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"What the hell are you doing here?"
He won't give her the pleasure of shuddering. The faint glow of the candles slashes her beautiful, hate-ravaged face with shifting shadows.
"I could ask you the same question."
Her fleshy lips stretch into a grotesque grimace and reveal to the great night the whining, crying little girl she never stopped being.
"Go away," she cackles in a perfect parody of the queen she always wanted to be, never was.
And he bows gracefully, as a kind and noble knight would to the lady having the favor of his heart.
He knows perfectly well that she feels all the mocking and contemptuous meaning of his gesture.
He knows that she knows how much he hates her.
"Yes, Your Grace," he taunts her with an ignoble ironic smile.
.
Cersei is a lying whore, she's been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and probably Moon Boy for all I know.
Jaime wants to start screaming but it's too late, Cersei has already vanished into the night.
.
"How dare you come back here?"
"My sweet sister, how nice it is to see you again."
Tyrion and Cersei stand face to face at opposite ends of a hallway. The sun rises and fills the sky with beautiful colors that, in a sorry contrast, only reveal the ugliness distorting their features and poisoning their hearts.
"I am home. I am a Lannister," he replies, as if he felt the need to justify himself, again and again.
To the rest of the world, the lion he always wears as proudly as a purse of gold coins has never been anything but a joke, starting with his own blood.
"You are a traitor," Cersei spits.
That's all she's ever been able to do, spit at him, insult him, too, and it all gets really tiresome.
"You don't belong here, you vile little monster, you-"
"My name is Tyrion Lannister, dearest sister, and that is if even your intellectual abilities were never enough to understand what that means."
He turns away.
He won't give her the satisfaction of having the last word.
"Casterly Rock is my home, and I'm not going anywhere."
.
Where do whores go?
Tyrion begins to watch for Tysha's shadow amidst that of his memories.
.
She wanders the corridors of Casterly Rock like a caged lioness, the traces of her footsteps will soon be visible on the stone floor, as well as those of her acidic tears and those of the stained blood she longs to shed.
Every time she feels the presence of the lame and useless lions who are her brothers, an imaginary roar tears her throat and pierces their hearts poisoned by betrayal. The long golden mane is hers, and something so bright is not destined to remain in the shadow of two fools who have never done anything to be worthy of the red glory that has run through their veins since birth, and then suddenly she remembers that this mane, she no longer has it, that it was taken from her and that fate has conspired against her so that it does not grow back.
Cersei is too angry and especially too self-centered to wonder why the corridors of the castle are as hopelessly empty as her heart, and her mind may be too unhinged for her to realize that emptiness has replaced many of her memories.
"You're pathetic," Tyrion sneers every time they have the misfortune to cross paths.
She never sees Jaime - she doesn't look.
.
I'm a lioness. Those two are just kittens.
But even lionesses can be afraid, and that's something Cersei would rather forget.
.
Cersei, Jaime and Tyrion all sense that something is wrong with the castle being too empty and their memories too cloudy, but they don't talk about it, even though they should.
Instead, they strut around with their heads high as they have done all their lives, pretending not to have noticed anything wrong so as not to appear weak in front of those they see as their worst enemies.
.
"I lost my nose."
Jaime feels Tyrion is highly satisfied with his idiotic thought.
"You lost your hand."
No golden hand, here, and Jaime has turned the castle upside down looking for it, just another way to waste his time.
His stump is starting to burn.
Tyrion turns to Cersei. Jaime knows he's having the time of his life, because after all, it's not like he has anything else to do.
"And you, you lost your hair."
Calling her a whore wouldn't have caused such a violent reaction - he muses with hateful satisfaction that it's because it's the one and only truth.
She's been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and probably Moon Boy for all I know.
The slap burns his cheek.
Cersei chokes with rage.
Tyrion continues to smile.
"Really, what a great trio we make."
His slightly demented laughter is not without reminding him of his twin's mad, wildfire eyes.
Yes, Jaime thinks, bitter, while watching her walk away, fists clenched. A superb trio.
.
