reignfall | 𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔟𝔬𝔯𝔫𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔦𝔤𝔫.

𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔟𝔬𝔯𝔫𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔦𝔤𝔫.

In spite of all her terrible fears, it really does seem as though it was naught but the common fever, which had struck her young son. Joffrey Zarek had never known a day's suffering, however, not a lack of rest nor a hint of true hunger, and though he is but few turns away from his third nameday, encroaching upon them in the second month of the year, the disease passed by him quickly. It is the fourth day now, and his appetite was ferocious when she had broken her fast with him on honeyed bread and fruit, he was eagerly chasing a cat he had spotted right thereafter, and only during their walk in the open air did any sort of fatigue catch him. Awake he remained for the waterfalls and his spotting of a large bird of prey, though he was solidly asleep in her arms soon enough on their way back. Before she set him down in his bed, she felt his forehead for the umpteenth time, but it is as the healer had assured her: he is well once more, even the cough is gone.

Relieved, she leaves the boy to his afternoon nap, and goes again to find her husband. Gone had he been in the earliest hours of morning, as was his usual way, though it is strange that he not even been present to ignore her request to join her and their son for their morning meal, nor has she seen hide nor hair of him since.

She finds him in his study, in the end, and it does not take more than a look for her to know what has befallen him. There is a glaze to his otherwise so sharp eyes, a pallor to his skin, dark rings beneath his eyes. The lips dry and cracked, his breath the lightest rasp. "My emperor." She inclines her head, though she is trying fast to suppress a hint of mirth. "If you would excuse me for another moment?"

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It is as well, perhaps, that he is sinking so inexorably towards sleep (whether he wants to or not), and that he feels so leaden in his limbs and so muddy in his thoughts. It is as well, because even under those circumstances, there is an alarming lurch in the pit of his chest at that hastily cut-off admission, at what it might mean. What conspiracy is she working, that calls for that kind of open near-compliment? What does she stand to gain by his resting, except that it will loosen his grip on his power? And, worst of all: why do those questions feel like they ring so hollow, as though he already knows that she did not, after all, say it as part of some grander campaign against him?

He cannot feel her hand on his chest, not through the furs. Even so, he finds himself strangely aware of it, and of his own disinclination to move it.

"Then we must both be careful not to coddle him too much." His voice lacks its usual sharpness. "Or he will learn to value that, and in adulthood, no-one will be so gentle with him."

Strange it is every time that she is awake enough still to note when he himself is winding down to rest. Most frequently, she is the one to fall asleep first, to wake only when he rises, and then only to stir to a different sleeping position that does not rely on him for her being comfortable. To be here now, as sleep steadily claims him, is almost too much of an intimacy between them – and perhaps it is for the best that she can feel the need for a brief respite nudging at her own self in turn. She shifts deeper under her own furs, sharing but the uppermost one of his, so when her hand rests on his chest the second time, there is one less fur between them – but surely, it makes no difference, layered as he is.

"He will value family, for he has one to value." Unlike Casimir, she does not say, but what father was there to look up to? None. The mother, mayhaps, if it is not wishful thinking on his part, but Joffrey need never suffer such insecurity. She yawns, nuzzles closer to him. There is another thing to debate, of course, for even he, mighty Casimir, has someone here in this moment who is gentle with him, and why should their son be denied? But he seems disinclined towards the admission, and Cersei herself knows too great a risk when she sees it.

He does not push her away. He can tell himself, will no doubt tell himself, that it is down to the heaviness of his limbs and that uncomfortable knowledge that he must, after all, rest to restore himself as soon as possible to fighting condition. He can tell himself that he feels no comfort in her closeness, that there is no part of him that turns towards the weight of her body against the furs; he can tell himself, too, that if he did, it would only be a kind of habituation, for they have in the past few years slept beside one another more often than not. He can tell himself many things. He has always been a consummate liar.

What he cannot do is stifle his own answering yawn, or resist the urge to let his eyes close again and remain closed. Nor is he master enough of his own body, in this moment, to keep it from shifting a little closer still, until her breath brushes cool against his fevered cheek. He cannot dwell too much on it, except to think that perhaps, if he is fortunate, they will both have forgotten such small lapses by the morrow.

