Chapter Text
The first thing I remembered was dying.
It came in fragments, like shards of a broken mirror. There was a hospital, fluorescent lights, the smell of antiseptic. After that there was nothing, just black nothingness that might have lasted a moment or might have stretched into eternity. Then, there had been stuffed lions, and toy stags, and crawling through a nursery.
I opened my eyes to a canopy of crimson and gold, to silk panels embroidered with crowned stags. The bed beneath me was enormous, almost obscenely large, soft and deep as a cloud. For a moment I simply lay there, blinking at the familiar-unfamiliar ceiling while my brain performed the slow, agonizing work of assembling reality from its component pieces.
Where.
I looked down at my hand, a child's hand. It had small fingers, chubby at the knuckles, reaching up toward the silk. It was the same hand I’d always had, but nothing like the adult hand I also knew to be mine. Now that I was aware of the other memories, making them all fit together was complicated. I think I’d always had both sets. They just hadn’t made any sense, before. It was like giving an infant knowledge of how to do calculus. What would he even do with that?
Actually, that was exactly what it was like, except it was calculus, and science, and literature, and an entire lifetime’s worth of experiences. I think that my tiny, childish brain had just now developed enough to finally understand what it all meant.
I was a man who had died in a hospital. I was also a boy of three-years-old, a prince named…
Oh, I thought. Oh, no.
There was a startled cry. My nursemaid was standing in the doorway clutching her chest, because apparently a toddler staring at his own hand in silent existential horror was alarming. Fair enough.
"Your Grace," she managed, "you gave me such a fright. You were so still—"
"I'm fine," I said. My voice sounded wrong. It sounded right. This would take some getting used to. I cleared my throat. "I was thinking."
She stared at me.
Right. Three-year-olds didn't talk like that. Lesson one, absorbed immediately, before I'd even sat up in this ridiculous bed: Be careful.
"Sorry," I added.
My face had already done something by then. I wasn't sure what, exactly. There were tears, real ones. I registered it distantly, the hot prickling at the corners of my eyes, the instinctive lip-wobble of a child who had been frightened. I hadn't chosen any of it. The body had handled it without consulting me. I wasn't certain how I felt about that.
Marta's shoulders came down from around her ears.
Good, said the part of me that catalogued things. I filed it away alongside everything else: the body knew how to be three years old. The question was whether I could stop the other part, the part that had spent a lifetime constructing careful neutrality, from interfering with that at the wrong moments. The face was already the right tool. I just had to learn not to override it.
I glanced at the mirror across the room and a toddler looked back at me, a toddler with very old eyes.
~ ~ ~
I had the better part of a day before I was required to interact with anyone of consequence.
I’d spent an hour or two lying in that enormous bed. Then I toddled around the nursery under the nervous supervision of the woman whose name turned out to be Marta. I ate soft foods and drank honeyed milk and desperately, furiously catalogued everything I knew.
Joffrey Baratheon, eventually the first of his name. For now, Crown Prince of the Seven Kingdoms. Son of Robert Baratheon, First of His Name, and Cersei Lannister. Except—
Except not. I was the son of Cersei Lannister and Jaime Lannister, her twin brother, which was the kind of secret that got people killed in my new world. That meant that I’d been living on borrowed time from the moment of my birth. The only question was whether I wanted to spend that time screaming uselessly at the walls or doing something about it.
I was not, I decided, going to scream at the walls.
The timeline was straightforward enough. I knew who all the major players were. Most importantly, I knew shape of the catastrophe to come. I ran through it methodically, looking for leverage points. The Iron Throne’s debts to the Lannisters and the Iron Bank. Jon Arryn's investigation, and his death. The Starks' arrival. Ned's death. Robb's war. The Purple Wedding, which had originally been my wedding, which meant somewhere in a possible future there was a version of me who died face-down on a dais with a wine cup in my hand.
That was not ideal.
I had roughly a decade before the world started coming apart at the seams. I had a decade to build something that could survive the unbuilding.
Alright, I thought, staring at the crimson canopy. You wanted a second chance. You have one. Don't waste it.
~ ~ ~
The first real test was Cersei.
She came to visit in the evening, sweeping into the nursery in a crimson gown. Her hair was golden and her eyes a remarkable shade of green, the same color as my new eyes. She looked at me with adoration, the uncomplicated love of a mother. But there was more there, too, something assessing, possessive, and proud. In this world, the only way a woman was allowed to be ambitious was through her son’s successes.
