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A cold draft rattled the Keep's dusty bones; the fortress might have shivered, unseen, its pale red stones cold and dimmed under the inky dark sky. The Queen, a lone figure amid the empty courtyard, clutched her arms under the fabric of her crimson cloak and quickened her step, moving towards the doors to White Sword Tower.
The night felt familiar. The sharp cold and brisk wind had a vigor about them, even this late, and the stars seemed brighter for it. It was a night of potential. It brought back memories of the night—it must've been five years past now—when she had dressed as one of the smallfolk and run through the shadows of Weasel Alley to meet Jaime. There she was again, crossing the shadows of the night to tell Jaime what the future would hold, and praying he wouldn't be a fool about it.
Cersei crossed the threshold and started her way up the winding steps, surrounded by white fabric and stone, drowning in the ubiquitous and ever-unsettling paleness of it. Her thoughts ran ahead, already having reached her brother. Their encounters had become sparse, fleeting, since their return from Estermont, and she missed Jaime. His voice would lull her back from the affairs of the realm to simpler thoughts, to times of sea and endless sky; his ears would be the first to hear of her musings and fears, of the small seed of hope that appeared to form itself inside her.
As she neared the door to her brother's chambers, Cersei announced her presence with two curt, soft knocks against the wood. She pulled back her hood and waited.
He was surprised when he drew open the door. She seldom came here; he went to her, not the inverse. Jaime opened his mouth to speak, but something in her mien caught him. She was not worked into a fever as he had expected—not burning with fury, nor gripped by fear, nor ignited with lust. She did not seem urgent in the least, yet something was pressing enough to bring her to his door at the hour of the bat.
His sister slipped inside. He closed the door behind her, barring it for good measure.
Jaime did not approach her, studying her figure intently for several more moments as he sought to find some inkling of understanding in the tenuous lines of her face, the nonchalant stance of her body. She smiled at him, then; a slender little smile that bade him to come near her, to reach inside her.
He clung to the pale stone floor for a moment, staggered by the strangeness of it all. Then, as her eyes betrayed the first hint of impatience—or was it disappointment?—he went forward. His steps were light and cautious as he closed the short distance between them. The closeness of her scent invaded him, filled his senses with the promise of skin. As he drew near enough for their bodies to touch—chest against arm against hip against thigh—she took his hands and pressed them to her belly.
"Cersei—" He hesitated, uncertain.
The sudden disruption of the silence threw her off for a moment; she glanced at him with widened eyes and shushed him softly. "Feel it, Jaime."
She placed her hands over his. Her voice had a soothing tone to it, as if she wished to enthrall him into another state of mind, into the place where he'd dissolve into her, melt into her thoughts as though they were his own.
He looked down at her as a deep, primal understanding descended upon him. "Are you sure?"
He meant nothing by it—a rhetorical question, for what else was there to say?—but she tensed in annoyance under his hands. "Yes, I'm sure. I would never have let this happen if I were not sure."
Truthfully, that the babe could be Robert's had not even crossed his mind until she spoke it. He knew the lengths she had gone to—he had been courier to enough packets of moon tea. Further, he knew his sister. Beyond words (wind), beyond mummeries and farces, at the heart of things, in blood and seed, she was his and he was hers, fixed and unwavering. Rather than vex her by clarifying the question, he kissed her.
"Ours, Jaime; ours, ours." She crooned the words in barely more than a whisper, seeming half entranced herself.
But the thought she had dislodged made its way to the front of his mind. "Then it is to be mine?" he asked, already knowing the answer but needing to ask anyways.
She drew back. "It will be his, in the eyes of the world." Her words were firm, but she did not quite meet his eyes as she spoke them.
A heavy silence slithered itself between them at the thought of what this meant.
"I suppose it would be foolish to argue with this." The statement was dry, but layered with resentment. He averted his eyes and detached his hands from his sister, turning to pace around the cramped room. "As much as it would please me to believe you, Cersei, this child won't be mine."
