the prerogative of the brave . . . 1/6?, Caroline/Robb-30 Days of Caroline
title: the prerogative of the brave . . .
series: 30 Days of Caroline
author: Eena
disclaimer: Don’t own ‘em.
category: Game of Thrones/Vampire Diaries (the first, right? *Bounces happily*)
characters/Pairing: Caroline, Caroline/Robb Stark
spoilers: Season One for GoT, Up to 3.03 for TVD
summary: It is a world without Elenas, Bonnies, Moms, Tylers, Matts, Stefans, and yes, even Damons. It is a world where she is overwhelmed by a surging seas of constant companionship. The loneliness is the same.
a/n: I apologize because this isn't finished. I have about a third of it left to write, but as it was taking so long, I thought I would just post what I have and then update it later. For ishi_chan, for her Robb/Caroline prompt.
~0~
Stories usually end with a wedding.
This story starts with one.
~0~
King Robert Baratheon, first of his name, weds Queen Cersei Lannister at the end of a long war that saw too many deaths. The people (almost all of them) delight in the union, see the promise of a peaceful nation and the hope of love on the faces of their new monarchs.
They ignore the fact that neither one had meant to take the other in marriage. They ignore the fact that Cersei Lannister had prepared herself for the lost dragon prince almost since she was able to walk and that her loss to Elia Martell was accepted neither graciously nor pleasantly. They ignore the fact that Robert Baratheon started a war for a girl with brown hair and gray eyes, a girl with a wolfish smile and the north in her blood. They ignore the fact that he mourns that girl violently, even now, on the day of his wedding.
They know the promise of peace is worse than the promise of war, especially when it sits on such fragile foundations. And the hope of new love can turn easily into bitterness. But the truth is often forgotten in the midst of celebration. And perhaps the people can be forgiven their ignorance, especially when the new queen’s belly began to swell and toasts were being made in every corner of the Seven Kingdoms.
But, as always, there is a price to pay.
This one is paid in the lifeblood of a prince. A prince destined to be born, but is not to live. A prince of thick black hair and bright blue eyes-a prince born too soon and taken away even quicker. A prince who is meant to be born alone and to die the same way.
But here is where the story is changed.
Even as Cersei Lannister weeps from her birthing bed, even as Robert Baratheon beats his hands bloody on the bedroom walls, even as the prince turns white, then blue, and then stops moving-even then the story is disrupted.
The tiny figure on the right side of the gilded cradle twitches even as the tiny figure on the left stills. On the left is the body of a prince, on the right is the body of a princess struggling to breathe in a world where she should not exist.
The midwives huddle in one corner, one gasping in alarm as the princess stops moving. Robert Baratheon stops his violence and looks to see his wife fighting her way to their daughter. He sees the child, sees how still she is, and something inside him twists and burns in a way not unlike a sword through the gut.
He stumbles to his daughter, the little girl that surprised them all with her arrival, and cradles her face with bloodied hands. “Not her, too,” the king croaks, and then shouts again, “NOT HER, TOO!”
The midwives try to shrink into a smaller, less noticeable group. They would leave if they could, but the king has refused to dismiss them. They watch as quietly as they can, faces struggling to hold onto looks of despair and sympathy where grim satisfaction might be truer to their hearts. All three are well-known, respected, and natives to King’s Landing. They came to birth the heir to the throne, but came with memories of the Sack in mind. Perhaps, to their eyes at least, the price of a prince and princess is one these new monarchs owe. Lannister knives cut down a prince and princess just a year ago, and a Baratheon king had nodded his approval. Such deeds were evil in the eyes of the gods, and no doubt they deserved punishment. A prince for a prince; a princess for a princess-it is not so unjust to their weary eyes.
The Grand Maester is also there, holding the queen’s hand and murmuring condolences and platitudes in one breath. Robert stands before his daughter’s crib, aware of them all and, at the same time, unaware of anything other than the sight of his blood painting the princess’s face a hellish shade of red.
A drop of that blood lands on the girl-child’s cheek and slowly glides down towards her mouth. The child’s lips are parted and the blood slides inside and lands on her tongue.
Her tiny chest seizes and then rises, shuddering violently but moving nonetheless.
The king nearly falls to his knees, but catches himself. He is stooped over his children, one dead and one barely breathing, and wonders if somehow the gods have granted him a miracle. Cersei pushes away the maester, clutches the arm of the nearest maid painfully tight and forces the girl to take her to the king’s side. Husband and wife stand together and wait, until the child finally opens her eyes.
~0~
Her hair is Lannister gold.
But her eyes are Baratheon blue.
She is both of them, in one body, and yet, she is neither of them at all.
They name her Caroline, but they don’t know why.
~0~
The baby girl herself sees not the light of days for months. King and queen keep their precious child inside, under the careful watch of maids and maesters. Cersei herself does not leave the princess’s room except in the mornings, when she goes to pray for her daughter. The queen will kneel down in the sept, head bowed before the statue of the Mother, and pray so forcefully that she seems almost feverish.
Robert comes only at night, and he spends that time by the door. Cersei will sleep in a chair pulled close to the golden crib and three maids will be awake should anything be needed. Robert finds that he is not particularly good at being a husband, but even he knows that this shared watch for their daughter’s health should bring king and queen closer together.
But the spectre of their lost son looms always by their daughter’s side. Robert knows not the words to say, knows not how to show comfort. He only knows that he needs to see Caroline himself to be sure she is still well, and that his concern never truly extends far enough to reach his wife.
The maids bear witness to this all; the awkwardness and the tension that fills every inch of the room. The girl-child must feel it too, they whisper amongst themselves, for the little princess never has a calm sleep. The babe twitches and whimpers and fidgets all through the days and nights, and the maids remember what the midwives had warned of before. The girl grew in her mother’s womb with her brother, and though she is a mere infant, she searches for that brother incessantly. His absence, the midwives warned, would cause the princess almost endless discomfort. And as the maids cluck their tongues and shake their heads, they agree these bad dreams are the exact thing the midwives had foretold.
~0~
Both maids and midwives are completely wrong.
Caroline remembers nothing of the brother whose place she now holds.
And the child does not dream at night, when she twitches, fidgets, and cries.
Caroline does not dream-she remembers.
She remembers everything.
~0~
She remembers before, the life that came before whatever this could be called. She remembers the life and the death-both of them.
What she remembers most vividly is not her mother sobbing at her bedside, running shaking fingers through Caroline’s sweaty hair. It’s not the two friends of her childhood, one bleak with despair and one feverish with denial and determination. It’s not the amber eyes of the boy who loves her, pulled from her side before the moon hung too high to save other people from the monster inside him. It’s not even her one-time lover, one-time father, and all-time personal demon standing watch in the dark corners of her room, an obvious air of sorrow about him that she doesn’t understand. It’s not even the pain, all the fire and stabbing and twisting that ripped through every inch of her supposedly immortal body.
Her clearest memory is of HER, that woman who isn’t a woman, who wears the face of a friend to hide the teeth snapping just underneath the surface. She is the one who ended Caroline the first time, and she will be the only one willing to end Caroline the second time when the promise of green eyes and eternal friendship failed to materialize in time.
“The hybrid bites are different; the poison goes faster,” she explains, looks right at Caroline with unsympathetic, calculating eyes. “That thing wasn’t his first experiment; it won’t be his last. We’re going to need to work together-and fast.”
A cool hand presses against her cheek, a cruel parody of a loving caress. Caroline hears her mother arguing, but only as if from a distance. All Caroline sees is brown eyes and dark curls like satin ribbons. “She’s my daughter too, in a way. I brought her into this life; it’s fitting that I should take her out of it.”
There is an explosion of noise, but all Caroline can decipher is the sound of false affection. “I can’t save her, and you can’t either. But I can do something; offer another chance, as a show of goodwill.”
Katherine, her very own dark mother, is offering something like salvation. Katherine cares nothing for the argument, knows it means nothing. She has seen the end before the others, has her witch ready, and soon is guiding Caroline’s mother off the bed. “It’s bad enough for a mother to bury a daughter; you want to remember her as she was-not what she will be at the end.”
It is, perhaps, the first and only sincere thing Katherine has ever said.
It is enough to clear the room of all but one.
“You don’t trust me?” Katherine teases.
“You’re a liar,” he says, and stays in his corner.
The witch, some blonde thirty-something with hollow grey eyes, lights some candles, picks up some foreign-sounding chant, and Katherine hovers above Caroline and smiles that smile that is all sharp, white teeth. “Well, it’s your lucky day. Just think of me as your own personal fairy godmother. I’m going to wave my wand and turn the pumpkin into a princess, just in time for the ball.”
It’s a joke that no one but Katherine finds funny. Caroline is more concerned by the stake, and when it is raised, her eyes widen and she holds what little breath she has left.
“Not you,” and then Katherine is on the floor and he is above her, blue eyes fierce and sad all at once. The stake is in his hand now and she thinks that this is actually more fitting than what Katherine had proposed.
“I’ll miss you, Blondie,” he whispers and she thinks she remembers laughing.
“No, you won’t.”