I was her child. I was also, to her, a weapon and a legacy. I needed to be careful.
"My lion," she said, and held out her arms.
I went to her, because what else could I do? I let her hold me, and I tucked my head against her shoulder, and I said, quietly: "Mama."
Her arms tightened. Something shifted in her posture. She softened, genuine and unguarded. Cersei Lannister was, for all her considerable faults, capable of loving her children with a ferocity that bordered on elemental. That was real. That was something I could work with.
You're a tool to her in some ways, I reminded myself. But she's also a tool to you, in some ways. That doesn't make either of you bad people. It just makes you participants in a very high-stakes game.
"Were you frightened?" she asked. "Marta said you had a difficult night."
"I had strange dreams," I said, which was both true and appropriately vague for a three-year-old to offer. "But I'm better now."
She smoothed my hair back from my forehead and studied my face with those sharp green eyes. For a moment it felt uncomfortable, like being seen by a predator. Cersei Lannister was not stupid. She was many things — vain, paranoid, capable of catastrophic misjudgment — but not stupid.
"You seem different," she said, slowly.
"I told you," I said. "Strange dreams."
She made a small sound, not quite convinced, not quite suspicious, and held me a little longer before setting me down. I filed it away. I'd have to be more careful around her than around anyone else, which was saying something, given the company I was going to be keeping.
~ ~ ~
The second test was my father.
Robert Baratheon arrived like a storm: loud, vast, and smelling of the outdoors. He was still handsome, in a broad, battered way. He was still strong. This was the Robert of before, the Robert who hadn't yet dissolved entirely into the sediment of peacetime. I found myself unexpectedly moved by the sight of him, despite everything I knew about his tremendous flaws.
He was going to be difficult. He was also, I suspected, capable of being more than the man he’d become in those stories. Robert picked me up with ease. I leaned into his chest, luxuriating in the sensation of being held so completely. It had been decades, or perhaps days, since I’d felt anything like it. Then he looked me over with the appraising eye of someone checking livestock.
"Growing," he decided, which appeared to be a compliment.
"Yes, Your Grace," I said.
He blinked. He looked at Cersei, then back at me.
"Your Grace?" he repeated.
I widened my eyes slightly and let a beat pass. Then, slowly, as if correcting a terrible social error: "Sorry. Father."
Something in Robert's expression shifted, surprised, and then quietly pleased. He was a man who loved to be loved, and he was married to a woman who had stopped bothering to pretend. It was the kind of moment fathers remembered, a child saying Your Grace by instinct, then correcting himself with obvious embarrassment.
"Better," he said. And then, unexpectedly, he smiled. It was a good smile. "Smart boy."
"I'm trying," I told him, and meant it more than he would ever know.
~ ~ ~
By the time the candles burned low, I had formed the beginning of a working hypothesis about my situation. The good news was that I was starting young enough that I had time to build something. A decade was a long time. Kingdoms had been remade in less.
The bad news was that I was a child. I had no formal power, no money of my own, and the social capital of a particularly valuable piece of furniture. Everything I wanted to accomplish in the near term would have to be done through other people. That meant I needed to understand people — what they wanted, what they feared, what they couldn't resist — better than they understood themselves.
I lay in the dark and listened to the keep settle around me. I heard the distant footsteps of a guard change, the wind finding some gap in the stonework, the small unconscious sounds of Marta sleeping in the chair by the door. She had insisted on staying close, still worried I think, by what she had seen in me that morning. I had let her. It was easier than explaining.
I thought about Jon Arryn. Honest, serious, dutiful. A man who understood the weight of responsibility and didn't look for ways to set it down. I thought about Stannis, righteous and rigid and so profoundly, self-defeatingly right about everything, chronically denied any acknowledgment of it. I thought about Tyrion, brilliant and squandered and starving for someone to treat him like a person rather than a punchline.
There were people to find. There were things to build. I had some time to do it, if I was careful. I had years, and almost certainly not enough of them.
My hand was resting on the coverlet. I flexed it once, slowly, watching the tendons move under the soft skin. It was my new hand. It was the same hand I’d always had.
One at a time, I thought. Start small. Don't overreach.
I closed my eyes, and for the first time since waking up in this life, I slept.