Slaves obey, men choose: chapter 27: forgotten warmth

Sorry for taking so much time, health stuff and the like. I also wasn’t satisfied with the chapters so I rewrote them multiple times. I tried something new with this chapter. Hope y’all will like it. I'll post right now two chapters and if things don't go wrong, I should post two more in the following hours. Sorry again

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Evening had fallen which meant that it was time for what I had planned for the city to unfurl. If things went the way I had planned they went, it would also help nip in the bud the potential problem that was Viserys, my self proclaimed uncle.

And oh, how simple it all would have been if this was a world where the death of a tyrant and the birth of a free man could have been treated as one and the same—if this victory could have been clean instead of bloody, a liberation with bloodless hands instead of a burden of murder, death and pain, a future to build upon without the leering of a past forever haunting the foundations.

My strength, the city’s strength, was a gilded thing. A new polish over old, deep-set scars. Tonight, I would give my people the one thing power could not conjure on its own: an ending. A silence after the scream. Respite, the people of mourning those who were gone. We all deserved that peace. That’s how I felt at least.

“They are waiting for you, my king.”

The voice was a low, familiar rumble. I turned my head, not my body, and found Grey Worm standing beside me. He was a study in contradiction. For the first time since I’d known him, he was dressed in the soft, simple clothes of a civilian, yet the sword I’d forged for him—a sliver of my own magic given form—rested at his hip. The ease in his posture was a lie; I knew the weapon would be in his hand in less than a heartbeat should the air so much as whisper a threat.

He wore the soft clothes like a foreign skin, the fabric a silent rebellion against the rigid plates of his old life. The sword, I could however see with my eyes was not a contradiction but a continuation. It was the one piece of his old self he would never shed, the promise of violence that kept this new, fragile peace possible. It was the weight that kept him anchored, lest this new feeling of lightness make him float away.

But no threat would come. Not here. Not in Astapor. Here, the roots of the great tree Nemesis pierced the heavens, and through them, my awareness bled into the very stones of the city. I was its pulse. Its sight. Its law.

He was alone. My kingsguard, those fiercely devoted souls, men and women had been persuaded to stand down tonight. Their trust in me, it seemed, was the only thing greater than their sense of duty. Their one concession was the man beside me.

“I thought we were long past such formalities,” I said, my voice cutting through the quiet. “I distinctly remember instructing you to call me Aegor.”

“You did, your majesty.”

A ghost of a sensation, a flicker of intent in the calm pool of his spirit, confirmed it. He was fucking with me. The realization spread a slow grin across my face. “What happened to my commendably stern general? The one who never mocked his liege?” I laced the words with a playfulness that felt foreign yet warm on my tongue.

“Said liege made him change,” Grey Worm replied, his face an impassive mask. “By saving him.”

Months ago, such a statement would have been a flat, factual report. Now, it was layered, a stone skipped across the deep water of his transformation. The change was not just in being saved from death, but in being saved for this—for soft clothes, for teasing, for a life where a king’s smile could be met with something other than blank obedience. He was learning the language of humanity one stilted, painful syllable at a time.

Months ago, this man was a weapon, honed and hardened until all that was human was buried deep. Months ago, he would never have dared this quiet, steady ribbing. The change was a victory all its own.

My gaze drifted back to the city. Astapor, bathed in the dual light of starlight and the soft, pervasive glow of Nemesis. Snow, my snow, fell in silent sheets, blanketing the memories of blood and dust I had inherited. The air hummed with laughter and music now, not the old echoes of fear.

“Grey Worm.”

“Hmm?”

“Thank you.” The words were simpler than the feeling behind them. “Thank you for trying. For supporting me. For believing in these… dreams of mine.” Thank you for proving this isn't all for nothing,I didn't say, but the meaning hung between us, as clear as the night air.

He did not need to be liked, so long as he was useful. His entire existence had been proof of that axiom. But here was his god, not asking for utility, but offering gratitude for belief. It was a currency he was still learning to count, its value both terrifying and immense.