She reached for his arm and gripped it by the wrist, led by impatience, but by something else as well—an eagerness to make him see through her eyes, to make him understand. "Look at me, Jaime. This is yours, this—" she cradled her belly with an arm, "the hidden knowledge of this, the seed, the blood—it's ours. It could not be anyone else's."
"And yet it may as well be his." He let his arm hang limply, neither drawing back from her nor giving in to her pull.
"If it may as well be his, would you rather it be?"
Oh, but she knew how to get a rise out of him.
The mere look on his face brought a satisfied smirk to her lips. Point made, she dropped the acerbic edge and stepped close, snaking her arms around her brother's neck. "It is not his," she whispered, words once again taking on that mesmerizing lilt. "It will never be. I am carrying your child, Jaime, and I will never, never bear anyone else's."
Vows were his purview, not hers, yet this felt like one nonetheless. He nodded, silent and grave, and inhaled sharply before lowering his neck to rest his brow against hers.
"No—no, you will not. I have ensured that too many times to doubt the truth of it."
"You must believe me, then, sweet brother. Any claim the King might have had over this child has long been revoked—yes, long gone along with the would-be heirs I have refused and spurned and expelled with none but your aid. This child is every bit as yours as it is mine, my love."
Her words were gentle and warm against his ears, spoken in a hushed tone that drew him closer to her voice, to the intricate cadence of her speech. At that moment, he might be inclined to trust the most preposterous of claims, were they to come from her lips—and what she proposed rang right and true and soft, and so he reveled at the chance to believe her.
Pycelle's words were a stamp of confirmation—one she herself had no need of, but which others would. This was the seal she needed for Robert, for the court, for the raven to Father. The pregnancy would not be real for them until a man confirmed it.
Strangely, though, she did not mind overmuch—not today. Of course she must dress this secret—hers and Jaime's—in the perception of others. Pycelle, as he nodded knowingly, was just the first of hundreds who would think they knew, and would not. Every one of them would be another layer wrapped about her babe, swaddling him, keeping him safe.
"Two months along, I would say, Your Grace."
Two months ago they had been in the Stormlands, she recalled—Estermont. Of course, of course their child had been conceived that night. If she were not already beaming, perhaps the extra twitch of her lips threatening laughter might have been discernible. But as it stood, it was merely the smile of a joyous young woman receiving the news she was carrying her firstborn, and the maester did not blink twice.
Cersei told Robert before a Small Council meeting. The meeting had not yet begun but was about to, with half the attendants already gathered and Jon Arryn briefing a reluctant Robert on some issue or another. She announced it with Varys simpering in the wings and Ser Barristan standing guard, carefully robbing the moment of any accidental intimacy it might carry.
The letter to the Rock was too a matter of state, but one not so carefully stripped of emotion. As she penned the message, she thought of Aerys—of Father slaving away as his Hand; of Mother enduring his gropings; of Jaime slaying him, procuring the throne that would now be their unborn son's. Would you be proud of Jaime if you knew, Father? she wondered. He will have heirs after all. He will, in a way, pass on to them an ever greater inheritance than the Rock. We have done it, Father; we have finished your life's work. I shall give you a grandson and together we shall give him all Seven Kingdoms.
The raven from Aunt Genna took her by surprise. Their aunt had taken on a maternal role for them at times in their youth, yes, but Cersei did not expect this now, when she was a woman grown. Yet—unlike the meddling of old crones and the prying of the ladies at court—this did not vex her. Instead she found that the frankness in her aunt's words felt like a welcome change from the insincerity she had come to expect.
The letter contained an odd mixture of belated advice and sentimental memories of Joanna as a mother. No matter what your maester tells you, you can have sex while you're pregnant, and moreover you should, because it will hurt too much too afterwards… Until such time as people gain the common decency to stop telling pregnancy horror stories to pregnant women, you must simply disregard them. You never had any trouble with that before, so I suspect you will be fine… I never saw Joanna happier than I did the day you and Jaime were born…
That night, as Cersei lay on the edge of sleep, her mind returned to the letter. When she looked up, lost in a haze of sleep, a woman stood at the window, nightgown glowing around the edges in the moonlight, gold hair falling down her back.