"What a man values," he warns, in a voice made less stern by the yawn half-stifled beneath it, "is what will kill him. What he loves. Why do you think I love nothing but victory?"

But victory is cold and as empty as a ringing bell, and she is warm, and he has found himself strangely at peace here in that warmth.

Will a death in the name of victory feel grander than one in the name of a lesser value? She fancies a death in her own bed, falling asleep peacefully in a nest of gilded accomplishments, resting rich at the heart of an empire. It need not be blades, or a slow chocking. It is either this or a death found side by side with her twin, as their fealty goes, but it is evident Casimir has no taste for such things, not even when taken so harshly by sickness.

Now, though, he has come as close to holding her as he ever will, and she is nestled as comfortably as she ever does with him, and she cannot dwell too much on his voice and the word loves. He loves not. This is what she needs to keep her eyes on. "Then what is the difference? If they call kill the same. I won't let him be poisoned by love."

But he is so close to her, and she is tired, and she knows he will not open his eyes again for anything now, so why hide a contended smile at his closeness?

Hours later she awakens, at least three must have come by judging the change in the light, and rare as ever, she wakes first. There is sweat at his forehead, he is gleaming with it, and the room has gone cold with the diminishing of the fire. Not him, though: he is radiating a sick, feverish heat. Slowly, gently, she extracts herself from the furs, and pads over stiffly to the hearth, stoking it once again. Next, she finds the water, a cloth that she may wet for her task, and as she returns, she already begins her speaking. It will not do to wake him tenderly, and it will not do to startle him, either. She has no doubt that he can yet wield a knife. "You are burning, the fever is driving the sickness out of you." Softly, she sits down on his side of the bed. "I'll cool your forehead."

Joff, at least, had appreciated it, and she takes the cool, wet cloth to his heated skin with the same gentle care he had seen used on their boy.

He hardly stirs when she moves, and he hardly stirs when she speaks. It is so rare that he fully gives himself over to sleep, to anything so vulnerable as oblivion, that he struggles to wake at all, his body clinging to what it has so often been denied. If it were not for the heat of his body and the loud rasp of his breath against a swollen throat, he might easily be mistaken for a dead man, so still and peacefully has he slept.

Even when the cloth is laid against his brow, he does not fully surface: he only rises out of the depths of oblivion into the shallower waters of half-dreaming. He moves sluggishly to find the knife beneath his pillow, but does not draw it. The familiar smoothness of its bone handle is enough to comfort his half-waking mind, and his body feels so heavy, so entirely immovable. Besides, the cool caress of the cloth is not unpleasant in the slightest, and he does not, in his addled state, particularly want to push it away.

He mumbles - in Vasi, garbled with sleep - something he will not remember. Death makes hands cold, Mother. Stirs a little, his hand still clasping the knife beneath his pillow, to turn towards her touch and the weight that shifts the mattress beneath him. Surfaces a little further, still clinging to dreams. In sleep, his face has a different caste, slackened and almost gentle despite the feverish glow; as he rises towards the sharp-edged wakefulness that he so rarely releases, his features harden a little, draw back to their usual sardonic look. At last, fully half a minute since she spoke, one eye opens, bleary with sleep and not fully focused.

"Gold." It is mumbled, too, and he still is not entirely confident which language he speaks, but fortunately, his unconscious mind seems to have settled on Westerosi. His brow furrows beneath the cloth, and his tone is that of a man trying to draw together the disparate pieces of a thought. "Your hair. Gold."

They may not share even a droplet of blood, but the way he reaches for the knife beneath his pillow is remarkably akin to Joff reaching for one of the toys he insists on taking to bed. The same seeking of a routine comfort, of a familiar shape it is, and as so often, she does not know what to do with the similarities once she notes them. If she could at least mislike this, find notable reason to see that her boy does not grow into those self-same habits –– but there is nothing wrong, in her mind, with a man preparing himself for some evil to come.

