A House United

by GrannyVhagar0210

Summary:

Fifteen years after the Dance of Dragons, the Targaryen family struggles to heal the wounds of the civil war.
Following his half-sister’s wish, Aegon II kept his nephews alive and raised them alongside his own children, forging a new generation of heirs in the shadow of tragedy.
As the princes and princesses of House Targaryen ride dragons, attend tournaments, and navigate court intrigue, bonds of loyalty, rivalry, and family grow stronger—and sometimes dangerously strained.

Follow the lives of Aegon the Younger, Viserys, and their cousins as they learn that surviving the war was only the beginning—and that the ties of blood can be both a blessing and a curse.

Notes:

I introduce all the young characters in this chapter. I will give you their age, parentage, character traits and who they might look like (I personally like it when I have faces to the persons I write or read about so I thought I might add this, you don’t have to accept these ofc it’s just an idea).
I haven’t read the book but I heard about everyone’s Death so yeah.

SPOILER for everyone who has only watched the show!

As you may have noticed I have made some changes to the Canon story:
- Rhaenyra dies through Sunfyres flames, but Aegon the younger doesn’t have to watch and Rhaenyra asks her half brother to spare her sons
- Sunfyre and Dreamfyre Both survive
- Dreamfyre is not present at the storming of the dragon pit because she flew Helaena and Maelor and Jaehaera toward Essos at the command of Prince Aemond, so they’d be safe until the war is over
- Aemond did NOT burn his brother in here and was actually loyal to him, which is why Aegon named his son after him

Chapter 1

Aegon III Targaryen

- (almost) 19 years old

- first son of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Daemon Targaryen 

- heir of King Aegon II

- husband to Princess Jaehaera Targaryen 

- character traits: serious; reserved; responsible; just; likes to avoid conflict; loyal

- Dragon: Silverwing (claimed at age 13)

- look alike: in my head he looks like Damian Hardung idk 😭

Viserys Targaryen

- 17 years old

- second son of Rhaenyra Targaryen & Daemon Targaryen

- Wielder of Dark Sister (gift of Aegon II for his 12th nameday)

- character traits: charming; hot headed; quick to rage; arrogant (in a good way); ambitious; love for the sword; he’s basically a second daemon lol; Aegon II’s biggest headache ☺️

- Dragon: Lyra (hatched for him 1 year after the war)

- look alike: Aerion Birghtflame (Finn Bennet) from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. He just looks like he could be the son of Rhaenyra and Daemon to me haha.

Maelor Targaryen

- 16 years old

- second son of King Aegon II Targaryen and Helaena Targaryen

- character traits: entertaining; funny; loved by his siblings; love for wine and brothels; no ambitions for the throne

- Dragon: Shrykos (claimed at age 11) 

- look alike: don’t think that you know him but I imagine him as a young Edvin Endre 

 

Jaehaera Targaryen 

- 19 years old

- only daughter and oldest child of Aegon II and Helaena

- Future Queen

- Wife to Aegon III Targaryen 

- character traits: soft; patient; smart; empathetic

- Dragon: Morghul

- look alike: Elle Fanning (I loved her in Maleficent)

 

Daeron Targaryen

- 10 years old 

- third son of King Aegon II and Queen Helaena

- named after his uncle Daeron the Daring

- character traits: loves to learn; smart; attentive

- Dragon: Starfyre (hatched for him)

 

Aemond Targaryen

- 6 years old 

- fourth son of King Aegon II and Queen Helaena  

- named after his uncle Aemond “One-Eye”

- character traits: sweet; sensible; just happy to be alive 

- Dragon: Meraxus (hatched for him)

 

Aerion Targaryen

- 15 years old 

- first and only son of Alys Rivers and Aemond Targaryen

- I actually thought about naming him after Aemond but I kinda wanted to seperate him from his father so yeah

- his mother was brought to court by Aegon II after he found out that she was pregnant with his brothers child

- character traits: calm; loves to read and study; trains with the sword (often with Viserys); disciplined; polite

- Dragon: Aragorn (hatched for him)

- look alike: Idk why but Timothée Chalament (still don’t know if I’ll write him with silver hair or maybe with dark hair)

 

Rhaenys Targaryen

- 15 years old

- first and only child of Baela Targaryen and Jacaerys Velaryon

- her father died without knowing about her existence

- lives on Driftmark with her mother and aunt

- character traits: loving; kind; loves flying with her dragon or swimming in the sea; calm; patient; attentive; disciplined 

- Dragon: Morning (hatched for her; ik this is actually Rhaena’s dragon in the books but the has Sheepstealer so yeah)

- look alike: Bailey Bass (she’s so gorgeous I can’t even)

 

 

Chapter 2

Dragonstone — end of 132 AC

The Painted Table was colder than Aegon expected.

