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The Knife I Twist Inside Myself

Summary:

Now Valarr's dead and remarriage is on the horizon, Kiera's guilt surfaces stronger than before

Notes:

Title from Franz Kafka

Work Text:

Kiera sees him constantly. More than she did in life it feels sometimes. And every time, it just reminds of how she failed him.

She and Valarr loved each other. Somewhere in the course of their marriage, they’d become enamoured with each other. It was brilliant while it lasted. Now, it only tortures her further.

She failed him. She can’t deny that. She tried so hard to be a good wife and she was for the most part but she still failed. He wouldn't say such things to her, he probably wouldn't even believe such things, but she always did find him too forgiving.

She failed to give him children. The most significant reason behind any marriage, the most basic even, and she failed to do that. They got close two devastating times but both children, both sons, were dead before they had even been born. She knew they all wanted it to be her that was wrong, it was easier to blame the outsider, and she couldn't help believing it herself. Kiera had been the one to carry them, if something was wrong in the womb, it was her womb. And if they didn't, or pretended not to, they used to attack everyone else. They didn't deserve that. Valarr didn't deserve a wife who couldn't perform her basic duties but that's what he got.

And he did love her, she knows that. She especially knows it because he kept calling for her in his fever. They never let her go in but they kept telling her and sometimes when she wandered too close, she could hear him calling for her, for his brother, for his mother, and his long-dead father. That's what she hears walking the Red Keep and as she tries to sleep at night. Kiera never went to her own loved husband's bedside, even as he pleaded for her to be there. She failed him by not being strong enough to fight back against the maesters’ demands and argue her way through to his own wishes.

She's failed him in much that same way again too. They're having her remarry to Daeron, his drunkard cousin. The mourning period's not even over and they've got a wedding prepared. And she did nothing to stop it. She just let herself be carried along in her grief and misery straight to the bed of another man before the ashes of his pyre had even gone cold. That's the greatest travesty of all really. She can't even stay loyal to him, no matter how much she loves him. She's let herself be shoved into another Targaryen wedding. And for what? They won't even tell her why they still want her around.

She almost wants to forget him, to remove this white-hot shame at the source.

That just adds to it.

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