Her nose fills with the scent of him, his lips brush against her ear and she shivers. “Yes, I will.”
A sharp pain and she breathes her last.
The witch is still chanting.
~0~
The daughter of Robert Baratheon and Cersei Lannister is weak and frail in her infancy. The midwives keep to their lamentations of the lost brother and the Grand Maester will say that babes who come too early are often sickly at the first. If the child runs a fever, is restless and haunted in her sleep, and cries for hours to no avail-someone, somewhere, has a handy excuse for the desperate father and near-hysterical mother.
The truth of it is harder, and more difficult to imagine.
The little princess, sweet Princess Caroline, suffers from no ailment other than confusion and frustration. The plague of memories from another life and the inability to do anything, say anything, because even though she is seventeen, she is still a child-this causes her illness. She knows words, has a long list of things to say, but her babe’s mouth cannot yet form the words. She remembers walking, even running, but her tiny body is not capable.
The princess ails because she is imprisoned, and no one else knows it.
So she cries.
~0~
Eight months, and a kingdom holds it breath.
Across the Narrow Sea, in a house with a red door, a boy too young for bitterness is still filled with it. He hears of the little princess, struggling in her cradle, and prays not for her salvation, but for her death. A lord in the north, with more promises than he cares to have and more secrets than he wants to keep, sits before a white tree and thinks of two little bodies wrapped in red and gold before praying for lenience.
The queen, Cersei who is still not a Baratheon, keeps her daily trek to the sept, to the statue of the Mother. She prays and prays and then goes back to her daughter, and prays there as well. The maids remind her to eat, to sleep, to bathe, and do all those things that Cersei cares nothing for anymore. She has eyes only for the golden cradle and the pale babe lying within.
The king, Robert who still wishes for Lyanna, does not pray. He does not remember how. He does remember violence and the feel of his warhammer in his hands. He thinks that his daughter should live, if only to stop the carnage that will follow if she does not. And if that does not prompt the gods of this world to save her, then Robert thinks the gods must be dead.
Caroline does not know this, does not know how delicate this new life is. She cannot know for every five people that pray for her survival, there is one that wants her death. She is not used to a world where so much hangs upon her head, to a world where she is at the centre of so much attention. Stuck as she is, Caroline knows of nothing beyond the edges of her cradle and the sounds of the women who tend to her.
Caroline does know that waiting has done nothing; she knows that struggling has done nothing. She is where she is, remembers too much for a child to remember, and her circumstances are beyond her control.
That is the kind of world she is used to.
Eight months after her birth, the royal girl-child stops her fidgeting, her struggling, and her incessant crying. She stops refusing the milk brought to her lips, stops wailing so hard that her stomach empties three or four times a day. She wakes in the morning, naps during the day, and passes quiet night after quiet night. Her cheeks take on a rosy hue, her eyes clear, and she puts on much needed weight.
By nine months, the maids hum happily and the midwives breathe sighs of relief.
By ten months, the Grand Maester smiles and nods at the queen in a way that does not infuriate her for the first time.
When the child is a year old, the king declares a celebration in honour of his daughter’s first name-day. The tourneys, parades, and feasts last for almost two months. Robert seats the princess on his knee despite Cersei’s concerns and points out every lord and lady of the realm that has come to honour her. He does not know that the child will remember this, and remember those names, because to his eyes she is a babe.
But then again, people only see what they want to see.
~0~
There is not a person that the princess meets that she fails to charm.
The maesters marvel at her return to strength, at her ability to walk at nine months and the grace her hands gain at such a young age. The princess learns to talk just as quickly, short words rapidly turning into phrases which morph into whole sentences in a matter of weeks.
“Never have I seen such an intelligent child,” they say. “She will be the delight of her teachers. Her parents will never fail to be proud.”
Cersei makes small smiles, but the glory her daughter attains so young fills the queen with untold satisfaction. “My little girl,” the queen coos delightedly, pressing kisses on top of those golden curls. “My sweet little princess.”
Robert roars with approval, boasts to all that will listen that his girl can do this or says that. Never a feast goes by where the princess is not seated upon her father’s knee, at the center of the entire court, so that Robert can show her off. “Do you see my daughter?” he demands with a joyful bellow. “Do you see her? My little Baratheon princess!”
Caroline herself bears it all with quiet grace. She knows of this parental affection, remembers it from her other parents. She knows enough to wait patiently for it to end, because it must end. Her body is young, but her mind is not so. She recognizes the signs, the averted glances, the long tense silences. Caroline has seen that indignation in the eyes of a mother before, can say the same of the shame and lack of repentance in the face of a father.
Caroline knows what a dying marriage looks like, but the circumstances are different here. They are more difficult. This life is somehow more dangerous than the last.
To be honest, she’s not really surprised.
~0~
Her second name-day passes and the queen’s belly is swollen once again.
Caroline is told she has a brother, a golden prince who takes her place in line for the throne.
She would welcome him to it, but his eyes . . .
His eyes are green.
~0~
This is a world in which she is never alone.
At four, Caroline has more servants than she can count, and they all exist for the purpose of keeping her company. She always has at least one maid attending, along with tutors, maesters, chamberlains, and septas. There is never a moment where she wants for a thing, because one of her servants will produce it, often before she can even think to speak of it.
It is in the midst of all this company that Caroline finds herself yearning desperately for a moment of solitude.
And yes, she does appreciate the irony of that.
This world is the world of knights and ladies and kings and queens. It’s the world of gowns, jewels, swords, and ‘my lady’ and ‘my princess’-a world in which she lives in a castle of all places.
It is also the world of no indoor plumbing, no cellphones, no television, and no Tostitos.
It is a world without Elenas, Bonnies, Moms, Tylers, Matts, Stefans, and yes, even Damons.
It is a world where she is overwhelmed by a surging sea of constant companionship.
The loneliness is the same.
~0~
A princess of the realm is never to be without a gallant protector. She supposes the Kingsguard is meant to supply her with one.
The queen and the prince are also meant to have a protector with them at all times. The king also needs one, though it is best never to use the word ‘need’ in front of Robert Baratheon.
It is the sacred duty of the seven knights of the Kingsguard to serve and protect the royal family. They turn their backs on older vows of family and honour, surrender futures with blushing brides and smiling children. They give up much, these knights, to serve king and country.
Some of them are better at it than others.
Jaime Lannister is a knight of the Kingsguard. The queen’s own twin brother, and Caroline is expected to call him ‘Ser Uncle’.
When they think she isn’t listening, Caroline’s maids call him ‘Kingslayer’.
He comes to guard her at times, stands at the doorway and watches everyone with sharp eyes while his right hand rests upon his sword hilt. Since Caroline hears that he used his dagger to kill the Mad King, this worries her not as much as the other things he does.
He has a nice smile, Ser Uncle does. It’d be nicer if he didn’t use it so often to blind others. Caroline sees past the glare of his charm to the anger and bitterness that festers below.
Once, when she is six and he is perhaps a bit drunk, Ser Uncle smiles fondly at her in the dimly lit halls of Maegor’s Holdfast. His breath smells of something stronger than what Caroline is usually served and his cheeks are a little flushed.
“Sweetling,” he murmurs while one of her maids frets nearby. “My pretty little niece-you look just as your mother did at your age.”
She doesn’t; she looks like she did before, in that other world, when she was six there. But people see what they want to see.
“Mother and Father have gone to bed,” is what she says instead, and the darkening of Ser Uncle’s expression is not entirely surprising. “I am going now.”
Sometimes she wonders if she is too suspicious. She thinks a six-year-old should be more innocent.
But she left her innocence behind in the other world of black eyes, sharp teeth, and red dreams. And she knows they call Ser Uncle ‘Kingslayer’ for a good reason.
She worries for Robert, also for a good reason.
Ser Uncle’s eyes are green, too.
~0~
“You should watch over your brother,” Cersei tells her on a day that almost looks like summer. The snow had been delightful for only a short while. The seasons here stretched too long and grated upon Caroline’s patience. She remembers, fondly, a world where seasons lasted months, not years.
Her mind often wanders back to that world when the queen begins to lecture.
“He is your younger brother,” the queen repeats, reclining against a mound of pillows. Caroline eyes the bulging belly that forces this rest upon Cersei, more content to guess at the babe’s gender than to consider the one that came before.
“Caroline,” and it’s a tone of voice she remembers, though Cersei looks little enough like Elizabeth Forbes. Caroline glances up, reluctant to meet the gaze of this woman she calls ‘Mother’.
“He need your protection, and your guidance,” her mouth is set into a thin line and Caroline knows of the anger the queen is trying to swallow. Her own temper rattles and prompts her to look at Mother with blazing eyes. That the queen immediately drops her gaze is nothing new.
Caroline knows it is the blue of her eyes that discomforts Mother now, not the anger of a child. She knows it, and uses it. Mother is always the first to drop her eyes, but she has never been one to let go of an argument. “You should have come to me,” the queen leans back against her pillows and closes her eyes. “Your father could have hurt Joffrey. You know how he gets.”