"I still want to kill you."
The gleam of surprise that Jaime can't quite stifle in his eyes draws a small chuckle from him. Tyrion likes to think that what he sees is a wound, too, a wound on the Kingslayer's overly arrogant, overly perfect face, a wound that brings him a little closer to the monster he has for a brother. Perhaps Jaime thought they would join forces against Cersei because it's a beautiful image, after all, the proud, repentant knight and his little brother, who is purer at heart than the rest of his family, united against their deranged sister. It's tempting, it's pleasing, but it's just that, an image, and Tyrion intends to remind him of that.
"This... doesn't change anything," he continues, and he's not sure he can hide the tremor of fear in his voice because he doesn't know what this is, he doesn't know what these flashes that light up his mind for a brief moment in a swirl of voices and faces and pain are, he doesn't know anything, and if there's one thing he's always hated, it's knowing nothing.
"Do you still think about Tysha?" Jaime asks, pretending not to know, but Tyrion is not fooled.
Where did you send Tysha? his own voice whispers in a lost corner of his memory.
Tywin's fiery, defiant eyes stare back at him from the past.
Wherever whores go.
"Do you still think about Cersei?" Tyrion replies in the same tone.
He, too, knows how to hit where it hurts, and he never needed a sword for that.
No warmth remains in Jaime's icy smile.
.
"Well, kill me. I'm right here, in front of you. I'm unarmed. Kill me like you killed Father, like a coward, with a coward's weapon. Go ahead and kill me."
It is when they spew their hatred and offer the sky and the world the inner ugliness that keeps them alive that Tyrion thinks about how similar Cersei and Jaime are.
.
Tyrion stands alone in the deserted armory and lifts a ridiculously splendid sword that is too heavy for him and punches the air randomly with gestures that ooze pain and clumsiness.
Jaime's ghost is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
.
Days and nights follow one another in an endless stream of anguish, but they are not willing to give in and thus end this dance of deceit.
When they sleep, events they supposedly never witnessed parade before their closed eyes in an explosion of dead stars.
And Cersei dreams of fire.
.
"You didn't answer my letter."
Cersei and Jaime haven't been this close since the night they opened their eyes lying next to each other in the deserted castle in an almost perfect replica of the day they were born, and yet it's as if an infinite rift kept growing between them.
"No," Jaime replies.
His amused smile hints at a note of cruelty that only she in the world is capable of noticing, perhaps because the smile is also her own.
"I burned it."
He takes a step toward her, their noses brushing against each other but not touching.
She's been fucking Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and probably Moon Boy for all I know.
"I read it and burned it."
Jaime can feel a veritable dark sun of hatred swelling in her chest, where her heart should have been if she had one.
Come at once. Help me. Save me. I need you now as I have never needed you before. I love you. I love you. I love you. Come at once.
"I read it, burned it, and forgot it. As if it had never existed."
The slap he had been waiting for with baffling impatience does not come. He wants to hurt her, he wants to hurt her as she hurt him and he wants to feel the full extent of her pain as if it were his own, but her pain is his, he then reminds himself, her pain is his and always will be and that knowledge is much more painful than any blow.
Cersei's fingers close around his wrist and guide him without delicacy to her mangled mane.
"Look," she croons in a little girl's voice. "Look, look what you did to me."
"I didn't do anything to you."
"They undressed me, Jaime. They undressed me and they took my hair, my beautiful hair."
He pulls away with a sharp gesture.
"I didn't do anything to you," he repeats, but neither he nor Cersei are truly convinced.
"They paraded me through the streets naked, like a war prize. They spat on me as if I were a whore."
"So they were right."
"They could have killed me," she continues, choosing not to raise her voice, even as the urge to tear out the eyes that read the letter and turned away from it burns through her veins. "I could have been dead already, Jaime."
He turns his back toward her.
"If you were dead, I would have known," he spits, and in that moment he hates himself more than he will ever hate her.
.
In his dreams, Tyrion drowns in two amethyst-colored eyes and buries his hands in long silver-gold hair softer than silk.