Never has she seen him so heavy with sleep, or so accepting of a gesture some might quantify among tenderness of all things. He mutters something, and she does not cease the gentle motion with which she touches the cloth to his forehead. Vasi is not her greatest strength, but she has learned and is learning still. Here and now, she does not understand all: he mumbling, and she is unprepared. But her boy is raised to speak two tongues, and she understands best of all clumsy-tongued needs. Cold, for instance. And mother.

The latter, at least, is a surprise, and it does frighten her, coming from him. Is he so sick that he must ask for his mother? Men have died of all sorts of afflictions that looked, at first, conquerable.

"Yes," she answers, for once kind enough to speak his own tongue to him, her halting Vasi, which has seen far worse days than this one, but could stand betterment. "Gold." It seems struggle enough for him to speak, though his features have sharpened into some form of waking. Why she makes this attempt to please him now, she cannot say. "You need more sleep to heal."

The light seems to swim, lancing in strange ways when his eyelids flicker. His frown deepens, and his free hand drifts up, touching the corner of the cloth that she presses so solicitously to his forehead.

"I do not remember the battle." There must have been a battle, surely. But he does not remember it, nor feel the wound that has laid him low. But he is feverish, and he is lying here in the muddled state of a wounded man, and so he must be wounded, surely. His throat hurts. Maybe that is it. But when his damp fingers seek it, they find only old scars. A strange thing. The answer is there, near to hand, but he cannot quite seem to reach it. Sleep still hangs too heavily on him, cobwebs holding him still.

Her hair is gold. He blinks slowly, and her hair is still gold, and her eyes glint green, and she is not his mother. Of course she is not. Who is she? It takes him a moment, a long moment more, to grope through those cobwebs and grasp reality.

"How long was I asleep already?" His voice still murky with sleep, still sluggish and unsteady; but he speaks Westerosi consciously now, albeit with a stronger accent than usual, and there is something clearer in how he looks at her. "Have you checked on the boy?"

The sentence is simple enough for her to make quick sense of – and of course he would, in the first dizzy moments of wakefulness, think he had been injured gravely in some battle. Anything to not have to acknowledge the depths of mortality here: that something unseen and scarcely preventable had struck him as it could have struck her, or any noble, or any peasant for the matter. The spiteful little line of thought is calming.

It makes up, almost, for the way she has let him see her so vulnerable, with her cloth pressed to his forehead to soothe his fever, as she had done with their son. He must have thought her weak and gentle then; he would think worse of her now.

"You slept," she answers in Westerosi as well, "for a mere few hours. I meant to see to your fever until you woke, and now that you are awake, I will see to Joff." There was no battle. The words are everywhere and nowhere, and she does not seem too eager to rise. "The servants all had orders to call upon me, should he show the slightest sign of weakness today."

He does not, in point of fact, think her weak and gentle: right now, in the absence of any ability to move against her, he has to think her cunning. It is safer to think that her failure to kill him is part of some plan she has. It is safer to think anything, other than that she means it.

"It will break soon," he says at last, as though he can order the fever to pass by force of will alone. Rationally, he knows he cannot. Even he is aware, to some degree, of the limitations of mind over body. That does not stop him from trying to will himself into recovery, trying to drag the sickness out of himself.

And the memories, too. He has a faded, muddied sense of having conversed with her, but he cannot remember what he said, and that troubles him deeply. If, in his muddled state, he let something slip that might be used against him...

It is still hard to keep hold of the thought, or any thought. Everything seems somehow intangible, and it is hard to grasp at reality. He clears his throat, which quickly turns into coughing, and his eyes screw closed for a moment, a look of disgust passing across his face. Ill-temper is still written there when he opens his eyes again. "How many hours?" How much of the day have I wasted?

"It will break in time," she corrects him, none too tenderly. A mere few moments ago, he spoke of his mother as though she were present in this room, as she has none been dead for decades. If she had needed even an ounce more of confirmation that he should be diligent in his resting today, it was that – and if she has ever known her husband, then she knows what she must prevent now is another over-eager attempt at seeing to his manifold duties. Not that he gives her now the impression that he could stand, let alone walk, though the glaring seems to work just fine.

