Chapter Text
The first thing Baelor did when they brought the baby in was reach for him.
He was four years old and he did it without asking; pushed forward between the adults, got his hands on the bundle before anyone thought to redirect him, and stood there holding something that was mostly blanket and a very small face with its eyes screwed shut against the light. The nurse hovered. Their mother watched from the bed with the expression of someone too tired to intervene.
Baelor looked at the baby for a long time.
The baby did nothing. It existed, effortfully, the way new things did, breathing with its whole body, fists clenched at its sides, furiously present. Baelor carefully touched the barely there silver strands of the babe’s hair, and was returned with a pair of violet eyes staring into his two toned ones.
"Mine," Baelor said, to no one in particular.
"Your brother," their mother said, from the bed.
Baelor considered the distinction and found it irrelevant. He tucked the infant more securely against him; when the child cooed, Baelor smiled. Rhaegel leaned in, quiet and curious, pressing a small finger to the baby's cheek before looking up at Baelor with wide eyes.
Baelor looked back. Mine, his expression said, clearly, to his other brother.
Rhaegel withdrew his finger. He understood.
The baby was called Maekar and he cried a great deal in the first months, which was considered normal, and then continued to cry a great deal past the first months, which was considered less normal, and then someone noticed that he cried significantly less when Baelor was in the room and significantly more when Baelor was not, and the wet nurses began fetching Baelor the way you fetched a specific blanket; as a known solution to a specific problem.
Baelor came every time. He was four, then five, unbothered by the interruption, by the crying or the mess or the inconvenience of a small person who needed something constantly. He would sit by the cradle and talk about nothing, about everything, about whatever was in his head; and Maekar would quiet, not always immediately but eventually, reassured by the voice and the presence of the particular person he had apparently decided, before he had language for deciding anything, was his fixed point.
You're going to be trouble, Baelor told him once, when Maekar was perhaps eight months old and had just finished crying for no discernible reason. He said it with the tone of someone delivering a fond observation, not a warning. I can already tell.
Maekar blinked at him with the unfocused eyes of someone still assembling the world and made a sound.
Yes, Baelor said. Exactly.
When Maekar walked, he walked toward Baelor first.
Not toward their mother, not toward the king, not in any of the directions a careful adult had been encouraging. He stood up in the middle of the nursery floor on an unremarkable afternoon, took three unsteady steps, and sat down hard. Then he stood up again and took four steps in Baelor's direction and grabbed his knee with both hands and looked up at him with the expression of someone who had just solved a significant problem.
Baelor picked him up. He held him at eye level and looked at him with something very serious on his face.
You took too long, he said. I've been waiting weeks.
Maekar grabbed his nose and giggled a merry laugh.
Fair, Baelor said, smiling at his baby brother.
The shadow years, that was how the serving maids referred to them, privately, among themselves. From the time Maekar could follow Baelor around a room he did, and from the time he could follow him through a door he did that too, and the question was never whether Maekar would appear wherever Baelor was but simply how long it would take him.
Baelor took him everywhere. Not always, there were lessons and obligations that didn't accommodate a small trailing child but where he could, he did. He showed him things with the patience of someone who is not seven years old, but of someone wiser, who had decided teaching was not a burden: the stables, the yard, the kitchens at odd hours, the library where Baelor actually read and Maekar sat beside him and looked at the pictures in the books he was given and was, for a small person with strong opinions about most things, remarkably content.
The teasing started early and meant nothing except everything it was; delight, plain and uncomplicated, the specific joy Baelor took in the particular person Maekar was. Not cruelty, not deflection, not the careful managed thing it would later become. Just the irresistible impulse of someone who has found a thing that responds interestingly and cannot leave it alone.
Maekar was reactive in a way Rhaegel wasn't, in a way Aerys wasn't, in a way nobody else in any room ever quite wa. He had opinions immediately, expressed them immediately, his whole small face arranging itself into the concentrated frown that meant he was about to tell you exactly how wrong you were. Baelor found this unreasonably compelling. He would say something small and slightly wrong just to see it happen, just to watch the frown arrive and the eyes sharpen and Maekar draw breath to correct him with the confidence of someone who has never once doubted that his corrections are welcome.
They were. That was the thing. They always were.
Maekar didn't know that yet. He didn't know that Baelor said the small wrong things because he wanted the correction, wanted the frown, wanted the specific aliveness of Maekar engaged and present and aimed at him. He just knew that Baelor said things and he had opinions about those things and Baelor always listened, even when he was laughing, even when he ruffled his hair after in a way that meant yes, yes, you're right, you're always right, insufferable, without saying any of it.
Rhaegel watched all of this with his mild eyes and said nothing and smiled sometimes at things no one else had said.
Aerys watched and filed it away and also said nothing.
It was the first language they had. Before Maekar had the words for most things it was already there, the poke and the frown and the laugh and the hair and the batting hand and the doing it again in five minutes because once was never enough for either of them.