He has seen true beauty and yet, even though the memory of Daenerys haunts his heart and especially his body, he still loses his breath as soon as his gaze ventures a little too close to Cersei's face.
"Did you bed her?" she asks him, radiant with arrogance.
He won't give her the pleasure of asking her who she's talking about.
"Yes," he lies in a bored tone.
"I can't believe she let you touch her."
"Jealous, sweet sister?"
"Of a whore? Certainly not!"
Tyrion always knew how to make her angry.
Where do whores go?
"You should, though. She was younger and more beautiful than you."
Lies have always come much easier to him than the truth, and that may be their greatest similarity.
Cersei's ashen mane will always radiate more than Daenerys's moon hair.
Cersei walks up to him, grabs his chin without gentleness and forces him to look up.
"I suppose it's not surprising that the dragon queen was turned on by the idea of sleeping with a monster."
Her tone is vile and her grin reeks of satisfaction, as does her walk as she leaves him there.
Her icy laughter rips through Tyrion's insides and turns them into a vile, blackish mush.
.
It was not Daenerys that Tyrion took to his bed, she was not the one he eagerly undressed in the dark bilge of a ship after a storm in which he thought his longing for revenge would sink to the bottom of the Narrow Sea along with him.
Penny was ugly and he didn't want her, but she was a woman nonetheless, and it only took a hint of imagination for her porcine face and pig-like cries to take on the regal appearance of the one he had sworn to serve.
"The Dragon Queen's lackey," Jaime drawls as they watch the sunset through a window for the tenth or thousandth time since their return to Casterly Rock.
Tyrion sniffs contemptuously.
"I would have called you Cersei's lackey, but that would be inaccurate, wouldn't it?" he retorts with a big smile.
He remembers Daenerys's promises, her rosy cheeks and uncertain queenly walk, the kiss she placed on his forehead, the badge pinned to his clothes.
"You don't have the excuse of having been manipulated," he concludes by throwing a glance to the failed knight who is his brother and who has never known how to do anything else than to chase the dust of honor.
.
In his dreams, Tyrion still sees the same purple eyes that used to set off bonfires in his stomach, but something's wrong, they're the emerald color of the madness he left behind along with his father's still warm body.
When he wakes up shaking, the feeling of the rope tightening around his neck is still there.
.
"What the hell were you doing in the Riverlands?"
She glares at Jaime as if a single glance could freeze him on the spot or better yet, consume him.
The sensation of the razor running over every inch of her skin slashes her from the inside.
He doesn't answer, his eyes haunted by something only he can see.
"What the hell were you doing in the Riverlands with that fat cow Brienne of Tarth?" she resumes, clarifying her question, furious that the golden fool she has for a twin doesn't even bother to look into the reflection of his own eyes.
"Nothing that concerns you."
She comes closer to him with a move that has nothing graceful anymore and evokes rather a lioness ready to pounce on her prey.
"Did you fuck her?"
Cersei pictures Jaime's body moving in rhythm with the body of this parody of a woman, feels nauseous but cannot scream or tear him apart, cannot give him this sadistic joy.
"Yes," he replies, puffed up with pride and importance. "I fucked her, exactly like you fucked Lancel and Osmund Kettleblack and probably Moon Boy, for all I know."
He pins her against the wall, his stump against her throat.
"Tell me, Cersei, did they make you come?" he growls.
A devastating fire seems to stir his heart with a murderous impulse.
"Well?" he insists when the silence has become so intense that he shakes even more. "Did they make you come? Did you scream their names? Did you, Cersei? Did you?"
"If I had come, you would have felt it," she taunts him, and it works because suddenly there is nothing to stop her from collapsing and she falls to the floor like a weak, fragile, disarticulated doll.
Tears are burning her eyes.
The only weapon that the Gods were willing to grant me and you, you fool, are too stupid to understand it.
"I came."
He pronounces the words slowly, as if to taste them and revel in them, even though he has nothing left of Brienne of Tarth but memories already half-faded.
