Fic Entry #1: And the History Books Forgot About Us
California, 2012
She reminds him of the coast, gold-flecked water and that vicious current, her body spanning his smooth as a curve of highway. She steps from the walk-in closet in a red dress entirely unsuited to a family Christmas party (she does it to provoke him, of course, as with so many things.) The clinging fabric sets his heart to racing, and he entertains the image of her amidst dull distant cousins and their unbearable children, the bright spot that draws the eye.
“Well?” Hand on hip, her mouth curves like a scythe.
“I prefer you naked and dappled in sunlight,” he says, an almost-growl softened by an irreverent smile and half-lidded eyes. He slips the dress from her shoulders and remembers her in Mexico just after their eighteenth birthday, her skin glowing gold in the light of the setting sun. They rode towering waves and jumped from cliffs during the day, and at night he let her pin him down and fuck him until he could barely breathe and every exhalation was her name.
She hisses, “Not now,” and rather than locking on his, her eyes gaze past him. Now is not the time (there is never a time for them, never a place that stayed theirs long enough) and their father does not suffer tardiness.
In a sheath of emerald green silk (tamer, though her legs fall from the hem in a way that makes him shake if he looks too long) she enters the house before him. He treads water in a sea of pompous uncles and fawning aunts, and when they catch sight of each other they exchange the knowing look or superior smile over blond heads. Their father holds court on the balcony, solemn and stern-faced as always. Behind him the valley lies sprawled and glittering in the haze, and he stands as if he owns it.
Tyrion has already retreated to the kitchen, tall stool balanced on two legs as he leans back to inspect his handiwork: a towering structure of bottles, the evening’s wreckage.
“Cersei’s looking much better,” he says as his stool thuds back into place and the tower gives an ominous quiver. Jaime raises an eyebrow. “Fully recovered, I mean.”
Jaime stands very still, back to the cool marble of the countertop, gray-blue and dotted with gold. Tyrion’s mismatched eyes watch him too keenly; he has always been too bold for his own good and far too intelligent for theirs.
“She looked a real mess at Thanksgiving,” Tyrion goes on. The memory of it claws at him, Cersei’s face unnaturally pale over the tattered carcass in the middle of the table, the untouched plate of food before her. Aunt Genna’s eyes had lingered on his sister’s fingers as they traced the rim of her empty wine glass, but Tyrion’s had gone straight to Jaime.
When she’d told him, Jaime had been shocked to find that his immediate reaction was a hot flush of joy that began in his belly and quirked at the corners of his mouth. She slapped him so hard he was afraid she’d knocked out a tooth, and then she was screaming, her fist catching him hard on the shoulder and her nails raking his arm before he managed to take hold of both wrists. In the clinic the woman smiled so kindly at him, at the love of this brave brother for his beautiful sister. She could not know that the mess of blood she drew out of Cersei was his as much as hers, that it might have been a perfect, green-eyed child or a monster. He had not known until then Cersei’s greatest fear - that it might be like Tyrion.
She comes into the kitchen then, and Jaime sees how right his little brother is: she is worlds away from the gray-faced woman who curled in his bed and slept for a day and a half. He thinks that may have been the longest time they’ve ever gone without speaking to one another. She doesn’t look at either of them as she busies herself with the full bottles arranged on the other counter, when her white throat snaps back as she takes a shot of something.
“I can’t stand much more of these people,” she sighs.
“Finally, something we can agree on,” Tyrion puts in. Jaime stifles a laugh and Cersei’s eyes gleam fleetingly. “It must be the Christmas spirit thawing that icy heart of yours.”
In that moment he loves them both so fiercely it is painful. He wants to take his sister in his arms and kiss her right there in front of Tyrion - the only person who sees them for what they are and who, for all his sharpness where Cersei is concerned, has never ceased to love them. He settles for throwing an arm loosely about her shoulders (for ignoring the mild annoyance that shapes her lovely features.) When she relaxes against him, he remembers with a pang the knot of fear and nerves she had been barely a month ago. How in his bed she woke up crying that she’d dreamt a golden child with his face - their face - a son that roared his will to live like a tiny lion in her arms.
London, 1945
She hates to be in the shelter during raids; if death is coming for her, she’d prefer to look it in the face. But she knows it won’t be like this, that she won’t die on a London street in the middle of the night, not with the sky full of fire and buildings coming down around her. Cersei Lannister knows she will not die alone.
Her twin is on a ship somewhere out in a dark sea, but even miles of land and roiling water can’t deaden the feel of him like another part of her body, can’t dull whatever sense this is that lets her know he is alive. We can’t die now, because we will die together, she thinks, just as we were born. She rarely worries - it’s not in her nature - but when she does, this is what she tells herself. She remembers too what a strong swimmer Jaime is, sees his body flashing through the water like a sleek, untouchable blade.
