FIC: A Circle in a Spiral (Lysa/Petyr) for embossedsilver
Recipient: embossedsilver
Title: A Circle in a Spiral
Author: juno_chan
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Lysa/Petyr, Lysa/Jon Arryn
Word Count: 3730
Summary: An examination of Lysa Tully within the constructs of the five stages of grief/loss.
Warnings: Canonical character death.
Author’s Note: embossedsilver, I hope you don’t mind that this is a very Lysa-heavy round of exchanges for you, after you received such a wonderful Lysa fic for the got_exchange! Lysa is one of my favorite characters to write, so I immediately knew I would be writing about her! I hope you enjoy. Many, many thanks to A for her beta-ing skills.
Denial.
She thinks that this babe will be her salvation.
There is fear, of course, as she misses first one moon’s blood and then another (oh gods oh gods what will Father say…). She takes to holding her breath, around her father, around her uncle, around Cat and their septa, certain that even with her belly still flat and smooth they will see, they will know. She can, with the tenderness in her breasts and the nausea that strikes her like a fist to the gut and sends a thousand fish swimming through her veins, so how can they not know, simply by looking at her, that she is changed forevermore?
But they do not see and slowly she breathes; slowly she thinks that for now, it may be her secret, be their secret. She breathes and rests a hand to her stomach over her thin shift as she lie in bed at night and imagines the tiny life growing inside her, her heart fluttering with giddy thoughts of the future.
He will love me now, she thinks and she strokes the tiny bump that is still unnoticeable under the thick fabric of her gowns. She would tell her father, and he would see that he must let them wed, and she would give Petyr a son and he would love her - she who had always been so steadfast, had given him her maiden’s gift, his closest friend and confidante.
Now, she thinks, she hopes, things will be right.
The disasters run hand in hand: Petyr challenges Brandon Stark to a duel, for Catelyn (he does not know, she tells herself, and she bites her cheek hard against the pain. She has not yet told him about their babe and so he is not to blame; it will be different when he knows). And when he is defeated and broken and her father is black with rage, she knows it can be a secret no longer, knows that now is the moment she must be brave though it comes not naturally to her at all; she rushes to Lord Tully, desperate, to beg, please, please do not send him away, he is the father of the child growing inside me.
Her father strikes her across the face.
She holds her cheek and stares, and she isn’t sure if she or her father is more surprised is; he has never hit her before - and she cannot even cry, she will not cry, she is a Tully, and she will be strong even though she wants to run and hide (that is what silly children do, she tells herself sternly, she is no child, she will be a mother).
Her father’s jaw trembles, and she does not know whether from rage or sorrow. “Oh, Lysa,” he says, and his voice is raw and raspy as he rubs his face wearily. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
(What she does is drink the tea, as she had every other day in her life. Gods save me, she would think years later in her prayers, forgive me, I did not know.)
Her belly cramps as she bleeds out the only thing in the world that had been hers alone, and she pleads sickness and keeps to her chamber for the week. Her sister comes to sit with her, and Cat’s hand is gentle on her hair as she brushes it off her fevered brow with a soothing touch.
“Father said you were unwell,” Cat says, her voice so sweet, and Lysa is struck with an almost painful desire to press her face to her sister’s skirts and weep herself dry. Do you know what he did to me? she wants to ask. Do you know what he took from me, Cat?
“An ache in my belly only,” she responds dully. It is not the first secret she keeps from her sister, and she knows that Catelyn would never understand, could never understand what she shares with Petyr and all that she has lost. But she curls her fingers in her sister’s skirts regardless, lifting her head to rest it upon Cat’s knee, the way she did when she was a mere child and Cat would braid her hair. “Don’t leave,” she pleads quietly, and she lets Catelyn’s fingers against her forehead lull her to sleep.
Maybe, she thinks (she hopes), when she wakes it will all be nothing more than a vivid nightmare.
Anger.
She knows it is not fair or right to despise Jon Arryn for his sour breath and withered hands and suspicious eyes (she is sullied, after all, a tainted bride fallen victim to wild lusts, and oh, she will remember her nights with Petyr as romantic as all that). He is a good man, an honorable man, her father had told her, clasping her hands as though to convince her, as though she ever had a choice. He will keep you safe and you will have sons, trueborn.
