Chapter Text
The pain is staggering. There is a vice of sorts around his chest and Tommen cannot breathe because of it. He struggles to draw in air and there are hands around his wrists, a familiar set of arms drawing him to their bosom.
“Tommen, Tommen, my darling, shh, shh-” his mother attempts to soothe him, but why would Mother be here, in his rooms? Tommen beats at her ribcage, hearing confused tones and alert voices outside- outside where? Where is he? These are not the quarters of the King. Where am I? What is Mother doing here with me?
“What’s happening to him?” exclaims a familiar, reedy voice and that is what shocks Tommen to stillness, frozen with widened eyes as he lays eyes on Joffrey. His brother is here. Tommen inhales sharply, staring, remembering him all purple-faced and choking.
“Am I dead?” he asks, but the words can’t escape him in anything more than a whisper. They are still heard – but then the door to the carriage they are in opens, admitting another familiar face. Tommen does not hesitate before lunging, thinking, he is safe, he has always been good to me, he will keep me from Mother’s madness here in the Heavens.
Arms wrapping around Ser Jaime’s neck, Tommen bursts into tears. He remembers the green fires that burst up, raging where the Sept of Baelor once stood and his poor, beautiful Margaery’s death. In his sorrow, he hopes he sees her again – surely the Gods would let him leave this spiritual realm for another, where the Tyrell’s live.
“Prince Tommen, whatever is the matter?” Ser Jaime – for he is not my uncle, he cannot be my uncle now, not in my head where I know he is my father; the rumours were always true, they can’t have been anything else – lifts him up, exchanging a confused look with Cersei as Tommen blubbers and whines, arms pulling tighter around his neck. Two hands – two hands! – hold him, one pulled taught around his legs and the other rubbing his back soothingly.
With the door open, Tommen can feel the cool night air, crisp like winter. He can’t stop himself from crying and it worsens as he remembers his last moments, of rushing to meet the ground and the blackness of fainting from fright before he met it. Margaery, my Margaery, he thinks – but then he hears another voice, one strong and rough like gravel that he cannot help but recognise too.
“What’s going on? What’s wrong with my son?”
Father, Tommen thinks, stunned. He is here in our Heaven, too?
“Your Grace, he woke in fright – nothing we do is helping,” Ser Jaime says helplessly, turning around. Tommen sees into the carriage again, where his mother with her long blonde hair sits in her night-clothes along with Joffrey and- and-
“Myr-Myrcella?” Tommen hiccoughs, staring at her. “Are you dead, too?”
Myrcella is young and beautiful, with rosy cheeks and golden ringlets; when Tommen speaks to her, emerald eyes so like his own turn confused and frightened.
“I am not dead, Tommen – why would you say that?” she asks him, distraught. Her hands ring her blankets and Joffrey scowls at them both.
“No-one’s dead, imbecile,” Joffrey scoffs, “you had a dream.”
Behind him, King Robert comes up to him and prods Tommen’s shoulder sharply, gaining his attention. Robert is just as he remembers him – fat and beady-eyed, with a bushy black beard and a wide face.
“What did you dream of that has you waking up half the camp in the night?” he demands. Tommen reflexively tightens his hold on Ser Jaime, loosening it at the choked noises he makes. Swallowing large breaths, focusing on the hand rubbing at his back, Tommen starts with a trembling voice-
“I don’t have all night, boy,” Robert scowls, “Hurry up.”
“Don’t talk to me like that!” Tommen immediately replies, feeling the ghost of his grandfather at his back. I am a King, he thinks, drawing himself up forcefully. “Don’t talk to me like that,” he repeats, calmer. Robert looks taken aback. “Wildfire burned down the Sept of Baelor and I jumped out of the Red Keep in grief. It was so far to fall that I fell unconscious halfway down.”
“Wildfire?” Ser Jaime sucks in a breath. “Oh, what stories have you been read that you would dream of wildfire, my prince?”
Tommen rests his head briefly on Jaime’s shoulder, pressing indents into his forehead from the white-gold shoulder plates of his Kingsguard armour.
Robert grunts. “Falling from the Red Keep – bah. The Eyrie is taller. Afraid of heights? Afraid of fire?”
“Green fire,” Tommen mumbles. “It burned them alive. It burned them all.”
A shudder runs through his uncle-father, he who killed King Aerys. “That’s what he said,” Ser Jaime whispers in return. “‘Burn them all’.”
“Wildfire everywhere,” Tommen says monotonously. He thinks of the burning bay, when his Uncle Tyrion destroyed Stannis’ fleet. The sky was green and it took weeks for it to die down. His stomach roils at the thought of Margaery among the masses, skin charred black atop red. My Margaery, he thinks, before he pushes away from Ser Jaime, leaning sideways to abruptly vomit.
Ser Jaime and King Robert recoil. The contents of his stomach end up in the grass, splattering the carriage door. Tommen’s tears still run down his face when he finishes, feeling hollow and barren of life. I want my queen and my cats, he thinks dully.
“Disgusting,” Joffrey mutters. “Mother, do we have to have him in the carriage? He’s ill!”
“Shut it, boy,” Robert snaps. “You and your sister will ride the horses tomorrow while your brother recovers – and don’t think I don’t know it’s you who’s telling him nasty stories about the Mad King’s reign!”
“But Father, I didn’t!” Joffrey whines, but Mother sooths him and tries to reason with Robert about them riding. Tommen decides not to listen, focusing on Ser Jaime as the knight takes out a pocket handkerchief and wipes his mouth for him, wandering off to the nearby campfire.