That she fails to get along with this mother as well is not a parallel that is lost on Caroline. But she thinks, for the first time, that her obstinacy might actually be justified where this mother is concerned.
“Hurt him?” Caroline repeats, her child’s voice full of youthful ignorance that she does not possess. “Like Joffrey hurt the cat?”
Mother’s face hardens, but then her expression crumbles into one of almost despair.
“You truly are his daughter,” the queen laments.
She isn’t, but Caroline holds her tongue.
It seems pointless to argue at this point.
~0~
The queen will sigh that the relationship between brother and sister soured from that day forward.
She would be wrong.
Caroline has never felt any particular attachment to young Joffrey. Initially, she had been preoccupied with the shift of one world to the next and all the frustration of being nineteen but appearing just to be two. Joffrey’s birth had concerned her little, and she felt no real obligation to do anything for him or with him.
Time has not changed this detachment. Perhaps, she thought in those early years, perhaps this was normal. Caroline had always been an only child, in this world and the last. Her innate desire for people’s attention would be ill served with a younger sibling. Maybe these feelings were natural.
The cat puts an end to all that speculation, and all of Joffrey’s other misdeeds can no longer be dismissed as regular bratty behaviour. Rather, everything seems to dim and take on far more sinister tones. Caroline reads into events things she did not before, and her mind finds no comfort in it at all.
It is Joffrey himself who is not natural. He is made up of a strange temper and inhumane delights. That he strikes out at his child-companions is not surprising; that the queen lets him is also not unexpected. However, Joffrey’s almost desperate need for the king’s attention shocks Caroline every time.
That Joffrey hates her is a given.
“It is the way with mothers and fathers,” Mother says when Joffrey’s temper rises. “Mothers hold a special place in their hearts for their sons; fathers all over themselves for the love of their daughters.”
This is not true, and Caroline knows the reality of it. She’s had time to think, years now to reflect on her life before, and she knows now that Liz Forbes cherished her daughter far more than her husband did. Yes, Caroline infuriated the sheriff on occasion (on all occasions), but Liz never once raised a hand to Caroline. Not even when she thought Caroline was a monster and needed to be put down-Liz would have rather died than do it herself.
Bill Forbes had no such qualms, despite the years she spent being Daddy’s little princess. Caroline does not know if Robert would be the same, but the king’s temper is well known and causes quite a ruckus before it passes. And yet, he very obviously dotes on his daughter and perhaps overlooks his heir more than once.
It is a situation that Joffrey cannot abide, not even at four.
“But I’m the heir!” Joffrey’s eyes widen and burn with a touch of madness most days, and this day is no different. “I’m to be king after him! Not her!”
Caroline looks up from the book she pretends to read and gives Joffrey a stern look. “But I’m his daughter.”
She’s not, really, but she’s closer to the idea of it than Joffrey ever will be. And if Mother makes anything of the deliberate emphasis in Caroline’s words, it is brushed aside in favour of handling her son. Caroline just goes back to her book.
Joffrey breaks all her dolls later, stringing their heads together and leaving them on her bed. She runs a finger down one disfigured face while the maids scramble to clear her room of the wreckage. The next day, she makes sure that everyone is watching when she calmly asks the king for a new doll.
He buys her a chest full of them.
Caroline thinks that she must hate Joffrey too, just a little, to provoke him so. However, that doesn’t mean that she cares.
~0~
Myrcella Baratheon is born with golden curls and green eyes just like her elder brother.
Caroline is stunned to find that she loves the babe anyway.
~0~
Robert Baratheon likes it when she calls him ‘Father’ instead of ‘your Grace’, and Caroline still has her moments of desiring acceptance through acts of appeasement.
Father also has two brothers, two more men she must call ‘Uncle’, and they are a family fractured beyond repair. Uncle Renly smiles almost as pretty as Ser Uncle does, but he means it more often than not. He’s witty, charming, and unabashedly blunt when it comes to all things family related. Caroline also knows that Uncle Renly prefers the company of men to women and that Father couldn’t see it even if he were to ever walk in on Uncle Renly in the act. Father sees himself in Uncle Renly, and so does everyone else. To be honest, Father treats Uncle Renly more like a son than he does Joffrey-and Caroline knows the reason for that even if Father doesn’t yet realize it.
Uncle Stannis is different, and not very much like Father at all. He also doesn’t see what is plain to see with Uncle Renly, but those sort of matters appear to be completely beyond his scope. If Uncle Renly can be said to be homosexual, than Uncle Stannis can be said to be asexual. Caroline is fairly sure Uncle Stannis is not unfamiliar with the act itself, but he appears to have little understanding for it-and even less understanding for how it motivates others.
(Father, if she is pressed to say, might best be described as screw-anything-with-a-pair-of-breasts-and-two-legs-sexual, and he is so flagrantly obvious about it that Caroline never begrudges Mother her anger).
Uncle Renly tries to be her favourite uncle, to shower her with gifts and to make the notoriously solemn princess smile more often. Caroline thinks half of it is to solidify that connection with the king, to make sure Renly is the favourite brother at all times. She suspects that the other half might be actual affection.
Uncle Stannis is no better with affection than he is with sexual matters. Caroline sometimes catches him looking at her, much like how a person might stare at a three-headed cow. She wonders why she would be such a spectacle to him when he’s seen other children before, even has one of his own. But whatever Uncle Stannis thinks he keeps to himself, locked away behind those cold blue eyes. She does know how much he resents Uncle Renly and Father, for slights that were only partly intentional. She also knows that he’s not particularly forgiving and can nurse wounds for years on end.
Caroline often wonders if there’s even one person in this kingdom not bursting at the seams with bitterness.
~0~
It should be noted, that of all his children, the king favours Caroline the most.
She thinks it odd, because she’s not his child-not really. She calls him Father, but ‘Dad’ is still a memory with Bill Forbes’s face. But she thinks that by now someone would have noticed that she’s not very much like her parents at all-that blonde hair and blue eyes aren’t particular only to Lannisters and Baratheons, and isn’t the princess a bit too mature for an eight-year-old?
But people only see what they want to see.
Robert Baratheon wants to see a daughter, and so he does. A daughter who makes him proud, a daughter that he can show off to the world. A daughter that he seats upon his knee whenever he can, so that all can see the apple of Robert Baratheon’s eye.
It affords her some graces, this obvious preference, and some grief as well. Joffrey’s jealousy is the most pronounced downside. A certain leeway with her words is a definite upside.
“You’re getting fat,” she says one day when she’s slipped too far back into her other world skin and she’s forgotten to lock up her mouth. It’s a poor setting for the words, but most of the other council members are gone and only Uncles Renly and Stannis remain. She’s here not by choice, but because the king has been bringing her occasionally since she was four and he found that she could write with a hand as steady and elegant as a woman three times her age. It’s not uncommon to see the little princess upon her father’s knee at a council meeting, a look of solemn concentration on her face as she painstakingly writes one beautiful letter after another at the king’s urging.
What the other council members think of her presence, she does not know. Joffrey hates it, will throw tantrums that last for hours whenever Father takes her along. Even the queen disapproves, because Mother still thinks she’s too young to be so often in the company of men. Perhaps Littlefinger and the Spider laugh it off, another stubborn fancy of a king full of wants and somewhat wanting in sense. The Grand Maester just nods while Jon Arryn remains stoic. Uncle Stannis frowns and Uncle Renly tries to tickle her foot under the table while Father laughs at them all.
Father does not laugh that day. “What did you say?”
And she’s on thin ice, she knows, but she has the armour of her child-body to protect her from the worst of it. “You’re getting fat,” and she turns around and pokes the belly that bulges even more than Mother’s does with the newest babe growing inside. “How am I supposed to sit here for much longer? It’s getting uncomfortable. You should get me a chair of my own Father; it’s too hard to write with your belly bumping my arm.”
She counts to thirty-six in the tense silence that follows. But when Father breaks it, there is none of the anger that Mother receives for similar warnings.
“Do you hear her?” he bellows at his brothers, slapping the table hard with the force of his mirth. “Do you hear my daughter? She is afraid of nothing! Nothing! She will make some poor boy a formidable wife one day.”
“And until then, you must contend with her,” Uncle Renly is all grins and winks. “She’s right, by the way; you are getting fat. You eat too much, big brother.”
“Drinks too much, too,” she adds before leaning in close to blow dry the ink on the parchment.
“When they made me king, they said no one could tell me what to do from that point on,” Father pinches her cheek and then kisses her sloppily to provoke a shriek of indignation. “No one ever got around to letting you know that, did they sweetling?”
She wipes at her cheek and then goes back to her writing. “Everyone gets told what to do, Father; it’s whether you have to listen that makes all the difference.”
Uncle Stannis rises from the table and gives her a strange look before leaving. “Your daughter is very wise, for her age.”
She’s died twice and been born thrice-Caroline doesn’t want to pay the price for any further wisdom.
~0~
Four children, and the queen is finally done.
Prince Tommen is blonde, green-eyed, and unbelievably sweet right from the start.
She might not actually be his older sister, but Caroline finds she likes playing the part nonetheless.