"I took her maidenhood, and I came, and she came, she came so many times I lost count."
Cersei muses that he looks like a little child like this, an insignificant little child telling his achievement of the day to anyone who will listen.
"You didn't come," she declares with certainty as she struggles to her feet.
"I told you that-"
"You may have fucked her," she spews, so disgusted by the thought. "Maybe you honored her with your seed."
Her heart sinks to the bottom of her empty belly and makes her want to writhe in pain.
"But you didn't come."
This time, she is the one who pushes him against the wall.
"I would have felt it."
Cersei is Jaime and Jaime is Cersei and, really, it hurts that he even tried to forget that.
.
Like Cersei's, Jaime's chilling dreams are haunted by fire. An emerald explosion, roars, blood, rubble.
A body that is almost impossible to recognize, a sword - his sword.
His own sword through his body.
Darkness.
After an eternity, Jaime finally understands what, deep down, he has known all along, but the Lannisters have always had a gift for ignoring what bothers them, and perhaps that is what caused the fall of their empire of gold and blood.
.
"You killed me."
The words have the horrible bitter taste of betrayal and the even more tragic one of the fate she could not escape.
Her dream became more precise, this night, more cruel - more real.
Before her helpless eyes, the Red Keep was reduced to dust in a blast of wildfire as she sat on the Iron Throne, where she belonged, where she wouldn't let anyone else sit, least of all that whore who thought she could bring the world to her feet with her fire-breathing dragons and her teasing looks.
"You killed me!" she repeats, her eyes wide.
"You blew up the Red Keep with the wildfire the Mad King had hidden underneath," Jaime simply says, and Cersei knows he can see the scene flash before his bewildered eyes. "And half of King's Landing with it."
Cersei sees Daenerys again, proudly sitting on her dragon, embracing the city of her dreams with her slightly overconfident and far too crazy gaze.
"If I couldn't have the throne, then no one could," she murmurs, a storm of rage in her heart.
A sad, wry smile stretches Jaime's lips - she feels like she hasn't kissed them in centuries.
"The Gods did not grant you the pleasure of dying in fire," he says quite unnecessarily.
The wildfire, finally a storm to match all that fury built up since her birth, the demonstration of her inaudible screams, the ones she let out as she saw the swords ripped from her hands, as she endured Robert's rapes and insults, as she sought the power she was denied, it was her revenge on life and on those damn words that took her crown and her three children, but life is a bitch and it didn't grant her the luxury of a grand death.
"You found me in the rubble. I... I was in pain."
"You were half dead."
And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands around your pale white throat and choke the life from you.
The valonqar was never meant to be Tyrion.
Cersei pictures the moment it all began, when Jaime was born holding her foot.
"You strangled me."
"I killed myself."
"No, you killed me!"
"That's what I just said."
Cersei takes a step back, as if he had slapped her.
A mirthless laugh rises from Jaime's throat and mixes with the sound of his sobs.
.
"When I found you, you were hugging her. Your sword through your body."
The smell of burning makes him nauseous. Jaime stares blankly at the horizon.
"And what did people say?"
Tyrion finds it so predictable it's almost pathetic, and maybe it is.
"The people? There were no more people, Jaime. Just dead bodies and ashes."
Ashes, so many ashes that settled on his hair and his heart, ashes in Daenerys's delirious eyes.
He pulls his brother's arm to force him to look at him and in the process the truth he has always tried to deny.
"And what would you have wanted people to say about you if they could have?"
Jaime tries to pull away, to no avail. It's a different kind of strength he'd need, and he has the misfortune of never having possessed it.
As always, Tyrion understands him better than he understands himself, and his words have the abominable taste of truth.
"The repentant Kingslayer come to save the Seven Kingdoms from the Queen's madness. Is that, Jaime, what you wanted people to think of you?"
"Stop."
"What else did you want? For people to write a song singing your glory? Did you want to be Arthur Dayne's worthy successor?"
"Tyrion-"
"You wanted to save King's Landing a second time to show you could be an honorable man?"
"That's enough!" Jaime roars as he roughly pushes him away.