He ran his fingertips along the carved rivers and ridgelines of Westeros, letting his hand rest on the jagged mountains of the Vale. They told him the table could glow — that firelight, properly coaxed, would make the carved land shimmer like the map of a living world.

Now it was only stone. Silent. Dead.

Aegon curled his fingers around one of the carved dragons standing guard upon it. Its wings felt smooth beneath his palm, worn down by a hundred hands before his own. He was turning the figure absently when the great doors groaned open.

Bootsteps. Metal on stone.

Aegon lifted his head.

Two guards entered first, and between them—

Her.

Rhaenyra Targaryen.

His half-sister. His rival. The woman who had nearly taken everything from him.

The last time he had seen her was almost a year ago and yet — she seemed far older than her thirty-five years. Grief and defeat had carved themselves into her face more cruelly than time ever could.

At Aegon’s small gesture, the guards released her arms. Rhaenyra straightened slowly, her eyes scanning his face — lingering, as everyone’s did, on the burned and stiffened half that the flames had claimed.

The silence between them smoldered.

Ser Alfred Broome stepped forward, breaking it.
“My king,” he said, bowing stiffly. “Do you wish the execution done at once?”

“No,” Aegon shook his head. “Leave us.”

The guards withdrew immediately. Ser Alfred hesitated only a heartbeat before obeying. The doors shut behind him with a dull, echoing thud.

Silence swelled to fill the hall.

Rhaenyra broke it first.

“I thought you were dead,” she said, her voice low, almost disbelieving.

Aegon let out a dry, humorless laugh and toyed with the dragon piece in his hand.
“So did many.”

He rolled the figure between his fingers, refusing to meet her eyes fully.
“We always knew it would come to this. One of us had to fall. It is almost poetic, isn’t it? Two dragons, only one surviving the fire.”

“No poetry,” Rhaenyra murmured. “Only loss.”

He sighed. “You know why you are here.”

“I do.”

Aegon ignored the trembling in her voice.

“Our brothers are dead. Your eldest sons are dead, as is mine. Your husband is dead. Our father is dead.”

His voice hardened with a bitterness that tasted like smoke.

“With your death… all this may finally end. We can bury the past.”

Rhaenyra stood still and quiet, lips a thin line. She would not let him see fear.

Aegon set the dragon piece down and straightened. “I never wanted any of this,” he said quietly. “Not the crown. Not the throne. Not the war.” His mouth twisted bitterly. “On the day they crowned me, I tried to flee. Did you know that? But that, too, failed.”

He turned to her fully.
“Tell me something, sister. Is it true? What my mother claimed? That you would have had my head — and those of my brothers — to secure your rule?”

Rhaenyra stood very still. When she spoke, her tone was not cruel, only tired.
“It might have been necessary,” she admitted. “But I would not have done it with joy.”

Aegon tilted his head, studying her for a long moment.

Then he exhaled, as if a decision had finally settled in his bones.
“At sunrise,” he said. “You will die by dragonfire. Sunfyre’s flames will take you. I need not trouble myself with a burial.”

He turned away from her and began to walk.

He had taken only two steps when a single word stopped him cold.

“Brother.”

Aegon froze.

Slowly, he turned back. Rhaenyra stood exactly where she had before, but something in her eyes had changed — not defiance, not fear. Something deeper.

“Spare my sons,” she said quietly. “Aegon and Viserys. They are only children. They bear no blame for what we did.”

The hall seemed to shrink around them.

Aegon said nothing at first. The silence stretched, thin as glass, heavy as stone.

Her gaze did not waver.

“Please,” she added, her voice steady despite the weight of everything she had lost. “Let the war end with my fall.”

Aegon’s throat tightened. He looked at her — truly looked — and for the first time saw not a rival, not a pretender, not a threat.