None of the girls in the office believe the writer of all those letters can possibly be her brother. They think she has some secret sweetheart, a married man perhaps, or a man so grand she will not or cannot tell them his name. She lets them gossip behind gloved hands in the dingy room where they eat their meager lunches, and remembers Jaime’s last leave with a coy smirk plucking at her lips. He stank of sweat and salt and she shook so hard she thought her bones would crack - his mouth hot between her thighs, that insolent tongue of his on her, in her. She flushes when her eyes refocus on the page before her, her ears registering the clatter of tapping keys all around. A girl with dull hair says, “Dreaming of your lad again?”
She tries not to let these girls - mouse girls, she calls them - get to her, but sometimes she can’t help it. Rage flares in her chest with a frightening ease when they try to draw her into their idle talk, and of late the fun has gone out of pitting them against one another as she’d used to enjoy doing. She thinks, I should have been born a man. If she was a man she would be with her twin now; she would be doing something useful rather than hiding in a mouse hole and feeding on crumbs with the other vermin. What she wouldn’t do to feel powerful again.
She must content herself with gaining status where she can: occasionally fucking the boss, mostly because he’ll take her out to a real dinner (and also because his hair is the closest she can find to true gold, and he has a sly, ready smile just a little like Jaime’s.) His eyes are an insignificant shade of hazel, so she coos for him to shut them, which he seems to like - it’s better for both of them, really. After every time, she regrets it. He comes loudly and then wants to hold her for unbearable lengths of time. When his face is stilled in sleep it looks even less like her own, and she begins to feel stifled and sick in his small room.
One night on their shared walk home, Cersei kisses the pretty, dark-haired girl who sits across from her. She’d hoped her melancholy (she hates to name it, to admit that this is what pools in her belly) would give way to something else. She’d thought she might feel whatever men do when they take this sort of thing from women. It was no good - Taena licked eagerly into her mouth and said why didn’t she stay so neither of them would have to be alone, but all Cersei felt was a heavy disappointment. And a deep exhaustion sinking into her muscles that she knew was Jaime’s absence.
Sometimes when she can, she goes to Jaime in his own clothes: finely cut trousers and shirts that still smell of him, the things their father insisted he dress himself in before the war. She does it partly out of convenience - easier to travel alone - and partly for the simple thrill of it, for how it excites her. She pins her hair up under a hat and in the mirror her eyes are doll-wide; they make her look so young, just a boy. She goes to him like a mirror come alive, dressed in his own skin.
Paris, 1920
They spend the champion’s purse on dinner and a bottle of wine that isn’t half bad, and afterwards walk down to the river. This is everything he thought he might never have again - the city teeming around them, car horns and music on the corner, and Cersei’s pale, white neck curving below her cropped hair. He hates to be sentimental (and Cersei hates it even more), but some nights the simple fact of being alive hits him hard, somewhere between ecstasy and a crushing fear that whispers, usually in his father’s voice, that it surely cannot last.
She stops on the bridge, in the pool of darkness between two streetlamps. Even though she’s got an old, shabby scarf of their mother’s pulled over her bright hair, fear thrills through him when they kiss. She bites his lip hard; he remembers her biting her own as she stood by the door in the basement room and he met her eyes over his opponent’s tensed shoulder. She makes good on her promise now. She says she likes to see him fight because it’s the next best thing to doing it herself, but they both know she comes mostly out of fear: someone has to protect all those bleating sheep from the lion she knows him to be. She says someone ought to be there just in case, and they both know it could only be her.. He hasn’t lost control yet, but he never insists she leave. Not that it would do any good if he did.
“Let’s go to a party,” she says when she breaks away. She takes his good hand and leads him down narrow, cobbled streets to a house where she knows some people. She knows everyone, his sister - she’s playing at being an actress these days, and she says that’s half the work. She’s got a talent for it, those wide, cut glass eyes and her voice pitched just like she’s fourteen again and lying to their mother. Mostly she likes the power in being coveted, in making men want what they can’t have. Doubtless it tastes like justice to her, like revenge.
He watches her dance through a veil of smoke, leaning against the wall with his bad hand tucked away in his pocket. He doesn’t like the words they use for men like him: coward, deserter. He’d like to be back in the ring wiping the contempt off some boy’s face, shattering every knowing smile in the crowd with his bad hand better than another man could with two good ones. He remembers the cigarette between his fingers that winked like a star just for an instant, then the pain. After that, nothing: no memory of the road home, the miles between there and her with his hand aching and the letter tucked inside his shirt, crumpled against his skin. A few insignificant lines in her elegant script, those fierce down strokes that threatened to tear the flimsy paper. Then at the end, I love you, three times. Some nights he thinks that was the bravest thing he ever did, the best of him. The things I do for love. They call him a man without honor and maybe he is, but honor’s never meant a thing to him. The word rings in his head like something hollow.