“What’s going on in that head of yours, my prince? You dream of fire and death,” Ser Jaime says, voice soft. He seats himself down on a log in front of the fire and Tommen curls up loosely in his lap. Ser Jaime orders a servant to get water and a pail – a good idea, for when Tommen starts throwing up again, his imagination running wild with gross depictions of his beloved burnt to cinders.
“Fire and death,” he repeats, after a while. He thinks of the Targaryen queen across the Narrow Sea. “Ser Jaime, what would happen if dragons came to Kings Landing? There must be more wildfire – there can’t just be the single cache, can there?”
“Dra- more than one? Of course there is, Tommen,” Ser Jaime’s voice croaks, barely more than a whisper. “Mad King Aerys wanted to burn Kings Landing to the ground. Forget dragons – a single act could have ignited them.”
Tommen twists further into Ser Jaime’s grasp, watching King Robert stomp his way over to the opposite side of the campfire, seating himself down and bellowing for wine. Ser Barristan is across the way, looking hearty and old. Tommen recognises more and more whom he sees; dead men, all of them.
“Good thing we’re dead, then,” Tommen mutters to his uncle, safe in the knowledge that this caravan of folk are unto the Gods; wildfire can no more harm them than dragons. “Wildfire only becomes more dangerous with time.”
But his uncle reacts strangely to this comment. There is a long, drawn out moment before he squeezes him tight and bursts into laughter. Tommen looks up at him in confusion.
“Uncle Jaime?”
“Ages- ages,” Ser Jaime cackles, but his face does not show joy nor happiness befitting his laughter. He clutches Tommen tighter to him, his lungs working hard. “Wildfire ages like wine. Who could have known?”
Across the fire, the King growls. “Kingslayer, what are you blathering on about?”
Ser Jaime only holds onto him tighter. “Wildfire, Your Grace – hundreds and hundreds of barrels beneath the Red Keep, the Sept of Baelor, all the streets of Kings Landing, including Fleabottom. Tommen here has informed me that it gains strength with age and I have been the willing fool, thinking it would become impotent in the seventeen years it sat there.”
Seventeen years? Tommen wonders, before Ser Barristan draws his sword, the crackling fire casting shadows across the gleaming steel. Around the camp, murmurs are spoken – more swords drawn.
“You kept this from us? From the King?” Barristan demands answers of Ser Jaime, who presses an apologetic kiss to Tommen’s head. “Or were you really that much of an idiot?”
“The latter, I’m afraid,” Ser Jaime says, wiping tears from his eyes, laughter abating. He continues quietly. “Good thing we aren’t in Kings Landing right now, eh? The Royal Family out of reach, in case of a terrifying explosion.”
“But leaving the people undefended,” Ser Barristan curses. “Gods. Your Grace, we must make haste to remove the wildfire, before it is lit.”
“Aye- aye, see it done. Awaken everybody. We make early for Winterfell for their ravens, forget waiting for sun-up. Kingslayer-” Robert stops, awkward. Over the fire, he looks hesitant and almost scared as he quietly says, “Always did wonder why you killed the pyromancer.”
He walks off abruptly, barking orders. Tommen looks up at the dark sky above, the moon half-hidden by cloud. White drifts down past his face and he goes almost cross-eyed trying to look at it, hand reaching up to touch the tiny crystal of snow flying through the air.
“Tommen,” Ser Jaime starts, solemn. “Tommen, do you know what you have done?”
“What have I done?” Tommen asks him, for as he goes over the conversation in his mind, nothing makes sense. That there is wildfire below Kings Landing was known – everyone here is dead. Why would they attempt to remove it from the tunnels?
Unless, Tommen thinks, unless I am reliving my life. Am I- am I merely seven namedays? He balks at the idea. Though it might mean others are alive, his Queen has not met him yet – and probably thinks him but a young child. It’s awful to imagine such a scenario that Margaery does not greet him with a smile that crinkles at either side of her eyes, making them sparkle in joy. She is such a happy woman and an even better Queen.
I will hold out for her, Tommen swears to himself, even as his stomach rebels again as he remembers that it was not him whom Margaery married first. She will be betrothed to his traitorous uncle, Renly, if she isn’t already and then after his death, Joffrey would discard sweet Sansa for her, too. Tommen is third in line – and third for King, too.
Third, third, third, he chants in his head. He is the third child, too, his mother’s third golden lion born of a crime that goes against the Gods. My head be taken, if they find out, he thinks fearfully. Or sent to the Wall. I am already changing the past just by ridding Kings Landing of wildfire!
“Nephew-mine,” Ser Jaime murmurs, oh-so quiet. His hand rubs Tommen’s back and the young prince wonders if he would have been a good father, in another world. He knows that Ser Jaime can be kind. It is his mother who is the mad one.
“I want to ride into Winterfell,” Tommen says to him.
A chuckle. “Really? You’ve just been ill, my Prince.”
“I want to ride into Winterfell – on Joffrey’s horse,” he repeats, with an addendum. The look his not-uncle sends him is disbelieving. Tommen attempts to harden himself, straightening his face like his grandfather taught him. “Joffrey wants not to ride. I do. I was ill because my nightmares frightened me – not for some flu or plague.”
“…eloquent, my Prince,” Ser Jaime replies, “but I am not the one you need to convince.”
“Who, then?”
And his not-uncle smiles tightly, though his eyes twinkle slightly as he leans in to whisper.
“I’d start with the King.”