An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 54/54
Fandom: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV), A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark, Jon Snow & Sansa Stark, Catelyn Stark/Ned Stark
Characters: Jon Snow, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Bran Stark, Ghost (ASoIaF), Catelyn Tully Stark, Ned Stark, Robb Stark, Benjen Stark, Brandon Stark, Lyanna Stark
Additional Tags: Fanart
@lucife56 has such an incredible art style! Their interpretation of many characters is how I picture the book version in my head. Thank you for sharing your talents with the rest of us!
Happy Holidays @Lucife56 and enjoy a bonus ficlet of Jaime/Elia in an AU where she survived the rebellion! Your Secret Santa gift ‘The Wasting Crown,’ a Ned/Cersei AU, is being posted on AO3.
There had been a summer, when his father and sister were at court and he was home from squiring Crakehall, that his Uncle Kevan had sent him down to his cousins in Lannisport to bend his energy and attention to seafaring. At the time, even resentful as he was without Cersei, Jaime Lannister had felt that sailing and navigating and all the activity that went with it was a bit of a lark, and he did not so much learn a craft but play at it in the noble way of a future lord paramount. In the height of summer, with a fully manned ship to attend him, sailing had seemed the easiest and most pleasurable thing to accomplish.
In the moons since the fall of the Targaryen dynasty, he had long since reconsidered his youthful view. All manner of voyaging the seas was treacherous work, and made only slightly more so by the fact that he and his charges were fugitives of the crown.
On that first panicked trip to Myr, his hands had burned under the pull of the ropes and there hadn’t been a muscle that hadn’t ached. And, while his body had learned the motions and the strength needed to earn his keep on any vessel, he lacked entirely the instincts that could bring a ship from port to port, around storm and pirate.
Jaime could not say what it did for his pride that it was Princess Elia who proved the better sailor and the more valued companion for the crew, even having shed their titles and nobility to book passage in the chaos surrounding the sack of King’s Landing. Elia was a quick hand at repairing sails and nets, at mending torn vestments and soothing wounded men. She knew better and raunchier stories (though Jaime suspected that these were borrowed from her brother) and could tease the entire ship into singing on windless days when tempers blew hard. If the sellsails suspected a higher bearing for either of them - and on the first ship, they almost certainly did, if for no other reason than that they found him gratingly unskilled - Elia’s charm and beauty were enough to stay their tongues.
Where Jaime had boarded a ship for Myr a disgraced kingsguard with the supplanted princesses and prince of the Targaryen reign, it was Lann and his wife Nym, and their two children Rhae and Dunk, who set sail for Lys. And it was Joff and his son Davos, with hair cut so short their scalps gleamed in the sunlight, who befriended Mariah and her child Ash, delicate featured but styled as a boy, on the way to Qarth. In Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen, he had been a sellsword guarding a merchant’s daughter as she toured the cities with her children. He had been husband again by Volantis, and through Tyrosh to Pentos, and now, hunting for a ship to Braavos, he was beginning to fear that he had either completely exhausted his repertoire for aliases and professions or could no longer tell the difference between lie and truth.
His middling talent for fiction aside, Jaime found that he was quite unable to pretend away the closeness that came with pretending to be a husband, and, whatever name she wore, Elia had become as familiar to him as Cersei had ever been. Which is why he knew to be suspicious when Prince Aegon, nearly four name days, was not there to greet him with endless questions about the ships in the harbor, and when Elia’s face was too carefully serene, and when Princess Rhaenys burst into giggles when his greeting gave way to a grumpy frown.
“Any luck on booking passage?” Elia plated a selection of sweet meats and fruits for him, the rewards of their earlier market trip, setting it in front of the chair he favored in their rented house.
“A few possibilities,” Jaime rolled a grape between his fingers, observing the graceful courtesies that Elia extended naturally and noting that there was something sharp and stubborn in her eyes that he knew was going to be a source of trouble. “I will ask around about the captains tomorrow, and see if I can spot any familiar faces in their crews.”
“We’ve been lucky so far,” Elia commented, handing Rhaenys a sliver of melon before tiding up the remains of dinner to be served again at breakfast.
“I know I’m not always the best at identifying times to be cautious, but this seems a reasonable safeguard,” His stomach growled and, as much as he wanted to be focused on what Elia had yet to tell him, hunger won out. The simple meal, unpreserved and unsmoked and likely grown in a garden less than a day’s ride from their rooms, was something to be treasured when faced with weeks of hard tack and fish at sea.
“Why do we need to be cautious Papa?” Rhaenys asked, brazenly stealing another bit of melon from his plate.
“Why Rhae, it’s because you are too beautiful and too clever and all the world would like to have you for their very own,” Jaime’s heart no longer wrenched at being called father, though he still could not escape the itching memory of fleeing everything he had ever known in clothes borrowed from a dead man with his wife and children.
Rhaenys no longer knew she was a princess, no longer knew that she was anything more than a sailing sellsword’s daughter with a seamstress mother, but her disbelief was near imperious. “Be serious Papa!”
“Mama and papa have to work, little Rhae,” Elia’s voice was firm as she sidestepped the question, though he could hear in it the echoes conversations they’d been having since Tyrosh. The children were getting too old to be fooled and heard more than they should — and that was dangerous for keeping secrets. “That is why we will go and live in Braavos.”
Jaime distracted Rhaenys with a slice of orange. There was time enough to explain the dangers of the world to her when she was older. “And where’s Maron hiding?” The false name the rightful king of Westeros believed to be his own.
