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“Practice your hand,” the Maester had told him as his fingers had struggled to hold the pen in his morning lessons, and while he usually enjoyed his time in the man’s rooms, he would sooner have tried to cartwheel on his aching legs than sit still and draw - the growing pains in his arms were agony, like a thousand knives jabbing into him all day and night. The Maester, who he knew the way he imagined normal boys knew their own fathers, had taken to slipping him potions for the pain, though they both knew his father would not approve - a Lannister did not show weakness, after all, and he was still a Lannister even if everyone else saw him as a pathetic excuse for one. “Draw,” the man had told him, kindly enough but clearly an order he expected the boy to follow the same way he followed instructions on how to massage his muscles or caring for cuts and bruises. So he had limped back to his room - straightening up whenever he saw or heard anyone approaching so father would not hear the servants mocking his gait again.
At his desk, propped up by half a dozen cushions, the door barred and the sea-air cooling his face, he chewed the end of his hair - he chewed pens when using them but charcoal, he had learned the hard way, tasted awful. He didn’t know what to draw, so he drew a dragon. Balerion the Black Dread from the study in ArchMaester Charrilon’s book on Aegon and his sisters - he drew with precision and every scale was done to detail from the memory of those vivid pictures that had thrilled him as a much younger boy. With the level of concentration he put into the sketch he realised as he came to finish it that he had not thought on the pain in his arms for what must have been several hours. The dragon’s eyes stared back at him as he looked at the work he had produced, and he felt pride for the first time since… he tried to think of the last time he felt pride in himself. Perhaps the first time he had conversed fluently in High Valyrian with Aunt Genna, a year or more ago, or when he had learned the Sixteen Wonders and Uncle Gerrion had clapped and cheered for him, even as Father looked uninterested. This drawing felt like an achievement akin to those, and he wished that Jaime or Gerrion would return from their adventures to give him a shred of approval for his newfound talent.
The pain in his arms returned with a vengeance the moment he was no longer focused on his work, and he reached instinctively for the small vial the Maester told him to keep with him - not poppy milk; this was not as strong or incapacitating, but he still did not like to use poisons to control his body - that was for drunks, fools and fiends and he was none of those. No, instead his fingers reached again for his coals and began to draw once more. He drew until the sun had finished it’s trek across the sky and down into the sea, and there was a study of the horse Aunt Genna had given him - Spirit, and he had just completed sister dragons for Balerion when the servants came in to light the candles. He had not thought on his pain for hours, and was amazed to find himself enjoying his work, and his mind raced with ideas of what to draw next - just one more before bed.
He wanted to draw Jaime, but Jaime’s return to Kings Landing after the war was still so raw a wound that even a year on the idea hurt too much. He could not draw himself as was suggested in some of the volumes about drawing he had found in the library as a boy - the notion of having to look in the silvered glass nauseated him worse with every passing day as fuzz and spots began to blight his face - as though the gods needed to ravage him further. He looked over his dragons again, feeling dejected now he could think of nothing else to add to the collection. And then it hit him… he had a sister… a hateful, beautiful beast - like a dragon, really. He could draw Cersei and feel no sorrow at her absence, and triumph that his wicked, spiteful sister was making herself useful to rid him of pain rather than increasing it, for once. So he picked up his coals, delighting in the notion of making her likeness as ugly as her character was. But his fingers betrayed him, working the face he knew almost as well as his own - Jaime and Cersei’s faces were still so similar in his head, even though Jaime’s had squared and Cersei’s had softened slightly with the onset of adulthood, but he still knew them both in their similarities and differences; they were both as beautiful and golden as the sun. But he could not think on Jaime once he began to draw the features, though they were similar of course - he had to make it Cersei or else it would hurt his heart.
He began with the eyes, planning to make them look sharp, disgusted, the way they always did when they looked at him. But all he could think of was the way she had looked the day she had ridden out for Kings Landing to the royal wedding he was not invited to - when she had looked over at Jaime by her side and the last glimpse he had caught of either of them before they had spurred their horses off into the distance had been her total adoration of their brother. That was the face he ended up drawing - the hard glare of her eye smudged carefully with his fingertips so their expression softened to love. “This doesn’t mean I miss you,” he told her as the drawing took form - her long, luscious hair taking shape around her shoulders, with a few flyaway strands over her cheeks. “I just wanted someone to draw. It helps,” he murmured as he shaped lips that Jaime must have kissed a hundred thousand times by now.
He looked her over as he finished her nose - he had made her look as though she cared what he was saying… “It hurts,” he told the portrait. “Jaime said it would hurt… growing, becoming a man, but never how much.” He found green ink in his writing desk and dipped a fingertip in to brighten the eyes of the drawing - she looked almost alive as he stared, bleary eyed and tired at his finest work of the night. “What did you tell Jaime to do when he started to ache? He promised to tell me, but then you both left,” he said, feeling a bleakness as his pain returned, and he hopped down from the chair, away from the picture as he stripped and changed for bed.
Against his better judgement he took the paper with him to his bed, unable to look away from the haunting beauty of the green, green eyes he couldn’t help but dream of looking at him as she looked at his brother. A love he would never know, a love he would never admit to wanting, not even when he woke with the paper still spread on the pillow beside him the next morning, a little less lonely for the shadow of her company.