Noon passed in darkness.
But when it was done, Steffon Baratheon led the king out of the dark into the day of his true chambers, where finally Aerys Targaryen, second of his name, laid down to truly rest for the first time since the white raven came, falling asleep with the light of the sun shining down upon him.
Steffon emerged from the royal apartments with a relieved heart, a sheet of paper in his hand, his head stuffed full with royal confessions sad and terrible, and a storm in his soul made of wind and fury. He looked at the two whitecloaks watching him with almost wholly hidden amazement and held out the paper for them to read.
It is by my order and for the good of the Realm that the bearer of this has done what he has done. – Aerys, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.
He inquired as to their schedules and rotations, then worked with them to assign men from his retinue in place of the Goldcloaks normally watching the royal quarters. It was an unfair slight to the watchmen, but Aerys had seemed to draw strength from the offer no matter how off-handed.
"If this is supposed to be a test," Steffon had said when Aerys gave him the Great Warrant. "I won't treat it as one. I'll do whatever I think is right, not waste my time trying to guess what you want me to do."
Returning to the Tower of the Hand, he caught Tywin just as he was leaving his solar to retire. Steffon contained himself for only as long as it took to get some privacy before he gave him the what for he clearly needed. "Listen to me, Tywin, and listen well! From this point on you get no more excuses! The king listened to me and heeded me, so you will listen and heed me as well." Steffon took a long, deep breath through his nose but did not relent his grip on Tywin's shoulders. He leaned forward, looming over the scowling man with all his bulk behind him. "If you need to talk, talk to me. If you need a shoulder to cry on, cry on me. And if you can't find it in you to suffer the presence of Joanna's children, any of Joanna's children for any reason, foster them with me. Do you understand?"
Tywin actually glared at him for that, but didn't reply. Whether because he was too outraged at his presumption, or shocked that Aerys had actually come out and admitted that 'Tywin looks at me like I fucked his wife and sired his children' (never mind all the timing issues involved), Steffon didn't have the patience to care.
"Incidentally, Aerys was always going to reimburse you for that Citadel business."
Steffon let go, turned around and left.
"I'm not mad, Steffon, but that's no mercy! You speak of sense? Sense tells me I can't even be sure my kin and children fell to poison instead of the gods' cruelty. Sense would have me feel guilt over my grief! What should I believe, Steffon? Do you have any idea what madness Pycelle spouted in his ravings? There was no difference between his lies and his truths by the end!
His next stop was the dungeons.
"Do you know who he tried to bring down with him? Do you know how long this conspiracy has to have existed? Father, grandfather, Summerhall, the dragons, the Dance Itself! You think I'm the only one now wondering what really happened to them? And now this news of the Faith! There's your madness! If I were mad, I'd burn Oldtown to the ground, Tywin's head would be on a spike outside my window and this place would already be ash." Aerys had barely been able to raise his voice by the end, when Steffon tucked him into bed. "I'm not mad, Steffon." His voice had been so weak. So frail. "I'm not mad. Not yet."
The Black Cells were precisely as black as the name implied. But the special prisoners were being fed well, Leyton Hightower had only been there for a few hours, and Gerold Hightower had long since accustomed himself to his new environment and was doing handstand push-ups when Steffon let them out. Leyton gladly accepted relocation to Maegor's holdfast, if still afflicted with that odd bemusement that only the condemned mustered when they were resigned to whatever came next. Gerold Hightower didn't accept reinstatement though, not from anyone less than the king. He refused to go back to the White Sword Tower and only complied with 'sentry' duty for his nephew when Steffon told him flat out he'd have him escorted out of the dungeon at sword point if he didn't show sense. A good man, that Ser Gerold, stout and true!
Way too uptight though.
Not as self-possessed as he liked to act either, once the light hit his eyes again.
The Storm Lord dithered somewhat when that was done, torn between several directions. In the end, the decision was taken out of his hands when the Master of Laws Symond Staunton descended upon him with many anxious questions. That particular meeting ended with an acknowledgment of his changes to the guard roster, and Cressen's all but assured instatement as Grand Maester at the next meeting of the Small Council. Which would be early the next day. To which he was invited.