Her new husband is not unkind to her, and he comes to her bed to do his duty, and her house words say that this should be enough for her. But she remembers dancing and drinking more wine than she should and falling breathless and laughing with a boy she loved into a soft, warm bed; and so she cannot help but hate Jon, for all that he is and all that he is not.
She cannot help but be glad when he rides off to war, and in her deepest of hearts, she prays that he will not return. She goes to the sept, and her intentions are always to pray to the Seven to take such wicked thoughts from her mind; instead, she finds herself clasping her hands and begging for swift redemption from the fate to which she has been cast.
But Lysa knows enough to hate her father, too, for what he denied her and for the lies he told her. And she is lost enough to hate her sister, too, when Catelyn sits by the window overlooking the rivers and hums a song to the child growing in her. Of course Catelyn, she cannot help thinking, is allowed to keep her babe.
Catelyn proudly lets out the lacings of her gown, her belly swelling far beyond the meager amount Lysa’s was allowed to grow. She rests her hand upon it, she talks to the baby inside her, and she glows like the Mother herself. And Lysa knows that Cat does not know what she has suffered, but she cannot help hating Cat for what she will have, what was stolen from Lysa.
She almost hates the child, too, when he comes, when Catelyn beams and cradles him in her arms. His birth is a thing to be celebrated, not shamed and hidden and destroyed; the little heir of Winterfell is pampered and adored by everyone, but by his mother most of all. And when Lysa looks in on the babe, she almost hates him, almost thinks that he stole the life from her child. She wonders why he should be allowed to live and her boy had to die, and she gnashes her teeth at the terrible unfairness of it all.
(These thoughts, at least, she truly begs the Seven for forgiveness for.)
By the time the war is over, and her husband returns home (how glad she is, she must be, she tells herself), Lysa scarcely recognizes the woman in the mirror. Her eyes are granite, her mouth is steel, and she scarcely remembers the girl who drank and laughed and danced with a boy that she loved. Surely, she decides, that must have been someone else, and not myself.
Surely, she wonders, she was never that happy.
Bargaining.
There is a small joy to be found, however hollow it echoes in her chest at times, in being such a great lady at court. She has always been the last of her siblings - her sister equal parts brave and dutiful, the pride of their father’s eye, her brother gregarious and beloved for his gender, for being the long-awaited boy heir, and Lysa has always been the stranger in the shadows until she is the blight upon her house’s honor. But Catelyn and Edmure are far from here; here she is a lady honored only behind the queen and infant princess, here she is the only child of Lord Hoster Tully who matters. There is a joy to that, to being important, to being important at last.
Here there is always a courtier eager to whisper a bit of flattery in her ear, if it please the kind lady, they say, to just speak a word to her lord husband, the Hand of the King. She does not correct their assumption that she holds any sway over Lord Jon Arryn, does not mention the silent dinners and cold beddings grown more and more infrequent as more babes are born dead, and hope fades for both of them. It is a thing as close to power as she shall likely ever taste and she drinks it eagerly, fleeting thing that it is.
But she would forsake it in a moment, she swears as she kneels before the Mother in the sept until her knees are bruised and aching, if the gods would but grant her a child, a living child.
You will have sons, her father’s voice echoes in her ear along with her screams as she sweats and cries and bleeds to bring forth another babe, another child born blue and dead. Her fingers tremble, and her maids clasp her hands and murmur sweet words of false comfort, but their eyes are accusing, bewildered. What is wrong with you? they seem to ask, what is wrong with you that you cannot bear a child?
The failure tastes like pennyroyal and ashes in her mouth, and desperately she gasps for air. She sees the flicker of resigned disappointment in Jon’s eyes, and she bites back the words she longs to scream, this is your fault, you will never give me a child. Until one day she does not bite them back, and she screeches until her voice goes hoarse, until she is weeping, and he turns sharply on his heel and leaves her to her agony.
She almost does not recognize the sound when she goes to the birthing room again and this time, for the first time, she hears a child’s cry join hers - small, fragile as a baby bird, but alive and her own.