~0~
At eleven, apparently she is almost grown. Caroline doesn’t feel all that affected by the proclamation; she was born with the memories of a seventeen year old girl. By her own calculations, she’s twenty-eight, not eleven, and has been grown almost since she opened her eyes for the first time.
She is aware this means that Myrcella will be deemed as grown by eleven, and that bothers her more than anything else. She doesn’t understand why childhood has to be so short in this world.
Father does understand, but he doesn’t like it all the same. At eleven, Caroline’s edging into her growth spurt years. Mother says she is too big to sit on Father’s knee anymore; too big to be his little princess because she’s almost a woman now. Father ignores her, as he usually does, and Caroline feels stuck in the middle in such a way that she hasn’t felt with them before.
But the queen is not wrong.
Uncle Stannis agrees, and says it bluntly whenever she’s present at the council. Jon Arryn has similar feelings on the topic and Father gets angry with him for the first time in Caroline’s memory.
But when Uncle Renly begins to question him, Father cannot deny the truth any longer.
“Why did you have to grow up, sweetling?” he asks her sadly.
“I’m sorry, Father,” but she’s not really, because what could she do to stop it?
And that is the end of her visits to council, to her place of honour at all feasts. Father may relent, but he does not do so gracefully. His anger is directed at Mother in ways that are alarming and his drinking almost doubles. Caroline watches as the king’s belly grows, undoing in three months what took her three years to achieve.
“He’s being childish,” she is shocked to say. Father could be irritable, lewd, and drunk-but never so downright petulant.
“He’s being Robert,” is what Uncle Renly says, a sad smile on his face as well. “You don’t understand, do you sweet niece? That you are growing is not the problem; children grow all the time. But you are a girl, and you’re growing into a woman. And when a daughter becomes a woman, she ceases to be a daughter. You’re going to leave him soon, Caroline, and he has started his mourning early.”
She thinks it’s a strange notion, to mourn for someone still living. She thinks Bill Forbes must have felt the same way, when he chained her to that chair.
Fathers are the most curious of creatures.
~0~
This world is perilous for women.
It’s an odd adjustment for a girl who has seen things like elected female government officials and lived in the post-women’s liberation era. To go with that mindset into a world where she’s more property than person-it’s odd.
And frustrating. Endlessly, endlessly frustrating.
“House Martell-dragon lovers,” Joffrey makes a face like this is the most disgusting thing he can imagine. She thinks he’s forgotten the sight of his hands covered in cat entrails. Or maybe he hasn’t.
The Grand Maester looks slightly pained, as he tends to when Joffrey makes his lack of diplomacy so pronounced. “The ruling house of Dorne, my prince; a fiercely proud and formidable people. The only part of the Seven Kingdoms to join of their own free will, rather than by conquest.”
Joffrey snorts dismissively. Caroline shakes her head and keeps her gaze on the books the master had brought for today’s lesson. She lets her eyes trace the borders of Dorne, imagines Nymeria’s ships making their way to port, and smiles.
But Joffrey, as he often does, refuses to drop the issue. “They married their women to dragon kings, didn’t they? Whored their way into the kingdom is more like it, and that last one-“
And she’s had enough, even if the Grand Maester is willing to let this continue. “Elia Martell wasn’t a whore; she was a girl who married where she was told. And she paid dearly for it.”
Joffrey’s lips twist into that disgusting sneer of his. “No less than what she deserved.”
She doesn’t really remember her hand moving, but she does feel the baby fat of his cheek shuddering against her palm. It is a delightful feeling.
The Grand Maester cannot swallow his gasp in time and Joffrey’s eyes are watering even as his cheek colours almost to a purplish hue. He needs a few seconds before he can properly process what happened, but then he is on his feet and looking slightly maniacal. “You-“
She slaps him again, on the same cheek, before rising up and pushing him back down into his chair. “Elia Martell married a prince, but didn’t exactly have a choice in it. She and her children were perhaps the only true innocents in the war-and they did nothing to deserve what happened. Being born is not a good reason for condemnation, and neither is marriage. Our mother married where she was told, and if you put even half your brain to proper use you would know how close she came to being Elia Martell. Save for Aerys’s madness and Father’s warhammer, you and I could have been dragons.”
If the little beast understands any of that, it doesn’t show. “One day, I’ll be bigger and stronger than you-and then you’ll be sorry!”
His green eyes are wild, far past sane. Caroline looks into them and remembers, suddenly and vividly, the feel of cool metal bars against her forehead. She can still feel the wooden bullet digging its way through her brain, still smell the odour of burnt flesh from where the vervain ate at her like acid; she still remembers all the pain-and him, Brady, calmly asking her questions while he hurt her.
She remembers, as well, reinforced steel manacles tying her down, the fire of sun on her unprotected skin. She remembers begging and pleading with the one person she thought would always love her, no matter what, because she always loved him, no matter what. She remembers begging her dad not to hurt her anymore, and remembers him ignoring her. And the pain of that is still worse than anything the sun did to her.
“You will never be stronger than me,” she turns away from the madness in his eyes and walks from the solar with all the grace and dignity befitting a princess.
That Joffrey tells Mother is unsurprising; that he tells Father is a bit more unexpected. And that both king and queen should unite to scold their eldest is practically unbelievable.
And yet-
“Why would you strike your own brother? Caroline, you are his elder sister; you should know better.” Mother, as always, is more concerned with how little Caroline and Joffrey accept each other. Caroline understands Mother, though she rarely agrees with her. The queen loves her children, all four of them, and wants nothing more than for them to love each other and her-but not Father.
“And what is this talk of being dragons?” Father’s face is cloudy, the closest to madness as Robert Baratheon can get. The Targaryens have that effect.
Caroline looks between both Mother and Father and wants to laugh because even when they come together, they are not really together.
She turns to Mother first. “He said Elia Martell deserved to be raped and killed-and I say no person deserves that. Joffrey is a boy, but a boy with a mother and two sisters-he should not be so agreeable to such acts. He should know better.”
And then Father. “Dragons, stags, lions, wolves, trout-it doesn’t matter. A women marries were she is told, and even if she does not, a wife is not accountable for sins committed by her husband. I’m to marry soon, Father; what if my husband offends or injures someone like Rhaeger did to you? Would you let them rape me in retaliation? Murder my children?”
She has not placated them, only worsened their discomfort. But neither can say anything in response.
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you sweetling?” Father’s face is still red, but the endearment rings as true as always.
“I don’t want to hear of you striking your brother, or anyone else, again,” Mother’s lips press into a thin line, as they do when she holds back what she really wants to say. “It’s not ladylike.”
“What’s right is right.”
She is speaking to both of them. They both fail to hear her.
This is nothing new.
~0~
Caroline has one final man to call “Uncle”, though Mother would prefer that she didn’t.
Tyrion Lannister is exactly as his older brother, even though he is much shorter. Caroline remembers the old world, where people said you shouldn’t let physical attributes (or lack thereof) define you. She thinks that mentality should be brought to this world, but knows that it never will.
Uncle Tyrion is proof of that.
She does not know who first named him “Imp”, but she does know that he lives up to the moniker to the best of his ability. Ser Uncle hides his bitterness behind blinding smiles and looks meant to send women swooning. Uncle Tyrion wears his bitterness like armour, deflecting all things that came his way. She wonders if this is so because he cannot smile as prettily as Ser Uncle, or if this would be the case regardless. Part of Uncle Tyrion’s rage comes from being a dwarf (and being shunned for being a dwarf), but most comes from his father’s rejection and contempt. “Grandfather”, that cold patriarch, hates his youngest for being born; the deed killed the mother, and obviously the babe is to blame. She does not think that Grandfather would ever accept Uncle Tyrion, not even if he were six feet tall and handsomer than Ser Uncle.
Caroline has seen Uncle Tyrion off and on since she had been born in this world. He peeked into her crib a few times when she was still ailing, and played hide and seek with her when she was older. He had suggested it, the few times they played, and though no child-like games ever amused her growing up, Uncle Tyrion made it fun. Perhaps because he was closer to her size and not as easily detectable as her maids.
Uncle Tyrion is also clever, and values intellect in a way that no other around her did. Every gift from Uncle Tyrion is a book, something rare and beautiful. Caroline never had much time for books in that other world (Twilight being her one, sad exception), but she has no other way to pass her time here; sewing tires her for its unbearable monotony.
She remembers, every time Mother begins to insult him, that Uncle Tyrion was the one who gave her that first book on Nymeria-beautifully illustrated and carefully bound together many years before she had been born. Father had been dismissive of the gesture, but Mother had scowled. “Such an old book, for a child. She’ll tear it to pieces, Tyrion.”
Uncle Tyrion hadn’t bothered to even look at Mother when she spoke. His eyes were trained on Caroline and she made sure to smile gratefully as she opened the book as carefully as her three-year-old hands would let her. “You should pay closer attention to your daughter, dear sister. She would never do such a thing.”
Uncle Tyrion is not perfect; he drinks and whores and does many other things that Caroline finds distasteful. But she supposes he can understand the frustration of being an adult in a too small body. And he is aware enough to trust her while others would coddle her.
