Chapter Text
Cersei walked swiftly through the keep and sidled out of the castle doors undetected. It was winter, but she’d chosen to wear a summer dress, olive green and sleeveless and cut up to her ankles. She walked barefoot on the cold cobblestones, her breath a ghost trailing behind her as it left her mouth, the last bit of warmth within her being released into the world, the only part she’d given willingly. The only part that hadn’t been yanked away from her.
Take it. She said to the winter, scornful. You’ve taken everything else.
The wind whipped at her golden hair, the braid she wore keeping it from her face. Her skin was pricked with gooseflesh, and so cold it was nearly blue.
She did not feel it. Cersei had decided to stop feeling things.
Her whole life she’d felt too much, and what good had it brought her? Over and over she was dismissed, rejected, scorned, fucked. She’d stopped feeling, stopped wanting, stopped caring: it gave her some power back.
Take it all. Take everything, and see if I care. She breathed. She couldn’t tell if she’d said it aloud or in her head. Things like that were getting tricky to parse lately.
She made her way down the rocky cliffs to the shore of King’s Landing. It was foggy and the sky was stormier than the bruises she sported on her neck and all up her arms, curtesy of her loving husband. Her king.
She smiled; not anything noticeable, just the twitch of her lips as she thought how funny that was. She wished the Seven Kingdoms could see him as he was every night; splayed out on the floor, a half-empty horn of ale next to him and a whore or two in his bed - their bed, she shuddered at that. And that was on the nights he came home. What a king.
She hadn’t bothered to cover the bruises today. Let them see.
He’d been incessant lately, Robert, raving about needing an heir. He would fuck her roughly, pressing her head into the pillow so nobody would hear her scream as she fought against him, and she always fought. But he’d failed so far to put a baby in her. She’d made sure of it.
Cersei laughed to herself as she thought of it; herself curled up by her chamber pot, clutching her stomach, ridding herself of what Robert had done to her. A queen’s job was to provide an heir, a king’s job was to fuck his wife bloody and drink himself into oblivion, apparently. Father must be so disappointed in her failure to serve her dutiful husband. Her life was one cruel joke after another.
By the time she’d reached the rocky shore, her feet were bloody. She hadn’t felt a thing, and that made her smile a bit, too.
She walked directly into the sea, the waves crashing around her ankles, soaking the hem of her dress. She smelled the salt and sand and sea, and it reminded her of her childhood home. It had been nice briefly, her childhood. Her life had had its moments, she supposed. Perhaps that was why she was still here. Perhaps it was something else.
She held her arms out and let the wind rush around her. What was left for her? How long could she go on living this way? She stepped further into the ocean. She pictured it swallowing her up. Would she feel any differently than she did now? She wondered, if faced with the prospect of death, would she feel? Would she feel at all? She’d become quite comfortable with the numbness. She wondered what it would take to break her of it. Then she laughed, thinking that there might be nothing at all. She laughed and laughed until tears ran down her face for reasons she did not understand, the salt of them joining the salt air around her, her cheeks burning red from the cold wind.
She turned around to look at her wing of the castle, the keep, true to its name. But she stopped in her tracks as she spun around. Her throat went dry and the laughter was choked out of her. She looked upon the bluffs and saw him, standing there in his armour, his hair matted but golden as ever, golden as hers. Jaime. And again, she was unsure if she’d actually said it aloud.
Suddenly, she found herself wincing. Her feet rather hurt.