He is small and as much grey as he is pink, and the midwives tell her that he will not live (just as none of the others live). But when she puts him to her breast, he suckles, and she feels him feed to the beat of her heart.
He will live, she tells everyone and no one at all, holding her son (her son) close to her, cocooning him in her warmth. She will do and give anything to make sure that he lives, this child so hard won.
They never stop telling her that her baby will die, that he is weak and sick, and she never stops holding him close to make sure that he lives. And he grows, and so beautifully, and when Petyr comes to court, she almost thinks that maybe she can be happy again. And there are days when Petyr dines with her and her baby (and the Hand of the King), and she can almost pretend that her sweet babe is the one that they lost. She closes her eyes part way, and it is practically as though the three of them are the only ones in the world (it is always almost, practically, nearly).
It is not enough, it is not true happiness or togetherness, but it is more than she had dared to dream of ever having again.
Depression.
The suitors begin to fade away when it becomes clear that the Lady of the Eyrie has no true intention to wed any one of them (that she waits for someone else, as she always has). She locks herself away in a castle in the sky, like a princess from a song, and she waits for a knight to come rescue her.
Far below her pretty palace in the clouds, the world burns.
We do not need anyone, she says, to her loyal retainers, to her baby, to herself, and she almost starts to believe. She tells herself that the loneliness doesn’t press down like a glove over her nose and mouth, choking her in her sleep; she tells herself that she does not talk to herself merely to hear the sound of conversation. When she laughs, she tells herself it is with purpose, even more so when she weeps.
More than anything, she repeats like a mantra, I am not mad; we do not need anyone and I am fine.
She had not liked the Eyrie, early in her marriage, so isolated and claustrophobic, with only the voices in your mind for company. She had leapt at the opportunity to go to court, even if it meant she must be with her lord husband. And even now, she feels the walls closing in on her, and her little one; and she tries to hold them up with her bare palms because she swore, she promised that she would give anything for a living child. And for her child, her boy, she will do anything - they tell her still that he is sick and weak (and spoilt, now, they add), but she knows that he only needs his mother’s touch to be well and healthy and alive. He will live and thrive because she will care for him, and together, they will survive.
They are fine because they are safe, locked away from the world that offers such misery. She clutches her boy to her chest, to her breast - here is safest of all, my little one.
Here it is easy enough to pretend that her family has not been broken down and destroyed - it is easy to pretend that she has no family outside of her dear little Sweetrobin. When Catelyn’s letters arrive, pleading her to come with all haste to see their father, before it is too late, they go one after another into the fire. I have nothing to say to him, she thinks, and he shall not have my forgiveness just because he is near to death.
She hopes that the first face her father sees, when he passes, is her child that he murdered, his own grandchild that he made her bleed away. When the letter arrives announcing that he is gone, she burns it, as she did the rest and tells herself that she feels nothing at all. (And she is getting so good at telling herself these things, that she almost believes.)
It is harder when the news comes of Catelyn’s death, to even tell herself the lies that keep her company. She has spent her entire life defining herself by her elder sister, kept count of all the ways in which she never measured up. Without the suffocating shadow that Cat cast, even far in the North, Lysa is left grasping for who she must be now that she is the only Tully girl left in the world.
She sees her sister behind her eyelids when she tries to sleep at night, bright and fair in Riverrun, always three steps ahead with laughter drifting back to Lysa as she falls behind. When Lysa wakes in the morn, it is to dampness on her cheeks and a heaviness in her heart, and she tells herself that it does not matter, that her family is dead. She reminds herself that she has no family save her baby - he is all that she needs in the world, and she is all that he needs. Catelyn is dead, her father is dead, but Lysa and her Sweetrobin will survive; she will make sure of it. She wipes her face and pushes the spectres that haunt her away; I do not miss you, she tells them, tells herself until she believes it.
(And really, it is easy enough for her to bring to mind the northern lady in grey who had confronted her and threatened to take her baby away, to tell herself that she is the one who is dead. She had not been the sister who had woven flowers in Lysa’s hair, who had spun stories and run barefoot in the godswood; she was Lady Stark, and Lysa does not mourn her.)