The sun had set almost entirely by the time he was alone again. Deciding that Tywin had had his fill of him for one day, and that it was too late in the evening to take care of a certain last bit of business, he went to tell Cressen the 'grand' news, had a late dinner and bedded down for the night.
Alas, the new dawn came not with a Small Council meeting! It brought instead a sudden call by the King for Court to congregate post-haste!
It was quick business. One brief announcement by the king, then the court dispersed again in a furor of gossip that left Steffon in sore need of personal time with friends and family that weren't Ser Arsehole. Unfortunately, both his friends were the most obstinate shites imaginable and his only family nearby was his cousin the King.
The King who'd just made him Hand of the King.
"Well." Steffon said. "Shit."
"Yes," Tywin said. "Quite."
Oh well! Such was life!
"How would you like to be Master of Coin?"
Tywin scoffed derisively.
Considering how little emotion the man mustered on his worst day, that more or less confirmed everything about the relationship between Aerys and him that Steffon had been deferring judgment on.
"Well, I had to make the offer."
As he stood in the Hand's Solar on the other side of the desk compared to the prior day, Steffon Baratheon watched Tywin Lannister gather his personal effects. He thought to the last words his father ever told him. Endure nothing, Ormund Baratheon had said as he lay dying. Endure nothing from anyone, save the Lord Hand and the King.
Ormund Baratheon had been Hand of the King too, in his day. Steffon wondered what he endured from his King, fresh out of the tragedy at Summerhall. Possibly nothing near what Tywin had to have endured from theirs. What he no doubt thought Steffon was about to. Shows what he knows!
"So." Steffon sat down on Tywin's obscenely comfortable gilded chair. "Do you have any advice now?"
"Do your job, expect no honors save having your competence trusted so highly that the king won't shy away from being every bit as rude to you in public as you are to everyone, and leave your wife at home."
"If I go without a good fuck for much longer, I'll go nuttier than the both of you combined. Pull the other one."
And for the love of Gods, Aerys, you don't insult a woman's breasts! Especially when she's the wife of your childhood friend. Especially not in public! And Steffon still hadn't gotten to the bottom of whether Aerys had cuckolded Tywin or not, honestly, that man! And what role did Joanna play in all this? There's not speaking ill of the dead and then there's thinking the dead were perfect saints. Both were complete dog shit!
Right! Moving on! "Well?"
Tywin paused and pinched his nosebridge, then gave him a long, considering look, walked over to the desk, leaned over to dig through the bottom right drawer and pulled out two tubes made of elder wood, from which he took out great scrolls, fancy as all get with golden ink decorating the edges. The man put them both before him with a sharp gaze of consideration, then went back to his business.
Steffon read them one after another. Then he read them both side by side. Then again. Then again. Then he bowed forward and rested his brow on his clasped hands.
Tywin was speaking now, about intrigue and politics and knowing when to set, when to curb, and never bend. Teaching him. Advising him just like he'd requested. He even sounded like he meant what he was saying. Of the rule of law to crush the braying of mob and ambition. Of how there was never an end to the paltry feuds and lowly ambitions of upstarts that needed putting in their place.
"This Citadel Town Charter is the greatest snarl I've seen since the so-called reforms of King Aegon," said the proud lion. "But it's only the first of many snarls you'll be expected to unknot. By now you will have noticed the different wording. There's a reason I've yet to deposit either scroll in the Archives. The wording may be blatant to coin-counters, but to an up-jumped trader like Darklyn?"
Steffon Baratheon listened grimly as Tywin Lannister explained his great trap.