A lump rose in her throat. "Mother?"
The woman turned. For a moment she thought it was Mother, and then she thought not—was it herself? But then again, perhaps…?
"A mother," the woman mused, half to herself. She smiled softly, wrapping her arms about the soft swell of her middle. "Yes, I suppose I am."
Cersei had only ever conceptualized her body in relation to Jaime, but now, facing this apparition, she recalled the countless times her aunt and uncles had told her she resembled Joanna. Not until this very moment had these claims resonated so vividly. Cersei had been but a child, and a child could not have borne great resemblance to a woman, to a mother. But she had grown. She now resembled not the girl of Lannisport that Joanna's cousins had known in their youth, but the woman she had been in her daughter's time; a mother. This phantom, incorporeal as it was, showed Cersei the Joanna she knew, the one she remembered—and, in Joanna's figure, she saw her mother and herself, both images intertwined in a way she had never thought possible.
She ran to her and wrapped her arms about her waist—she only came that high, for that was how hugging Mother had always been. Yet when she drew back, she was once again a height with the woman, eyes on a level with her own.
For one dizzying moment the woman was not her mother but the Mother, arcane mystique and bodily reality, frightening and inspiring awe in being alive twice over.
Cersei awoke in that moment to the quickening, her son drumming against the backside of her navel from within her womb.
He was real, this unborn son of hers. He was real; he lived and moved. A person, someday, and a person needed a name—a Lannister name, a King of the Rock. Loreon was the first name to come to her mind, then Gerold. But no—it ought to be a name that began with a J, like Mother's. Joffrey, perhaps.
Yes, Joffrey; that was the one. Like the westerman who married a daughter of House Lannister and took his wife's name as his own. Joff had also been the name of one of Queen Rhaenyra's boys. A good name: a Lannister name and a princely name both, and a J name—like Joanna, like Jaime.
"Joffrey," she said, testing the name aloud. Her son stirred as if in agreement.
Tywin seemed almost relieved when Joanna decreed she would nurse you herself. her aunt had written. I suspect he was distrustful of wetnurses in general after Father took Gerion's wetnurse as his mistress…
Cersei had always known the story of how Mother forbade any wetnurse, insisting on nursing the twins herself. Even with two children, she had refused. Until now Cersei had never given the story a second thought, but in that moment she vowed, with great conviction, that she would do the same.
"Joff," she said again. She placed her hand over the quavering below her skin and imagined her son's hand palm-to-palm with her own on the other side. It felt like a promise.
Amongst the Kingsguard, there had always been an understanding that guarding the Queen was uniquely Jaime's duty. When Robert went on his hunting trips, there was never any question that Jaime would be among those left behind to guard Cersei.
Over the past months, Jaime's role as the Queen's foremost protector had been increasingly solidified. Now that Cersei was pregnant, the court treated her with an added level of deference. A quiet suggestion that she was feeling tired or unwell was all it took for her to be excused from any situation without question, being escorted back to her chambers under the watchful eye of her dutiful brother.
Jaime wondered how anyone might believe those claims. There had been some nausea, true—some of which he swore he felt himself—but that had now passed. Cersei had always been radiant, but now she positively glowed, as if she carried the sun's light with her into even the darkest rooms. Much like the courtiers, Jaime noticed his sister had begun to inspire some newfound reverence in him as well. He felt increasingly aware that, within the confines of her body, she held the essence of all they were, all they had ever desired to become—two bodies fused together, melded into one—and she seemed all the brighter and more luminous for it.
For his sister, Jaime wagered, her pregnancy meant being granted a share of control she had always craved—over her body, the King, the realm. Yet for him—in spite of the tangles of deceit they had begun to weave all too soon—it was simpler, somehow. It meant he had been vested with the power to whisk Cersei away, to steal her out from under the eyes of the court. It meant escorting her through the courtyards and the Godswood each time the Queen's state demanded her to take the airs, basking in the glow of their golden secret. And in Robert's absence, it meant the ability to sleep by her, under the duty of guarding the King's wife and heir through the night—a dignified pretext for sharing Cersei's bed through a few glorious mornings and sleepless nights.