And terribly, so horribly that she manages to push the thought away most days, there is a small part of her that is thrilled to know that he must let her go now. Even when he laid with Lysa, even when he whispered promises in her ear, Cat was always the shade in the room, the shadow in the bed with them. And now she is no more, and Petyr will open his eyes and see that it has always been Lysa who was steadfast, Lysa who loved him most of all, and he will forget that there ever was an elder Tully sister. He will forget Cat, and for that, she is thrilled.
And when the letter comes from King’s Landing, with a mockingbird seal, she knows that she is right. That the girl who had haunted them is gone, and now he is coming for her; her knight is coming at last, at long last.
Acceptance.
She knows a moment before it happens, when Petyr places his hand firmly on her chest, above the swell of her breasts - that she is going to die.
Perhaps she knew it before that.
Perhaps she knew it when Cat’s beautiful child, poor motherless girl, stood before her in her bedroom. You look so much like Catelyn, Lysa had said, and the girl had answered it’s kind of you to say so, as though it were a thing to be praised, Cat’s hair and eyes and the high curve of her cheek taunting her from beyond the grave, the ghost in her new marriage as she had been the ghost shadowing Lysa always. When Petyr kissed her in her Riverrun bedroom, when she brought forth dead child after dead child, when she slipped those tears in Jon Arryn’s cup and when Petyr pressed the quill in her hand, write to her, and now, even now, it has always been Catelyn; always Cat, only Cat, beautiful, brave, beloved.
Or perhaps it comes when she sees them through the window, the girl (always Catelyn, no, no she reminds herself, Catelyn is dead and Petyr is here, he is here with her and he loves her) kissing her husband, seducing him, luring him, harlot, she seethes, she decides, wanton as her mother, and she realizes that already her precarious hard-won happiness is melting away, that there is a tapestry being woven and she is not a part of it.
She will not allow it, will not allow her sister (no, not her sister, or is it, she cannot seem to remember as the shadows shift and faces change) to steal her happiness, not now when it is finally within grasp, when he is finally within grasp. Cat had her chance, had her joy, had a husband who loved her, had child after child, boys and girls and breathing living creatures who grew and laughed and lived until they did not live anymore, they are dead, all of them; Catelyn, her husband, her children, all of them, except this one, come to ruin her happiness, to take it. I will not let her.
Petyr holds her, and the child trembles (the child, she is still a child really, she was to marry Lysa’s own Sweetrobin, she would have given her the world, her most precious gift, her son, she always wanted a daughter but this one is faithless…) and Lysa weeps against him.
Only Cat, he tells her, and yes, she thinks, it has, hasn’t it, it has always been Cat. In her bedroom at Riverrun with her maiden’s blood on her thigh, in all those years she waited for him, as he stood on her shoulder’s, on Jon’s shoulders (she had told him that her child’s father deserved a sweeter smoother death but she had done as he had asked, she always does as he asks), to climb to the council. In his letters to her, in their marriage, it has always, always been Catelyn, and her lip curls.
She meets his eyes in that brief moment when he rests his hand on her, and she knows she is going to die, that she is a piece and no player, matter how badly she tries to stop playing the game, that she has fulfilled her purpose (and that all she has ever been to him, is a means to a purpose). She thinks she has swallowed the Tears of Lys herself for how badly her heart burns.
Oh, for all that, she thinks, for all I’ve done, it’s always been Catelyn, only Cat.
It should not matter, she is going to die, he is going to kill her so he can have this slender child with Catelyn’s face (she is not the only one who travels in circles, and there is some small comfort to that). She will be gone, and her Sweetrobin will have no mother; her baby will be alone in this terrible world where everyone leaves you, I am so sorry, my sweet one.
She never loved you, not as I do, and this one will not either, she almost says, she almost forms the words; she thinks that if she says them perhaps the pain that slices through her like a dagger (is this how it was for you, Cat, when they cut you down?) will abate, perhaps she will even live.
But she does not say them, she looks at him and his eyes are cold, and she thinks oh Petyr, how much easier life would have been if you had only loved me back.
He pushes, and she falls.
Denial.
Oddly, she is not afraid.
