Chapter Text
She knew she was in shock. She was barely in possession of her wits to know that much. Shock at what had just happened to her army, to Euron’s fleet, to the shock and awe of that Targaryen girl’s horrific and tyrannical slaughter of Kings Landing, at Qyburn’s brains dashed out before her very eyes, the Mountain and the Hound facing off to one another as she decided this was not a battle she wanted to stay around for but most of all, the shock of seeing Jaime.
He had come back for her.
For her.
For one grave moment, she thought she may have misunderstood Maggy the Frog’s premonition. It wasn’t Tyrion who was the Valonqar, it was Jaime. It suddenly made sense, despite born immediately one after the other, he was still her younger brother.
When he put his hands around her to draw her to him and not around her throat, she almost felt utter relief until she found him bleeding gravely. He brushed away her concern and she allowed him to lead her away, into the cellars beneath the keep and on and on. He obviously knew where he was going and she had no idea so she clung to his hand as if she would never let go.
He stopped abruptly and she looked in the direction of his panicked gaze. Rubble had fallen over their exit, blocking it. He broke their link and made towards the pile, starting to climb to see if he could find a way out. She looked around and saw only a tomb.
Her tomb.
Hers and Jaime’s.
“No… no… not like this.” Of all the possible ways she could have died, never did she envision that this would be her end, under the Red Keep with rubble raining down on her from the Targaryen usurper’s destruction.
She heard Jaime rushing back to her and she turned to him.
“I want to live. I want to live. I want our baby to live, Jaime.”
Jaime shushed her. “Look at me.” He bent over slightly so he was at her height and held her face in his hands. “Cersei. Look at me” She finally quietened, “You and me are the only ones that matter. You and me and our child. Look Cersei, there’s some light at the top of that rubble, it’s a way out but we need to climb. Can you do that for me? For our baby?”
She looked at where he was pointing, saw the steep pile and light beaming through the top and nodded through her tears. Jaime brought her in for a quick hug and kissed her forehead before grabbing hold of her hand and pulling her towards their way out. More and more of the keep was falling and ominously coming towards them.
“We have to hurry, come on.”
Cersei could hear the panic in Jaime’s voice despite the fact that he was carefully trying to hide it.
“We’re almost there Cerse, just a little bit more.”
Jaime had reached the top and she could see rays of light behind him. ‘We’ve done it’, she thought but the brick beneath her slipper rocked and dislodged her footing, making her slip back down. She cried out to her brother who shot his left hand out, grabbing the sleeve of her dress as the Keep came down around them. ‘Not like this’, she thought, ‘please gods, not like this’ as she looked at Jaime. If this was her last moment in life, she was going to die with Jamie being the last thing she would see.
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The noise had been unbearably loud. And then there was nothing. No sound. Just silence. She wasn’t sure if this was the hallowed hells, that everything would unleash once she opened her eyes and so she kept them shut.
Then…
Movement.
Whatever she was lying on shifted and moved. Something was moving across her face. Startled, she realised it was a hand, not her hand, someone else’s, which meant…
“Cersei… please… open your eyes for me.”
In a final desperate attempt to pull her from her potential tomb, Jaime had used just about every last drop of strength he had left in him to lift her up and over the summit of the rocks and to safety. She was lying on him, both of them lying head first on the downward slope.
“Cersei. Please. I need you to move.”
She was reluctant to open her eyes but there was something off in his voice, something pained…weak. When she opened them, she realised she was positioned high over where he had been bleeding, his body fully taking her weight. She seemed to come to her senses and looked up. She could see daylight and hear the waves beyond the end of the tunnel. Moving off him, she was careful to place her hands on rocks rather than Jaime and he groaned in both pain and relief when the weight of her, although she was slight, was off him. As she moved, he was able to right himself but with some difficulty, she noted. She managed to scrabble down the reminder of the pile and from her vantage point could see the end of the tunnel.
“Follow the light and there’s a boat waiting for you.”
She stopped dead in her movements, fear flooding through her.
You, not us. Cersei looked back from the light to look at her brother. He was pale and sweating and clutching at his side. He had made no attempt to make his way down or even stand. It was clear that Jaime thought this was the end of the road for him.
Fresh tears overlapped her existing ones. “No… no, Jaime not like this, no! You can’t leave me. This isn’t happening.”
“Cersei, please…go! I’m… I don’t think…I’ve haven’t got long left. I need you to get on that boat and get out of here.” His breathing was more laboured.
Cersei shook her head.
“No. We go together or not at all.”