“As I have told you, my king,” he said, his voice a low, steady current. “The thanks are yours to claim. You broke the chains. You asked for nothing in return. If I have a single regret… it is that you were not born sooner.” The words were soft, yet they carried the weight of a thousand lost years, a universe of ‘what ifs’ left to rust.

The regret was a living thing, a second shadow.

If you had been born sooner, he might have lived. If you had been born sooner, the spear might have missed its mark. If you had been born sooner, the name ‘brother’ would not be a ghost that haunts my throat. It was the cruelest math: the joy of this liberation divided by the immeasurable loss of those who never saw it.

“May I ask you something?”

“Always, my king.”

My voice dropped, becoming a soft thing, a cushion for a question I felt was a bruise to press. “Do you think of them? The ones you lost… before all this?”

The silence that followed was a physical presence. The snow settled on his shoulders, on his hair, gilding him in the faint light. He looked like a statue from a forgotten age, carved from gold and grief.

He was back in the barracks. Not the physical space of stone and straw, but the emotional one of silence and shared terror. The question was a key turning in a lock he had thought welded shut. To think of ‘them’ was to think of him. The one whose face was gone but whose presence was a permanent fingerprint on his soul, a smudge on the lens through which he saw everything.

“The Unsullied were trained to be unfeeling. Unafraid. A good weapon cannot break. So you break it, again and again, until it forgets how to.” He paused, the words measured and precise. “Months ago, before the battle against the Dothraki and their twisted god, I would have said no. A soldier fights. He does not miss.”

It was the mantra, drilled into him with every lash, every branding iron, every night spent listening to the whimpers of boys becoming things. A soldier fights. He does not miss. A weapon feels no grief. A spear does not mourn the tree it was carved from. He had repeated it so often it had become the bedrock of his mind, the only truth that kept the howling emptiness at bay.

“And now?” I prompted gently.

“Now…” He breathed out, a plume of steam in the cold air. “Now, after fighting for you, after witnessing a care so potent it pulled men back from the grasp of death itself… Now I believe that if my god can hold such care, then perhaps I am permitted it as well. So yes. There is someone I miss.”

The permission was everything. It was the crack in the dam. He had been given a new mantra, not by command, but by example: If my god can care, then so maybe can I. It was a terrifying, glorious freedom, more daunting than any battle. To feel was to finally acknowledge the wound, and the wound was so deep he was afraid he might fall into it and never climb out.

He continued, his voice taking on a distant, haunted quality, as if he were reading from a scroll etched in pain. “I do not remember his name. Or his face. Time has stolen that. But I remember he called me brother. And I called him the same. I remember a feeling—that as long as we had each other, the training, the pain… none of it could truly touch us.”

The memory was not a picture but a sensation: the press of a shoulder against his in the dark, the silent exchange of a crust of bread, the way a single look across the training yard could feel like a hand reached out to steady him. Their bond was a secret room they built inside themselves, a place the masters could not reach. It was the one thing they truly owned.

A bitter smile touched his lips, a fleeting, painful thing. “Perhaps we were not discreet. Perhaps it was simply fate’s cruelty. I remember our bond being discovered. I remember the pain that followed, so profound it warped time itself. I remember being handed a spear in the training pit, and being made to face him.”

Discovery was not a moment but a process. A shared glance held a second too long. A smile quickly stifled. They were children playing at being invisible in a world designed to see everything. The cruelty was not in the punishment, but in its design. It was not enough to break their bodies; they had to break the secret room themselves, to be the architects of its destruction.

His gaze was fixed on something far away, in a past I could only glimpse. “I remember shaking. Not for myself, but for him. I remember not wanting to fight. I remember him begging me to. And I remember… I remember him throwing himself onto my spear. I do not remember his face in that final moment. But I think… I believe he was smiling.”

The shaking was an earthquake contained in a child’s body. The choice was no choice: disobey and both die, or obey and one live. His brother’s begging was the final, brutal lesson in their love—it was an act of sacrifice so absolute it felt like violence. The smile was the one detail he allowed himself to invent, a small, desperate flower placed on a grave of forgetting. He had to believe it was a smile. The alternative—fear, betrayal, pain—would have been a poison he could not survive.