I am not falling, she says to herself and she closes her eyes. All will be well.
Title: A Circle in a Spiral
Author: juno_chan
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Lysa/Petyr, Lysa/Jon Arryn
Word Count: 3730
Summary: An examination of Lysa Tully within the constructs of the five stages of grief/loss.
Warnings: Canonical character death.
Author’s Note: embossedsilver, I hope you don’t mind that this is a very Lysa-heavy round of exchanges for you, after you received such a wonderful Lysa fic for the got_exchange! Lysa is one of my favorite characters to write, so I immediately knew I would be writing about her! I hope you enjoy. Many, many thanks to A for her beta-ing skills.
Denial.
She thinks that this babe will be her salvation.
There is fear, of course, as she misses first one moon’s blood and then another (oh gods oh gods what will Father say…). She takes to holding her breath, around her father, around her uncle, around Cat and their septa, certain that even with her belly still flat and smooth they will see, they will know. She can, with the tenderness in her breasts and the nausea that strikes her like a fist to the gut and sends a thousand fish swimming through her veins, so how can they not know, simply by looking at her, that she is changed forevermore?
But they do not see and slowly she breathes; slowly she thinks that for now, it may be her secret, be their secret. She breathes and rests a hand to her stomach over her thin shift as she lie in bed at night and imagines the tiny life growing inside her, her heart fluttering with giddy thoughts of the future.
He will love me now, she thinks and she strokes the tiny bump that is still unnoticeable under the thick fabric of her gowns. She would tell her father, and he would see that he must let them wed, and she would give Petyr a son and he would love her - she who had always been so steadfast, had given him her maiden’s gift, his closest friend and confidante.
Now, she thinks, she hopes, things will be right.
The disasters run hand in hand: Petyr challenges Brandon Stark to a duel, for Catelyn (he does not know, she tells herself, and she bites her cheek hard against the pain. She has not yet told him about their babe and so he is not to blame; it will be different when he knows). And when he is defeated and broken and her father is black with rage, she knows it can be a secret no longer, knows that now is the moment she must be brave though it comes not naturally to her at all; she rushes to Lord Tully, desperate, to beg, please, please do not send him away, he is the father of the child growing inside me.
Her father strikes her across the face.
She holds her cheek and stares, and she isn’t sure if she or her father is more surprised is; he has never hit her before - and she cannot even cry, she will not cry, she is a Tully, and she will be strong even though she wants to run and hide (that is what silly children do, she tells herself sternly, she is no child, she will be a mother).
Her father’s jaw trembles, and she does not know whether from rage or sorrow. “Oh, Lysa,” he says, and his voice is raw and raspy as he rubs his face wearily. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
(What she does is drink the tea, as she had every other day in her life. Gods save me, she would think years later in her prayers, forgive me, I did not know.)
Her belly cramps as she bleeds out the only thing in the world that had been hers alone, and she pleads sickness and keeps to her chamber for the week. Her sister comes to sit with her, and Cat’s hand is gentle on her hair as she brushes it off her fevered brow with a soothing touch.
“Father said you were unwell,” Cat says, her voice so sweet, and Lysa is struck with an almost painful desire to press her face to her sister’s skirts and weep herself dry. Do you know what he did to me? she wants to ask. Do you know what he took from me, Cat?
“An ache in my belly only,” she responds dully. It is not the first secret she keeps from her sister, and she knows that Catelyn would never understand, could never understand what she shares with Petyr and all that she has lost. But she curls her fingers in her sister’s skirts regardless, lifting her head to rest it upon Cat’s knee, the way she did when she was a mere child and Cat would braid her hair. “Don’t leave,” she pleads quietly, and she lets Catelyn’s fingers against her forehead lull her to sleep.
Maybe, she thinks (she hopes), when she wakes it will all be nothing more than a vivid nightmare.
Anger.
She knows it is not fair or right to despise Jon Arryn for his sour breath and withered hands and suspicious eyes (she is sullied, after all, a tainted bride fallen victim to wild lusts, and oh, she will remember her nights with Petyr as romantic as all that). He is a good man, an honorable man, her father had told her, clasping her hands as though to convince her, as though she ever had a choice. He will keep you safe and you will have sons, trueborn.