“Why, Tom,” And, as always, it took him a moment to remember this was the name he had settled on. “I am ever a dutiful wife and I noticed how you adored the fashions of Tyrosh.”
“How thoughtful,” He remembered no such thing, had thought the Tyroshi disturbing and gauche in truth, but Rhaenys was giggling again. “Did you trade Maron for some pear brandy and jewel toned silks?”
“No, no Papa,” a voice burst from the courtyard, followed by a mass of pale limbs and bright, bright blue. “Mama would never trade me away.”
Prince Aegon smiled up at him, teeth flashing, and looked so much like Prince Rhaegar in the lines of his face that it took a beat to realize that his fine silver hair was blue.
Seven hells, his hair was blue.
“It’s always so silly that people comment on Maron’s hair,” Elia’s phrasing was obviously for the children’s benefit, as her direct gaze was for his. “And the children and I thought it would be even sillier if we gave them a better reason to look.”
“Mama bought the dye in Tyrosh,” Rhaenys added, dancing around her brother. “So it will last for a really long time because the Tyroshi are experts. Mama said.”
“Except,” And Elia gave the sly smile that always preceded an embarrassment for him of some sort. “I think it looks quite silly for my son to do this alone, don’t you, my dear?”
This was worse than he had thought, far worse. “Perhaps you or Rhae -“
“Our hair is too dark,” Elia shook her head in mock sadness, though Rhaenys’ pout as she held out the ends of her dark braid at least gave the farce some measure of truth. “Come children, let’s get ready to dye Papa’s hair.”
The children were a blur as they ran in search of buckets and whatever else they deemed necessary for inflicting this horror on him. He kept his voice low, just in case. “Elia, I don’t want to dye my hair.”
The smile she gave was truly sympathetic, even if her eyes promised that she would have no nonsense. “Dark hair is common enough in Braavos, Jaime. Rhaenys and I could walk down the streets in Martell colors and no one would think of it overmuch. But Aegon’s coloring is all Valyrian and even in Essos that is increasingly rare.”
“Robert thinks you dead,” Jaime murmured. “Every rumor we’ve heard on the way back from Qarth has agreed on that.”
He can hear the excited banging of buckets as the children prepare to play this new game that seems all strange silliness to them and that is all strategy to Elia. She thinks little of his vanity, Jaime knows, but he wonders if she is as aware of their intimacy as he is. When she walks over to him, propping her hip against the table, all he can think of is how soon he will be pressed against her in their berth on the way to Braavos and of her holding him close after he woke from yet another nightmare of Aerys’ court last night.
“Targaryen silver, Lannister gold. Enough rumors with both and Robert may change his mind.”
This too is a discussion that they have had more than once. Jaime’s father would surely welcome him back. Jaime’s twin, his other half, is Robert’s queen. Elia’s brothers had raged when there was no sign of her or her children. He has to believe that they could find a way home, to trade a dead king and future heirs and a returned kingdom for their safety.
“Viserys and Daenerys are in Braavos as well,” Elia adds, reaching out to card one hand through his hair and, he hopes perversely, enjoying the shade of it.
“Too many Targaryens in one basket,” Jaime winces. “I know you Elia. You intend to meet with them, yes? If it is too dangerous to return to your brother’s household, then you really shouldn’t be chasing after the Targaryens that Robert knows about.”
“Viserys is ten. His sister is two. They shouldn’t be on their own.”
Jaime had been ill prepared to venture out into the world at seven and ten without the safety of his father’s name; he couldn’t imagine doing so at eight. “Her Grace protected Viserys, but there wasn’t anyone in the Red Keep that didn’t know he could no more take pressure and stress and failure than Aerys could. He’ll have broken under it.”
“Children are resilient. There may be hope yet,” Elia’s delicate features danced with warmth and kindness and good humor. Now that he knew her plotting, it was easier to be in her company.
“And to keep our children -“ The feeling of being a fraud was fading more every day. “- safe and amused I need to have blue hair.”
Jaime didn’t know when it had ceased to be a question that he would give in to Elia’s demands.
“I am pleased we understand one another ser,” Elia leaned forward to brush a kiss across his forehead, lingering a measure that was either familial or loving, before disappearing to marshall the children to strip him of his golden crown.
Alone with the rinds of his dinner, he felt her touch like a brand, and he wanted to ask if she ever wondered which Lannister and Martell siblings their mothers had hoped would marry, and he wanted to ask if she still thought of Rhaegar and if she mourned him or cursed him, and he wanted to tell her of how betrayed he felt by Cersei’s marriage and how wretched he thought he should be now that she was with Robert’s child. He wondered if her appreciation of his glibness and irreverence was just another way she made do, and if he was still a knight of the kingsguard, and if she thought of him as a king slayer. He wondered, above all, what she thought and what she felt when her children called him father.
Jaime wondered who he could ask if it was a virtue and a sign of honor that he asked her none of this as the children laughed him to the buckets of water, scraps of linen, and dispiritingly large bottle of dye to turn his hair from gold to hues of blue.
But then Tom the sailing sellsword knew his wife Mariah loved him, even if he did like the Tyroshi custom of brightly colored hair. And it was Tom and Mariah, and their children Rhae and Moran, who would settle in Braavos to ply their trades and build their lives. And any answers that Jaime Lannister could gain would be lesser truths than those.
