Jon Arryn at least shows them the courtesy of looking shamed. Doran studies him for a moment, but only a moment because Oberyn is moving beside him and Doran cannot help but worry about Oberyn. Doran is angry, and grieving, but Oberyn’s grief has become something else.
He would have another war, a war we cannot win.
He sees that Oberyn’s gaze is fixed on the largest of the chests that Jon Arryn has brought. It pains Doran to think of the contents.
“Show me my sister,” Oberyn demands.
The silent sisters move swiftly. Elia is covered with a banner, the banner of House Martell.
“No,” Oberyn says angrily. “You cannot cover what was done to her. We know.”
Jon Arryn remains composed but Doran can see the strain in his face.
“My sister’s return is a beginning,” Doran starts to say before Oberyn cuts him off.
“A beginning?” Oberyn’s voice rings out loudly. “ She hurt no one, and they butchered her. We’ll never hear her laugh again, or see her smile. She was kind, and witty, and she deserved more than this.”
Oberyn is spitting, and Doran wants to tell him he feels the same, that seeing Elia’s remains has stirred his anger too but he is the prince of Dorne. He must think carefully, think of his people, of his children.
The children.
There are other chests, and they are so small, and Doran knows what it means. It is meant as an offering of peace, but when the chests are opened Doran has to send Oberyn from the room, for his brother is beyond hearing reason when he sees the tiny forms buried beneath more cloth in their house colours.
House Martell, not Lannister. They no longer need to hide the blood.
Doran does not speak, but he looks. Jon Arryn has averted his eyes, but Doran wants to remember, so he examines every detail, even though his heart is breaking with the effort.
“I have done as you asked, Prince Doran,” Lord Arryn says quietly. “It is our hope that you might convince your brother to make a peace. Peace will serve all of our interests. There has been too much loss already.”
Doran nods, slowly, allowing the older man to think that he is in agreement. He makes certain that he says what he must say, but he cannot forget Elia, and he cannot forget her children. The return of their bones is poor amends. It is no fit response to murder.
Doran will never forget.
Doran will never forgive it.
He will bide his time, because Elia was his sister, a princess of Dorne, and she deserves justice. No matter how long it will take Doran will make certain she gets it.
i accidentally deleted my blog a while back and with it, a ton of fics so this is a repost
elia x lyanna + affair (aka what if lyanna had an affair with elia instead)
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For months after the divorce, everyone still believed it was Rhaegar who had Lyanna for a mistress. Not to say that he didn’t have a mistress or two, all chosen because Rhaegar was convinced of the woman’s ability to bring him children of prophecy. Elia would have to be blind to not have known, although she had contented herself with feigning ignorance for the sake of their children for more years than she cared to remember.
It’s also, not to say, that Rhaegar didn’t want Lyanna for a mistress. She was an attractive woman, not just physically but in all the ways that can allow one to be completely charmed by another.
Elia had met her at a charity benefit, back when she would hang herself from Rhaegar’s arm and smile without realising that it was just a bearing of teeth. Rhaegar insisted on conversing with Brandon Stark, the heir to Winterfell – “it never fails to be on good terms with those of the future,” Doran would say and she had always been inclined to agree with him.
Lyanna had been at his side. She walked uncomfortably in her heels, and tugged her dress down as if it were something she’d never worn before, but when she smiled, it was genuine and so beautiful. She’d argued with Rhaegar about renewable energy, and donated close to half a million at a drop of a hat, and invited Elia for drinks because “I’m getting bored and you seem to be good company”.
Nothing had happened that night but Elia would confess that she wanted something to. It was the first time she had ever wanted to break her marriage vows.
She did end up breaking them, a little over a month later, after a night in with wine and terrible movies. Lyanna had tasted of the beer she had been drinking when Elia veered over to slot their lips together. She remembered grabbing at the front of Lyanna’s shirt to keep herself steady, how she didn’t care that the position was uncomfortable because nothing had ever felt so good in her life. She remembered Lyanna drawing her between her splayed legs, putting her hand to the back of Elia’s head and slowing the slide of lips until Elia shivered.
“Your husband,” Lyanna murmured against her.
“He won’t be home tonight,” Elia swore.
He wouldn’t be, because Cersei Lannister would hold him a willing hostage for the night, until he had spent his seed thoroughly and she was carrying his son. Elia suspected it drove Cersei insane to know that it wasn’t her who gave Rhaegar his first borns.
But honestly, in that moment, she couldn’t bring herself to care. Cersei Lannister could bring as many Targaryen bastards into this world just as long as Lyanna just didn’t stop kissing her.
Rhaegar knew something was different but much like her, preferred to stay oblivious. He would invite Lyanna to their home and attempt to woo her with gifts and promises that he meant at the time but could never actually keep. He pretended that his wife and his intended mistress didn’t sneak off together and come back rumpled.
He didn’t try to hide his affairs so neither did she.
