Chapter Text
Dragonfly
A Song of Ice and Fire Self-Insert, Original Character Fanfic
By Sif Shadowheart
Prologue
First Day of the Fifth Moon, Two Hundred and Forty-Four Years After Aegon’s Conquering of Westeros
Maegor’s Holdfast, the Red Keep, King’s Landing
“How could this have happened?” Aegon Targaryen the Fifth of His Name, known as Aegon the Unlikely, King of the Seven Kingdoms, demanded of his most trusted friend none other than Ser Duncan the Tall, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. “After everything that was done to prevent… this.”
He grimaced in distaste as another scream of agony ripped through even the thick walls of the holdfast and into his private rooms.
Most believed that the king was in deep contemplation regarding state affairs of the utmost importance.
Too important moreover to expect his presence in the antechamber of the birthing room where his son’s wife now labored.
His first son’s wife.
That…low born creature who ensnared his Duncan and set the realm to shambles for longer than even a king liked to remember.
His pride and joy, who’d taken his mother Betha’s dark locks when the rest of his children were blessed with the silvery hair of House Targaryen, if only Duncan hadn’t inherited his beloved’s strong will along with the infusion of the blood of the First Men.
Duncan had fallen in love and the realm had bled for it.
The land was drenched in blood, the royal coffers bled gold, and the crown lost their first prince and heir apparent.
All for a little chit with golden hair and full lips with nothing to her name.
Not even a full name, with a family behind it at that, but a slip of nothing at all with only her beauty to commend her.
A better king would have had her strangled in her bed before allowing his heir to elope.
A better man wouldn’t have had her unknowingly fed moon tea for years in order to prevent a possible claimant to the throne from arising from her base blood to challenge his more legitimate heirs.
It was short-sighted at the time, but with a civil war on his hands he’d not worried about having Duncan abdicate on behalf of his line as well. He’d take care of it, he’d thought. The wench would never bear a child, that would be the end of it.
And yet, here they were regardless.
Jenny of Oldstones lived, and due to a spur-of-the-moment impulse (which characterized much of their lives as a couple, it must be said) pregnant when his son took her away to Lys and the Summer Isles in hope that the remove from the pressures of Court for a time would gift them with the child they wished so dearly for.
Little did Duncan know but it was the distance from the agents planted in their household and guard that produced the spawn Jenny was laboring to deliver, not any miracle of Lyseni tonics or Summer Isle magics.
“Even you cannot control fate itself, my friend.” Dunk sighed, rubbing one hand over the back of his neck in discomfort. It had never sat well with him, Egg’s determination to prevent Jenny from taking with child. And yet: the king’s secrets were his secrets, the King’s will, his will. “The Mother wished for Lady Jenny to grow fertile and fecund and so she has.”
Aegon grumbled beneath his breath as he continued pacing his office in agitation.
Together the pair, just as unlikely as they’d always been, waited out the hours of Jenny’s travail until at last word came from the maesters and midwives.
The Prince of Dragonflies and his wife had been blessed with a living child, the King’s first granddaughter; born two years after his current sole-grandson in young Aerys.
On the other hand, the King had been given a blessing as well, though only he was aware of it along with the Small Council and those of the Court who unknowingly shared his concerns.
The child, rather than a prince to grow into a potential threat to the realm, was a girl.
For the record: being reborn sucked major ass.
And it didn’t get much better, not for years and years, and even then it was debatable.
Naerys supposed things could be worse.
She could’ve been shunted into the body of an important character from the wonderful world of Planetos.
Someone with a dire prophecy hanging over their head, like Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen. Or a bleak fate in a different way like mad Lysa Tully or Malora Hightower. Or worst yet been born as a slave.
So yes: for all that she internally bitched and moaned for literal years as she figured out the world she’d unceremoniously been tossed into after dying in her original life, the situation could have been anywhere from minorly to significantly worse.
But it certainly wasn’t sunshine and daisies either.
And that she was 99.99% certain that the body she’d been born into wasn’t supposed to exist didn’t help her make sense of her new reality.