Tyrion nearly falls but manages to catch himself, struggling to believe that it was Jaime who just shoved him like this and not his other half, and he thinks that it shouldn't hurt because Jaime betrayed him and nothing would delight him more than to see his head on the end of a pike, and yet it hurts, more than any slap.
Eyes burning, Tyrion can't bear to look at him another second and turns his head away.
The time when Jaime taught him how to walk and gave him his first pony is long gone.
.
Finally, Tyrion is the last one to understand how he ended up here, and it doesn't come without a storm of incomprehension.
"She killed me," he whispers.
Cersei and Jaime stand there and no compassion shines in their eyes. Lions never feel sorry for someone who has betrayed them, especially if their own blood runs through their veins.
"I don't understand."
He almost wants to start sobbing, and this time it's not the twins who are acting like insufferable, whining children.
"I helped her. She made me her Hand. I helped her. I gave her everything, everything. I helped her and she had me hanged. And she watched me die."
It was with a deadly smile that Daenerys Targaryen watched his body convulse at the end of a rope, a hint of regret in her eyes and perhaps her heart.
I'm sorry, she sighed in a disinterested tone that finished robbing him of air. You are a threat. And threats have no place in my new world.
"A threat?" Cersei sneers, and he realizes he's been thinking out loud and is now staring at her with an unfamiliar stupid look in his eyes.
"I don't understand," he repeats, naturally hoping to get an explanation from the two people he hates most in the world.
Wherever whores go - another thing he doesn't know.
He remembers the time he managed to stroke one of the mother of dragons's children in front of her eyes, he remembers her impressed look and his own falsely modest smile that poorly hid his glee.
"What does it matter?" Cersei concludes impatiently.
Tyrion does not miss her delighted look.
"You made an alliance with that whore, and that whore ended up killing you."
And, because Cersei is Cersei, she adds with a dreamy smile:
"There's at least one thing I have to thank her for."
.
The truth was implied but none of them decide to give it real substance through words, and this little game could have gone on forever if Tyrion hadn't decided to end it.
"We're dead."
The three of them stand at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the sea and watch the waves rip on the rocks below.
The blade falls in a dark, heavy silence - the sound of the water is so familiar to them that they can't even hear it anymore.
"If we are dead... then what is this place?" asks Jaime.
"Limbo," Cersei says in a sharp voice without even looking at him.
It is a bit more contempt that he and Tyrion reap when they turn to her without bothering to hide their surprise.
Without adding anything, she turns away and quickly walks away.
"And how do we get out of here?" Jaime calls out to her, counting on the wind to carry his words away, but that was hopeless too.
.
"You should be roasting in the Seven Hells by now," Tyrion points out to Cersei, suddenly full of anger. "You are the greatest murderer in Westeros. You murdered your own people without flinching, all for the pretty little crown that should never have been yours."
"I'll take that as a compliment," she retorts, not at all upset, falsely cheerful.
She begins to circle around him with a feline gait that reminds him that the greatest evil can be hidden behind the most beautiful of faces - something she has in common with another queen.
"You like it, thinking you're better than me, right?" she teases.
He'd like to jump on her and smash her arrogant smile to a pulp and gouge out her arrogant eyes.
"I'm better than you."
"You killed my son."
"No. But I wish I had."
Maybe it's because he has no reason to lie now that his body is nothing but dust that, for the very first time, a strange spark that looks like doubt appears in the emerald ocean that has always haunted his nightmares.
"Don't get me wrong, Cersei," he growls, still full of bitterness. "Your bastard deserved to die, and so do you."
She clenches her fists.
"You're no better than me, Tyrion. I may have blown up all that wildfire, but it was your pretty little queen who finished the job... the queen you brought to Westeros."
And she bursts out laughing as if she had just said something very funny.
"Tell me, were you still hoping to become her king of the ashes just before she put the noose around your neck?"
Cersei has no intention of letting him reply and turns away. Tyrion may be better than she is, but he's not as good as he'd like to think he is, which is why he retorts with a gasp:
"I found the place where whores go!"
