#me holding lucerys up to you all: i just think he's neat

[childotkw]

I can't stop thinking about Luke surviving the dance (with or without dragon tbh) and basically taking over Driftmark since Corlys has gotten too old to rule it. He isn't legally Lord of Driftmark but everyone respects him and calls him as such. I'd imagine him either being a hostage for the greens for a bit before escaping them or surving the fall and finding his way around Stormlands, maybe some family in a small village takes him in for a month so that he can regain his strength. But then he is absolutely fucking furious and goes all sicko mode. He claims a dragon (could be any of them or maybe Arrax is alive) but he never really forgets how much of a problem Velaryon fleets and ships could be to the greens, so he takes after Corlys and leads the Velaryon troops into war and they win pretty much everytime. He maybe even basically (spoilers for fire and blood if you haven't read it) saves Jace in the Battle of The Gullet with Velaryon ships and his dragon. After the war no one ever dares to call him a Strong again, he is both a Velaryon and a Targaryen and he is proven himself as such. You can sneak in Lucemond into this somehow haha i just conpletely forgot about Aemond here. Maybe when Arrax dies Aemond basically thinks the debt as payed (an eye for a dragon, a dragon for an eye) and when Luke goes and claims another dragon Aemond cannot blame him for it, bc then he'd be a hypocrite. I'd honestly love an AU where Luke is captured and it's a whole story about how he goes through some shitty stuff but those only make him stronger in the end. (ig theres many plotlines in GoT that contains hostage situations too haha it just has the best potentials)

I love this and I'm gonna do a twist on it, if that's okay?

Lucerys survived, and when he came back to Dragonstone he refused to claim another dragon. He lost Arrax and the pain of that severed bond was too raw, too fresh, for him to contemplate replacing his friend. In the future, maybe, but right now? No. No, he couldn't bring himself to do that.

So, he embraced his Velaryon heritage instead.

The sea almost took him once after all, but it gave him back, and that marked him in some way. Being at the mercy of the vast ocean and allowed to survive - it changed a person.

He was more a tempest than fire now, but he's just as sharp, just as dangerous as any dragon that soared through the sky.

And Lucerys had always wanted to protect his family. It was the one thing that never failed to rouse his temper, and to defend their cause from the sea while his mother, father and siblings defended it from the sky? It was - not perfect, but as close as he could get.

He became known as the 'Sea Dragon'. His weakness for sea travel fell away to a confidence unmatched by any other, and Corlys would burst with pride at how his grandson grew to take command of Driftmark and the Velaryon fleet.

Lucerys sailed, and he fought, and he won more often than not. For all that he was young and untested, he was reckless and bold, and his ingenuity was one of his biggest strengths.

And his men loved him for it.

By the end of the war, no one who worked under his command would dare claim him unworthy of the title Lord of the Tides. Bastard or not, he carried the Velaryon name and lived up to the legacy.

(And if it were a kinder world, one where Aegon eventually decided that enough was enough and he was sick of being a pawn in his mother's games and his grandsire's ambitions, and he bent the knee to his sister? Well, Lucerys and Aemond would eventually reunite, and though he had known his nephew had survived their ill-fated fight above Shipbreaker Bay, Aemond still found himself breathless when he saw Lucerys again for the first time.

His nephew had grown in the past year, the last of his boyishness peeling away to reveal a defined jawline and strong features with the beginnings of stubble on his cheeks. Muscular and tanned from his days on board his ship, Arrax, and eyes that roiled, he looked -

Handsome, Aemond realised with a jolt.

But the thing that bothered him the most was that, for all the pain and anger that lurked between them, Lucerys didn't look at Aemond. Not during the negotiations. Not during the tense feasts that followed. Not even at his mother's coronation when they stood right across from each other. It was as if he had ceased to exist in his nephew's eyes, and that burned.

For Lucerys, his indifference was the last armour he had, because if he acknowledged his uncle, if he dared look at the man that had carved half of his soul from his chest and now seemed to live under his skin, then he'd do something he'd regret. Like kill him.

Or kiss him.

He wasn't going to tempt fate and see which side the coin landed on.

Too bad for him, Aemond refused to be ignored.)