Tags: A divergent story sprouting from my other, earlier work, The Jade Dragon, which doesn't have to be read to understand this fic. Gender-bent story. Told through a series of interconnected drabbles. Male!Daenerys. Fem!Harry. Targaryen!Harry. Triad Fic. Slow burning. Incest (brothers and sisters). Blood and gore. Morally grey characters doing morally grey things. Heavy Targaryen focus. Strong AU. Heavily messed with canon, both for Harry Potter and Game of Thrones.

Full Summary: Across the Narrow sea, Viserys and Daeron Targaryen fight for their lives in a pit of poison, plots and persecution. Two brothers dead from rebellion, mother lost to her birthing bed, and a father slain on the steps of his throne, it seemed they were the last of their once grand House. Then their little sister come tumbling out the sky astride a great silver dragon, and everything changed. Haraella Targaryen, fresh from war, driven by dreams of a lemon tree, a red door, and boys with bright lilac eyes, fled England on the tail end of a storm with nothing but her wits, wand, and the Iron Belly she had rescued from Gringotts. She had only meant to find a place that felt like home, instead, she discovered something immensely more precious. Love.

Pairings:

Viserys/Fem!Harry/Male!Daenerys.

Fem!Jon Snow/Aegon VI.

PROLOGUE:

The Kinder Way.

Haraella Targaryen's P.O.V

Haraella Targaryen didn't remember much of her parents. Only a wash of sensations that tickled across her skin like feathers gliding across prickled flesh. Almost a caress. Almost a flair. Almost a memory.

Almost but never quite.

Black marbled dragons, Haraella thought she saw when she, sometimes, closed her eyes at night and tried, tried so hard, to reach that hazy skyline of times long passed. If they ever existed to begin with. Memory was funny that way, especially memories formed years ago before one had learned how to speak.

Imagination had the tendency to crawl in at the edges and fill in the blanks. It was hard to tell what was real and what wasn't when recollections were tainted by the hopes and dreams of an orphaned child starving in a under stairs cupboard desperate, so fuckin' desperate, for love and family.

Dreams had been all she had.

And a name.

Targaryen.

Still, Haraella thought she remembered their wings, these colossal stone dragons standing vigil at a hollowing door. Flaring, broad, arcing. She remembered their colours most. Red and black and glistening. Jewelled and gilded. Proud. Magnificent. Sometimes, they turned to ash before her, sallow, rotting, blowing away in the wind before she could reach out and touch them.

Nightmares nipping at her heels with antlers for a crown.

She didn't understand her dreams most of the time. A messy mixture of reality, imagination, and metaphor. She dreamt of volcanoes exploding until the skies themselves bled red with fire and heat. She dreamt of a man, as silver haired as she, with a circlet of square rubies, grinning at her. She dreamt of fields of sapphire roses smothered by rolling sands. A woman, beautiful, adorned in Arabic silks, pounding at a mountain that snatched the babe at her chest and devoured it whole. She dreamt of snow, and ice, and death slinking through red leafed trees, glass hands reaching.

She dreamt and dreamt and dreamt.

Yet, she tried to remember a time before she was dumped in the forbidden forest at a year and a half old. A time before James Potter and Lily Potter had found her squawking in the dark like a broken baby bird fallen from a nest, in the midst of war, and took her in as their own. The girl with snow for hair and jade for eyes, bathed in blood, and completely, utterly alone in the world.

Haraella thought she might remember a song. Hummed. Bustled. Purred. A woman's voice, serene and gentle, a siren in the void. Haraella would croon it to herself sometimes. Rarely. When she was sure no one was listening.

Gentle Mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war, we pray. Stay the swords and stay the arrows, let them know a better day. Gentle Mother, strength of women, help our daughters through this fray. Soothe the wrath and tame the fury, teach us all a kinder way.

It was almost ironic how much that simple song had stayed her own hand in the war.

Made her fight for the kinder way.

Mostly, Haraella didn't remember sight or sound. She remembered touch. An embrace. Safe. Warm. A silver storm with silver rain… Or was it silver hair fluttering in her face? An embrace, a lopsided smile, a twirl, whirling, spinning through her memory. A tower of salt and smoke and storm, a bloodstained bed, a dying woman's last smile.

Once upon a time, someone had held Haraella Targaryen. Someone had kept her safe and warm. Far away, long ago, Haraella Targaryen had been loved and cherished. That ember of a memory, dim, faded, kept her hopeful through the dark days of her short life.

And the darker days yet to come.

When she died in that flash of putrid green with Tom Riddle's taunting face laughing at her, she first dreamt of a red door with a lemon tree, and a pair of smiling, lilac eyed boys calling her name. When she stood once more, raised from the dead, she thought she had her first taste of what felt like home.

xXx

Haraella laid upon the hillside and stared hard at the horizon, Vaenora coiled around her protectively. The war was over. She had won. She supposed Tom, in all his scheming and strategizing and soul splitting, had not thought she, a fourteen-year-old orphan girl, would come riding into battle on the back of a dragon.

More fool him.

She had, of course, done so. Perched on the bridled spine of Vaenora, the Iron Belly she had saved from Gringotts, she had burned it down. Ash and fire and blaze and slag, she had destroyed it all.

Hogwarts was nothing but a mound of molten stone now.

A soaring monument to a dragons wrath.

