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On his name day—their name day—she finds it amusing to bring him a plate of sweets in his bedchamber.
“Would you love me more…” she says, eying him, perched on the foot of his bed, “…if I’d made these for you instead of sending for them? If I’d been up for hours already, working my hands to aching while you lay in the sunlight, stiff and lazy and warm in your bed?”
*
She was furious, after her flowering. It meant they could no longer play at swapping clothes or tricking the servants, tricking Father, tricking the master at arms. Their bodies would only become more different from then on. It’s while seeking to punish him for this that she brings him inside her body for the first time. Her face tightens, she concentrates fiercely and bounces in his lap, slowly at first, wincing around the pain, and then faster, decadent, to paint his cock and thighs in Lannister crimson.
He knows this is a test, to see if he’ll recoil or back away. But nothing about her body could ever disgust him. They are twin suns. Years later he’ll grip her hand each time she gives birth to her children—their children—his eyes her anchor during the worst of her pain, and years later still he’ll take her in the Sept where their firstborn’s corpse sways above them, and she’ll have her moon’s blood and it will make no difference then, either, but for now he shuts his eyes and gasps, chords tightening in his neck, blood thrumming, sick with need for her, and somehow that makes her angrier. Her fingertips, smeared from where she’s been rubbing herself, press against his eyelids so hard he sees stars.
“If I’m watching, so shall you,” she instructs him and it doesn’t even occur to him to disobey. Her finger drifts down to his lips and he sucks it into his mouth, lathing it, cleaning it, cleaning her and tasting copper.
But looking in her eyes only quickens his body’s reaction. He bucks helplessly into her, spilling his seed and smiling against her warm, pale neck. She doesn’t smile back.
“Was it the gods who finished you off or was it me?” she whispers, her breath hot and angry against his ear. “Was it the gods you should be thanking, or is it me?”
He couldn’t remember praying, couldn’t remember the shout he’d muffled against the perfect pulse of her neck, except that it must have been one of desperate worship.
“You,” he assures her, his breath still ragged and wild in his throat, his heart tripping over itself. Only ever you.
*
“What would you have done differently than Father?” she asks, lying in the grass beside him, their fingers laced, the sky flawless and golden in the early evening. They don’t know about Crakehall yet, don’t know a separation is coming. Because the summer is endless and why shouldn’t it be?
He knows it’s a trick question; he just doesn’t know what the trick is, yet. He can only guess at what she wants to hear.
“Nothing,” he says, confident it’s the right answer. “I wouldn’t have done anything differently than Father.”
She nods as though she expected that response, and his breathing settles. But then she waits, and the pause feels charged.
“You didn’t ask me,” Cersei points out.
“I didn’t ask you what?” he murmurs, leaning over her, blocking the sun, trailing a path of kisses across her cheek, down her neck.
She tries to push him off, but he laughs and captures her wrist, pinning it against his chest, crushing her fingers like the bones of a bird.
She yanks it free and he allows it. “You didn’t ask me what I’d have done differently than Father.”
She wants to make her point and there’ll be no kisses for him until she does. He sighs, resting on his elbows above her. “Well you’ll never have the chance to find out,” he reminds her, “So I don’t see really the point of—”
“If it had been me,” she said, “I’d have kept one of them alive, up there. Just one of them. And only just alive.”
She’s talking about the Reynes, impaled on the city gates all summer, so many summers ago, the only thing she ever wants to talk about.
He tilts his head, morbidly curious. “Why?”
“So they could answer questions, of course.” She arches toward him now, her lips finding his, and he thinks maybe he should stop her, stop this talk of rot and horror, but her mouth is soft and wet and open to him and her green eyes are shining, and he wants to engulf her. It’s Cersei who eventually pulls away. Always Cersei.
“So they could tell everyone who passes by what Father did to them, and why,” she finishes triumphantly, her eyes searching his, eager for his response.
Her cheeks are flushed and he knows she’s soaking beneath her small clothes but he doesn’t want to think too hard about the reason.
*
“Would you love me more,” she asks, “If I were kinder?”
Her questions always come when he’s least capable of expressing a coherent thought. She’s been stroking him to completion every morning since Father left for the capital, it’s the best part of his day, though lately she’s been drawing it out, keeping him hard for what feels like ages with her lips and tongue and hand, trying to make him late for lessons because every minute he misses of sword practice to stay with her is a victory.
*
He wakes early one morning, gets dressed before she can stop him, and tells her firmly that he cannot miss another lesson, because how else will he learn to keep her safe? How else will he be able to protect her? He’s roaring, insistent: He must learn for both of them.
She has a fit, sobbing into their shared pillow, slapping at him when he tries to hold her, because it isn’t fair that he’s allowed to be out there, out in the world, and she must stay confined.
*
“Kinder?” he repeats.
“Kinder to the servants, kinder to Septa, kinder.” Her impatient, slick fist pumps faster, so hard he gasps.
“Shh,” she warns him, not because anyone will hear but because that’s one of the other games they play: Whoever makes a sound loses. Whoever begs for release loses. It is almost never Cersei; the time she rocked her hips against his face and cried out, Please, Jaime, is burned in his brain like wildfire. She assumed he would crow about besting her, but he didn’t want to; he just wanted to bask in the knowledge that he’d given her what she so often gave to him.