Caroline, in some ways, quite adores him.
~0~
series: 30 Days of Caroline
author: Eena
disclaimer: Don’t own ‘em.
category: Game of Thrones/Vampire Diaries (the first, right? *Bounces happily*)
characters/Pairing: Caroline, Caroline/Robb Stark
spoilers: Season One for GoT, Up to 3.03 for TVD
summary: It is a world without Elenas, Bonnies, Moms, Tylers, Matts, Stefans, and yes, even Damons. It is a world where she is overwhelmed by a surging seas of constant companionship. The loneliness is the same.
a/n: I apologize because this isn't finished. I have about a third of it left to write, but as it was taking so long, I thought I would just post what I have and then update it later. For ishi_chan, for her Robb/Caroline prompt.
~0~
Stories usually end with a wedding.
This story starts with one.
~0~
King Robert Baratheon, first of his name, weds Queen Cersei Lannister at the end of a long war that saw too many deaths. The people (almost all of them) delight in the union, see the promise of a peaceful nation and the hope of love on the faces of their new monarchs.
They ignore the fact that neither one had meant to take the other in marriage. They ignore the fact that Cersei Lannister had prepared herself for the lost dragon prince almost since she was able to walk and that her loss to Elia Martell was accepted neither graciously nor pleasantly. They ignore the fact that Robert Baratheon started a war for a girl with brown hair and gray eyes, a girl with a wolfish smile and the north in her blood. They ignore the fact that he mourns that girl violently, even now, on the day of his wedding.
They know the promise of peace is worse than the promise of war, especially when it sits on such fragile foundations. And the hope of new love can turn easily into bitterness. But the truth is often forgotten in the midst of celebration. And perhaps the people can be forgiven their ignorance, especially when the new queen’s belly began to swell and toasts were being made in every corner of the Seven Kingdoms.
But, as always, there is a price to pay.
This one is paid in the lifeblood of a prince. A prince destined to be born, but is not to live. A prince of thick black hair and bright blue eyes-a prince born too soon and taken away even quicker. A prince who is meant to be born alone and to die the same way.
But here is where the story is changed.
Even as Cersei Lannister weeps from her birthing bed, even as Robert Baratheon beats his hands bloody on the bedroom walls, even as the prince turns white, then blue, and then stops moving-even then the story is disrupted.
The tiny figure on the right side of the gilded cradle twitches even as the tiny figure on the left stills. On the left is the body of a prince, on the right is the body of a princess struggling to breathe in a world where she should not exist.
The midwives huddle in one corner, one gasping in alarm as the princess stops moving. Robert Baratheon stops his violence and looks to see his wife fighting her way to their daughter. He sees the child, sees how still she is, and something inside him twists and burns in a way not unlike a sword through the gut.
He stumbles to his daughter, the little girl that surprised them all with her arrival, and cradles her face with bloodied hands. “Not her, too,” the king croaks, and then shouts again, “NOT HER, TOO!”
The midwives try to shrink into a smaller, less noticeable group. They would leave if they could, but the king has refused to dismiss them. They watch as quietly as they can, faces struggling to hold onto looks of despair and sympathy where grim satisfaction might be truer to their hearts. All three are well-known, respected, and natives to King’s Landing. They came to birth the heir to the throne, but came with memories of the Sack in mind. Perhaps, to their eyes at least, the price of a prince and princess is one these new monarchs owe. Lannister knives cut down a prince and princess just a year ago, and a Baratheon king had nodded his approval. Such deeds were evil in the eyes of the gods, and no doubt they deserved punishment. A prince for a prince; a princess for a princess-it is not so unjust to their weary eyes.
The Grand Maester is also there, holding the queen’s hand and murmuring condolences and platitudes in one breath. Robert stands before his daughter’s crib, aware of them all and, at the same time, unaware of anything other than the sight of his blood painting the princess’s face a hellish shade of red.
A drop of that blood lands on the girl-child’s cheek and slowly glides down towards her mouth. The child’s lips are parted and the blood slides inside and lands on her tongue.
Her tiny chest seizes and then rises, shuddering violently but moving nonetheless.
The king nearly falls to his knees, but catches himself. He is stooped over his children, one dead and one barely breathing, and wonders if somehow the gods have granted him a miracle. Cersei pushes away the maester, clutches the arm of the nearest maid painfully tight and forces the girl to take her to the king’s side. Husband and wife stand together and wait, until the child finally opens her eyes.
~0~
Her hair is Lannister gold.
But her eyes are Baratheon blue.
She is both of them, in one body, and yet, she is neither of them at all.
They name her Caroline, but they don’t know why.
~0~
The baby girl herself sees not the light of days for months. King and queen keep their precious child inside, under the careful watch of maids and maesters. Cersei herself does not leave the princess’s room except in the mornings, when she goes to pray for her daughter. The queen will kneel down in the sept, head bowed before the statue of the Mother, and pray so forcefully that she seems almost feverish.
Robert comes only at night, and he spends that time by the door. Cersei will sleep in a chair pulled close to the golden crib and three maids will be awake should anything be needed. Robert finds that he is not particularly good at being a husband, but even he knows that this shared watch for their daughter’s health should bring king and queen closer together.
But the spectre of their lost son looms always by their daughter’s side. Robert knows not the words to say, knows not how to show comfort. He only knows that he needs to see Caroline himself to be sure she is still well, and that his concern never truly extends far enough to reach his wife.
The maids bear witness to this all; the awkwardness and the tension that fills every inch of the room. The girl-child must feel it too, they whisper amongst themselves, for the little princess never has a calm sleep. The babe twitches and whimpers and fidgets all through the days and nights, and the maids remember what the midwives had warned of before. The girl grew in her mother’s womb with her brother, and though she is a mere infant, she searches for that brother incessantly. His absence, the midwives warned, would cause the princess almost endless discomfort. And as the maids cluck their tongues and shake their heads, they agree these bad dreams are the exact thing the midwives had foretold.
~0~
Both maids and midwives are completely wrong.
Caroline remembers nothing of the brother whose place she now holds.
And the child does not dream at night, when she twitches, fidgets, and cries.
Caroline does not dream-she remembers.
She remembers everything.
~0~
She remembers before, the life that came before whatever this could be called. She remembers the life and the death-both of them.
What she remembers most vividly is not her mother sobbing at her bedside, running shaking fingers through Caroline’s sweaty hair. It’s not the two friends of her childhood, one bleak with despair and one feverish with denial and determination. It’s not the amber eyes of the boy who loves her, pulled from her side before the moon hung too high to save other people from the monster inside him. It’s not even her one-time lover, one-time father, and all-time personal demon standing watch in the dark corners of her room, an obvious air of sorrow about him that she doesn’t understand. It’s not even the pain, all the fire and stabbing and twisting that ripped through every inch of her supposedly immortal body.
Her clearest memory is of HER, that woman who isn’t a woman, who wears the face of a friend to hide the teeth snapping just underneath the surface. She is the one who ended Caroline the first time, and she will be the only one willing to end Caroline the second time when the promise of green eyes and eternal friendship failed to materialize in time.
“The hybrid bites are different; the poison goes faster,” she explains, looks right at Caroline with unsympathetic, calculating eyes. “That thing wasn’t his first experiment; it won’t be his last. We’re going to need to work together-and fast.”
A cool hand presses against her cheek, a cruel parody of a loving caress. Caroline hears her mother arguing, but only as if from a distance. All Caroline sees is brown eyes and dark curls like satin ribbons. “She’s my daughter too, in a way. I brought her into this life; it’s fitting that I should take her out of it.”
There is an explosion of noise, but all Caroline can decipher is the sound of false affection. “I can’t save her, and you can’t either. But I can do something; offer another chance, as a show of goodwill.”
Katherine, her very own dark mother, is offering something like salvation. Katherine cares nothing for the argument, knows it means nothing. She has seen the end before the others, has her witch ready, and soon is guiding Caroline’s mother off the bed. “It’s bad enough for a mother to bury a daughter; you want to remember her as she was-not what she will be at the end.”
It is, perhaps, the first and only sincere thing Katherine has ever said.
It is enough to clear the room of all but one.
“You don’t trust me?” Katherine teases.
“You’re a liar,” he says, and stays in his corner.
The witch, some blonde thirty-something with hollow grey eyes, lights some candles, picks up some foreign-sounding chant, and Katherine hovers above Caroline and smiles that smile that is all sharp, white teeth. “Well, it’s your lucky day. Just think of me as your own personal fairy godmother. I’m going to wave my wand and turn the pumpkin into a princess, just in time for the ball.”
It’s a joke that no one but Katherine finds funny. Caroline is more concerned by the stake, and when it is raised, her eyes widen and she holds what little breath she has left.
“Not you,” and then Katherine is on the floor and he is above her, blue eyes fierce and sad all at once. The stake is in his hand now and she thinks that this is actually more fitting than what Katherine had proposed.
“I’ll miss you, Blondie,” he whispers and she thinks she remembers laughing.
“No, you won’t.”
Her nose fills with the scent of him, his lips brush against her ear and she shivers. “Yes, I will.”