He wonders if these people imagine he’s the type to wake up screaming or to see the faces of his dead comrades peeking from behind every tree in the park. The fallen don’t haunt him, and it wasn’t ever death he feared in the trenches - at least, not death in its own right. It was her absence that galled him; in the dark he’d turn his face to the side and feel his heart sink every time Cersei wasn’t there to mirror him, forehead to forehead, nose to nose. When he does start awake in the night (never screaming, only shaking and drenched in sweat, hand already half way to hers), the nightmares that come back in bits and pieces are always full of the stink of decay, of dark places where Cersei is nowhere to be found. Men with missing limbs are everywhere now, and Jaime thinks maybe he knows a little something of what they feel - but it’s that memory of separation, nothing to do with his wound. Cersei can’t see it; she says they don’t seem any different. Other people have always looked incomplete to her.
Jaime watches two boisterous, black haired men laughing in the small circle that surrounds his sister, and as the trailing wisps of smoke from their cigarettes mingle with hers, he feels it starting. It sparks in his chest, a fire that catches between ribs that are dry as kindling and ache as they burn. She is no more than three steps away, yet somehow it feels as though an empty space opens at his side. Not a real thing but the memory of a nightmare, something he once knew coming back to him, bleeding through the years between. It lengthens like a shadow at the corner of his vision, a thing he can’t hit, not even with his good hand. She sees; she always sees.
She takes him back to their little garret and undresses them both the way she did the night he first came home, and in their bed she wraps herself around him like she wants to be the flesh on his bones. Hips and knees, nails and the sharpness of their faces all press, and still they aren’t close enough. “Hush,” she says, the only soothing sound she ever makes, only for him. “You’re home now,” she says, and then he is.
Yorkshire, 1890
For all that he is a widower, Robert’s kisses are clumsy and unpracticed when compared with Jaime’s. But then, she has been kissing Jaime since they were children - when the governess lingered at her bath or had already fallen asleep in the next room, or when they managed to lose the old groom set to tail them on afternoon rides. They would duck low in the tall grass by the riverbank to exchange kisses that were innocent until they were not.
She always knew she would marry a man she did not love, and she could have done far worse than a Duke. Cersei was prepared for that man to be more interested in Papa’s money, it is only that she thought he would be interested in her too, at least to begin with. That was how marriages went, as a rule, or so her Mama had told her. She has only to look at Jaime to know how exquisite she is, has only to listen ever so briefly to the deferring, idiotic prattle of the other debs to assure herself that men prefer a girl with spirit - a girl like her. Her intelligence is quite remarkable, they say, her talent at the piano impressive, and she rides as well as any man. Yet this black-haired Duke deals out only the barest of courtesies, and when his seed spills into her on their wedding night, it is as if his dead wife is there in the bed with them. And to think how she had worried that he might know she came to him without virtue. With his eyes squeezed shut, he hardly saw her there beneath him.
“It makes no matter,” she tells Jaime with an indifferent shrug of one shoulder. They are lagging far behind the rest of the hunt, but Cersei slows her mount to a walk. “He wanted a fortune to save his dreadful estate, and next he’ll want an heir. And then,” she waves a hand airily and gives him the first real grin he’s seen since her wedding, “Then he’ll leave me be, and we may do as we like.”
“I believe I can be of service to his grace where the quest for an heir is concerned.” When he smiles in return, she feels it deep in her belly, almost right down to her sex.
She likes the idea of Jaime’s son inheriting what Robert has labored so hard to maintain: a rather vulgar house in an unmanageably large park, and quite an exorbitant amount of Lannister money. Her son is born in September, and Robert never comments on the golden curls or the emerald colored eyes. He never voices the simple truth that in less than a year of marriage, she has given him this single most invaluable gift, and the one thing Lady Lyanna never could. She hates that his ignorance hurts her, even if it stings only a little. Once Robert has glanced at the sleeping baby and left her bedroom Jaime says, “You deserve better.”
“Yes, of course,” she sighs, looking down at her son, then back up at her twin. “More than this, but not Casterly. Never that.” Sometimes it is impossible to swallow the truth and her bitterness, sometimes all her powers of restraint escape her and she can’t keep the civil tongue her breeding and station demand. She should be happy today, the day she truly becomes a woman (or so Mama says), but it only serves to remind her of what she will never have.