That morning, as he woke, she was his very first sight. He had fallen asleep with her wrapped in his arms, but now they lay curled face-to-face, arms and legs folded in, his head tucked into the crook between her chin and breast; they had migrated in sleep back to their position in the womb. In moments such as this, with his mind obscured by the veil of half-sleep, Jaime found it easy to forget their truth—the truth of who they were. As he watched Cersei sleep, her face luminous and soft, he could have sworn it was his wife that he gazed at.
His sister had sunlight upon her eyelids, and a warm breeze rustled her hair. Beams of golden light seeped through the gaps in the windows with a fullness that suggested some sort of eagerness, a desire to slide against her skin, to trace the growing curves of her body. Jaime mirrored the sun in its silent appraisal of her.
He went to her eyes first, then cheeks and lips and neck, with fingertips and lips and soft kisses that wavered along with the fluttering of her eyelashes. Then he ran fingers over her abdomen, tracing the new lines there. There was an unpaid debt between them for every time she had left marks on his clavicle that he had been forbidden from repaying, lest Robert or a handmaiden see. Now Jaime splayed his fingers over the marks that documented their union, and thought perhaps that debt was paid. He kissed each mark the same way she did the scars he incurred in battle, sliding fingertips across every fresh imprint of change, every sign of growth—their child's growth—that lay engraved, etched into her. Let them not fade, he hoped. Let her forever carry the sign of the child he'd gotten on her.
He heard a slight sound, the soft rustling of fabric against skin, as Cersei's body shifted underneath him. Heady with the scent of her, he drew back as she startled awake and laughed at him, soft and drowsy-eyed. This, he thought with sudden clarity, was summer—alight and fertile, unspeakably alive. He closed his eyes, breathing sunlight and skin—breathing her in, like a gust of fresh wind—and curled an arm around her shoulders, pulling her in for a languid kiss. The moment their lips parted, she slid her body downward to rest her head against him.
"Sleep, sister. I didn't mean to wake you."
She reached out, running a single finger along a red line on his skin, and then, to where the same line continued on her own—a crease in the sheet, imprinted onto their entwined bodies as they slept. "Are you quite certain? You did seem awfully intent on attracting my attention."
Jaime laughed, the sound of it bright and clear inside his head. She seemed at ease, there upon his chest, limbs entwined with his in ways that defied the boundaries of flesh. This peace, this leisurely grace, was something Jaime associated with the afterglow of their unions. Yet that had been many hours past, and here she was, awoken this way, apropos to nothing.
In the evening, he had been complete—held by her as every morsel of his being coalesced with hers, her presence within him every bit as palpable as the length of his cock inside her—one with her in soul and seed and blood. Yet, as she moved against him, lips hovering near, cheek pressed to his heart—impossibly close—he felt something akin to the fullness of their embraces, to the unearthly relief of losing himself inside her.
In the evening, he had been complete—but perhaps that, too, was a sort of completeness.
When she fled her own body, it was always Jaime's that she went to. His body was hers too, after all, and safer and better fortified than her own. Summoning their bond and clawing her way along it, leaving her own body empty and lifeless, was a difficult trick, but one she had mastered since her marriage.
On the nights when she was called to her husband's chambers, when he claimed his rights, when she went away inside, she never stayed gone for long. Yet now, as she stood naked, surveying herself before the ornate mirror, she wondered if she had always come back quite in full.
She studied herself in the mirror, bare skin and gold hair, breasts fuller and belly rounding, and before she even realized it she was laughing, loud and unrestrained.
No bruises marred her. Robert—thank the gods—had never left a mark on her that did not fade away, given enough time. She spread her fingers over the narrow lines that had formed across her abdomen. These, she knew, might lighten but would never fully vanish. Her lover and her child, writ into her skin for all the days of her life. She counted each one as a victory. Jaime reclaiming her body for the both of them was nothing new. It had taken many forms, from kissing every inch of her skin in reverent purification, to frantic fucking that sought to drive away aught else with its intensity. Yet none had ever had the permanency that this did.
