fic: the death of lovers.
the death of lovers
a song of ice and fire. cersei; cersei/jaime. r. 1800 words. their sighs are as matched as their bodies; it is difficult to tell where one of them will end and the other begin. notes; spoilers for the series.
Vying to exhaust their last fires
our hearts will be two vast flares,
reflecting their double glares
in our two spirits, twin mirrors.
[THE DEATH OF LOVERS, charles baudelaire]
Jaime comes back to the city sometime after the coronation. He burns his path through King’s Landing from the shore to the gates, the crowd thronging around him and the rest of the guard, appreciative and fearful in equal measure. There are no shouts for Lannister. Friends and enemies alike call for the “kingslayer” and she watches his face hold up a smile, tight around the corners of his mouth, his lack of comfort discernible (to her) even at this distance, even before he has reached and dismounted his horse at her feet.
There is a chorus of collected sighs from the women behind her, whispers mixed with muted laughter as he kneels, the sun turning his golden head to fire.
When he stands, she greets him with a brush of her mouth by his cheek; his own lips stretch till their corners touch and when she draws back, she finds him grinning.
“And is my queen happy?” he asks, standing in the entrance to her rooms with his arms crossed behind his back, a vague mockery of formality.
“That depends on your definition of happiness,” she responds, letting the words curl out in a low hiss, she is lying across her bed, naked in her furs and her husband is to the hunt, it is afternoon and the sun in the sheets with her. The room is large like a cave and the hangings seem to turn bloody in the corner of his eyes, blank red paling out like a canvas behind her.
“You look very -- how should I put this -- satisfied.”
“Like a queen ought to be.”
“Like a bride ought to be,” he amends, “Content and satisfied with her husband. Are you satisfied with your husband?”
“Is there something that you’re looking for me to say, Jaime?”
“I have no idea what you mean,” he grins, stepping around the bed, the windows pulling light out from around him and she is in the dark now, she is only skin and gold and there is something in the way Cersei looks at him that feels both familiar and strange, as if she has not looked at him this way for a long time.
He runs a hand over the dress laid out on her trunk, “did he tear it off you?”
“I don’t want to talk about that, Jaime.”
Her voice pulls out as if rising beneath lungs, small and almost plaintive -- not really, of course but more vulnerable than she would generally allow herself to be, even around him and he looks up, sharp and asks “did he hurt you?” and he pushes the furs away from her skin, the heavy dark pelt falling back to warm, pale skin and his eyes begin to scan for bruises.
She reaches up for him, curls a hand around his neck.
“Jaime,” she says, turning fingers through his hair and tugging, “Jaime.” And she swoops up, opens her mouth against his own, the taste of spices and the south on her tongue, syrupy and warm and she tastes like a different woman, a stranger but her hands, insistent dragging him down to the bed and his inspection, the inventory he meant to take of her long pale limbs is forgotten and they both move to undress him, snapping off buttons and undoing clasps.
“So -- “ he pulls his mouth of hers, turns his palms up against her face, feeling the heat spread over her skin, the flush colouring her cheeks, “So, I can take this to mean you have missed me, sister?” he asks, one hand slipping down between her legs, fingers roaming flesh. He waits for the gasp, the catalogue of sounds that his sister makes when he is inside her is based on a rising scale and his hands go fast around her hips, turning their bodies so that she is above him.
It has been too long, he thinks, since they were last together. It has been too long.
“Jaime,” she cries, her body coming undone in his hands.
(Cersei’s palms braced on his bare chest, her mouth pressing down over his and what he takes for insistence is the need to forget, the memories of a stranger’s body swaying over her own, of another woman’s name on her husband’s lips and Jaime is the force that makes the rest of the world drop dead.)
Their sighs are as matched as their bodies. It is difficult to tell where one of them will end and the other begin.
Robert says only peasants have their fortunes told. They turn them away from the castle gates as they would beggars.
“Damned charlatans,” he grumbles, wiping wine from his beard.
It is the first; the only thing that she and her husband agree on.
These encounters, the heated brief spells of their bodies that are quartered into the early days of her marriage seem to mark the passage of the time, the growth between childish fumbles in the grass of Caterly Rock, where the wide, warm fields were safe from discovery, where they knew every hidden chamber, recognized every footfall, where the only danger was separation.
