[𝐌𝐄𝐌𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊]:Softish angst prompts
[𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐒]: accepting
[𝐅𝐑𝐎𝐌]: @loraeis
[𝐌𝐄𝐌𝐄]: “ you don’t have to hide your tears. let it out. then we’ll move on, together. ”
This isn’t what he wanted. Not like this. Why couldn’t Stannis just surrender? Why did he have to attack one of Renly’s knights? Why did the knight throw a fatal blow when Renly had asked everyone to keep his brother alive? In truth, he cannot remember the details of how it had happened exactly, even though he was right there. He remembers being next to Stannis as he let his last breath. He remembers feeling scared for the first time in fifteen years, being like the boy he had been then, pleading for his brother to stay.
He shouldn’t care. This shouldn’t hurt him. Stannis had been more a stranger to him than he had been family. Stannis had made the choice to stay out Renly’s life long before they stood in opposite sides on the field. So why is Renly grieving for him? Is he even grieving for losing Stannis? Or for just losing the opportunity to talk to him, to tell him what he had wanted to for fifteen years now? Now he would never get to ask Stannis why he had despised Renly so much, he would never know if all the memories he held of him were real in the first place and not something a boy without a family had made up. Now, he would never get to make it right? He knows — as a part of him always knew — that he had loved him. That there was a time that Stannis had been everything to him and even though years had passed he never got to mean nothing to him.
Only he doesn’t want to feel like this. He wants to feel the way Stannis would if Renly had been the one to die. He wants to be able to turn off the love he had felt for him the way his brother had when he had left, easily like blowing out a candle.
So it is true, he does hide his tears because they should not fill his eyes. They had no right to be there, not for a man that could not care less about Renly all his life. Stubbornly, he shakes his head, wiping his eyes furiously as if that would prevent him from crying any further ❝There is nothing to move on from. Everything is temporary. Everyone dies. We already knew that.❞