But that means nothing to her, and Tysha is nowhere to be found in the castle, and he is doomed to roam these walls like a lost and desperate lion for the rest of his ghostly days.
.
Sometimes, at the corner of a corridor, Jaime expects Lady Stoneheart and her vengeful eyes to appear, but this time Brienne won't be there to bend under the weight of her remorse and save the day. It's a completely irrational fear because he's dead and no longer in danger of anything, and yet he still sometimes feels the noose around his throat and sees his legs flailing.
It's almost funny that it was Tyrion who died in a way that his knightly heart calls stupid - it would have been more so if he were still alive to watch him die without lifting a finger to save him.
Brienne's eyes settle on him beyond death and his hand finds the feel of her skin against his own.
"Brienne of Tarth was in love with me," he tells Tyrion as if he had something to prove.
Kingslayer. Man without honor. Traitor.
His little brother just stares at him with a bored expression.
"Poor thing."
"And why?"
"Because you weren't in love with her."
"And what do you know about it?"
Thunder couldn't have rumbled that loud. Tyrion's laughter hurts him more than the sword he pierced his heart with, and he sincerely misses the days when there was no sweeter sound to him, except of course Cersei's voice.
"I could have married her," Jaime says. "I could have lived a peaceful life with her on Tarth and given her children and..."
Tyrion is rolling around on the ground now, not finding his breath, and this show would definitely be hilarious if Jaime hadn't been so serious.
He finally calms down and, with a conviction that hurts him a little more, declares:
"You've got it all wrong, Jaime. The Kingslayer and the Maiden of Tarth... a pretty song, I agree, but the ugliness of reality has no place in songs."
"I-"
"You never cared about your children. By all the gods, you were jealous of Joffrey because he was stealing Cersei's attention."
"With her, things could have been different," he insists with the energy of despair, but Tyrion offers him no helping hand and pushes him further down.
"You are not a good man. I am not a good man. Cersei..."
He bites his lip and, because he probably thinks he's too smart to kick in an open door, doesn't finish his sentence.
The conversation ends there.
Jaime sees the reflection of his own darkness in Tyrion's eyes.
.
There is only one way out of this place, and it is an intuition that all three of them are struck with, but it is so ridiculous that they don't even dare to think about it for fear of cracking their ribs from laughing so hard.
.
"Did you mean it, in your letter?"
Cersei brushes the remnants of her mane of glory with her fingertips.
"What do you want, Jaime?"
This bedchamber is identical to the one that was hers in the real Casterly Rock, where they chased each other through the room and slept huddled together, legs and breaths intertwined. The one where they loved each other, or so she thought.
"I asked you a question."
Her nails dig into her palms.
"What do you care? You preferred to wander off into the Riverlands with that fat cow rather than come to my rescue."
"You know perfectly well it's not that simple."
Cersei wonders if he is trying to kill her again and again, her twin-valonqar destined to haunt her until the end of time. For a second she feels the cold metal of his golden hand on her tender throat again, the soft caress of his flesh hand before it closes like a bird's claws.
"And you are in no position to blame me."
"Why? You blame me for spreading my legs for someone other than you, is that it?"
Their size difference makes her vibrate with rage as she comes to stand in front of him and gets close to the body that is her but not hers, and the Gods throw their cruel malice in her face once again.
The face of Jaime hardens at once.
"I refused to believe that my sister had become the queen of whores. I was quite mistaken."
He doesn't escape the slap this time, and a part of him must be well aware that he has fully deserved it, but his foolish pride still drives him to not admit it.
"I needed those men."
"To help you turn the kingdom upside down? You did it," he scoffs.
Cersei raises her hand a second time but gives up, who is this stranger who has taken the place of her twin and does not even try to make the effort to understand her? Why doesn't he understand that she had to take care of Margaery and the other Tyrells, why did he abandon her to die, why, why, why?
"Get out."
Her tone is blunt. Jaime doesn't try to argue and heads for the door.
"You still haven't answered my question."