At court, there are eyes everywhere. She feels them crawling over her like spiders, turning webs around her skin, her neck, choking her.
Everything is a gamble in this city and everything moves faster now, without the langour of their youth and the battles, small skirmishes gather around them, accumulating. Jaime is away, when she is first with child and there is a kind of gratitude mixed in with the longing, her body grows wide and her skirts are let out around her waist. There is not much to do but sit and wait and this is a woman’s lot, she supposes, a wife’s lot, a mother’s (a sister’s) and there are letters sent, secret ones, warning him to return before the birth.
Of course, he will come and Robert with hunt and Cersei will press her teeth together, her nails into Jaime’s hand as it goes and their son will be golden and born but there is the time between then and now that eats away at her. Everyone has secrets in this court and the queen is no different, the queen is a woman and she is jealous in a way that no one expects of her. Her jealousy is not like her brother’s or her husband’s, the quick, flushed anger when they are suspicious, when another man pays court to her.
Cersei's jealousy is a cold, cruel thing, wrapped around her lungs like a vice, her jealousy is bred of fear in all the times that he is away that he will give up, that there will be a woman, simple, an uncomplicated woman with a warm body, who is not married, who is not his sister, who lives in places where secrets are only gossip and not daggers.
They meet in cold corners of the old castle after every return and as she is undressing him, his mouth burning the bone of her clavicle, she asks, often, “Have you missed me?” It always ends on the same sharp his but there is something almost plaintive about the way the words fall, the jagged breathing as his hands tug her legs up around his waist and she tries to cover the space between her question and his response with heated kisses, her mouth curving around his chin, burying her skin into his and it is an effort to remember herself in these moments with him, her new position, her role as mother or queen or wife, all the different masks, the various masks of court stripping away layer by layer and all that is left is Jaime.
With him, she is only herself; with him, they are only extensions of each other.
She sits with her brother in the throne room. Not Jaime; Tyrion, she sits with him after Jaime’s capture and she supposes she has not succeeded in hiding her grief (she will mourn her brother’s capture more earnestly than her husband’s death) but there is also fear for she could never trust anyone who wasn’t him, who wasn’t Jaime (and Jaime was only an extension of herself).
“You do look lonely, dear sis,” notes Tyrion, turning papers over in his hands, “I was telling Viserys how I worry for your health.”
“And what would you know about loneliness?” she drawls, “A man has to know companionship before he knows what it is to go without it.”
“So, it is your husband you miss?” he tackles, slyly, looking up at her beneath his eyelashes and her mouth curls into a frown.
“What else could I mean,” she answers and the room falls silent and Tyrion rolls back in his chair, with his wine and his knowing and she thinks if she did not hate him already, she would now.
There was the briefest moment, she supposes, for which she thought that perhaps they, the two of them could have forged an alliance, that their could be a compromise of sorts -- they are Regent and Hand after, all. Perhaps her brother (Tyrion is always the other) perhaps Jaime would have liked it better that way. He was always fond of Tyrion; she remembers him daring her, when they were children, the garden of Casterly Rock, he dared her to kiss him. She had needed to bend even then, her lovely long neck swooping down, mouth making brief quick contact with the broken cut of his cheek. She half expects him to swing through the doors, “look at my family getting along” and the golden grin, and him sliding in to the seat beside her, his fingers warm in her lap. She waits, breathes but he is not coming.
Her brother would have preferred it that way but it comes to nothing.
Even in these dark times, the prophecy always nags.
In her dreams, they stand together at the end of it all, over the burning bodies in King’s Landing, the two of them standing tall over the wreck of it, the thousand mad kings in their crowns, the soldiers, lovers and all the other bodies turning to dust there and all of Westeros and it’s seas left to their own command.
Or perhaps, they would die together with their bones tangled together and they would be buried in one grave (one soul) and after a time, their flesh would melt away leaving only their bright hair, twisted like hands around their bared throats.
It makes little matter which of the two will be true. They would have to leave the world as they entered it.