In her first life, Naerys had been an avid reader and a writer. Both of original fiction and fanfiction. She’d watched all eight seasons (yes, even the last one) of Game of Thrones. She’d read not just the main series but also some of the peripheral books.
Out of all of that research (for fanfiction, at the time, and now far too applicable to her life for her comfort) never had she come across the Prince of Dragonflies and Jenny of Oldstones spawning.
Ever.
For the most part, the lack of children from the semi-royal pair was blamed on Lady Jenny, dubbing her as barren to go along with her low-class birth.
Naerys herself suspected royal intrigues of some sort in play, but didn’t have any proof.
Well, other than the fact that for a man who should be ecstatic to see his line continue, her grandfather Aegon had never seemed fond of her. She only met him a handful of times (that she could remember, babies and toddlers didn’t have the best long term memory capabilities) before her father took her and her mother away from King’s Landing. And in none of them had the King been more than perfunctory, with all of his attention and what little he had to spare of affection lavished on Naerys’s father alone.
Aegon the Fifth may have married outside of House Targaryen, but he was still a royal.
And nothing made that clearer than the way he looked at Naerys’s mother when her parents weren’t watching, or the barely-concealed distaste in his eyes directed towards Naerys herself.
The King wasn’t happy about polluting the vaunted Targaryen bloodlines with Jenny’s commonfolk taint, if Naerys had to guess what was behind his bullshit.
Which also had the side-effect of giving her a prime candidate for the culprit behind the lack of Naerys having siblings, but suspicion was hardly proof.
And it wasn’t like the Court of the Red Keep were any more fond of her mother, outside of a few friends Jenny had made over the years, usually with lower-born women themselves.
Naerys spent more time before her father took them away from Court with the cooks in the kitchen, watching as her mother laughed with the servants than she did with either of her living grandparents.
Though at least Queen Betha wasn’t as obvious in her elitism as her husband, actually deigning to speak to Jenny and Naerys, so there was that.
Regardless, it all amounted to the same reality: as far as his parents were concerned, or at least his father, the Prince of Dragonflies was not meant to have a child with his lowborn wife.
And with the silence of the Iron Throne on the matter of Lady Jenny and her daughter, the Court followed suit, snubbing the pair in ways great and small.
It took her new father all of three years to realize what was going on, being usually busy with serving on the Small Council at his father’s leisure to register just how deeply unhappy his wife was.
Naerys’s mother never truly recovered from the birthing bed, leaving her a fraction of her former vitality for all that she was as sparklingly vivacious as ever.
Naerys could see how her father had been enchanted with her mother, even if she thought he was a selfish asshole for forcing the realm to pay Jenny’s brideprice in blood and corpses when his good-father-to-be in Lord Baratheon rebelled at the slight to his daughter.
His daughter that was meant to be a queen, and instead was forsaken for a snip of a girl barely one step up from a woods witch.
Yeah, Naerys logically understood the position she’d been born into.
Damn was it a clusterfuck.
As a result, she was fucking ecstatic to leave tutoring with the royal septa, and awkward dinners in the royal solar, and playing a political game that she had no real-life experience managing far behind when her father finally grew a pair of balls and took his family away from the Court.
Anything was better than watching her new-mother slowly waste away under the demands and pettishness of the Court.
Even traveling from pillar-to-post all around Westeros.
At least the Reach was pretty and didn’t stink like a cesspool.
It was far more than King’s Landing could claim.
Too bad about Lady Olenna though.
That was one bitch that could give the worst of the biddies at the Red Keep a run for their money.
And so they moved on.
And on.
And on, never truly staying long in one place or putting down roots.
It wasn’t the most conventional upbringing, she had to admit, but at least she wasn’t bored.
Then she hit puberty, and her non-conventional life with a slowly-fading mother and charismatic father hit a snag.
In the form of her grandparents demanding her presence at Court for “proper instruction for a young lady of House Targaryen” as soon as word hit them that she’d - as the Westerosi put it - flowered.
Fuck being reborn into Westeros.
Fuck it hard.