Just his father’s daughter. Just a mother.

He turned the wooden dragon in his palm once more, though he no longer remembered picking it up.

“Your husband paid men to raise their hands against my son,” he said after a moment, voice low and precise. “Jaehaerys was a child, too. He was innocent, too.”

Rhaenyra’s face tightened, something like grief flickering across it and gone. She drew in a sharp breath. “Daemon is dead,” she said. The name hit the air like a stone. “Jaehaerys was avenged. My Lucerys was avenged. It’s all over now.”

Over.

Aegon’s jaw worked. “They came to my halls,” he reminded her quietly. “They struck where my son should have been safest. How am I to believe there will be no more strikes? How am I to trust the vows of a family that has burned half the realm?”

Rhaenyra’s fingers curled at her sides as if gripping some invisible railing. She did not raise her voice. She had no need for it here. 

She stepped forward a pace, and for the first time there was a tremor in her bearing. “Listen to me, Aegon. I fought. I lost sons, I lost my husband. I have been hunted and I have hidden. I have felt the weight of each life taken because of this claim. It has hollowed me out.” 

He watched her. The scar across his cheek felt hotter for a moment—an old fire, a fresh ache.

“How many more must die because of a crown?” she asked. “How many more mothers and sons, uncles and cousins, until the realm is whole again?”

Aegon couldn’t answer — his mouth was too dry.

“Too many,” she answered herself. “I will see it end, if it is on me to end it. I will be the final price.” Her voice held no melodrama; it was the steady, terrible promise of someone who had counted losses and found the sum unbearable. “I am willing to lay down my life.”

Aegon’s shoulders went rigid. The thought of condemning her to die in dragonfire still stuck in his throat like ash. He had not wanted this. He had never wanted to be the man who ordered another’s death as justice. He had wanted safety, order, an end.

Rhaenyra’s next words came softer, and they landed like a plea. “But not my children. They are too young to carry this debt. Aegon, please. Let them live.”

Silence spread again; it was a different silence now, not charged so much as heavy with consequence. Aegon turned the wooden dragon between his fingers, watching its worn wings. He thought of Jaehaerys’s laugh—the bright, brief thing that had once cut through the court’s gloom. He thought of the boy’s headless body in the quiet of the halls, of the emptiness that followed.

“You ask mercy for boys who will be men one day,” he said at last. His voice had the dry, careful edge of someone balancing a scale. “How am I to keep them safe without becoming the very cruelty you fear? I cannot promise you they will never be used by schemers. I cannot promise they will never be the cause of more death.”

Rhaenyra’s eyes shone, but there was no theatrics in them—only tired, fierce resolve. “Then teach them differently,” she said. “Raise them where they are seen, not hidden. Let them grow with eyes open, not blind with hatred. If they must wear my name, let them learn not to wield it as a sword.”

Aegon’s mouth flattened. Responsibility sat on him like a physical weight. He had not been raised to rule; he had not been raised to preserve the crown at all costs. But the cost, he had learned, could be ruinous in its own right.

“Aegon,” she said again, more gently—so gently that for a moment he almost forgot the labels and the crowns and the burn-marks. “Let the killing end with me. Let the children live in a world where they are no prisoners of our hatred.”

He closed his eyes for a beat, feeling the old habit of duty curl its fingers around his heart. When he opened them, they were steady. He was a king; his decisions left scars no less visible than fire.

“Sunrise is still tomorrow,” he said finally. “I will not be the one to break my word lightly.” There was a careful neutrality to his tone—no mercy yet, no absolution. “But I will hear you. I will consider… alternatives. For your sons.”

Rhaenyra’s shoulders sagged as if she had been holding them high for too long; a small, almost inaudible exhale escaped her. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“Do not mistake it for forgiveness,” Aegon added bluntly. “There are debts that must be paid. There are consequences—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “And I accept them. I only ask that my boys not inherit them.”

Aegon looked at her then, not as a rival to be extinguished nor as an enemy to be humiliated, but as a woman who had carried a ruinous love into war and survived it in name only. His voice was quieter than before, almost something between a vow and an observation. “If I spare them, they will be part of my court. They will sit where they can be seen, and they will be taught by men who will not use them as tools.”