She was more fully in her body than she had been in a long time.
She reached back into her memory. To walk the halls of the Red Keep, their secret flush beneath her skin, was an unwontedly familiar feeling—like being a child roaming the halls of Casterly Rock in Jaime's clothes; a secret in plain sight. Knowing no one else knew, they had nearly floated; it was a triumph over the adults who governed their lives. You think you control us but you do not. You say we are different, but we are not—look, you cannot even tell us apart.
When her breasts had come in it had been with trepidation which quickly turned into sickening horror when she realized she could not pass for Jaime anymore. Her own body had turned against her, shoring up the predictions of adults. Her septa warned her that her moon's blood would start—commonly by twelve or thirteen. Cersei had glowered at the old woman, swearing that she would not bleed—spitting, "And I am not common," for good measure. When her blood came all the same, it had been a bitter betrayal of her own flesh.
She was not a child this time. This was not some cruel twist of nature; now her body grew lush at her bidding. It was their doing, willful and deliberate—for her babe, for herself. If her body had betrayed her once before, this was restitution.
She was not a child this time; she was the Queen of all Seven Kingdoms. For every older woman who presumed to know, with their knowing smiles and condescending advice, they did not. It was far easier to smile politely, Cersei found, when she had the silent litany, You will hail the child my brother planted in me as your king.
At first, Jaime was afraid.
He had been able to keep his unspoken fears at bay, for a time. Throughout the past months he had subdued them, watching them turn to dust in the light of day—yet, much like dust, they still lingered in dark corners, never truly forgotten.
He had sought Pycelle's advice once, pulling the man aside and quietly questioning him on the matter of Cersei's safety. "The Queen's pregnancy has been an easy one," the maester had declared, dismissing Jaime's fears with a levity he found disconcerting. "She is young and healthy."
Jaime did not mention that both of those things had been true of their mother as well, nor did he ask the other side of that question, the one he truly feared: What if the child had Tyrion's condition?
If Cersei died and he followed her… this might be sooner than Jaime would prefer, but their death was something he had never truly feared. He wondered, with macabre amusement, what form such a death would take on his body. What would a maester examining his corpse conclude had killed him? Yes, Lord Lannister, your son died in childbirth…
But an orphaned dwarf child? If Father arrived at court in the wake of that, Jaime had a sickening suspicion that he would not make the same decision he had made at Tyrion's birth twice. To imagine his child as some second rendition of his baby brother, and one that he could not protect—those were the moments when fear took ahold of Jaime's lungs.
And what still if Cersei and the dwarf child both survived? What would she make of her babe then?
Yet when the time came, and Cersei took to the birthing bed, though, Jaime banished those thoughts. Fear was his sister's right, today, not his. He was her annex; he would take her fear and hold it for her, but he could not afford to have any of his own.
Cersei scoffed at the unasked question writ across her brother's face. "I can take pain." But as her eyes scanned the room—a maester, two midwives, and a frankly obscene number of maids—she squeezed his hand with sudden urgency. In a voice far needier than her pride typically allowed, she breathed in his ear, "Don't leave me alone with these people."
Cersei did not scream or cry as she gave birth to her child. She groaned, whimpered, and cursed, but she did not wail. She had been told childbirth would be the most painful thing she would ever experience, and perhaps it was that, but it was not the worst thing she had ever had to endure. This pain had purpose, and she had her brother at her side. She had withstood worse, and she had done so in unwavering silence, refusing to cry out or let herself be broken. So too did she endure this.
More than anything, childbirth was long. Pycelle assured her that this was common for a woman's firstborn. Always, why did they always think being assured she was common was somehow a comfort?
The queen did not cry until they placed her babe—her son—in her arms.
She had thought she loved him fiercely even in the womb, but she had not known the true extent of it until that very moment. Her love for the boy was a love she had thought impossible to feel towards anyone but Jaime, a feeling wrought of sureness and conviction. This was love born of birth, insured unto death.