Her new husband is not unkind to her, and he comes to her bed to do his duty, and her house words say that this should be enough for her. But she remembers dancing and drinking more wine than she should and falling breathless and laughing with a boy she loved into a soft, warm bed; and so she cannot help but hate Jon, for all that he is and all that he is not.
She cannot help but be glad when he rides off to war, and in her deepest of hearts, she prays that he will not return. She goes to the sept, and her intentions are always to pray to the Seven to take such wicked thoughts from her mind; instead, she finds herself clasping her hands and begging for swift redemption from the fate to which she has been cast.
But Lysa knows enough to hate her father, too, for what he denied her and for the lies he told her. And she is lost enough to hate her sister, too, when Catelyn sits by the window overlooking the rivers and hums a song to the child growing in her. Of course Catelyn, she cannot help thinking, is allowed to keep her babe.
Catelyn proudly lets out the lacings of her gown, her belly swelling far beyond the meager amount Lysa’s was allowed to grow. She rests her hand upon it, she talks to the baby inside her, and she glows like the Mother herself. And Lysa knows that Cat does not know what she has suffered, but she cannot help hating Cat for what she will have, what was stolen from Lysa.
She almost hates the child, too, when he comes, when Catelyn beams and cradles him in her arms. His birth is a thing to be celebrated, not shamed and hidden and destroyed; the little heir of Winterfell is pampered and adored by everyone, but by his mother most of all. And when Lysa looks in on the babe, she almost hates him, almost thinks that he stole the life from her child. She wonders why he should be allowed to live and her boy had to die, and she gnashes her teeth at the terrible unfairness of it all.
(These thoughts, at least, she truly begs the Seven for forgiveness for.)
By the time the war is over, and her husband returns home (how glad she is, she must be, she tells herself), Lysa scarcely recognizes the woman in the mirror. Her eyes are granite, her mouth is steel, and she scarcely remembers the girl who drank and laughed and danced with a boy that she loved. Surely, she decides, that must have been someone else, and not myself.
Surely, she wonders, she was never that happy.
Bargaining.
There is a small joy to be found, however hollow it echoes in her chest at times, in being such a great lady at court. She has always been the last of her siblings - her sister equal parts brave and dutiful, the pride of their father’s eye, her brother gregarious and beloved for his gender, for being the long-awaited boy heir, and Lysa has always been the stranger in the shadows until she is the blight upon her house’s honor. But Catelyn and Edmure are far from here; here she is a lady honored only behind the queen and infant princess, here she is the only child of Lord Hoster Tully who matters. There is a joy to that, to being important, to being important at last.
Here there is always a courtier eager to whisper a bit of flattery in her ear, if it please the kind lady, they say, to just speak a word to her lord husband, the Hand of the King. She does not correct their assumption that she holds any sway over Lord Jon Arryn, does not mention the silent dinners and cold beddings grown more and more infrequent as more babes are born dead, and hope fades for both of them. It is a thing as close to power as she shall likely ever taste and she drinks it eagerly, fleeting thing that it is.
But she would forsake it in a moment, she swears as she kneels before the Mother in the sept until her knees are bruised and aching, if the gods would but grant her a child, a living child.
You will have sons, her father’s voice echoes in her ear along with her screams as she sweats and cries and bleeds to bring forth another babe, another child born blue and dead. Her fingers tremble, and her maids clasp her hands and murmur sweet words of false comfort, but their eyes are accusing, bewildered. What is wrong with you? they seem to ask, what is wrong with you that you cannot bear a child?
The failure tastes like pennyroyal and ashes in her mouth, and desperately she gasps for air. She sees the flicker of resigned disappointment in Jon’s eyes, and she bites back the words she longs to scream, this is your fault, you will never give me a child. Until one day she does not bite them back, and she screeches until her voice goes hoarse, until she is weeping, and he turns sharply on his heel and leaves her to her agony.
She almost does not recognize the sound when she goes to the birthing room again and this time, for the first time, she hears a child’s cry join hers - small, fragile as a baby bird, but alive and her own.