The air around us seemed to still, the very snow falling slower to hear his confession. It was no longer a story being told; it was a ghost being given form.

“If you could speak to him now,” I asked, my voice barely a whisper, “what would you say?”

“What would I tell him?” He considered it, the question settling deep. “I think… I would thank him.”

“Thank him?”

“Yes. For this feeling. This grief. It should have been scoured from me, but he left its echo behind. I would thank him for the joy he gave in the darkness. I would thank him for being born. For being my brother.” His voice, always so steady, developed a faint, almost imperceptible tremor. “And I would tell him I am sorry. Sorry it was him and not me. Sorry I was not stronger. Sorry I did not think of him for so long. Sorry I was not a better brother. Sorry he is not here now to see… all of this. I do not remember him, but something tells me he would have loved you as I do.”

The apology was a debt compounded over years of forced forgetting. Sorry for every morning I woke up and did not consciously remember. Sorry for every meal I ate that he did not. Sorry for this new life that feels, at times, like a betrayal of his death. The thanks and the sorry were twin currents of the same river, flowing endlessly through him. And the final thought—that his brother would have loved his king—was the ultimate act of communion, weaving the two most important people of his life together across the impossible gulf of death.

The silence that followed was sacred. I did not break it. I simply stepped forward and did the only thing that felt right: I wrapped my arms around him. I held him the way I imagined a brother would. He froze, every muscle locking, his breath catching in his chest. I held on. Slowly, so slowly, the tension bled from him, and he relaxed into the embrace.

The freeze was instinct, a lifetime of conditioning where touch from a superior was only ever a precursor to pain. My touch was not a blow, but it landed with the same shocking force. The relaxation was not a choice but a surrender, a terrifying and beautiful yielding. It was the physical manifestation of his new mantra: If my god can care, then so maybe can I. For a moment, in that embrace, the secret room was not a memory. It was real again.

When I pulled back, my own heart felt too large for my chest. “I could tell you he would be proud. That he would be happy for you. That you have nothing to apologize for. But I am not him.” I looked into his eyes, willing him to understand the weight of what I was asking. “So I will only ask you for a promise. For tonight, remember every word you just spoke to me. Carry them with you. Can you promise me that?”

There was hurt in his gaze, and confusion, but beneath it, a dawning understanding. “I will,” he said, his voice firm once more. “I trust you, Aegor.”

The use of my name was akin to an explosion, an opening of Eden or maybe of Pandora’s pithos, a final brick laid in the bridge between us. The promise was not a light one. To remember was to willingly pick up the weight of that grief, to carry the ghost consciously for the first time. But my request, my trust, was a yoke he would willingly bear. He would do it because I asked, and because some part of him, the part that was still that boy in the barracks, was desperate to finally keep a promise to his brother.

The fact that he had for once said my name was overshadowed by the profound truth of his trust. This conversation had changed what I had planned for the night. My plans had been for a city, for a people and they still were but now, I wanted, needed them to be more and I could say that it was because of the people in my Astapor but that would be a lie. Now, they were for one man. For his ghost and everything else would be incidental.

“Thank you, Grey Worm.” I meant the words with every fiber of my being. “I swear to you, on my very dreams, I will not let you down.”

The swear was not a king to his subject, but a man to his friend. It was a vow made at the altar of shared vulnerability. To let him down would be to betray not just him, but the smiling boy who fell on a spear, and the secret room they built, and the future they were all trying to forge from the wreckage of the past.

I smiled at him then, and even seeing its reflection in his eyes, I knew it was a strange, brittle thing. But it was the truest smile I had ever offered this world.

It was a smile that cost me something. It was not the grin of a conqueror or the confident smirk of a king, but the fragile, hopeful expression of a man who had just been entrusted with a broken, precious thing and had promised to mend it.

It could even be said that it was the smile of a brother.