The Adopted Prince (HOTD Harem x Male Reader)

Y/n Targaryen - Bio

Backstory - No songs were ever written about the day Y/n entered the world. No bells rang from the septs of King's Landing. No ravens carried news of a noble birth across the Seven Kingdoms. No maester dipped his quill into ink to record the hour of his arrival, nor did any lord or lady celebrate the coming of another heir. His birth passed unnoticed by history itself, as though the world had already decided that the child would never matter.

He was born in one of the countless crumbling tenements hidden within the winding maze of Flea Bottom, where entire families survived inside single damp rooms whose walls sagged with rot and age. Rain leaked through broken roofs, rats nested beneath loose floorboards, and every winter claimed lives that no one bothered to count. The air was thick with the smell of smoke, overflowing chamber pots, spoiled ale, and sickness. Outside, merchants shouted over one another while drunken brawls erupted in muddy streets only a stone's throw from where starving children searched gutters for discarded scraps. It was a place where life was cheap, death was ordinary, and hope rarely survived childhood.

Inside that miserable room, only suffering remained. His mother, exhausted from hours of labor, never held him. There was no midwife skilled enough to save her, no healer carrying herbs expensive enough to stop the bleeding, and certainly no maester willing to descend into Flea Bottom for those who possessed nothing with which to pay. Before dawn painted the rooftops gold, she was dead, her final breath leaving the world only moments after her son's first cry echoed through the room. The newborn was wrapped in an old wool blanket that smelled faintly of smoke and seawater. It would be the closest thing he ever had to a mother's embrace.

He never learned the sound of her voice. Never felt her hand brush his hair. Never heard anyone whisper that he was loved. If his mother had died giving him life... His father had abandoned him long before he drew his first breath. No one knew who the man had been. Some claimed he had been a sailor who disappeared across the Narrow Sea. Others insisted he had died in a tavern fight. A few simply shrugged and said he had run the moment he learned a child was coming. Whatever the truth, his name vanished before Y/n became old enough to ask it. No keepsake remained. No stories were told. His father became less than a memory, he became an absence.

From the moment he entered the world... Y/n belonged to no one. The years that followed blurred together into a childhood measured not by birthdays, but by whoever happened to own the room where he slept that week. He drifted from one caretaker to another, passed between widows, beggars, drunks, and petty thieves whenever someone believed an extra pair of small hands might earn a few more coppers. None kept him for long. Children were valuable only while useful. Once they became another mouth to feed, they were someone else's burden.

No one ever tucked him into bed. No one praised him for good behavior. No one celebrated his birthdays because no one even knew when they were. Affection was a luxury reserved for children fortunate enough to have families. Y/n had usefulness instead. He swept tavern floors sticky with spilled ale until his hands blistered. He fetched water from public wells so heavy that the buckets dragged across the cobblestones behind him. He carried messages between gamblers, collected discarded bottles for glass merchants, and crawled beneath market stalls retrieving goods too inconvenient for adults to reach.

When he worked well... He was ignored. When something went missing... He was blamed. When tempers flared... He was beaten. By the age of four, he had learned to recognize danger long before the first blow ever landed. He could hear it in the slight hitch of a drunkard's breathing. See it in the tightening of scarred knuckles around a mug. Notice it in the silence that settled over a room moments before anger erupted. Without understanding why, he instinctively curled into himself before fists connected with his ribs. He learned to shield his head with his arms.