"You scarcely slept three hours. It is nearly time for supper." She pretends as though she hardly noticed his coughing; her eyes most certainly did not widen with the same concern she had felt when Joffrey had suffered from the self-same coughing fits a few days prior. It is nothing, his sickness, it is a common ailment, it cannot bring him down, and if it did, she would celebrate at the head of the empire she stands to inherit until Joff comes of age. She should feel nothing, really, except mayhaps anticipation.

Then it must be anticipation when she runs her free hand through his hair, touched light as it is by the sweat that comes with heavy sickness. "You will have to endure a good night's rest."

The lack of tenderness in her tone is a relief, swiftly countermanded by the strange gentleness of her touch. He feels, as he rarely allows himself to feel, off-balance: caught between comfort and suspicion, between what he expects and what is happening. It does not help, either, that his mind still feels foggy and slow, as though his thoughts are creeping through a swamp. It irritates him.

It frightens him. That irritates him much more.

"I will not be eating supper." He is ill. Very well; he can grant that he is ill. (Eventually, and with very bad grace, but he is hardly about to admit that to himself.) Being ill, then, he should manage his illness, so he does not need her. He cannot need her. And he has a half-remembered sense of what his nursemaids told him, when he was young and prone to such human weaknesses as admitting to illness, before he was the Emperor. "Feed a cold, and starve a fever. A lean day or two will settle the matter."

Also, it will spare him the humiliation of finding out whether he can keep food down. He has absolutely no desire to fill his belly only to empty it again.

"Surely you will take some broth, at least." She needs to regain a hold on herself, and quick, but she could not have held in that quick, near-snapped remark any more than a storm could have held its lightning. Now it cannot be a thing brought forth by pedestrian concern, by an ordinary wife's fretting worry. It is one thing to be fragile of heart where Joffrey is concerned, she would, by and large, be judged more harshly if she showed no such care towards her boy, but this softness cannot, cannot extend to him.

Grasping for the faintest moment, she regains her composure, and seemingly something akin to her wit. "Think, Casimir. That you would keep to your rooms is one thing, that can be attributed to any number of reasons, but that you would forgo your meals?" Only the sick do this, the sick and ailing and close to death. She does not say they will think you weakened, because she does not wish to provoke him to take to further gambling with his wellbeing, but the thought hangs between them, heavy as his coughing had.

"Joffrey has taken a strong liking to rosół, and he has already demanded it for his supper again tonight. No one would think twice of a father and mother who take a helping of their son's new favourite meal."

Once again, she is right, and once again, he resents it with an almost petulant intensity - then resents himself for that petulance, for the thought that a passing sickness really has rotted away his self-control so quickly. He should have thought this through by now, should have settled what can and should be done to minimise the issue. He should be several steps ahead of her, not trailing a few thoughts behind.

You were asleep, he reminds himself, and you are feverish, and both have the unpleasant timbre of excuses. It does not matter why he is so slow on the uptake, why he has allowed her to outpace him in considering his own situation. It only matters that it is so, and that cannot be tolerated. He has to recover himself, first and foremost. He has to regain the upper hand.

What he wants to do, then, is to come up with a better idea, one that will silence her and remind her that he knows what is best for him, more than she does. What he wants to do is to reassure them both that he has not weakened, that this passing fog that lays on his mind is... well, passing. He wants to consider her suggestion, and dismiss it out of hand, and put forth something better that will shame her into admitting she had no right to doubt him.

Unfortunately, he cannot actually think of something better. He needs to at least appear to eat: this is true. He needs something that will not upset his stomach or worsen his fever: this is also true. He needs (and how he hates this fact!) for her to hold her tongue, and not throw one of the fits of temper she is so prone to, which means that he probably needs not to push any disagreement too far until he has the means to chastise her properly.

All of which considered, again: she is right.

"Fine." His tone is not exactly gracious. "I will take rosół, and a little bread, and then will you shut up?"

Masterful, how he spins this into a fault of hers, as though her talking would have been needed had he deigned to take the necessary steps toward recovery of his own accord. Where would he be, had it not been for her intervention? Passed out in his study, at best, or collapsed on his way to their bedchamber at worst. What if he had a moment of awareness and ordered a servant to bring him his tea, his dinner, anything at all – and then lost his sense of time as he had with her, speaking to her as though she were his mother? What servant would not have abused that power?