Cersei remains unmoved and her lips remain sealed.
.
"If Mother had survived, everything would be different."
Cersei, Jaime and Tyrion have never been able to stand the solitude and that is the only reason they spend time together. They sit on the edge of the cliff and secretly wonder what would happen if they dared to jump off, or maybe they know but are aware that they are not ready and probably never will be.
Jaime nods thoughtfully and Tyrion feels no embarrassment when a contemptuous laugh breaks through his lips.
"You're idiots, both of you."
"Well, enlighten us," Jaime retorts dryly.
"You consider Mother a saint who would have saved you from all the unkind things that have ever happened to you and the rot in your hearts, and I find that hilarious."
Cersei leaps to her feet and he's pretty sure she's going to rip his throat out.
"Don't talk about Mother like you know her! You killed her, you abominable little monster, you tore her apart from the inside, you..."
This song is so familiar to him that he knows it by heart, so he doesn't bother to listen to it again. Cersei leaves to scream her rage at the sky and the sun after giving him one last glare and he is left alone with Jaime.
"What makes you say that?" he asks, suspicious.
Tyrion almost blames himself for being about to shatter one of his last illusions - almost.
"She was Tywin Lannister's wife," he replies simply.
"So what?
"Everyone said they were happy together. Do you really think our dear father would have been happy with a saint?"
Jaime is speechless. To make things worse, Tyrion could ask him if he would have been happy with Brienne of Tarth, a relevant but useless comparison, so he won't do it.
Jaime does not say another word for the rest of the day, his mouth and mind full of bitterness.
.
"Do you still want to kill me?" he whispers to Tyrion as night falls.
Jaime is not the only one who knows how to remain silent. Tyrion shrugs and turns away, angry with himself.
.
"I could push you."
Cersei doesn't flinch and just looks at Tyrion creeping up beside her out of the corner of her eye.
"That wouldn't work," she replies dismissively. "You know as well as I do what jumping means."
The slightly surprised look he gives her makes her want to slap him again and again, until she manages to wipe all the smugness off his ugly face.
"Sweet sister, you're actually less stupid than you look."
The waves all the way down probably have the melodious sound of eternal rest, but it's highly unlikely they'll manage to hear it.
"Do you think Jaime gets it?"
Cersei rolls her eyes.
"If I understood, then he understood."
Even as she hates him with all her soul, she persists in wanting to be one with her twin, and Tyrion supposes he must admire her a little for that, because through the betrayals, the strange bond between them that he could never understand somehow manages to remain.
A grain of hope crosses Tyrion's heart, blown by a strange wind of gold and emerald, but it is immediately swept away by Cersei's indifference, and he can only watch her return to the castle, bitter.
.
In one of her dreams, Jaime and Tyrion team up to bring her down and together they choke the life from her, and Cersei screams and screams and screams but they don't listen to her, why would they listen to her, they hate each other and hatred is the only fire that will ever burn between them, and...
Cersei wakes up.
Tyrion's pale eyes glow like two dead stars in the darkness. He crushes her with his weight and Cersei is helpless before his sharp words.
"When I was in Essos, I told someone that all I would ask from Daenerys as a reward for my help would be the opportunity to rape and kill you when I saw you again."
Panic surges through her veins and she tries to push him to the side, to no avail.
"But you changed your mind, didn't you?" Cersei spits to buy time, because she can't die anymore, but that doesn't mean she can't be defiled and broken, and that prospect scares her more than all the dragons in the world.
"The reward you wanted was that whore's hand, wasn't it?" she continues, growing more desperate.
Calling Jaime for help crosses her mind but it's useless. Jaime burned her letter, Jaime didn't come to save her, and Jaime ended up killing her.
The pain distorts Tyrion's features and she feels a savage satisfaction. Hurting him, again and again, because he killed Mother, because he's going to kill her, and then she thinks it's too late because Jaime did it and then she doesn't think anymore, doesn't know what to think, except that no one is here to help her.
Tyrion brushes her throat with his fingertips.