A sharp pain and she breathes her last.
The witch is still chanting.
~0~
The daughter of Robert Baratheon and Cersei Lannister is weak and frail in her infancy. The midwives keep to their lamentations of the lost brother and the Grand Maester will say that babes who come too early are often sickly at the first. If the child runs a fever, is restless and haunted in her sleep, and cries for hours to no avail-someone, somewhere, has a handy excuse for the desperate father and near-hysterical mother.
The truth of it is harder, and more difficult to imagine.
The little princess, sweet Princess Caroline, suffers from no ailment other than confusion and frustration. The plague of memories from another life and the inability to do anything, say anything, because even though she is seventeen, she is still a child-this causes her illness. She knows words, has a long list of things to say, but her babe’s mouth cannot yet form the words. She remembers walking, even running, but her tiny body is not capable.
The princess ails because she is imprisoned, and no one else knows it.
So she cries.
~0~
Eight months, and a kingdom holds it breath.
Across the Narrow Sea, in a house with a red door, a boy too young for bitterness is still filled with it. He hears of the little princess, struggling in her cradle, and prays not for her salvation, but for her death. A lord in the north, with more promises than he cares to have and more secrets than he wants to keep, sits before a white tree and thinks of two little bodies wrapped in red and gold before praying for lenience.
The queen, Cersei who is still not a Baratheon, keeps her daily trek to the sept, to the statue of the Mother. She prays and prays and then goes back to her daughter, and prays there as well. The maids remind her to eat, to sleep, to bathe, and do all those things that Cersei cares nothing for anymore. She has eyes only for the golden cradle and the pale babe lying within.
The king, Robert who still wishes for Lyanna, does not pray. He does not remember how. He does remember violence and the feel of his warhammer in his hands. He thinks that his daughter should live, if only to stop the carnage that will follow if she does not. And if that does not prompt the gods of this world to save her, then Robert thinks the gods must be dead.
Caroline does not know this, does not know how delicate this new life is. She cannot know for every five people that pray for her survival, there is one that wants her death. She is not used to a world where so much hangs upon her head, to a world where she is at the centre of so much attention. Stuck as she is, Caroline knows of nothing beyond the edges of her cradle and the sounds of the women who tend to her.
Caroline does know that waiting has done nothing; she knows that struggling has done nothing. She is where she is, remembers too much for a child to remember, and her circumstances are beyond her control.
That is the kind of world she is used to.
Eight months after her birth, the royal girl-child stops her fidgeting, her struggling, and her incessant crying. She stops refusing the milk brought to her lips, stops wailing so hard that her stomach empties three or four times a day. She wakes in the morning, naps during the day, and passes quiet night after quiet night. Her cheeks take on a rosy hue, her eyes clear, and she puts on much needed weight.
By nine months, the maids hum happily and the midwives breathe sighs of relief.
By ten months, the Grand Maester smiles and nods at the queen in a way that does not infuriate her for the first time.
When the child is a year old, the king declares a celebration in honour of his daughter’s first name-day. The tourneys, parades, and feasts last for almost two months. Robert seats the princess on his knee despite Cersei’s concerns and points out every lord and lady of the realm that has come to honour her. He does not know that the child will remember this, and remember those names, because to his eyes she is a babe.
But then again, people only see what they want to see.
~0~
There is not a person that the princess meets that she fails to charm.
The maesters marvel at her return to strength, at her ability to walk at nine months and the grace her hands gain at such a young age. The princess learns to talk just as quickly, short words rapidly turning into phrases which morph into whole sentences in a matter of weeks.
“Never have I seen such an intelligent child,” they say. “She will be the delight of her teachers. Her parents will never fail to be proud.”
Cersei makes small smiles, but the glory her daughter attains so young fills the queen with untold satisfaction. “My little girl,” the queen coos delightedly, pressing kisses on top of those golden curls. “My sweet little princess.”
Robert roars with approval, boasts to all that will listen that his girl can do this or says that. Never a feast goes by where the princess is not seated upon her father’s knee, at the center of the entire court, so that Robert can show her off. “Do you see my daughter?” he demands with a joyful bellow. “Do you see her? My little Baratheon princess!”
Caroline herself bears it all with quiet grace. She knows of this parental affection, remembers it from her other parents. She knows enough to wait patiently for it to end, because it must end. Her body is young, but her mind is not so. She recognizes the signs, the averted glances, the long tense silences. Caroline has seen that indignation in the eyes of a mother before, can say the same of the shame and lack of repentance in the face of a father.
Caroline knows what a dying marriage looks like, but the circumstances are different here. They are more difficult. This life is somehow more dangerous than the last.
To be honest, she’s not really surprised.
~0~
Her second name-day passes and the queen’s belly is swollen once again.
Caroline is told she has a brother, a golden prince who takes her place in line for the throne.
She would welcome him to it, but his eyes . . .
His eyes are green.
~0~
This is a world in which she is never alone.
At four, Caroline has more servants than she can count, and they all exist for the purpose of keeping her company. She always has at least one maid attending, along with tutors, maesters, chamberlains, and septas. There is never a moment where she wants for a thing, because one of her servants will produce it, often before she can even think to speak of it.
It is in the midst of all this company that Caroline finds herself yearning desperately for a moment of solitude.
And yes, she does appreciate the irony of that.
This world is the world of knights and ladies and kings and queens. It’s the world of gowns, jewels, swords, and ‘my lady’ and ‘my princess’-a world in which she lives in a castle of all places.
It is also the world of no indoor plumbing, no cellphones, no television, and no Tostitos.
It is a world without Elenas, Bonnies, Moms, Tylers, Matts, Stefans, and yes, even Damons.
It is a world where she is overwhelmed by a surging sea of constant companionship.
The loneliness is the same.
~0~
A princess of the realm is never to be without a gallant protector. She supposes the Kingsguard is meant to supply her with one.
The queen and the prince are also meant to have a protector with them at all times. The king also needs one, though it is best never to use the word ‘need’ in front of Robert Baratheon.
It is the sacred duty of the seven knights of the Kingsguard to serve and protect the royal family. They turn their backs on older vows of family and honour, surrender futures with blushing brides and smiling children. They give up much, these knights, to serve king and country.
Some of them are better at it than others.
Jaime Lannister is a knight of the Kingsguard. The queen’s own twin brother, and Caroline is expected to call him ‘Ser Uncle’.
When they think she isn’t listening, Caroline’s maids call him ‘Kingslayer’.
He comes to guard her at times, stands at the doorway and watches everyone with sharp eyes while his right hand rests upon his sword hilt. Since Caroline hears that he used his dagger to kill the Mad King, this worries her not as much as the other things he does.
He has a nice smile, Ser Uncle does. It’d be nicer if he didn’t use it so often to blind others. Caroline sees past the glare of his charm to the anger and bitterness that festers below.
Once, when she is six and he is perhaps a bit drunk, Ser Uncle smiles fondly at her in the dimly lit halls of Maegor’s Holdfast. His breath smells of something stronger than what Caroline is usually served and his cheeks are a little flushed.
“Sweetling,” he murmurs while one of her maids frets nearby. “My pretty little niece-you look just as your mother did at your age.”
She doesn’t; she looks like she did before, in that other world, when she was six there. But people see what they want to see.
“Mother and Father have gone to bed,” is what she says instead, and the darkening of Ser Uncle’s expression is not entirely surprising. “I am going now.”
Sometimes she wonders if she is too suspicious. She thinks a six-year-old should be more innocent.
But she left her innocence behind in the other world of black eyes, sharp teeth, and red dreams. And she knows they call Ser Uncle ‘Kingslayer’ for a good reason.
She worries for Robert, also for a good reason.
Ser Uncle’s eyes are green, too.
~0~
“You should watch over your brother,” Cersei tells her on a day that almost looks like summer. The snow had been delightful for only a short while. The seasons here stretched too long and grated upon Caroline’s patience. She remembers, fondly, a world where seasons lasted months, not years.
Her mind often wanders back to that world when the queen begins to lecture.
“He is your younger brother,” the queen repeats, reclining against a mound of pillows. Caroline eyes the bulging belly that forces this rest upon Cersei, more content to guess at the babe’s gender than to consider the one that came before.
“Caroline,” and it’s a tone of voice she remembers, though Cersei looks little enough like Elizabeth Forbes. Caroline glances up, reluctant to meet the gaze of this woman she calls ‘Mother’.
“He need your protection, and your guidance,” her mouth is set into a thin line and Caroline knows of the anger the queen is trying to swallow. Her own temper rattles and prompts her to look at Mother with blazing eyes. That the queen immediately drops her gaze is nothing new.
Caroline knows it is the blue of her eyes that discomforts Mother now, not the anger of a child. She knows it, and uses it. Mother is always the first to drop her eyes, but she has never been one to let go of an argument. “You should have come to me,” the queen leans back against her pillows and closes her eyes. “Your father could have hurt Joffrey. You know how he gets.”
That she fails to get along with this mother as well is not a parallel that is lost on Caroline. But she thinks, for the first time, that her obstinacy might actually be justified where this mother is concerned.