He is small and as much grey as he is pink, and the midwives tell her that he will not live (just as none of the others live). But when she puts him to her breast, he suckles, and she feels him feed to the beat of her heart.
He will live, she tells everyone and no one at all, holding her son (her son) close to her, cocooning him in her warmth. She will do and give anything to make sure that he lives, this child so hard won.
They never stop telling her that her baby will die, that he is weak and sick, and she never stops holding him close to make sure that he lives. And he grows, and so beautifully, and when Petyr comes to court, she almost thinks that maybe she can be happy again. And there are days when Petyr dines with her and her baby (and the Hand of the King), and she can almost pretend that her sweet babe is the one that they lost. She closes her eyes part way, and it is practically as though the three of them are the only ones in the world (it is always almost, practically, nearly).
It is not enough, it is not true happiness or togetherness, but it is more than she had dared to dream of ever having again.
Depression.
The suitors begin to fade away when it becomes clear that the Lady of the Eyrie has no true intention to wed any one of them (that she waits for someone else, as she always has). She locks herself away in a castle in the sky, like a princess from a song, and she waits for a knight to come rescue her.
Far below her pretty palace in the clouds, the world burns.
We do not need anyone, she says, to her loyal retainers, to her baby, to herself, and she almost starts to believe. She tells herself that the loneliness doesn’t press down like a glove over her nose and mouth, choking her in her sleep; she tells herself that she does not talk to herself merely to hear the sound of conversation. When she laughs, she tells herself it is with purpose, even more so when she weeps.
More than anything, she repeats like a mantra, I am not mad; we do not need anyone and I am fine.
She had not liked the Eyrie, early in her marriage, so isolated and claustrophobic, with only the voices in your mind for company. She had leapt at the opportunity to go to court, even if it meant she must be with her lord husband. And even now, she feels the walls closing in on her, and her little one; and she tries to hold them up with her bare palms because she swore, she promised that she would give anything for a living child. And for her child, her boy, she will do anything - they tell her still that he is sick and weak (and spoilt, now, they add), but she knows that he only needs his mother’s touch to be well and healthy and alive. He will live and thrive because she will care for him, and together, they will survive.
They are fine because they are safe, locked away from the world that offers such misery. She clutches her boy to her chest, to her breast - here is safest of all, my little one.
Here it is easy enough to pretend that her family has not been broken down and destroyed - it is easy to pretend that she has no family outside of her dear little Sweetrobin. When Catelyn’s letters arrive, pleading her to come with all haste to see their father, before it is too late, they go one after another into the fire. I have nothing to say to him, she thinks, and he shall not have my forgiveness just because he is near to death.
She hopes that the first face her father sees, when he passes, is her child that he murdered, his own grandchild that he made her bleed away. When the letter arrives announcing that he is gone, she burns it, as she did the rest and tells herself that she feels nothing at all. (And she is getting so good at telling herself these things, that she almost believes.)
It is harder when the news comes of Catelyn’s death, to even tell herself the lies that keep her company. She has spent her entire life defining herself by her elder sister, kept count of all the ways in which she never measured up. Without the suffocating shadow that Cat cast, even far in the North, Lysa is left grasping for who she must be now that she is the only Tully girl left in the world.
She sees her sister behind her eyelids when she tries to sleep at night, bright and fair in Riverrun, always three steps ahead with laughter drifting back to Lysa as she falls behind. When Lysa wakes in the morn, it is to dampness on her cheeks and a heaviness in her heart, and she tells herself that it does not matter, that her family is dead. She reminds herself that she has no family save her baby - he is all that she needs in the world, and she is all that he needs. Catelyn is dead, her father is dead, but Lysa and her Sweetrobin will survive; she will make sure of it. She wipes her face and pushes the spectres that haunt her away; I do not miss you, she tells them, tells herself until she believes it.
(And really, it is easy enough for her to bring to mind the northern lady in grey who had confronted her and threatened to take her baby away, to tell herself that she is the one who is dead. She had not been the sister who had woven flowers in Lysa’s hair, who had spun stories and run barefoot in the godswood; she was Lady Stark, and Lysa does not mourn her.)