As she held her son, marveling at the miracle of him, her eyes teared up. For every moment she gazed at him, he looked more like her brother. She had known he would, prayed he would, and yet nothing had prepared her for the actuality of it. The infant was them manifest, their two cleaved halves melded back together, kicking and fierce and more beautiful than she could ever have imagined.
Her babe was crying, far bloodier and more aggrieved by this whole ordeal than she was. He squirmed against her, latching onto her nipple. Somewhere far away the maester was speaking, but she did not hear his words. Moments later he approached her and reached for her child, and she snarled—an animalistic sound that surprised her almost as much as the maester, who quickly backed away. Somewhere to her right, she heard Jaime chuckle that smirking laugh of his.
He stood by Cersei's bedside and held her hand, held it through the throes of labor, welcoming the unyielding grasp of her fingers as part of his share of pain. Even as her nails cut through his skin, he did not flinch. They were one person in two bodies, and in this moment of extreme physicality, he felt a specter, watching his own body from outside himself.
His sister let go of his hand only to hold her son.
When she did, Jaime suddenly found himself unanchored. He looked about, half-waking from a trance. Cersei was cradling the babe, beaming and half-sobbing. He reached up to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. She didn't seem to notice.
She was elated, enraptured, and he was—what? What was a man supposed to feel when the love of his life gave birth to their firstborn child? Surely not this guarded detachment, carefully schooling his face not to show anything unwonted—or, perhaps, anything at all.
This was his Cersei; the raw side of her which he rarely glimpsed in the presence of others. She was softly weeping, making no move to control her tears. When the maester stepped too close she snarled at him, a feral sound that made Jaime chuckle, flooded with a sudden rush of pride, and he ached to kiss her.
His sister's openness made his own restraint constrict all the more acutely. Jaime glanced uncomfortably at one of the midwives. You should not be here, her reproachful face silently insisted. For the first time that day, Jaime wondered if perhaps the midwives were right. What was his role now? Cersei had no need of him, and the babe certainly didn't.
Still feeling rather like a specter, he reached out to his sister again, squeezing her shoulder. When she did not glance up, he looked around the room once more then slipped out the door. The midwife gave him an approving nod as he exited. No one else gave him a second glance.
He fleetingly thought to get drunk, but that had never been his vice. He found himself instead in the courtyard by the White Sword Tower, blade in hand, practicing until his limbs quivered with exhaustion and his breath grew ragged.
He collapsed, aching, on the first step of the tower, leaning against the wall and vaguely thinking he ought to stay awake—his sister would call for him when she regained her strength.
Jaime woke at dawn, his back impossibly sore on the steps, his hand still imprinted with the shape of his twin's nails, and the cloak of one of his sworn brothers spread over him.
Cersei had not sent for him.
There was not yet a name for what came over him once he regained awareness. The largest measure of it was loneliness, tinged with a helplessness that he had never been taught to feel, mingled with grief pungent enough to rival the one he felt upon his—their—mother's passing. The eeriness of it was not lost on him—part of his mind seemed eager to greet life with thoughts fit for death, and it unsettled him, raising questions within him he did not know whether or how to answer. But above these feelings loomed another—something quite unexplainable, icy and taunting and a touch too close to betrayal.
Her brother's reckless foolhardiness was contagious. It had always been easy—so easy—to let him convince her they were half gods, golden and magnificent and unbreakable.
Joff's existence instilled in Cersei fear like she had never before known. His body—this delicate bundle of softness and skin—both fascinated her and filled her with dread. He was so tiny, so fragile. One wrong word making its way to the Spider and her son's head would be smashed against the wall.
She dreamt of Princess Elia's little boy, red pulp in a red cloak, and awoke in a cold sweat. She sat in the nursery with Joff until dawn, cradling his sweet-smelling head to her breast and feeling the soft spot on his crown pulse in time with his little heartbeat. As she closed her eyes and held him closer, allowing the scent of him to set her mind at ease, she vowed to protect him, to guard him with her life, if need be.
"Do not wrap him in red," she told Joff's nurse when she appeared.
