Chapter Text
Principal Pycelle looked back and forth between the two mothers, who sat fuming in his office. These were never his favorite sorts of meetings because no matter how often these affluent Southern mothers might kick their kids in the britches, Lord help you if you were the one in the unenviable position of having to suggest that they do so. They sat in twin wooden chairs with red leather cushions, a pair of prim bookends, seething in the yellow autumn light slanting through the blinds that hung in the tall windows beside his old oak desk.
Catelyn Stark was the first to break the silence after the lengthy pause. “Mr. Pycelle, I’m sure Mrs. Lannister wants to make sure her boy is treated fairly, just like any other parent,” she began carefully, trying to contain her simmering rage. “But he has been harassing my daughter since the beginning of the school year and I do not want there to be any mistake about that.” She fixed her blue-green eyes on Pycelle’s face with an intensity that even made him quake a little in his loafers. “I expect you to handle this appropriately.”
Cersei Lannister, seated three feet to Catelyn Stark’s right, troubled herself less with hiding her simmering rage. She was a golden-haired Georgia belle, a steel magnolia to the core, but she sported thorns bigger than switchblades itching for an excuse to pop out. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Stark, but what proof do I have that Joffrey even did what your daughter claims he did? I’m not going to stand for him receiving detention on her word and nothing else.” She paused, smiling a smile that dripped contempt. “How do we know, Mr. Pycelle, that the girl’s even telling the truth, for pity’s sake?”
Pycelle sighed. “Mrs. Lannister, I’ve already spoken with a number of students who saw Joffrey kick Sansa’s music stand over in orchestra.”
“A childish prank,” Cersei replied dismissively, “hardly worthy of suspension. It could have been an accident.”
Pycelle sighed again, heavier this time. “It wasn’t just that, it was the language.” He’d really almost rather be stuck in a locked room with vipers than with these two angry women, particularly Mrs. Lannister. She had too much of her father in her, and he’d never been able to deal with him, either.
Catelyn glared at her. “I understand your boy’s been through a lot recently, but that’s no excuse for the type of things he said to her, which I cannot and will not repeat.”
Catelyn Stark was more diplomatic, but the end result was still the same. Misery for him. In the end, he held firm in the face of Cersei Lannister’s seething contempt and veiled threats, and declared that he would administer disciplinary action. He resisted Catelyn Stark’s insistence that he be suspended, and instead settled on two weeks of detention for Joffrey’s behavior toward Sansa. Neither parent would be satisfied and both would leave his office hating him; in other words, he’d done an exemplary job. He stared into his fish tank, looked eye to eye with his goldfish for several moments, and began counting the days until retirement again.
**
Catelyn marched out to the car, her spine stiff and her lips still pressed firmly together. She tried to remember to breathe, but it was never particularly easy. She had six children, no husband, a business to run and godforbid she wanted to ever take a moment to do anything for her own enjoyment. She saw Cersei Lannister, four spaces down, fuming as she got into her Range Rover.
Most of her wanted to simply head back to the coffee shop. She’d closed it for the morning so she could take this meeting, and she hated it leaving to sit like that; not making money, while boxes of raw cane sugar and Colombian fair trade coffee sat in the back room, not getting unpacked.
She wanted to talk to Cersei Lannister again. Her mother wolf instincts were ready to tear the woman’s throat out, but Catelyn was no fool. She reminded herself again and again that this wasn’t Chicago, it was a small town, and her family was going to have to live with everyone else’s. Especially the Lannisters, whose patriarch had a grip on half the properties in town in one way or another. And with three of the six kids in her care being…. well, different, in one way or another, she didn’t need to be making a lot of waves. She needed diplomacy. She needed to fit in.
She lost her husband, too, Cat reminded herself. It’s no wonder the boy is acting up. She gamely tried to couch things from a sympathetic angle as she approached the sharply dressed blonde. “Cersei,” she called, quickening her steps on the wet asphalt in the parking lot.
Cersei shot her a disgusted look and continued climbing into her truck. “I don’t have anything else to say right now, Catelyn. You need to talk to your daughter about making problems for my son,” she said coldly, and pulled the door shut.
Catelyn couldn’t tell whether the light blush in Cersei’s cheeks was due to the heat (normal, for early fall) or the after-effects of anger. “Cersei, you and I both know that Joffrey has a problem. And it’s not so hard to understand, with losing his father-”
Cersei’s green eyes glared at her through the open window. “His father did us all a favor by dropping dead, and I’ll thank you not to mention him again.”
“Nevertheless,” Catelyn pressed, perturbed, but undeterred, “sometimes boys struggle when they lose their fathers. My own kids-”
“I’m not interested in getting to know you,” Cersei interrupted, starting the massive engine. She fixed her with a stare that was at once disinterested and casually murderous. She was a lion that wouldn’t think twice about killing. The truck did the roaring for her. She started to roll up the window.
Catelyn placed a firm hand on the tinted glass as it rose, and Cersei stopped putting the window up for a moment. “You might want to consider it,” she pressed. “We’ve got at least four more years of this and it would be much better if we could find a way to deal with each other.”
Cersei resumed the window’s ascent. “I have one. It’s called, rolling up my window and driving away.”