Rhaenyra let out a small, broken laugh—half relief, half disbelief. “That is all a mother can ask,” she said.

Aegon straightened, the decision still not whole in him, but a hinge beginning to move. He had not promised life yet. He had promised to think. For now, that would have to be enough. He set the carved dragon back upon the table, fingers lingering a moment on its smooth back as if feeling for a warmth that might not be there.

Outside, the sea hissed against Dragonstone’s rocks. Inside, two survivors of a long war stood in the cold light of a hall and, for the first time that day, spoke of ending the violence rather than continuing it.

——————————————————-

Aegon pushed open the doors of the Painted Table chamber, the air of the corridor brushing over him like a sudden reminder that the world outside the room still existed. His thoughts were still turning—slow, heavy—when Ser Alfred stepped forward from the shadows beside a pillar.

The knight bowed, though not deeply. His eyes were sharp with expectation.

“Your Grace,” he said. “May I ask—what did the whore want of you?”

Aegon stopped walking.

The word struck him like a physical jolt. His shoulders tightened, his jaw twitched—only for a moment, but enough for Ser Alfred to see.

He answered slowly. “She wished to speak of her sons.”

Ser Alfred’s expression darkened with a contempt he didn’t bother to hide. “Her sons,” he repeated, as if the phrase itself were an insult. “What did she dare ask?”

Aegon exhaled through his nose. “She wants them to live.”

Ser Alfred let out a short, derisive snort. “Of course she does. They all do, when the sword is at their neck. She would have had you all cut down to the roots if she could. She brought her rogue husband; she brought fire. She—”

“She will pay her price,” Aegon interrupted. His voice was quiet but firm. “So will we all.”

Alfred’s eyes narrowed. He leaned closer, lowering his voice until it was a rasp. “Then spare us the pious speeches. If it were up to me, I would see the little bastards put down — quick and clean. I will do it myself. No fuss, no second thoughts. We end this bitches’s line, once and for all.”

Aegon stepped toward him, and for the first time since… ever, there was something unmistakably kingly in the way he held himself. The corridor seemed to narrow around the force of his presence.

“No,” he said. His voice was quiet, but there was steel beneath the syllable. “You will not touch them, Ser Alfred.”

The knight’s mouth pulled. “They would grow to be vultures, your grace. They would learn the tongues of traitors and the art of slaughter. Better a blade now than a war later.”

“No,” Aegon said again, softer this time but with no room for argument. “No one will harm my nephews.”

Ser Alfred’s face went hard, disbelief and fury flitting across it. “You would spare the spawn of the man that burned half the realm? You would show mercy to those who would snuff out your line?”

“They are children,” Aegon replied. “Children do not choose which womb they come from. They did not send assassins to my halls. They do not carry their parent’s guilt upon their shoulders.”

Alfred swallowed, anger fraying into something else — unease, perhaps, or just pure hatred. “You would have your name be known for mercy,” he muttered. “Or weakness.”

Aegon met his gaze without heat. “I will not be judged by the hardness of my hand, Ser. I will be judged by the steadiness of it. You serve the crown. You serve me. If you disobey, if you lay a finger on those boys, I will have you put to the sword. Do you understand?”

The threat was simple, unadorned. Alfred’s posture flickered; the man had never been threatened like that by the king’s tone. He bowed his head, though he did not surrender his sour expression. “As you command, your grace.”

Aegon did not ease at once. He folded his hands, the motion small and purposeful. “I will not forget the past. I will not forgive the wrongs done. But I will not allow more blood in this hall in the name of vengeance. Keep your blade in its sheath. Watch the boys. Protect them. That is your duty now.”

Alfred’s reply was a grunt that might have been assent. He tightened the strap on his gauntlet as if putting on armor against the idea itself. “They will be watched,” he said. “But do not think I am content.”

“I do not ask you to be content,” Aegon said. “Only obedient.”

For a beat the two men regarded one another: old soldier and new king; a man who trusted in the swing of steel and a man who trusted, for now, in restraint. Then Alfred turned and strode away, the click of his boots on the flagstones loud in the hush.

Notes:

Yeah so I couldn't get this out of my head and just went for it lol - idk when i will be able to upload the next chapter bc I have another work which i'd like to continue.

Anyway, I hope you liked it and feel free to leave kudos and comments 💞