, she who still remembers having sole possession of their father’s attention before everything went wrong. Before Jon.

She even reluctantly allows him to hold her first child when they visit Winterfell, a girl who is the very image of a Martell, save for the eyes that, while darker than Robb’s, are unmistakably blue. His niece, though Jon doesn’t say that. He had held Aegon’s babes, too, yet somehow it is Rhaenys’s approval that remains the thing he most desires.

The Ironborn mount a rebellion not long after Aegon passes reform that would severely limit the ability for their raiding parties, and the North sends troops to aid the crown’s forces, troops that Jon joins in part to fight at Robb’s side. Robb’s, and Aegon’s. Many had discouraged the king from participating, but he had declared that a sovereign should not send his people to fight battles he is unwilling to fight himself, and if he should fall he has an heir who could succeed him.

Somehow, they all survive the war, though not without casualties; fortunately, far more for the Ironborn than for the crown. It isn’t conscious thought on Jon’s part to take a blow to the chest for Aegon, yet take it he does. Later, after Aegon himself bestows a knighthood upon him and they return to the capital, Rhaenys pulls him aside.

“You saved my brother’s life. Thank you.”

“He’s my brother, too,” Jon points out, “and the king.”

He expects her to qualify his words, but she doesn’t; instead, she bites her lip then kisses him on the cheek, so quickly he has to convince himself it happened at all.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” she says. “I—I’d never thought how it would feel to…to lose two brothers.”

She runs off after that without looking back, and it takes a week for Jon to stop smiling.