There is no space in either of their hearts for one of them to survive the other.
a song of ice and fire. cersei; cersei/jaime. r. 1800 words. their sighs are as matched as their bodies; it is difficult to tell where one of them will end and the other begin. notes; spoilers for the series.
Vying to exhaust their last fires
our hearts will be two vast flares,
reflecting their double glares
in our two spirits, twin mirrors.
[THE DEATH OF LOVERS, charles baudelaire]
Jaime comes back to the city sometime after the coronation. He burns his path through King’s Landing from the shore to the gates, the crowd thronging around him and the rest of the guard, appreciative and fearful in equal measure. There are no shouts for Lannister. Friends and enemies alike call for the “kingslayer” and she watches his face hold up a smile, tight around the corners of his mouth, his lack of comfort discernible (to her) even at this distance, even before he has reached and dismounted his horse at her feet.
There is a chorus of collected sighs from the women behind her, whispers mixed with muted laughter as he kneels, the sun turning his golden head to fire.
When he stands, she greets him with a brush of her mouth by his cheek; his own lips stretch till their corners touch and when she draws back, she finds him grinning.
“And is my queen happy?” he asks, standing in the entrance to her rooms with his arms crossed behind his back, a vague mockery of formality.
“That depends on your definition of happiness,” she responds, letting the words curl out in a low hiss, she is lying across her bed, naked in her furs and her husband is to the hunt, it is afternoon and the sun in the sheets with her. The room is large like a cave and the hangings seem to turn bloody in the corner of his eyes, blank red paling out like a canvas behind her.
“You look very -- how should I put this -- satisfied.”
“Like a queen ought to be.”
“Like a bride ought to be,” he amends, “Content and satisfied with her husband. Are you satisfied with your husband?”
“Is there something that you’re looking for me to say, Jaime?”
“I have no idea what you mean,” he grins, stepping around the bed, the windows pulling light out from around him and she is in the dark now, she is only skin and gold and there is something in the way Cersei looks at him that feels both familiar and strange, as if she has not looked at him this way for a long time.
He runs a hand over the dress laid out on her trunk, “did he tear it off you?”
“I don’t want to talk about that, Jaime.”
Her voice pulls out as if rising beneath lungs, small and almost plaintive -- not really, of course but more vulnerable than she would generally allow herself to be, even around him and he looks up, sharp and asks “did he hurt you?” and he pushes the furs away from her skin, the heavy dark pelt falling back to warm, pale skin and his eyes begin to scan for bruises.
She reaches up for him, curls a hand around his neck.
“Jaime,” she says, turning fingers through his hair and tugging, “Jaime.” And she swoops up, opens her mouth against his own, the taste of spices and the south on her tongue, syrupy and warm and she tastes like a different woman, a stranger but her hands, insistent dragging him down to the bed and his inspection, the inventory he meant to take of her long pale limbs is forgotten and they both move to undress him, snapping off buttons and undoing clasps.
“So -- “ he pulls his mouth of hers, turns his palms up against her face, feeling the heat spread over her skin, the flush colouring her cheeks, “So, I can take this to mean you have missed me, sister?” he asks, one hand slipping down between her legs, fingers roaming flesh. He waits for the gasp, the catalogue of sounds that his sister makes when he is inside her is based on a rising scale and his hands go fast around her hips, turning their bodies so that she is above him.
It has been too long, he thinks, since they were last together. It has been too long.
“Jaime,” she cries, her body coming undone in his hands.
(Cersei’s palms braced on his bare chest, her mouth pressing down over his and what he takes for insistence is the need to forget, the memories of a stranger’s body swaying over her own, of another woman’s name on her husband’s lips and Jaime is the force that makes the rest of the world drop dead.)
Their sighs are as matched as their bodies. It is difficult to tell where one of them will end and the other begin.
Robert says only peasants have their fortunes told. They turn them away from the castle gates as they would beggars.
“Damned charlatans,” he grumbles, wiping wine from his beard.
It is the first; the only thing that she and her husband agree on.
These encounters, the heated brief spells of their bodies that are quartered into the early days of her marriage seem to mark the passage of the time, the growth between childish fumbles in the grass of Caterly Rock, where the wide, warm fields were safe from discovery, where they knew every hidden chamber, recognized every footfall, where the only danger was separation.