If Darklyn somehow managed to get through Tywin's iron grip on the Red Keep, the wording was by design ambiguous enough that he could dismiss it as a small misunderstanding if brought up to the King. After all, they all worked together on the document, the Hand, the Master of Laws and Lord Denys Darklyn himself, with final reading and sealing by himself the King. It would be madness to think the Hand would ever sabotage the effort in the eleventh hour. But the Hand gets the 'honor' of doing the drudge work, so who's to say what could have happened during the final write-up? Mistakes could easily slip by the scribe's hand while putting down the final charter on the fancy scroll. Who would dare accuse the Hand of sabotaging the Crown itself? More like it was a moment of inattention, a brief spell of exhaustion, the scribe failed to control his penchant for flowery courtly language and he, Tywin Lannister, will certainly hasten to write up an amended paper at once!
What grand a scheme. A spark of brilliance. A masterstroke, isn't it just so?
"You never meant for him to stay quiet about it. You meant it as a warning."
"Quite so."
"This could beggar them."
"Don't be a fool, Steffon. Even without leave to install whatever system of governance he can dream up, which can render moot this whole issue in a hundred different ways, that was never the point."
The point was to make him grovel and beg. "And if he doesn't bring it up, it gives you, or whoever next becomes Hand or King, grounds to go after their entire House in the future regardless of how Darklyn interprets it."
"If he is enough of a fool to do that, he deserves every consequence."
Or maybe he just believes in Tywin Lannister's reputation, down to the most dark and gruesome parts he bought for himself in the blood of drowned children.
"I admit I didn't expect the man to catch the issue from a single skim in the throne room," Tywin admitted. "But he is no threat. One minor lord will make no difference to the number of lesser houses that will disdain you for your high office as a matter of course, so you needn't worry there is any greater risk of poison in your wine beyond what the position of Hand brings along. As for armed recourse, that you can safely discount. What are you doing?"
I'm thinking I shouldn't feel so inconvenienced for wanting to enjoy the King's Peace.
Steffon finished writing his raven message – it always surprised people to learn his big hands could write such small letters instead of relying on a maester for it – then he put the pen away, rose and headed for the door. More precisely, the men standing guard right outside. "Harbert. Take this." He gave Ser Arsehole the charter. The real one. Because for all his cuntish ways, he was loyal and brave. "To be delivered directly into the hands of Lord Denys Darklyn at the Dun Fort in Duskendale. You leave at noon. Now get me the Grand Maester."
Steffon closed the door. There was a storm gathering at his breast, large and clamorous.
"… I should have known."
Steffon went to the nearby sconce and held the fake charter over the candlelight.
"I should have known," Tywin ground from behind as the gilded scroll caught fire. "As always when faced with a knot of any kind, your first and only instinct is to cut it and damn the consequences."
And what of the consequences of tying the knot to begin with? "Are you sure you want to discuss knots with me, Tywin?" The storm frothed wildly. "I'm more of a sailor than you are."
"Hardly."
The storm tossed and foamed in the depths of his lungs, but now he knew what this other friend of his needed. "Then maybe you'll indulge in a story. Why, I just remembered one! There's this friend of mine, see. He's a hard man. Been a hard man doing the hard decisions for a long time now. It's given him quite the fearsome reputation at home! Unfortunately, he's still just a man, this good friend of mine. Alas! He's been digging his own family's hole diplomacy-wise, what with nobody daring to talk about him. Makes it awkward when wholesale slaughter's his only go-to when touting his own horn, if you follow me. Terrible business! Between that and all the nepotism in the capital and whatnot, methinks he's locked himself into this pattern where all this being the hard man making the hard decisions makes him miss it when the hard decision isn't the right one. Robs you of other options, that, especially in the long run. The real irony, though? He was this close to having all the snags in his foreign affairs done and solved. I mean sure, the Dornish are oathbreaking, guest-right-defiling cunts probably involved in the slave trade, but they were this close."
"I am not laughing, Steffon."
The storm whined. "Of course you're not. If it were up to you, I'd never laugh again either and then you'd have no joy in your life at all."
He wasn't joking, and by how quiet it got behind him, Tywin damn well knew it. But then, Steffon wasn't joking before either.
"…Get to the point or we're done."
