this is a disclaimer.

AN: more of the watch!verse. Whereas the first lot of stories were in chronological order, these ones probably won't be. So for the dates in the chapter titles (aRW = after the Red Wedding) I refer the interested Reader to the last chapter of my watch began, which is a timeline for this AU. (Title of this collection from McMaster Bujold.)

aegon – 31 months aRW

King Robb comes to join him in the stables on the third day. Aegon is lounging against the wall feeling lost and irritable because horse-smell is at least familiar, and because everyone keeps looking at him as if he's about to throw a fit, go from perfectly sane to as irretrievably mad as his grandsire in the space of a second or less, and promptly start slaughtering every man woman or child he can get close enough to to hit with a sword.

It's annoying.

"What are you doing out here?" asks the King.

"Freezing my balls off," says Aegon. "How do you bear it?"

His Grace laughs. "As best we can."

"That's not a very encouraging answer."

The King grins again, touches his broken nose with a grimace, climbs up to sit on a barrel of... something... at Aegon's side. "Perhaps it wasn't meant to be."

"You mean, if I find it bleak and horrific enough up here, maybe I'll just pack up and leave and we can all pretend I didn't come here flourishing letters meant to prove your brother is not in fact your brother, but mine?"

Aegon hasn't had much experience with Kings, especially not ones his own age. He suspects that's just become painfully obvious.

The fact of the matter is: it simply does not help that King Robb does not act like a King. He doesn't even act like Dany, who spent most of Aegon's time in Meereen being alternately suspicious, tearful or affectionate, but never quite lost a certain sharp, regal air while she did so. Robb shouts at his siblings and carries his daughter around with him almost everywhere he goes and argues military tactics with Aemon at the breakfast table. He is the most defiantly alive person Aegon has ever laid eyes on, and judging by some of the things he's heard about Robb, it's entirely deliberate, and Aegon just cannot judge a man who does that.

"Something like that," Robb says now. "Why came you here, Aegon Targaryen? What gain did you think to have from it? Jon won't leave the Wall or his command to throw his support behind your Queen, and no man in Westeros would respect him if he did. Your grandfather murdered mine; my lords will not follow you."

"I don't ask for followers," says Aegon uncomfortably. "I don't ask for a thing, and never have since I've come here, except that Aemon listen to me."

"Your Queen will," says his Grace. "And his name is Jon."

"Perhaps," says Aegon. "But my brother's name is not."

Robb says nothing.

Aegon sighs. "A year ago, my mother died," he says. "A fever, as I told you. On her deathbed, she told me she loved me, and that she was sorry. I thought she meant for dying, or – perhaps for my life, I don't know. I knew she was a noble lady in Westeros. I'd always had an idea she did not want me to join the Golden Company, to be a sellsword. Anyway, I went to Father next day, to ask what she meant. He told me: for lying to you. About what, said I, like a damn fool boy with less sense than –" he waves a gloved hand, searching for a suitable comparison "- stubble."

Robb snorts.

"And Father said, about your parentage. You are not my son, Aegon. Nor were you ever Ashara's. You are not named for Rhaegar's child. You are that child. You are not my son."

Silence. Aegon is watching the horses now and talking as if he'll never stop – things he has not said to Dany and never said to Quentyn and would not say to Aurane if he knew where his friend was and might not even say to Aemon, who is his brother, but he can say them here, to the stable walls and the wolf-khal of Winterfell with his eyes like ice: ice, and death.

"I laughed at him. I laughed in his face and told him he had drank too much, that Mother's death had snapped his mind and lost him his reason. I told him the Targaryens were dead and good riddance, that dragons had no place in my world, that he had raised me to put my family and my friends first, to be loyal to them, to be more cunning and ruthless in their defence than I ever was in the employ of any man who contracted the Company, and that if he thought this bedtime story would drive me away, or whatever it was he was trying to do, he was sadly mistaken.

And the next day he called a council, my father did, summoned all the Captains of the Golden Company and stood up before them and laid Blackfyre on the table at his side and pointed at me and said: that boy is not my son."

"Gods be good," says Robb involuntarily.

Aegon laughs and knows it's bitter. "They weren't," he says. "It took an hour for the shouting to die down. That boy is your King, my father kept bellowing, Rhaegar Targaryen's trueborn heir by Elia Martell... and so Aegon Connington died, and Young Griff turned out to have been a shadow and a spook all along."

"Then you went to Meereen."

"First Griff held a speech about usurpers and hidden passageways in the Tower of the Hand that he so briefly held for his own. He talked about Rhaegar until the sun went down, and about prophecies and dragons and all sorts of nonsense. He said the Iron Throne was mine, and Dany born to be my Queen. And then he said: but three heads has the dragon, and Rhaegar had another son."

"Jon."

"My brother Aemon," says Aegon again. "I want no throne, Stark. I want no honours and no armies. I told Dany so, and she merely shrugged and said good, because she did. I think Griff was apoplectic over that, but he swore to her anyway. I want... well, nothing. I thought to –"

"You thought to find here what you've lost," says Robb.

"I suppose. Yes. You, I think, understand that."

"I understand losing, yes. And I understand standing up again afterwards and stabbing the bastards in the back." He smiles, a sharp-edged smile that makes some half-sleeping sellsword's instinct in Aegon wake with a start and remember to be wary. But then it falls away, and he's a boy now, tired and cold with a broken nose and a shadow of grief on his face. "I wish I didn't. More, I wish I didn't have to. I doubt my lord father meant for me to become the kind of man I fear I'm turning into."

"Will that man protect your siblings?" asks Aegon. "Will he save your wife? Will he see your daughter safe to adulthood, and a wedding that doesn't earn a colourful epithet?"

Robb looks at him. "Yes," he says.

"Then regret him all you like," says Aegon, "but don't change him."

They shiver together in silence for a short time before Robb asks, "Will you tell Jon any of this?"

Aegon shrugs. "Perhaps," he says. "Will he ask?"

Robb shrugs. "Perhaps," he says. "Will you?"

Aegon smiles suddenly. "Yes," he says firmly.

"Then so will he. Come on, Targaryen; it's near midday and I doubt dragons live off straw any more than direwolves do."

"I have a hankering for lion myself," says Aegon.

Robb grins. "We'll have that too, you and I," he promises.