It felt like being chosen. That was the only way to name it, later, from a distance. It felt like being the specific person someone had decided was worth the trouble of engaging with, worth the small deliberate provocations, worth the attention. Maekar was four and five and six and he didn't have language for any of that. He just knew that Baelor's attention was the one he wanted and that the teasing was a form of it and that the days it didn't happen felt emptier than the days it did.
He didn't examine that. He was too young to examine it. He just lived in it, the way you lived in warmth without thinking about warmth, without knowing there was a version of things where it was colder.
That came later.
Maekar was six when the maester said it.
Not directly to Maekar of course, Maekar was six, you didn't say things directly to six-year-olds that were meant for the adults in the room. He said it to their father, in the measured tones of medical observation, about certain indicators, about likelihood, about what the signs suggested for presentation in six or so years.
Omega, the maester said. And then a great deal of careful language around it, about health and temperament and what this would mean, practically, going forward.
Baelor was ten. He was in the corridor outside the door because he had not been told to be elsewhere and the door had been left slightly open and he was ten and had not yet learned that some information was not meant for him.
He stood in the corridor and heard the word and understood it the way a ten-year-old understood things; partially, imprecisely, but enough. He understood what the court did with omegas. He had seen it; the way they were looked at, assessed, placed. He understood, in the wordless way of children absorbing adult dynamics before they have vocabulary for them, that omega in a royal house meant something about how people would see Maekar, talk about Maekar, want things from Maekar.
He stood in the corridor for a long time after the maester left.
Then Maekar appeared at the end of the hall, having escaped from somewhere, trailing a toy and looking for him with the focused intent of a person who has noticed an absence and decided to correct it.
Baelor looked at his small brother and felt something he didn't have a name for move through him; not simple, not just the fondness of before, something that had weight and edges and a new quality of what do I do with this. Something that understood, dimly and imprecisely but genuinely, that the world was going to find Maekar. That it would look at him freely, without asking, without Baelor having any hand in it and he would not be able to stop that. Had never needed to think about stopping it until this moment in this corridor with the maester's word still sitting in the air.
He didn't know why that felt wrong. He couldn't have explained it, couldn't have said what exactly he wanted to stop, or why the idea of other eyes on Maekar produced this particular feeling, low and nameless and new. He was ten. He didn't have the words for it.
He just knew that Maekar had always been his first. And the world was going to find him too. And that felt, in some wordless essential way, like a door he hadn't known he was standing in front of being opened without his permission.
Maekar found him and arrived and grabbed the hem of his tunic with one hand, the way he did, the specific territorial claiming gesture that Baelor had seen him deploy a hundred times.
There you are, Maekar said, with six-year-old certainty.
There I am, Baelor said.
He ruffled Maekar's hair. Maekar batted his hand away. Baelor ruffled it again.
It was the same gesture as always. It was not the same thing underneath it.
The teasing didn't stop. That was the thing, it was still there, still the same small pokes, the comments timed just so, the particular pleasure Baelor took in the furrow of Maekar's brow. On the surface nothing had changed at all.
But something had changed in Baelor. The moment in the corridor had done something to him that he didn't have the language for yet, left him with a feeling he couldn't put down and couldn't examine directly, something that lived in his chest at a low persistent frequency and had no name and wanted none. He was ten, then eleven, carrying it the way children carried things they didn't understand: around the edges of it, carefully, without looking at it straight.
And so the teasing changed. Not deliberately… He didn't decide to put distance in it. It arrived on its own, the distance, the way defenses arrived before you knew you needed them. The warmth was still there, it had always been there, it was not going anywhere. But it was covered now. Wrapped in something that kept it from being too plain, too visible, too much of what it actually was.
Maekar felt it anyway. Felt something in the quality of it shift the way you felt a season turn, not in one morning, not in any single moment you could point to, just gradually and then completely, the air different in a way you couldn't name until you were already standing in it. He didn't know what had changed. He was six, then seven, without the language for any of it. He just knew that the thing he had always chased in Baelor's attention, that particular warmth, easy and unconcealed, the delight of being the person someone had decided was worth poking at was still there but further away than it had been. Like a room he had always walked freely into that now had a door. Still open. Just there, where there had been nothing before.
He chased it anyway. Of course he did. He was Maekar and Baelor was Baelor and that had been true since before he could walk, and some things were simply the shape of the world. He just worked a little harder for it now without knowing why.
And Baelor let him chase it. Watched him from archways and fence posts and corridors and said nothing useful and said many things not useful, and somewhere underneath all of it was the feeling from the corridor that still had no name, that he still couldn't look at directly, that he didn't understand any better than he had the day he first felt it. He didn't know why he covered the warmth. He didn't know why the distance arrived. He only knew that something had changed in him and he didn't know what and he couldn't put it back the way it was and Maekar was still there, always there, and Baelor didn't know what to do with any of it.
He was always, in every room, the first person Maekar's eyes found.
Neither of them understood, yet, what that meant.
That would take years.