“Hurt him?” Caroline repeats, her child’s voice full of youthful ignorance that she does not possess. “Like Joffrey hurt the cat?”
Mother’s face hardens, but then her expression crumbles into one of almost despair.
“You truly are his daughter,” the queen laments.
She isn’t, but Caroline holds her tongue.
It seems pointless to argue at this point.
~0~
The queen will sigh that the relationship between brother and sister soured from that day forward.
She would be wrong.
Caroline has never felt any particular attachment to young Joffrey. Initially, she had been preoccupied with the shift of one world to the next and all the frustration of being nineteen but appearing just to be two. Joffrey’s birth had concerned her little, and she felt no real obligation to do anything for him or with him.
Time has not changed this detachment. Perhaps, she thought in those early years, perhaps this was normal. Caroline had always been an only child, in this world and the last. Her innate desire for people’s attention would be ill served with a younger sibling. Maybe these feelings were natural.
The cat puts an end to all that speculation, and all of Joffrey’s other misdeeds can no longer be dismissed as regular bratty behaviour. Rather, everything seems to dim and take on far more sinister tones. Caroline reads into events things she did not before, and her mind finds no comfort in it at all.
It is Joffrey himself who is not natural. He is made up of a strange temper and inhumane delights. That he strikes out at his child-companions is not surprising; that the queen lets him is also not unexpected. However, Joffrey’s almost desperate need for the king’s attention shocks Caroline every time.
That Joffrey hates her is a given.
“It is the way with mothers and fathers,” Mother says when Joffrey’s temper rises. “Mothers hold a special place in their hearts for their sons; fathers all over themselves for the love of their daughters.”
This is not true, and Caroline knows the reality of it. She’s had time to think, years now to reflect on her life before, and she knows now that Liz Forbes cherished her daughter far more than her husband did. Yes, Caroline infuriated the sheriff on occasion (on all occasions), but Liz never once raised a hand to Caroline. Not even when she thought Caroline was a monster and needed to be put down-Liz would have rather died than do it herself.
Bill Forbes had no such qualms, despite the years she spent being Daddy’s little princess. Caroline does not know if Robert would be the same, but the king’s temper is well known and causes quite a ruckus before it passes. And yet, he very obviously dotes on his daughter and perhaps overlooks his heir more than once.
It is a situation that Joffrey cannot abide, not even at four.
“But I’m the heir!” Joffrey’s eyes widen and burn with a touch of madness most days, and this day is no different. “I’m to be king after him! Not her!”
Caroline looks up from the book she pretends to read and gives Joffrey a stern look. “But I’m his daughter.”
She’s not, really, but she’s closer to the idea of it than Joffrey ever will be. And if Mother makes anything of the deliberate emphasis in Caroline’s words, it is brushed aside in favour of handling her son. Caroline just goes back to her book.
Joffrey breaks all her dolls later, stringing their heads together and leaving them on her bed. She runs a finger down one disfigured face while the maids scramble to clear her room of the wreckage. The next day, she makes sure that everyone is watching when she calmly asks the king for a new doll.
He buys her a chest full of them.
Caroline thinks that she must hate Joffrey too, just a little, to provoke him so. However, that doesn’t mean that she cares.
~0~
Myrcella Baratheon is born with golden curls and green eyes just like her elder brother.
Caroline is stunned to find that she loves the babe anyway.
~0~
Robert Baratheon likes it when she calls him ‘Father’ instead of ‘your Grace’, and Caroline still has her moments of desiring acceptance through acts of appeasement.
Father also has two brothers, two more men she must call ‘Uncle’, and they are a family fractured beyond repair. Uncle Renly smiles almost as pretty as Ser Uncle does, but he means it more often than not. He’s witty, charming, and unabashedly blunt when it comes to all things family related. Caroline also knows that Uncle Renly prefers the company of men to women and that Father couldn’t see it even if he were to ever walk in on Uncle Renly in the act. Father sees himself in Uncle Renly, and so does everyone else. To be honest, Father treats Uncle Renly more like a son than he does Joffrey-and Caroline knows the reason for that even if Father doesn’t yet realize it.
Uncle Stannis is different, and not very much like Father at all. He also doesn’t see what is plain to see with Uncle Renly, but those sort of matters appear to be completely beyond his scope. If Uncle Renly can be said to be homosexual, than Uncle Stannis can be said to be asexual. Caroline is fairly sure Uncle Stannis is not unfamiliar with the act itself, but he appears to have little understanding for it-and even less understanding for how it motivates others.
(Father, if she is pressed to say, might best be described as screw-anything-with-a-pair-of-breasts-and-two-legs-sexual, and he is so flagrantly obvious about it that Caroline never begrudges Mother her anger).
Uncle Renly tries to be her favourite uncle, to shower her with gifts and to make the notoriously solemn princess smile more often. Caroline thinks half of it is to solidify that connection with the king, to make sure Renly is the favourite brother at all times. She suspects that the other half might be actual affection.
Uncle Stannis is no better with affection than he is with sexual matters. Caroline sometimes catches him looking at her, much like how a person might stare at a three-headed cow. She wonders why she would be such a spectacle to him when he’s seen other children before, even has one of his own. But whatever Uncle Stannis thinks he keeps to himself, locked away behind those cold blue eyes. She does know how much he resents Uncle Renly and Father, for slights that were only partly intentional. She also knows that he’s not particularly forgiving and can nurse wounds for years on end.
Caroline often wonders if there’s even one person in this kingdom not bursting at the seams with bitterness.
~0~
It should be noted, that of all his children, the king favours Caroline the most.
She thinks it odd, because she’s not his child-not really. She calls him Father, but ‘Dad’ is still a memory with Bill Forbes’s face. But she thinks that by now someone would have noticed that she’s not very much like her parents at all-that blonde hair and blue eyes aren’t particular only to Lannisters and Baratheons, and isn’t the princess a bit too mature for an eight-year-old?
But people only see what they want to see.
Robert Baratheon wants to see a daughter, and so he does. A daughter who makes him proud, a daughter that he can show off to the world. A daughter that he seats upon his knee whenever he can, so that all can see the apple of Robert Baratheon’s eye.
It affords her some graces, this obvious preference, and some grief as well. Joffrey’s jealousy is the most pronounced downside. A certain leeway with her words is a definite upside.
“You’re getting fat,” she says one day when she’s slipped too far back into her other world skin and she’s forgotten to lock up her mouth. It’s a poor setting for the words, but most of the other council members are gone and only Uncles Renly and Stannis remain. She’s here not by choice, but because the king has been bringing her occasionally since she was four and he found that she could write with a hand as steady and elegant as a woman three times her age. It’s not uncommon to see the little princess upon her father’s knee at a council meeting, a look of solemn concentration on her face as she painstakingly writes one beautiful letter after another at the king’s urging.
What the other council members think of her presence, she does not know. Joffrey hates it, will throw tantrums that last for hours whenever Father takes her along. Even the queen disapproves, because Mother still thinks she’s too young to be so often in the company of men. Perhaps Littlefinger and the Spider laugh it off, another stubborn fancy of a king full of wants and somewhat wanting in sense. The Grand Maester just nods while Jon Arryn remains stoic. Uncle Stannis frowns and Uncle Renly tries to tickle her foot under the table while Father laughs at them all.
Father does not laugh that day. “What did you say?”
And she’s on thin ice, she knows, but she has the armour of her child-body to protect her from the worst of it. “You’re getting fat,” and she turns around and pokes the belly that bulges even more than Mother’s does with the newest babe growing inside. “How am I supposed to sit here for much longer? It’s getting uncomfortable. You should get me a chair of my own Father; it’s too hard to write with your belly bumping my arm.”
She counts to thirty-six in the tense silence that follows. But when Father breaks it, there is none of the anger that Mother receives for similar warnings.
“Do you hear her?” he bellows at his brothers, slapping the table hard with the force of his mirth. “Do you hear my daughter? She is afraid of nothing! Nothing! She will make some poor boy a formidable wife one day.”
“And until then, you must contend with her,” Uncle Renly is all grins and winks. “She’s right, by the way; you are getting fat. You eat too much, big brother.”
“Drinks too much, too,” she adds before leaning in close to blow dry the ink on the parchment.
“When they made me king, they said no one could tell me what to do from that point on,” Father pinches her cheek and then kisses her sloppily to provoke a shriek of indignation. “No one ever got around to letting you know that, did they sweetling?”
She wipes at her cheek and then goes back to her writing. “Everyone gets told what to do, Father; it’s whether you have to listen that makes all the difference.”
Uncle Stannis rises from the table and gives her a strange look before leaving. “Your daughter is very wise, for her age.”
She’s died twice and been born thrice-Caroline doesn’t want to pay the price for any further wisdom.
~0~
Four children, and the queen is finally done.
Prince Tommen is blonde, green-eyed, and unbelievably sweet right from the start.
She might not actually be his older sister, but Caroline finds she likes playing the part nonetheless.