A minute later, he cries all the tears of his twisted little body with his head resting on her chest, like the love-starved child he has never stopped being.
.
"I made you laugh once," Tyrion murmurs, his eyes sleepy.
"What?"
"When we were children, I learned to walk on my hands. One day you saw me, and you laughed. But it wasn't a mocking laugh."
From the way she tenses up, he understands that she remembers this, but cannot tell if the the tears rolling down his cheeks taste like joy or sadness.
"You hugged me, too. When I told you that Stannis and Renly were going to fight each other instead of joining forces to fight us... you hugged me."
"What's your point, Tyrion?" she snarls.
But Tyrion does not answer: he has fallen asleep.
.
When Jaime finds them in this position the next morning, he believes he has died a second time because what he is looking at cannot possibly be true.
.
"You didn't push him away."
Cersei and Jaime, for lack of anything better to do and having exhausted their supply of dark glares, stroll side by side through the castle corridors, as they have done a thousand times in the past.
"He was crushing me, Jaime," she sneers. "And he's heavier than he looks."
"You didn't push him away," he repeats with a sigh.
She crosses her arms over her chest.
"It's amazing you didn't ask me if I spread my legs for him. Fucking her other brother is something the queen of whores would do, don't you think?"
Jaime doesn't feel hurt by her vengeful venom, just incredibly tired. He freezes abruptly.
"Did you mean what you said in your letter?" he asks for the third or hundredth time, he doesn't know anymore.
"The same stupid questions again and again..." Cersei replies angrily.
"I love you. I love you. I love you. Your words."
"My words in the letter you burned."
"Did you mean them?"
"Why did you kill yourself?"
It was an answer he expected and not a question, and he feels completely caught off guard.
"Why didn't you go back into the arms of the fat cow of Tarth-"
"Don't call her that," Jaime cuts her off, because no matter what his heart thinks of Brienne, his mind will never stop thinking of her as the chivalrous ideal he could never attain.
"Why didn't you go back to Brienne's arms after you strangled me?" Cersei asks, not because she wants to please him, but because to her Brienne is as insignificant as a small grain of sand.
Anger, jealousy, hatred, it all mixes together and makes them stare into each other's eyes in a heavy silence that drags on, and deep down maybe no words are necessary because the answer to both of their questions is the same, because they both know it and because it is the only truth they have ever known, no matter how hideous and dark it is.
Sparks fly in the air as their lips meet and never let go, sparks fly as Jaime leads Cersei into the nearest room and eagerly undresses her, sparks fly in their eyes as they rediscover the bodies they know perfectly well, Jaime caresses Cersei's breasts, buries his face between her thighs until she cries out his name, and then they roll on the bed and truly remember what it means to be one.
A few minutes or a hundred hours later, as they stare at the ceiling huddled together, Cersei and Jaime know they will never ask these questions again.
.
Cersei, Jaime and Tyrion will not be the heroes of history. There will be no songs written about their courage or wisdom or goodness, they will not be remembered as the saviors of the Seven Kingdoms, perhaps their imaginary graves will be spat upon, and their legacy of blood and ashes will be cursed, but none of this will reach them anymore.
They stand at the edge of the cliff from which Jaime jumped as a child and, unbelievable as it may seem, they are holding hands, as if they were one, finally, after all these years of crossing oceans of emptiness on their raft of hatred while crying acid tears, another kind of heroism.
To jump is to leave this life behind and move on. This is not the time they can manage to forgive each other, miracles don't exist and the three of them have learned this hard lesson in a way that is far too brutal, but they were able to take a few steps towards each other, tiny, tiny, almost insignificant steps but still enough, enough to jump.
"Where do we go next?" Tyrion, who for once doesn't have an answer for everything.
Jaime and Cersei look at each other and shrug.
"Elsewhere," Jaime simply replies.
Finally, it is Cersei who steps forward first.
"Together?" she asks reluctantly, as if saying the words could hurt her.
Jaime and Tyrion nod with determination, and the dark heroes of bitterness gather their momentum, jump, and watch the world turn white.