The moment that Elia realised she’d begun to consider herself Lyanna’s woman rather than Rhaegar’s was startling if nothing else. She should have suspected. Rhaegar had drawn himself away through work, through new discovers that inflated his beliefs, through the soft whisperings of Cersei and Lysa Tully and all that could promise him the third head of his dragon.
And with his absence, Lyanna had stepped in to fill the space. She joined them at the park, usually with her little nephew Robb, a sweet little thing that followed after Rhaenys with awed eyes. She stayed for dinner and made the appropriate noises for Aegon to eat his peas. She helped put them to bed – put on pyjamas, read stories, sat with them until they fell asleep.
“Lya Lya,” Aegon called her, wave his chubby hands until his demands were met.
He never called for his father like that.
After that, the divorce was an eventuality. Lyanna never pushed her for it – would stroke back her hair, murmur her profession of love into Elia’s forehead and remind her that “I don’t care that I have to share with him, I’m just happy that I have you, even just for now” – but Elia couldn’t say that Lyanna didn’t play a big part in why she went to her solicitor in the first place.
Rhaegar caught them together the day before she handed him the papers. It was different, thinking and knowing, and after that day, neither could deny. Elia would wear Lyanna’s bites for days, and Rhaegar would hear his wife’s crescendos of pleasure brought to her by another.
When she gave him the papers, he looked at them with resignation.
“It was good, wasn’t it?” he said.
Elia bobbed her head. “For a while, yeah.”
“Did you love me?”
“Once.” She was honest.
“When did you stop?”
“When Aemon was born.”
Aemon Blackfyre was three years old then. She’d never realised how much Aegon had looked like his father until faced with that boy.
It was cordial, regardless of what the papers were saying. Rhaegar signed on the dotted line with little prompting, and Elia accepted what she was owed from the prenup she had signed. There was shared custody of the children, but Elia got the house so they could continue to grow up in what they had always known.
Rhaegar wasn’t to know that his father, in his rage, would burn the place to the ground.
Just as Lyanna couldn’t know that her drunkard of an ex, Robert Baratheon would let slip how many days she spent at the Targaryen residence. Apparently, her brother Ned had confined his worries for his sister in his friend.
They called her a dragon’s whore. It wasn’t so blunt in tabloid newspapers or on gossip blogs, but the words were hissed under the breath of those in polite society more often than not. Lyanna told her that she didn’t care, would smile so widely that you had to believe her, but Elia knew. She hated it.
Oberyn called her that too until Elia had snapped at him. “She’s no whore, and belongs to no dragon. Only a snake.”
She’d never spoken of them until now. And once her family knew, what did it matter if the world did?
When Elia looked for a new home for her and her children, she asked if Lyanna wanted to join her. They’d been spread out across Lyanna’s bed – Elia on her front and scrolling through estate agent websites on Lyanna’s laptop, while the woman herself contented herself with tracing patterns into the dip of Elia’s back.
“We’ll find something big enough. For me, the kids…you,” Elia looked out of the corner of her eye to judge Lyanna’s reaction.
Her hand had stilled and spread warmth against Elia’s skin. “You want me to live with you?”
Elia bit her bottom lip and nodded. She didn’t say what she was thinking – the idea of waking up beside you every day is the most I’ve wanted in a long time.
“Really?”
“I love you,” Elia confessed. “I want to live with you. I want to have children with you. I want to marry you.”
Too much at once and anyone else might have run at the pressure, but Lyanna just grin and shuffled forward so she could press their lips together. It was an awkward angle, their noses pushing together at a strange angle, but like all kisses with Lyanna, Elia found it breath-taking.
“Let’s start with the house,” Lyanna teased, “Although, I must admit, Elia Stark sounds pretty good.”
Elia nudged their noses together gently. “Not as good as Lyanna Martell.”
Lyanna stole a kiss. “Stark.”
Elia took it back. “Martell.”
In the end, they took both.
Elia and Lyanna Stark-Martell had the best kind of ring to it.
This is dramatic but I would probably die of happiness if you continued "Your Broken Crown" like I've reread it about three times now *___* no pressure though, writing is hard! I just wanted to let you know how awesome that story is to me
Hahaha awww thank you!! I never say never, but it is pretty far down the list right now, sadly. But there’s always a chance inspiration will strike! :D Thanks for the sweet message! <3
@eliyannas replied to your post “hi my name is celia and i am so wildly against the concept of fic...”
ooh im curious, why is that?
ok here goes. don’t reblog this--i hate it, i think it opens a can of worms i’ll get to, but at the end of the day, i think that it’s down to someone’s individual choices as to whether or not they do it and if they want to i’m not gonna hit them over the head i’m just gonna sit here and AOiwefdsknaef;alsdk;alk at them silently. reply/message if you want to talk more.
response 1) my former roommate is in law school, and last year as she was grappling with 1L work, one of her sample cases was about a girl who was getting fucked over by US copyright law because of stuff she did with fanfiction. admittedly, this (not real) girl was doing some really dumb shit, but she was still getting fucked by US copyright law.