~0~
At eleven, apparently she is almost grown. Caroline doesn’t feel all that affected by the proclamation; she was born with the memories of a seventeen year old girl. By her own calculations, she’s twenty-eight, not eleven, and has been grown almost since she opened her eyes for the first time.
She is aware this means that Myrcella will be deemed as grown by eleven, and that bothers her more than anything else. She doesn’t understand why childhood has to be so short in this world.
Father does understand, but he doesn’t like it all the same. At eleven, Caroline’s edging into her growth spurt years. Mother says she is too big to sit on Father’s knee anymore; too big to be his little princess because she’s almost a woman now. Father ignores her, as he usually does, and Caroline feels stuck in the middle in such a way that she hasn’t felt with them before.
But the queen is not wrong.
Uncle Stannis agrees, and says it bluntly whenever she’s present at the council. Jon Arryn has similar feelings on the topic and Father gets angry with him for the first time in Caroline’s memory.
But when Uncle Renly begins to question him, Father cannot deny the truth any longer.
“Why did you have to grow up, sweetling?” he asks her sadly.
“I’m sorry, Father,” but she’s not really, because what could she do to stop it?
And that is the end of her visits to council, to her place of honour at all feasts. Father may relent, but he does not do so gracefully. His anger is directed at Mother in ways that are alarming and his drinking almost doubles. Caroline watches as the king’s belly grows, undoing in three months what took her three years to achieve.
“He’s being childish,” she is shocked to say. Father could be irritable, lewd, and drunk-but never so downright petulant.
“He’s being Robert,” is what Uncle Renly says, a sad smile on his face as well. “You don’t understand, do you sweet niece? That you are growing is not the problem; children grow all the time. But you are a girl, and you’re growing into a woman. And when a daughter becomes a woman, she ceases to be a daughter. You’re going to leave him soon, Caroline, and he has started his mourning early.”
She thinks it’s a strange notion, to mourn for someone still living. She thinks Bill Forbes must have felt the same way, when he chained her to that chair.
Fathers are the most curious of creatures.
~0~
This world is perilous for women.
It’s an odd adjustment for a girl who has seen things like elected female government officials and lived in the post-women’s liberation era. To go with that mindset into a world where she’s more property than person-it’s odd.
And frustrating. Endlessly, endlessly frustrating.
“House Martell-dragon lovers,” Joffrey makes a face like this is the most disgusting thing he can imagine. She thinks he’s forgotten the sight of his hands covered in cat entrails. Or maybe he hasn’t.
The Grand Maester looks slightly pained, as he tends to when Joffrey makes his lack of diplomacy so pronounced. “The ruling house of Dorne, my prince; a fiercely proud and formidable people. The only part of the Seven Kingdoms to join of their own free will, rather than by conquest.”
Joffrey snorts dismissively. Caroline shakes her head and keeps her gaze on the books the master had brought for today’s lesson. She lets her eyes trace the borders of Dorne, imagines Nymeria’s ships making their way to port, and smiles.
But Joffrey, as he often does, refuses to drop the issue. “They married their women to dragon kings, didn’t they? Whored their way into the kingdom is more like it, and that last one-“
And she’s had enough, even if the Grand Maester is willing to let this continue. “Elia Martell wasn’t a whore; she was a girl who married where she was told. And she paid dearly for it.”
Joffrey’s lips twist into that disgusting sneer of his. “No less than what she deserved.”
She doesn’t really remember her hand moving, but she does feel the baby fat of his cheek shuddering against her palm. It is a delightful feeling.
The Grand Maester cannot swallow his gasp in time and Joffrey’s eyes are watering even as his cheek colours almost to a purplish hue. He needs a few seconds before he can properly process what happened, but then he is on his feet and looking slightly maniacal. “You-“
She slaps him again, on the same cheek, before rising up and pushing him back down into his chair. “Elia Martell married a prince, but didn’t exactly have a choice in it. She and her children were perhaps the only true innocents in the war-and they did nothing to deserve what happened. Being born is not a good reason for condemnation, and neither is marriage. Our mother married where she was told, and if you put even half your brain to proper use you would know how close she came to being Elia Martell. Save for Aerys’s madness and Father’s warhammer, you and I could have been dragons.”
If the little beast understands any of that, it doesn’t show. “One day, I’ll be bigger and stronger than you-and then you’ll be sorry!”
His green eyes are wild, far past sane. Caroline looks into them and remembers, suddenly and vividly, the feel of cool metal bars against her forehead. She can still feel the wooden bullet digging its way through her brain, still smell the odour of burnt flesh from where the vervain ate at her like acid; she still remembers all the pain-and him, Brady, calmly asking her questions while he hurt her.
She remembers, as well, reinforced steel manacles tying her down, the fire of sun on her unprotected skin. She remembers begging and pleading with the one person she thought would always love her, no matter what, because she always loved him, no matter what. She remembers begging her dad not to hurt her anymore, and remembers him ignoring her. And the pain of that is still worse than anything the sun did to her.
“You will never be stronger than me,” she turns away from the madness in his eyes and walks from the solar with all the grace and dignity befitting a princess.
That Joffrey tells Mother is unsurprising; that he tells Father is a bit more unexpected. And that both king and queen should unite to scold their eldest is practically unbelievable.
And yet-
“Why would you strike your own brother? Caroline, you are his elder sister; you should know better.” Mother, as always, is more concerned with how little Caroline and Joffrey accept each other. Caroline understands Mother, though she rarely agrees with her. The queen loves her children, all four of them, and wants nothing more than for them to love each other and her-but not Father.
“And what is this talk of being dragons?” Father’s face is cloudy, the closest to madness as Robert Baratheon can get. The Targaryens have that effect.
Caroline looks between both Mother and Father and wants to laugh because even when they come together, they are not really together.
She turns to Mother first. “He said Elia Martell deserved to be raped and killed-and I say no person deserves that. Joffrey is a boy, but a boy with a mother and two sisters-he should not be so agreeable to such acts. He should know better.”
And then Father. “Dragons, stags, lions, wolves, trout-it doesn’t matter. A women marries were she is told, and even if she does not, a wife is not accountable for sins committed by her husband. I’m to marry soon, Father; what if my husband offends or injures someone like Rhaeger did to you? Would you let them rape me in retaliation? Murder my children?”
She has not placated them, only worsened their discomfort. But neither can say anything in response.
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you sweetling?” Father’s face is still red, but the endearment rings as true as always.
“I don’t want to hear of you striking your brother, or anyone else, again,” Mother’s lips press into a thin line, as they do when she holds back what she really wants to say. “It’s not ladylike.”
“What’s right is right.”
She is speaking to both of them. They both fail to hear her.
This is nothing new.
~0~
Caroline has one final man to call “Uncle”, though Mother would prefer that she didn’t.
Tyrion Lannister is exactly as his older brother, even though he is much shorter. Caroline remembers the old world, where people said you shouldn’t let physical attributes (or lack thereof) define you. She thinks that mentality should be brought to this world, but knows that it never will.
Uncle Tyrion is proof of that.
She does not know who first named him “Imp”, but she does know that he lives up to the moniker to the best of his ability. Ser Uncle hides his bitterness behind blinding smiles and looks meant to send women swooning. Uncle Tyrion wears his bitterness like armour, deflecting all things that came his way. She wonders if this is so because he cannot smile as prettily as Ser Uncle, or if this would be the case regardless. Part of Uncle Tyrion’s rage comes from being a dwarf (and being shunned for being a dwarf), but most comes from his father’s rejection and contempt. “Grandfather”, that cold patriarch, hates his youngest for being born; the deed killed the mother, and obviously the babe is to blame. She does not think that Grandfather would ever accept Uncle Tyrion, not even if he were six feet tall and handsomer than Ser Uncle.
Caroline has seen Uncle Tyrion off and on since she had been born in this world. He peeked into her crib a few times when she was still ailing, and played hide and seek with her when she was older. He had suggested it, the few times they played, and though no child-like games ever amused her growing up, Uncle Tyrion made it fun. Perhaps because he was closer to her size and not as easily detectable as her maids.
Uncle Tyrion is also clever, and values intellect in a way that no other around her did. Every gift from Uncle Tyrion is a book, something rare and beautiful. Caroline never had much time for books in that other world (Twilight being her one, sad exception), but she has no other way to pass her time here; sewing tires her for its unbearable monotony.
She remembers, every time Mother begins to insult him, that Uncle Tyrion was the one who gave her that first book on Nymeria-beautifully illustrated and carefully bound together many years before she had been born. Father had been dismissive of the gesture, but Mother had scowled. “Such an old book, for a child. She’ll tear it to pieces, Tyrion.”
Uncle Tyrion hadn’t bothered to even look at Mother when she spoke. His eyes were trained on Caroline and she made sure to smile gratefully as she opened the book as carefully as her three-year-old hands would let her. “You should pay closer attention to your daughter, dear sister. She would never do such a thing.”
Uncle Tyrion is not perfect; he drinks and whores and does many other things that Caroline finds distasteful. But she supposes he can understand the frustration of being an adult in a too small body. And he is aware enough to trust her while others would coddle her.
Caroline, in some ways, quite adores him.
~0~