"Will you begin to take the rest you require of your own accord, or must I remind you every step of the way?"

Her voice is sweet, saccharine, but with an edge to it that often suggests the dawning of the sort of fight he much prefers to nip in the bud – or smother into a pillow when it suits him. These are not quite options he has in his state, and to taunt him with it is almost a relief: now she need not examine too closely the weight that was lifted from her when he agreed to have a light dinner, after all.

He hears that fight in her voice, and where it might sometimes invigorate him, the promise of a cinder to be quashed to ash... where it might sometimes bring the promise of a brief and victorious struggle, here it just makes him feel profoundly tired. To his disgust, he must admit he has no energy to fight, not even with her. If she stripped naked and climbed atop him, he is not sure he would have the energy to fuck, either. No appetite, he laments to himself - no appetite for food, for power, for victory. What is a beast without appetite?

He sighs, with a heaviness that is also unlike him, and settles back against the pillows. His skin seems to burn, prickling with sweat; he shivers as though he were caught in the winter air of the mountains outside. It is, he thinks sourly, her fault he must feel this way, and the fault of her thrice-damned country, which has softened him with its moderate climate and its relative peace. It is the fault of her nannyish fussing, delivered though it may be with such an acid sting, and the fault of the weakness that sees him tolerate it. To his fevered mind, this seems to make perfect sense - but what is to be done? What can be done? The canker of weakness has already set in, eating at him, and he thinks again of the tarnished silver of his father's nose, but there is no silversmith who could cast a prosthetic of a man's power.

"I am still in bed, am I not?" His voice is less sharp than he would like, more peevish. "I have slept half the day away. And I have lived this long without your little reminders."

"Then you will leave a good deal longer with them." That he does not rise to cow her in some other fashion - be it to pin her to floor, wall, or mattress alike, or to shove her roughly aside in a display of their mismatched strength – goes to show that her concern, however much she refuses to call it that, is not misplaced. He bears the same glassy look in his eyes that Joffrey's had had in the throes of fever, and though sweat pearls at his forehead, the furs stay where they are.

How well will he take it, she wonders, when the shaking persists into the morning? It took their son a good handful of days to get back on his feet, though it were three at the heart of the disease during which even he, stone-hearted emperor that he is, seemed... uneasy. She is trying to recall now any time at all that she has seen him so blindsided by the physical needs of his body that he was not able to tend to his beard in the mornings. Even sleep she has seen hints at more often.

"Your work is too thorough to be unsettled by a day that sees you sleeping about as much as an ordinary man might." She pours him a fresh cup of water, before soaking the cloth anew in its basin.

The compliment, admittedly, mollifies him: not, he assures himself, because it is flattery, but because it is true. He has built a house of cards, and it is fragile - more fragile, he suspects, than she realises - but it is not so fragile that one day's weakness will end it. He is a rational man, and, rationally, he knows this. Rationally, he knows that it is only one day; in his heart, he fears that one day may turn to two, and two to a week, to a month, to a year. Rotting away in a bed, without even the excuse of injury. They will whisper, as they did in his father's time, they will scheme behind his back and he will have no way to follow their plots, and in the end, he will be dead - or, worse, he will be the puppet that they tried to make him thirty years ago, the puppet he has fought against being all his life.

"One day." The firmness of it is directed at himself, as much as at her. He is not quite lucid enough, in truth, to keep himself from saying it aloud. "Two, at the most, and I will be on my feet again." His eyes meet hers, and there is a challenge in them, although it is not one he is entirely sure he can rise to: he is still perceptive enough to know some of what she is thinking, and yet feverish enough not to fully keep it to himself. "I am not a child, Cersei. This is not what will kill me. Two days, at most, and I will be myself."

And you will pay for witnessing me otherwise. Even fevered, he does not feel the need to say it. It is already said, just not in words.