At court, there are eyes everywhere. She feels them crawling over her like spiders, turning webs around her skin, her neck, choking her.
Everything is a gamble in this city and everything moves faster now, without the langour of their youth and the battles, small skirmishes gather around them, accumulating. Jaime is away, when she is first with child and there is a kind of gratitude mixed in with the longing, her body grows wide and her skirts are let out around her waist. There is not much to do but sit and wait and this is a woman’s lot, she supposes, a wife’s lot, a mother’s (a sister’s) and there are letters sent, secret ones, warning him to return before the birth.
Of course, he will come and Robert with hunt and Cersei will press her teeth together, her nails into Jaime’s hand as it goes and their son will be golden and born but there is the time between then and now that eats away at her. Everyone has secrets in this court and the queen is no different, the queen is a woman and she is jealous in a way that no one expects of her. Her jealousy is not like her brother’s or her husband’s, the quick, flushed anger when they are suspicious, when another man pays court to her.
Cersei's jealousy is a cold, cruel thing, wrapped around her lungs like a vice, her jealousy is bred of fear in all the times that he is away that he will give up, that there will be a woman, simple, an uncomplicated woman with a warm body, who is not married, who is not his sister, who lives in places where secrets are only gossip and not daggers.
They meet in cold corners of the old castle after every return and as she is undressing him, his mouth burning the bone of her clavicle, she asks, often, “Have you missed me?” It always ends on the same sharp his but there is something almost plaintive about the way the words fall, the jagged breathing as his hands tug her legs up around his waist and she tries to cover the space between her question and his response with heated kisses, her mouth curving around his chin, burying her skin into his and it is an effort to remember herself in these moments with him, her new position, her role as mother or queen or wife, all the different masks, the various masks of court stripping away layer by layer and all that is left is Jaime.
With him, she is only herself; with him, they are only extensions of each other.
She sits with her brother in the throne room. Not Jaime; Tyrion, she sits with him after Jaime’s capture and she supposes she has not succeeded in hiding her grief (she will mourn her brother’s capture more earnestly than her husband’s death) but there is also fear for she could never trust anyone who wasn’t him, who wasn’t Jaime (and Jaime was only an extension of herself).
“You do look lonely, dear sis,” notes Tyrion, turning papers over in his hands, “I was telling Viserys how I worry for your health.”
“And what would you know about loneliness?” she drawls, “A man has to know companionship before he knows what it is to go without it.”
“So, it is your husband you miss?” he tackles, slyly, looking up at her beneath his eyelashes and her mouth curls into a frown.
“What else could I mean,” she answers and the room falls silent and Tyrion rolls back in his chair, with his wine and his knowing and she thinks if she did not hate him already, she would now.
There was the briefest moment, she supposes, for which she thought that perhaps they, the two of them could have forged an alliance, that their could be a compromise of sorts -- they are Regent and Hand after, all. Perhaps her brother (Tyrion is always the other) perhaps Jaime would have liked it better that way. He was always fond of Tyrion; she remembers him daring her, when they were children, the garden of Casterly Rock, he dared her to kiss him. She had needed to bend even then, her lovely long neck swooping down, mouth making brief quick contact with the broken cut of his cheek. She half expects him to swing through the doors, “look at my family getting along” and the golden grin, and him sliding in to the seat beside her, his fingers warm in her lap. She waits, breathes but he is not coming.
Her brother would have preferred it that way but it comes to nothing.
Even in these dark times, the prophecy always nags.
In her dreams, they stand together at the end of it all, over the burning bodies in King’s Landing, the two of them standing tall over the wreck of it, the thousand mad kings in their crowns, the soldiers, lovers and all the other bodies turning to dust there and all of Westeros and it’s seas left to their own command.
Or perhaps, they would die together with their bones tangled together and they would be buried in one grave (one soul) and after a time, their flesh would melt away leaving only their bright hair, twisted like hands around their bared throats.
It makes little matter which of the two will be true. They would have to leave the world as they entered it.
There is no space in either of their hearts for one of them to survive the other.