And terribly, so horribly that she manages to push the thought away most days, there is a small part of her that is thrilled to know that he must let her go now. Even when he laid with Lysa, even when he whispered promises in her ear, Cat was always the shade in the room, the shadow in the bed with them. And now she is no more, and Petyr will open his eyes and see that it has always been Lysa who was steadfast, Lysa who loved him most of all, and he will forget that there ever was an elder Tully sister. He will forget Cat, and for that, she is thrilled.
And when the letter comes from King’s Landing, with a mockingbird seal, she knows that she is right. That the girl who had haunted them is gone, and now he is coming for her; her knight is coming at last, at long last.
Acceptance.
She knows a moment before it happens, when Petyr places his hand firmly on her chest, above the swell of her breasts - that she is going to die.
Perhaps she knew it before that.
Perhaps she knew it when Cat’s beautiful child, poor motherless girl, stood before her in her bedroom. You look so much like Catelyn, Lysa had said, and the girl had answered it’s kind of you to say so, as though it were a thing to be praised, Cat’s hair and eyes and the high curve of her cheek taunting her from beyond the grave, the ghost in her new marriage as she had been the ghost shadowing Lysa always. When Petyr kissed her in her Riverrun bedroom, when she brought forth dead child after dead child, when she slipped those tears in Jon Arryn’s cup and when Petyr pressed the quill in her hand, write to her, and now, even now, it has always been Catelyn; always Cat, only Cat, beautiful, brave, beloved.
Or perhaps it comes when she sees them through the window, the girl (always Catelyn, no, no she reminds herself, Catelyn is dead and Petyr is here, he is here with her and he loves her) kissing her husband, seducing him, luring him, harlot, she seethes, she decides, wanton as her mother, and she realizes that already her precarious hard-won happiness is melting away, that there is a tapestry being woven and she is not a part of it.
She will not allow it, will not allow her sister (no, not her sister, or is it, she cannot seem to remember as the shadows shift and faces change) to steal her happiness, not now when it is finally within grasp, when he is finally within grasp. Cat had her chance, had her joy, had a husband who loved her, had child after child, boys and girls and breathing living creatures who grew and laughed and lived until they did not live anymore, they are dead, all of them; Catelyn, her husband, her children, all of them, except this one, come to ruin her happiness, to take it. I will not let her.
Petyr holds her, and the child trembles (the child, she is still a child really, she was to marry Lysa’s own Sweetrobin, she would have given her the world, her most precious gift, her son, she always wanted a daughter but this one is faithless…) and Lysa weeps against him.
Only Cat, he tells her, and yes, she thinks, it has, hasn’t it, it has always been Cat. In her bedroom at Riverrun with her maiden’s blood on her thigh, in all those years she waited for him, as he stood on her shoulder’s, on Jon’s shoulders (she had told him that her child’s father deserved a sweeter smoother death but she had done as he had asked, she always does as he asks), to climb to the council. In his letters to her, in their marriage, it has always, always been Catelyn, and her lip curls.
She meets his eyes in that brief moment when he rests his hand on her, and she knows she is going to die, that she is a piece and no player, matter how badly she tries to stop playing the game, that she has fulfilled her purpose (and that all she has ever been to him, is a means to a purpose). She thinks she has swallowed the Tears of Lys herself for how badly her heart burns.
Oh, for all that, she thinks, for all I’ve done, it’s always been Catelyn, only Cat.
It should not matter, she is going to die, he is going to kill her so he can have this slender child with Catelyn’s face (she is not the only one who travels in circles, and there is some small comfort to that). She will be gone, and her Sweetrobin will have no mother; her baby will be alone in this terrible world where everyone leaves you, I am so sorry, my sweet one.
She never loved you, not as I do, and this one will not either, she almost says, she almost forms the words; she thinks that if she says them perhaps the pain that slices through her like a dagger (is this how it was for you, Cat, when they cut you down?) will abate, perhaps she will even live.
But she does not say them, she looks at him and his eyes are cold, and she thinks oh Petyr, how much easier life would have been if you had only loved me back.
He pushes, and she falls.
Denial.
Oddly, she is not afraid.
I am not falling, she says to herself and she closes her eyes. All will be well.