Maybe she feels the same way, maybe she’s tired of the imbalance.
For a long time they only fucked during her moon’s blood. “This way you can spill your seed in me and it won’t matter,” she explained, “it won’t count, it will be dead.”
*
“Don’t feel bad,” she told him after that first time, their thighs sticky where they remained joined. Her voice was flat, almost detached. She lifted herself off his lap and swirled a fingertip through the mess he’d made and held it up to show him. “We’ll practice,” she told him matter-of-factly, then patted his cheek and left to make herself presentable.
It hadn’t occurred to him to feel ashamed until she’d patted his cheek. Don’t feel bad clearly meant its opposite. Now he wanted to bathe, start over, try again, prove to her he could last much longer, that he could pump into her for as long as she wanted him to. Longer, until she was the helpless one, shattering and drowning from the things he did to her.
For weeks she trained him to think of other things, to go away inside his mind while she used his cock every way a person could use it; she trained him to picture misery and pain and death, the Reynes, so that his cock would remain rigid inside her cunt or her hand or her mouth but not spill over until she allowed it to—and when he stood in the Mad King’s throne room at age 17 and misery and pain and death surrounded him, he found he could go away inside his mind and be with Cersei in the warmth of his—their—bed, the warmth of Cersei, her smile as blinding as the sun.
“If you marry someone it will never be half as good as it is with me,” she said, her lips anointing his belly, his thighs, across his chest, back up to his mouth, and he agreed, he knew she was right. They were molded in each other’s image, they didn’t fit with anyone else, could never feel this way with anyone else.
It thrilled him, the way she spoke, the filthy things she said.
“Do you think a maiden would ever do this for you? Let you have her in all the ways I’ve let you have me? Or a whore? ‘Lannisters don’t pay for whores,’” she whispered in a mocking imitation of Father, her eyes dancing, a ghost of a smile on her lips.
Her other trick, the one that worked when everything else failed, was to press her flat palm against the root of his cock, press against the place between his legs to quell his seed, to delay it so the feeling that had built up would almost explode but then recede and not actually spill. When he agreed to feign illness for the day, she tormented him that way for hours.
Once she decided he could control his responses to her to her satisfaction, they learned together how he could use his tongue and fingers on her just as expertly as she used them on him.
He wondered if there was a correlation with her increased pleasure and her sudden doubts. In her mind, was it a sin not because of the acts themselves, but because they felt so deliriously good? When it was her exhausting Jaime, she was curiously unaffected, but now that he had proven himself equally adept at exhausting her, she withdrew, uncertain. Did the loss of control make her feel weak? Did it frighten her?
“It isn’t right,” she told him softly, floating down from the heights he’d sent her to seconds before. (He was always useless afterward, could barely speak, could barely hear, but Cersei’s mind raced, flickering.)
His face rested on her thigh where he looked up at her adoringly, his mouth numb and slick. He loved the taste of her, the way the timbre of it changed slightly after she’d climaxed. Her face was pink and tears pricked her eyes, shimmering there but not falling.
A moment ago he’d been proud of himself, but her ambivalence took a knife to it all, hacked it away.
“Mother didn’t like it, remember?” she whispered, her hands in his hair, lifting his face, urging him to climb her body, rest beside her. She pulled the sheets up over them, too, as though they could hide themselves now, pretend it had never happened.
He didn’t want to pretend. He wanted to fall asleep with their limbs entwined, rest with her heart and his heart pressed together, and dream that their chests had cracked open up so they could merge.
“She separated us,” Cersei added quietly. “Do you remember?”
She separated us, Jaime thought. And then she died.
Because we aren’t to be separated.
“I remember that when she died, I missed her very much, but I was also happy,” he said quietly, curling a strand of Cersei’s long, golden hair around his finger. The words tumbled out, unbidden. He hadn’t meant to say them.
He pulled the strand of hair against his mouth before letting it fall, silk flowing between his fingers.
“Happy?” Cersei repeated, sounding pained, confused.
“Because I knew no one would separate us again.”
Their eyes catch, hers flecked with sunlight and his darker, earthier, full of guilt.
She tugs him closer, urges him to rest his face on her chest so when his tears dampen her skin she won’t have to see.
*
She had a way of making each time feel like a dream; a way of making each time feel like it might never happen again, it might be the last time. Because the ecstasy he feels when he’s inside her is impossible to have in this life without paying a price. There was no way it could happen again, was there? No way that this, these languid kisses, this hint of tongue, would ever lead to that. So the fact that it will, and it does, makes him thrice grateful and astonished and harder than he can stand.
“Would you love me more if I were kinder to Tyrion?” she murmurs, and this is the real test, the one she’s been working up to, the final question. The only one that matters.
The sick part is, he doesn’t even need to lie, and he hates himself for it.
“If you were any different than you are,” he tells her, hauling her against him, “I could only love you less.”
This pleases her. “If you were any different than you are,” Cersei tells him, “I wouldn’t love you at all.”
Fin.