"Your wife just died." Steffon deliberately looked everywhere but Tywin because he knew the man wouldn't allow himself to feel anything if there was someone watching. "But instead of doing the human thing and grieving, you pushed all your spite over her death onto your baby boy, and then your hate at your baby onto a different party entirely. The same way you pushed your hatred of your father onto the Reynes and Tarbecks, except this time it was people who had nothing to do with it. You shat all over the efforts and legacy of the beloved wife who'd arranged the windfall in the first place. Says a lot that you acted the exact same way in both cases, doesn't it? Except while Tytos Lannister was someone you looked down on and hated, Joanna was the one you most loved and respected."
"You dare."
"You are wracked with a perverted sentimentality. You're as free with your contempt as your father was with his charity. Tytos Lannister spent his love and affection freely while you don't give out any. You spend your spite and hate freely, while your father didn't give out any. You're the opposite sides of the same coin because you're both insecure maids that overcompensate."
"Enough!"
Steffon flicked the ash off his fingertips and turned around. "You are your father's son."
Tywin Lannister snarled, literally snarled for the first time in Steffon Baratheon's recollection. A gruesome darkness passed over his whole face in that moment. It could have been betrayal. It could have been hate.
Steffon Baratheon watched Tywin Lannister all but throw the last of his effects into a bag, sidled just barely to the side of the door as if to get out of the way, waited until Tywin made to get past him, then he struck.
The storm bubbled over and burst out into the world like a hot summer rain.
"Steffon!" Tywin ground his teeth. Literally ground his teeth. "What. Are. You. Doing."
"I'm hugging my friend!" Steffon burst into tears all over the prickly arse who just couldn't bear living if he didn't make everyone and everything fall to pieces around him, the fucking arsehole! "You told me a lord isn't a true lord unless he can be an arse when he needs to! But this isn't you being an arse when you need to! This is you being an arse when you don't need to! I can't follow you down this slope! I won't! But you don't have to do it! Don't go!"
"Oh for Gods' sakes-"
"No!"
"You-."
"NAY!"
"Let me go."
"I SHAN'T!"
"Let me go, Baratheon."
"You said my name! My other name! You're upset! That's good! You don't let yourself go enough! So what if you're not perfect? Everyone makes mistakes! Even if you don't, you're not the first person to make no mistakes and still lose! That's not weakness! That's life! Why the hell won't you live it instead of-of-of this horseshit you dumb fuck!?"
"You've gone mad."
"You're the mad one, you skittering fuckweasel! Mad with grief, you and-"
"-don't-"
"-Aerys too!" Steffon sobbed.
"I swear by all the Gods, if you don't-!"
"You don't believe in gods! Dramatic shitstains the both of you, a pox on shit parents everywhere, it's like you're both determined to treat common sense and all of its arcane offshoots like, oh, love and kindness as if they're something unfathomable and impossible to understand, you MORONS!" Steffon was yelling and shaking Tywin by the shoulders by the end. "What the hell is so hard to understand about being friends!?"
"Gods," Tywin wheezed. "Why have you forsaken me?"
"Because you told them to take a hike, you decrepit omelette!"
"…Unhand me or I won't be responsible for-"
"NO!" Steffon bawled, wrapping himself around the man even tighter. "You'll have to kill me! Stab me with that knife why don't you! Do me a favour, why don't you!? Go on, do it! I dare you! What about me huh!? What about my feelings, huh? You can't expect me to just stop loving someone! Go ahead, do it! Do it already! Why won't you do it? You won't do it! I knew you wouldn't do it, you don't just stop loving someone once you've started you-you… you emaciated cave goblin!"
"Of for Gods' sakes…"
Tywin Lannister sighed gustily and settled to wait for Steffon Baratheon to finish blubbering out his hugs, tears and snot all over the man's hair.
Once the steel pole up his arse finished giving way back to his normal one made of prickly rosewood, Steffon reluctantly disentangled himself from the smaller man, took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Loudly.
Then he checked the door to see if Cressen had arrived at any point, which he had. "Here," he held out the crumpled paper. "For the Dun Fort. Might need to transcribe it first."
Cressen all but fled from the sight of them.
Which was fair.