there’s a lot of argument about what constitutes legality versus illegality in terms of us copyright law about fanfiction. notably you get authors saying different things and increasing pushback about it. OTW has some good resources on fair works and there’s a blog that i can’t find about legal defenses of fanfiction. that said, there’s a difference between law and culture, though and while “times have changed” w/r/t/writing fanfiction (an argument i have seen defending taking fic commissions), there’s still a lot of ways that, if it felt so inclined, the law could fuck you up for writing a fic commission. that’s not to say it will, of course, or even that it would win (but god those cases can be majorly financially draining). it would really depend on how far you took it. you’d probably have to make a shit ton of money about it (enough to gain someone’s attention) or have tried to claim it is your work originally and for the most part, i don’t see people trying to do that.
but i’m an anxious person and i see it as being one fucking slippery slope to some poor shmuck getting their ass handed to them by a legal team they aren’t prepared to fight. and especially when you see tumblr throwing around things like “times have changed” yeah times have changed--so have laws, but you can’t disregard the way that laws haven’t changed just yet, and also why they are there.
response 2) the argument that i’ve seen a lot is “why do fic authors do it for free while it’s normalized for fanartists to take commissions?”
that didn’t come from nowhere. they are different media. remove the fan part, and you have two different art forms entirely, ones with different historical distribution mechanisms and thus different normalized ways of accepting payment: art--make a thing and sell it, and if you are really lucky you’ll find a patron who’ll throw money at you to keep making stuff. fiction--write a thing and try and get it published for mass distribution where you’ll get money at selling it to a publisher and then a portion of the profits dependent on how successful it is.
those are two different things. those are two different traditions. those are two different arts.
the internet is a gamechanger--i can’t speak with authority on what it’s meant for traditional artists, but i think it’s a huge fucking mixed bag for writers: it can be great to spread your words to a mass audience out there without necessarily needing a middle man--getting paid for that can suck, and is part of why we have a clickbait culture: you need to write what people will read so they can get money.
i digress: i think asking that question, that comparison to fanartists, disregards the actual media you are creating. and while i’ll be the first to say that there’s a lot of fuckery in the writing industry, i also think that this isn’t that, and that throwing them on an equal plane without taking into account that they aren’t is not the argument to have. change the culture around fic vs fanart reblogs (things! i! am! bitter! about! *jumps on pedestal and screams* REBLOG FIC PEOPLE FOR FUCK’S SAKE) or putting visual fanworks on a pedestal above the written ones (because they are)
response 3) to me it destroys the spirit of fanfiction. this is a thing done for fun, it’s a hobby. and part of that has to do with its historical development as a genre to deflect response 1 (the legal stuff). but i would feel wildly uncomfortable taking commissions. am i prioritizing paid works over the ones people ask for that aren’t paid for? i take a fuckton of ficlet prompts and i find those wildly fun. am i basically saying “here, commons, have a little crumb for free” while giving ~white-glove~ treatment to someone else who can pay for it? i don’t like that. it’s not for me. and while i don’t see others doing that per se, i also think that the second money gets involved it changes the dynamic of the fandom community you are participating in.
i’ve written a shitton of fic in the past few years, so much so that my mom has said “i wish there was a way you could make money off this.” in my dream world, i am a novelist. in my dream world, people ask me for writing advice and i can smile at grrm and say “write fanfiction. it can be an amazing tool for honing your craft.” the financial payoff is something that comes later with my own original work. yeah, that’s me. yeah, i know that’s my goal and it’s not a goal that others have w/r/t/how they write fic (which is part of why--while steam will pour out of my ears at the very mention of fic commissions--i won’t get in people’s grills directly about it.)
I personally love the idea, but I'm wondering how you'd go about the "he looks exactly like Robert/renly" thing, I mean they can still look very alike but people comment on how exactly alike they look, don't they? Unless you also make Robert mixed, perhaps through his targaryen ancestor by making them poc too? (how much more interesting would it be if they were no?)
i think that’s part of what i like about it (it being gendry’s being biracial)--that it challenges the concept of what it means to “look exactly like” someone. like, maybe the tone of his skin is different, but his facial features are roberts in their shape, or maybe people zoom in on the eyes and it takes a moment to shake that his skin color is different. especially since you frequently have people who see race first and then facial features second, i like it as a subversion of that, a moment that demands to know in what way people do interpret visual similarity between family members. (and especially it gets interesting given that the things that people associate in text with gendry’s similarity to robert are primarily colors: his black hair, his blue eyes. yes there’s also his size, but it’s more frequently the black and blue.)
it’s a different ballgame if you have robert also be a person of color, of course, but i think what i like about the biraciality of it is that it challenges a lot and highlights prejudices and inconsistencies, which, of course, are so central to gendry’s experience in asoiaf as a (presumably*) white bastard.