As he started to feebly protest again, she rucked her skirts up and began to climb back up to him. She grabbed hold of his chin and forced Jaime to look at her.
“Listen to me, Jaime. I know you as you know me. We came into this world together and we will go out of it together. But the Gods have seen fit to look down upon us and we will survive today. But only together, my dear brother. I get on that boat, you get on the boat or neither of us will get on that boat. Is that clear?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer, her hand was positioned under her armpit, “Now get up!”
Cersei tried to pull Jaime up but he was too heavy for her and so she glared at him until she saw him join in the effort. They scrambled down the rest of the rubble and joined the path out to the sea. Cersei had flung Jaime’s arm around her and he leant heavily against her but somehow she could take his weight…just. Adrenaline she supposed. She just had to get him to the boat then get the boat on the water and hope they got picked up by a friend rather than a foe. After seeing what that girl had done to Kings Landing, surely support for the new queen was rapidly diminishing? Cersei could see the small skiff in the distance and what looked like Euron lying against a rock, causing her pace to falter.
“It’s ok. He’s dead.”
“How do you…” realisation dawned on her that it was Euron who had caused Jaime’s injuries.
“You had the gates closed. It was the only way in that I could get to you. I run into him.”
“I should have his head on a pike for what he did to you.”
Jaime wasn’t sure what he was running out of the fastest, life or patience. He had to get Cersei to the bloody boat.
“For the love of the fucking gods, Cersei. You aren’t the queen any more. Your reign is over. Your fucking keep has just fallen around you. You don’t even have a fucking stick to put anyone’s head on anymore.”
They had reached the boat and Jaime had all but collapsed head first into it. He managed to right himself and started to push the boat out. Realising he could not do it on his own, Cersei had gone to the other side and used her strength to push. Just like they did as children all those years ago on the Sunset Sea. She managed to get in, albeit with no grace whatsoever and managed to help Jaime the rest of the way in and settled him in the stern. Satisfied he wasn’t going to end up overboard, she took the oars and began to row them away. Slumped and half dead, Jaime looked up at his sister.
“I’m sorry… I’d row if I could.”
Cersei knew that even a fully fit Jaime would never be able to row, lest they row in circles all day long.
“It’s ok… but Jaime? Never speak to your queen in that way ever again. Or I will find a stick for your head.”
To her shock, Jaime started laughing. Jaime never did this. He would demure, grovel, pamper, apologise to her when she was angry with him. Told her things that she wanted to hear. He never laughed in her face.
“Sister, you’re not listening to me. You are not my queen anymore; you are nobody’s queen anymore.”
He let his head fall back so he was looking towards the sky. He may as well put a dagger to her heart. She had known deep down that he was lost to her when he returned from the Riverlands to find his baby boy dead. Where she refused to forgive Tommen for what he did, Jaime, when with her, had mourned him but Cersei refused again and again to answer his pleas for answers. She knew he had worked out what she had done to the Sept of Baelor and it had taken a lot of coaxing to get him back into her bed. Thinking about it, that was the first time ever in their relationship that she could remember chasing him, not the other way around. He always came round to her in the end, too afraid to lose her and once again ready to do whatever she bid. She’d always had that control over him. But then he had left her to go North, to honour his stupid promise to fight for the living. Their last row, where she had threatened him with the Mountain had left her seething. Jaime had never betrayed her like that, ever. Sending Bronn after him and Tyrion with Joffrey’s crossbow was the only thing that had simmered her anger… marginally.
Yet, he had come back to her. Come back to rescue her like a true knight of old.
Rowing, she looked at her brother. His unkempt hair and beard, his non descriptor clothes. With the exception of his hand, there wasn’t an ounce of Lannister about him. She realised with a start that she didn’t know him anymore. What had happened to him during the fight against the dead? What had happened to him up there full stop? Her birds had been useful to a point but when word got back that he hadn’t left Winterfell to return to her or march with Tyrion and his Targaryen bitch and was staying at the invitation of Sansa fucking Stark, her imagination had started working overtime at the meaning of it all.
She needed to know what she was to him now. She nudged him with her foot so he would look back at her, in the eye.
“If I am not your queen, then what am I to you, Jaime?”
“You’re my sister.”
Cersei knew she didn’t want to hear anymore but she needed to know.
“Is that all I am to you now? Just your sister?”
Jaime raised his head with some effort and met her eyes.
“Until the moment the gods take me, yes.”
With that last remaining effort, Jaime’s head rolled backwards as he finally lost consciousness.
Cersei watched him as her grief welled up and up within her. She had to stop rowing as her grief expelled itself from her as she screamed his name into the air around them.