I know what you're thinking. After such a long break, I come up with such a short chapter? Sorry, but this is just Jon's POV of the aftermath of Dany's revelation. He comes out at the end of it with a new resolution. I guess you can see it as a new beginning. After this, you'll see a new Jon Snow, or should I say, Aegon Targaryen?

Chapter 31

Hours passed before Daenerys was finally able to stop crying. Jon held her all through the night, until she finally fell asleep just as the first rays of sunlight were peeking over the horizon.

But Jon remained awake, watching her sleep, still reeling about Daenerys' revelations.

He didn't know what to think. He believed her, he believed that the dream she had seen was real, but the idea that something so horrific and hopeless could have happened to her, and to him, he wanted to reject it completely.

And yet, he couldn't. Daenerys had used what she saw in her dream to change things, to improve their reality and their situation, and so would he.

At first Jon didn't want to believe that he could act like Daenerys had described, but the more he thought about it, about the circumstances of everything, and the more he understood how it was possible.

When Daenerys had told him about his parentage he had felt so lost and confused and angry. But Daenerys had been there for him and he had gotten through it. He was still trying to figure out who he was but he, at least knew what he was and who he wasn't.

But what would have happened if he had found out such a thing while in the midst of the war against the dead? Without Daenerys by his side, with his own family and friends only caring about the fact that he was, supposedly, the heir to the Iron Throne, trying to use such an information for their own gain instead of supporting him like he needed to? With the northern lords furious because he had bent the knee to a Targaryen queen of all people, with Jon afraid not only of disappointing them but to end up stabbed to death – again – by people that were supposed to be on his side, the same people who had named him King in the North. With one sister scheming and plotting and manipulating and the other guilt-tripping him into choosing between the woman he loved – his kin – and the family he had grown up with and known all his life.

He had been vulnerable to their manipulations and they had succeeded. Jon hated to think that his own family and friends could be capable of something like this but he believed Daenerys, such pain, such desperation, they couldn't be faked. It was all true.

He didn't even want to imagine that he could be capable of killing Daenerys and yet, he could see it. He didn't want to but he could. Duty had always been the most important thing in his life, everything else had always come second. Duty and honor gave him purpose, made him feel like he could be more than the Bastard of Winterfell. Made him feel like he could become worthy of being the son of Ned Stark.

But he wasn't the bastard of Winterfell and he wasn't Ned Stark's son. That was the point, wasn't it? He hadn't seen what Daenerys had seen but he felt like the him in the dream hadn't had time to accept it. He had kept pretending to be something he wasn't and he had lost everything, became everything he hated and everything that Ned Stark would have hated. Queenslayer, Kinslayer, Oathbreaker.

Love is the death of duty, Maester Aemon had said to him years ago, but then duty must be the death of love. It had certainly been for him. But was it worth it? Was it worth becoming everything he hated and despised, killing the woman he loved, for duty, for a family he had never even really been a part of. The answer was a loud, resounding no.

Ned Stark had certainly taken him in, but he wasn't one of them. He might share their blood but he had never been a Stark. He thought the North was his home, but he had never belonged there. He thought it was because he was a bastard, that he was unworthy of it, that he needed to gain the right to be a Stark. But it was all lies.

It was as if everything had suddenly fallen into place. The truth he had denied for so long, it was out in the open now. And he was finally ready to accept it. The North and Winterfell weren't his home and the Starks weren't really his family, not in the way he had thought they were or the way he had always wanted them to be anyway.

If things had gone differently, he would have grown up here, in King's Landing, with the woman in his arms. She was his family, and she was home. He had never felt like he belonged anywhere, but he belonged here, with her, by her side. Nothing else mattered but the woman sleeping in his embrace.

It didn't even matter that, in another life, she could have burned a city to the ground. It only mattered because he never wanted her to reach such a point, because if it were to happen, after everything she did to avoid it, it would destroy her.

He had seen the devastation on her face, the pain and guilt and regret, the fear in her eyes, the self-loathing at what she could have done. She wasn't her father, she wasn't crazy, or cruel. She was selfless, and kind, and just – Jon wasn't wrong about that, he knew he wasn't. But everyone had a breaking point and in the dream she must have reached hers. Jon couldn't hate her for that, or resent her, couldn't muster even the slightest hint of distrust or fear. The Daenerys in that dream had been broken. She had lost faith in herself, she had felt alone and rejected, and like everything she had done, her entire life's purpose, had been taken from her after fighting, and standing back up, again and again.

And he had contributed to make her feel that way. He had abandoned her when she needed him the most. Was it any wonder she couldn't trust him now?

But he was different from the one in the dream, and so was she. Jon hadn't lied when he had said that none of what had happened mattered now. It had been important for both of them to know, so that they could both learn from their mistakes and so they wouldn't repeat them.

He wouldn't abandon her now, ever. Daenerys was right, she deserved to be his first choice, his main priority, and she was, he would prove it to her. Even if she decided she would never marry him. He loved her, but it was more than that. He needed her, like he needed air to breathe. A life without her in it, would be akin to death, or the darkness he had seen while he was dead. A dark, endless, meaningless nothing. He could imagine what kind of life the him in the dream would have lived after killing Daenerys. Smiling, laughing, eating, sleeping, day after day, and feeling nothing. A ghost, leaving in Jon Snow's shoes, looking like Jon Snow, but empty inside.

Not even before dying he had ever felt as alive as he felt while he was by her side. That in another life he could have snuffed the light out of the eyes of the person that made him feel alive would have felt like dying a second time. Blood pumping, heart beating, breathing, and yet a walking dead man.

He would not allow this to happen again, not to them. The world would burn before he would allow it to happen.