Steffon blew his nose again, folded the handkerchief with the clean side out and gave Tywin a once over. The look on Tywin's face as he rubbed him clean of all the tears and snot was like a dead-eyed zombie promising murder.
Oh well. "I'll ride with you."
The Lord of Casterly Rock stared at him like he was some foul beast from the Seven Hells. "… Fine."
Steffon beamed, hugged Tywin one last time, led him out past the suspiciously straight-faced guards, dragged him deep into Maegor's Holdfast to have the former Hand take his proper leave of the king – they were both so civil! – and then rode with Tywin and his retinue out of Red Keep all the way to the docks.
"I meant what I said before." Steffon clasped arms with the other man at the foot of the gangplank. "Talk to me. Write to me. Send your-"
"I know," Tywin said harshly, though his heart wasn't in it. "I know you meant it."
"You damn well better! I never say anything I don't mean!"
"It will be the death of you one day."
"And I'll die laughing!"
Tywin glared at him, as if it was somehow impossible that someone could both laugh and take things seriously at the same time. Then again, that was Tywin's main probl- "… I'm leaving part of my men here."
Steffon blinked, astonished.
"At least until you bring more of yours, though you'll have to dismiss them yourself if you want them gone."
"You do love me!"
"Goodbye, Steffon."
"I love you too, Tywin. Be well!"
Steffon Baratheon stood on the berth and waved until the Sea Lion disappeared from view.
Then he returned to the Red Keep and went to the Maidenvault.
It had not escaped him that none of the King's family were at court that day, or the day prior.
The music didn't escape him either.
The night you return, we're having a feast
The candles will burn, you've conquered the East
Get home safe, as you can't be replaced,
The honors you've earned, you fought like a beast,
The harp strings and verses reached him before he got there. They were both graceful, beautiful and a right buggering to the soul. Didn't use any oil to ease the kick either. Damn. Guess them sister wives don't make for much better bedding than being a right royal arse did.
So let's toast in your name, raise your glass to the moon,
Shall we dine with the gods, here's a toast, here's a toast to you!
Painting the map with the blood on your hand,
Expanding the realm, and winning new lands,
Get home safe, cause you can't be replaced,
The night you return, we're having a feast.
The night you return, we're having a feast
The candles will burn the night you return…
He waited with Darry outside the door until the last words faded, but wasted no time upon going in.
"You Grace!" Steffon bellowed, arms opened wide. "My Queen! Cousin! Your beautifulness! Give me a hug! And a kiss or two while you're at it! You must!"
Queen Rhaella Targaryen blinked rapidly at the sudden storm that overtook her confinement, but stood gracefully in an ethereal whorl of platinum hair and red satin. She welcomed him into her arms, kissing him daintily on both cheeks. Well, once he lifted her high enough anyway. She laughed almost gaily. Good. That pretty face was made for smiling.
Then he turned to behold the fifteen year old harper who'd stopped strumming to watch them. The tall and beautiful Silver Prince with deep purple eyes and long elegant fingers. A memory emerged unbidden at the sight of him. Him and he sheer ridiculousness of the lofty burden of sublime tragedy Steffon could read far too easily in the boy's face. Of the earliest words that Steffon could remember from his mother, Rhaelle Targaryen of House Baratheon.
Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
Such a shame he never obeyed her. He never said no to a good spot of wrestling.
"Prince Rhaegar Targaryen," Steffon ground out, walking to loom over the young man. "Your father tells me you're a dandy with your nose in old books and head in the clouds. Seeing as he confessed in the same breath to being a right cunt, I'll defer judgment." The aghast look on that far too pretty mug was delightful. "All the same though, we'll be living together from now on. Better brace yourself, my prince, because when it comes to my boys and their potential friends, I have very exacting standards." Steffon smiled wolfishly. "Whether or not you end up calling me father by the time we're done, you'll damn well be treating me like one."
Fuck the Maesters and their snobbish horsecrap. Screw the Seven and their child-buggering death cult. The Others take every last shit parent in the world. He'd do right by these dimwits and teach them how to live even if no one else will, if only to spite them all!