Tom hadn't known about Vaenora. No one had. They hadn't known Haraella had concealed her dragon in a cave in the forbidden forest, right where she had first been found so many years ago, hours before the final battle took place. Simply waiting for the right time. A right time that proved to be after she had died, the last of Tom's Horcruxes withered at her feet. He had not known until it was all too late and Haraella had come swooping in from the blackened sky, blazing, blistering, burning.

Sometimes, there was no kinder way.

Sometimes, all there was was fire and blood.

Sometimes a dragon had to be a dragon.

Haraella had won the war, but, she thought, she may have lost a little part of herself. That childish naivety that thought war could be won in bloodless ways. An innocence of how the world worked. An unending belief that if one did good, tried to be good, then, in the end, all would work out fine.

It never did.

Sometimes, there was no happy ending.

She could still hear the deafening noise when she laid down at night and pretended she was sleeping.

So much screaming.

xXx

Haraella was staring at the horizon again, the scent of lemon niggling at her nostrils. When she blinked, she saw, ghosting on the back of her eyelids, a round, red door. She often looked to the sky, daydreamed in the shades and clouds. Ever since she could remember, she had been infatuated with flying.

Perhaps it was her love of dragons.

Perhaps it was a fantasy of freedom.

Perhaps it was nothing at all.

Yet, in tough times, when her heart grew heavy and the world seemed such a cruel, cruel place, Haraella turned her attention to the sky as she did so that day, standing by the window of the Minister of Magic's office, envisioning lemons and doors and bright lilac eyes.

The Minister was going to give her an Order of Merlin medal. Her. Haraella Targaryen. The girl who had burned down Voldemort in a blizzard of fire and fury. They called her a liberator. Protector of muggleborns. A saviour of the Wizarding world. The dragon whisperer. The white-scale champion. They had misread her rage as righteousness. Her vengeance as justice. Her retribution as a voice for those slain in their worst war.

They didn't see the ugly truth.

A child soldier just trying to survive.

She supposed that was trickier to swallow than the myth they had erected around her. A tomb of words and awards. The epics and poems, and complete fabrications. Haraella didn't exist here, not really. She was something else. Fools gold. A tool. An instrument. Something to use and abuse and ditch when needed.

That was her life.

She knew she could play along. She could pretend to be as they said she was. A good person who didn't burn down armies. Perhaps one day, she may even believe it herself. Perhaps she could be happy then. She would never know. As the Minister held out that shining medal, told her about the great things she would do for her kind and country, Haraella could feel the walls closing in. Brick by brick, nail by nail, she was being buried alive and no one could hear her weeping. Or, worse, they did, and no one cared.

She didn't want this.

She never wanted any of this.

They had made her into a monster, and now gave her a shiny nugget of gold for being a pet well trained.

She left Shacklebolt standing there, hand extended, medal gleaming in palm, frown plucking his eyebrows tight as she marched from the room in a flap of cloak and thud of thestral hide boot. She left Hermione in the atrium, shouting her name to her fleeing back. She left Ron waiting at the Weasley's, expecting her stopover. She left. Just left. She didn't look back.

Not once.

xXx

Rightfully, Haraella didn't know she wasn't going to return from that fateful flight until she was already halfway over the Atlantic. She told herself she needed air. A moment to breathe. Just a moment away, in the one place she had only ever found peace. The sky. Only, she kept going. Over London. Over the channel. Over the sea. A beat of a dragons wings echoing the frantic pounding of her heart.

Haraella couldn't stop.

It wasn't running away. Not truly. She had done her duty, had she not? She had won the war. Vanquished Voldemort. What more could they want from her? Everything. Sadly, Haraella had nothing else to give. They had taken all from her. Her family. Sirius. Remus. Dobby. Her childhood. Her happiness. Her innocence. Her life. Nevertheless, they wanted more. Always more. It was never enough.

It would never end.

So she flew. She flew, and flew, and flew, and she daydreamed of a lemon tree, a red door, and bright lilac eyes. Home. She dreamt of home. The one thing, just one, she had ever, selfishly, with the hunger only an orphan could truly know, wanted for herself. Hers. Not something a part of Albus's grand design. Not a shard of Tom Riddle's anger. Not belonging to some prophecy or divination. Just hers. Only hers.

The storm hit hours later, creeping upon her back. A rabid beast of wind and rain and lightning. She strove to out fly it. To dip beneath the dense cover of grey clouds and around the bend, away from the trundling darkness, but as swift as Vaenora was, the storm was swifter. It crashed upon them within minutes. A sleet of hissing rain and spitting bolts of lightning.

They say Lightning doesn't strike twice.

Haraella would agree.

She got struck three times before she and Vaenora fell from the sky.

Maybe this death was the kinder way.

A.N: It's been nearly six months since I posted anything at all, and even longer since I posted anything on one of my big stories. For all my faithful readers, I am truly sorry for that. It's been a difficult year, and every time I've sat down to type something up, it just hasn't worked out. I know, rightfully, many of you would have preferred an update to one of my other stories, rather than a whole new one, but I'm trying to ease myself back into writing. I will get around to updating my older stories, at some point, however, at the moment, I just want to have some fun with it and try out new things. This side-story being one of them. Once again, sorry for those waiting for updates, they are coming eventually, and despite this not being an update, I hope you all enjoyed it as much.

That said, let me know what you think so far! And, hopefully, I shall see you all again soon. If you have a spare moment, drop a little review. Until next time, stay beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21