In the light of morning, her fears loosened their death-grip slightly. Exhausted, Cersei returned to her bed and slept again, only to wake an hour later, "gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds" still ringing in her ears. She ran to the nursery, not stopping even to pull on her dressing gown. When she got within earshot—still a ways down the corridor—she heard her son crying and her heart nearly stopped.
But when she threw the door open, nothing was amiss. Joff was whole and hale, crying at nothing in particular—he was a fussy baby. The nurse had been rocking him, and handed him over to his mother without a word. Once he was safely in her arms, Joff quieted.
Cersei looked down at his golden blanket and shuddered. "Do not wrap him in gold."
"What color should I wrap him in then, Your Grace?" the nurse asked. She did not have to be told to know the queen would be displeased to see the child wrapped in her husband's house colors.
She considered. "Green. Wrap him in green." Perhaps it will hurry along his eyes.
Jaime did not know what to make of the babe, equal parts intrigued and repulsed.
Joffrey was a tiny, wrinkled, red thing. The maester proclaimed him large for a newborn, but to Jaime's eye he didn't look quite done yet, not quite formed enough to be in the world so soon.
Cersei insisted her son looked like Jaime, but Jaime thought he simply looked like an infant. Joff's cheeks were so puffy they almost sagged, his nose was an upturned stub. His eyes were the blue-gray of many babes, and his hair—while certainly blond—was still too fine to have much color at all, more translucent than gold. He reminded Jaime more of Elia's Aegon than anyone else, and it was a comparison that made him uneasy.
And, yet Jaime was curious. The boy's hands in particular awed him, the nails and joints impossibly small for the level of detail they held. And while he didn't agree with Cersei's assessment that Joffrey looked just like them, there was something familiar in the set and shape of his eyes.
So yes; he would like to hold the child, perhaps.
He assented with a noncommittal nod of his head, and Cersei beckoned him to come closer. Jaime approached his sister gingerly, all too conscious of his limbs and stance.
"Come—careful, now. You should have your arms placed like this."
Her eyes seldom left the babe, even as she spoke. She cradled the child, holding him flush to her breast, and her intent seemed to falter for the briefest of moments before she held him out towards Jaime. Joffrey cooed softly, staring at Cersei with large, gleaming eyes.
Jaime held his arms as his sister had indicated, but she did not seem to realize. "Cersei," he said softly to get her attention.
She looked up then, and as she did she saw, in the corner of her eye, a servant entering the room. She met Jaime's gaze for a split second, gesturing to the servant with a flick of her eyes and giving an imperceptibly small shake of her head. Not now.
Not now—always not now. He gave her a look of reproach, but she was already gazing at the babe again and did not notice. That, far more than the servant, sent a shot of anger—better to call it anger than fear—through Jaime.
Cersei was reluctant to let anyone hold her son. He ought to be the exception—was he not always the exception?—yet that he could live with, he thought. It was Cersei unreachable, lost to him in some haze of motherhood, that frightened him more than he cared to admit.
He wanted to tell her to send the servant away. He wanted to tell her that uncles had been known to hold their nephews from time to time—it was not unheard of. If Father ever held them, Jaime had no recollection of it, but he clearly remembered Uncle Gerion giving them piggyback rides until they grew too big, and he longed to remind his sister of that.
He did not. This was the way or court; standing by, playing the silent sentinel until the moment he could bear it no more plunged his blade into Aerys, knowing his life was forfeit. Today, he knew, was not that dire, despite the storm raging in his breast.
He hated to find himself holding back his words when Joff had no qualms about demanding Cersei's attention, wailing for her. She would fly to her son's side, sending away the servants (even without a wetnurse, there were still two different nurses to watch over the crown prince in shifts) to gather the babe in her arms and tend to him herself.
There was a certain shame in admitting, even to oneself, that one envied an infant. Still, in spite of Jaime's aversion to that notion, he could devise no other way to explain what he often felt towards Joffrey—the realization was bitter and daunting, but inevitable. He resented Cersei's devotion to the child, the undivided affection she used to dedicate to him, alone. She was part of him—always—but she was part of the child too. Her baby was not the missing half of her, yet he was half her.
Here at last was someone who could exert an equal pull on his twin.