Jaime seizes her face and turns her toward him, his thumb and fingers pressed firmly against the line of her jaw. She glares defiance, knowing that it is not Jaime’s fault; he would give her Casterly if he could. He says as much now, claims that it has never meant a thing to him, that he would give his right hand to change it. In this alone, he is no freer than she is. Then he says, right into her ear so that his breath stirs her disarranged hair, “I’ll kill him. Let me kill him.”
She says nothing, lips to the impossibly soft curve of her child’s tiny, miraculous skull. It makes no matter, he has always known what she is thinking.
It happens in early January. The shooting party walks out into a frost-pricked world, gray-green and lovely beneath the heavy sky. She loves this country with such ferocity because it reminds her of the blissful ignorance of childhood - years that lasted what now seems only the space of a heartbeat, in which she believed she might live her own life rather than someone else’s. The time when they feared nothing and believed they would share a bed forever.
In this country she loves so well, not far from the place they had used to kiss as children, Robert dies by way of a faulty gun, or perhaps one that backfires somehow, or maybe it is only his own carelessness, his eagerness to move along to the next drive. It makes no matter - her son is strong; he will live, and so will they.
Saint Petersburg, 1865
They were born in the long night, Cersei first, Jaime holding tight to her foot. They did not see sunlight those first few weeks, the sun skimming just below the horizon and the city gilded in ice. When their mother looks at them, Cersei can see the thoughts swimming beneath the fine cheekbones and bright eyes: she thinks that this is the place they were meant for. That they ought to have stayed in the dark with the ghosts that followed them into the world. The servants say it was a gypsy who told her, a frail woman with bulging eyes and the voices of the dead curling in her ears. They say her eyes rolled and her throat tightened as if choked by an unseen hand, and that she spoke with a voice not her own. No one knows what she whispered to Joanna, but the secret is heavy and it fills the house like water, muffling sound.
She never leaves her twins alone together. The grim French governess is ever present, and Jaime is frequently packed off to the country and his cousins to ride and hunt, and to forget, though he never does. Joanna seats herself bodily between them in the drawing room of the Petersburg house. She watches with sharp eyes as Cersei pours tea from the samovar, and when identical eyes meet over the steaming cup she cringes involuntarily, she cannot help it. The proud lady with her crown of golden braids recoils as if burned.
When they are left with only the servants, a small army of whisperers who sing readily into their mother’s ears at every opportunity, the twins slip into French. The cook knows a few words and the butler has picked up a good deal, but they speak impossibly fast and pepper their talk with English and the nonsense words that hold meaning only for them. The servants cannot tell what they do not understand. These frantic exchanges feel like falling into place, like coming up for air again.
All their lives they kiss primly on each cheek the way one kisses an acquaintance or a person one does not like overmuch. Their cousins in the country are permitted embraces that seem almost violent, one leaping into the arms of another and the two of them careening in a whirl of blond hair and unrefined laughter. Watching it makes Jaime’s stomach and Cersei’s fists clench before their sideways glances collide and they remember themselves.
It is not until the morning of her wedding that they kiss, the first real kiss of their life. Everyone is occupied but they two, standing numb in the empty shell of her bedroom where he has come to bid her goodbye. First the chaste brushing of one cheek against another and then an imperceptible nod, an exhalation. And then they fold together like linked fingers, open-mouthed, breathless, temples burning with suppressed tears. She creaks in her stays as she leans into him and knows without question that this is what their mother feared. Filling his hands with her hips, her shoulderblades, her hair, Jaime wonders how the gypsy knew. Cersei expects to feel the shame that has sunk deep in the lines of Joanna’s face. It must be here someplace, hidden in the froth of her petticoats as Jaime reaches to hold more of her, or perhaps tucked into the hollow places of his body - his throat or his collarbone, or slid beneath his tongue. She never finds it; maybe it is too deep, flecked in the blood, buried in bone. All she can feel is whole.
She curls around him in her white and gold gown and gasps when he pushes into her; the sound shatters him, and he comes almost immediately. Long moments of stillness and shallow breath. She sees this life on the red insides of her eyelids: a man she does not love who will take her to a city she does not know and fill her with children she does not want. Jaime feels blinded by the feel of her skin as by the brightness of a flame, the dark stretching impenetrable to either side. Now is the summer when the sun never sets, but the days only grow shorter from here, he knows. He whispers nonsense words to the underside of her jaw, the soft skin below her ear.
Then, “You are to be married.” He thinks of saying, Run away with me, but in the next moment he knows they never could. All their money is not truly theirs, and their beauty would, in this, be their undoing. Men have never not looked at Cersei, and women cannot help but watch him. The sameness of their faces makes even children stare, and where would they go? He says none of this, only, “Today. You are to be married today.”
“No,” she says, and twining her fingers with his, places his hands about the curve of her throat where her pulse leaps in time with his.