"It couldn't kill our son. How could it possibly kill you?" She sounds dismissive, with an undertone of annoyance to her voice that betrays her youth. It is not an artful farce, far from it, but any mask will do if it means that she will not be made to admit that she rather dreads to think of him dying. It's all for the sake of the realm, of course: Joffrey is yet too young to inherit it, and she not yet so firmly lodged in the politics at the heart of Vasilion that she could easily rule in his stead – not yet, at least. The cold grasp she feels when he seems so close to lamenting some dark fate is not for his sake, but for all she stands to lose.

She is, as ever, concerned for herself and herself alone.

The cloth is returned gently to his forehead – folded now, so that it may rest there and do its cooling without her motherly aid. "I am in no rush to wed anew, besides."

"You would have no chance to." The barb is lacking from his tone, but he is at least lucid enough to remember (some of) the plans he laid when they were married, when she fell pregnant - that lucidity, at least, must be a good sign. "You cannot think I would let you outlive me long, sweet empress. I am not yet tired enough of life to give you that kind of motive."

Three things occur to him then, muddling together in the sweat-drowned swamp of his thoughts. Firstly, that he may have misjudged: that he should have been more obvious in making that threat clear (and it is a genuine threat, one which she will find traces of if she should care to look into his affairs - hollow threats are more dangerous than none), for it serves its purpose only if she is quite sure that she will not survive his killing. Second, that he is strangely bereft of her fussing, where its absence should come as a relief. And thirdly, that he no longer feels that threat is needed, after all. With the sharpness that only comes with borderline delirium, he is finally aware of the truth of what was said so many nights ago: that she does not want him dead, and he does not want her dead, and they do not hate one another. Madness. They are both mad; and he cannot even blame the fever for it.

He lets out a low, almost unconscious laugh, which turns into a cough, and rolls onto his side, away from her, as best he can without dislodging the cloth on his brow. "Is there still sage tea?"

"I am sure we could each put up a sincere fight." And right now, it might be as close to an equal one as they are ever like to get, and she still would not fancy her chances. Not in a direct confrontation, but she doubts he has ever feared direct confrontation. It is other things that trouble him, hidden things, secrets, whispered treasons. Out of a hundred levelled against him, he must, in the end, only miss one.

But the truth remains that she does not hate him, and that he, in turn, fails to hate her as well. She has half a mind to wish for a dose of this sickness, so she would at least have reason to fall to such an insanity.

"Of course." Fresh hot water is procured from above the fireplace, and she brews him but a single fresh cup this time. It is best served hot, and she sees no need to share in it each and every time he must suffer the earthy taste. This time, she does not ask if he requires honey – a drop of it is simply added. "I can gather more if need be, but for now, there is enough left to last you through the night."

She turns away from him, if only to open the window, to let in some fresh air. "The cloth helps?"

The window will not open more than a crack, and the air that comes in is laced with ice. He does not watch her try, focusing instead on holding the tea cup steady, on willing his hands not to shake as he raises the bitter, earthy tea to his lips.

"It helps." He cannot disguise the resentment in his tone, but it does not seem worth lying. The cloth does help, leeching away some of the aching heat of his fever into temporary, but blessed, cool. He wonders, in the back of his mind, whether it is not false help - after all, he has always been taught that the best thing for a fever is to sweat it out, and perhaps this will only slow the process - but it is hard not to be grateful for the soothing cold.

It is hard not to be grateful for several things. He wants to be grateful for none of them. Gratitude is only a form of obligation, and he will suffer obligation to no cause but his own.

And yet, the glimpse of her from the corner of his eye is oddly comforting, and he is oddly grateful.

"A sincere fight would not help you. You are a long way from home, here." Where threats dwell, surely, obligation does not.

It was a cold morning, but it seems to have turned to an even colder afternoon. For as mesmerised as she had been by the country upon her arrival, she has quickly begun to question how any soul has managed to settle here – though it does explain, she reckons, why Casimir has come to claim warmer shores for himself. It does not much surprise her when the window barely budges: even back home, he has made sure the windows do not make for easy access points. That she used to sleep with her windows wide open as a girl is not something she has ever mentioned to him, knowing well to how much ridicule she would open herself to.

"No, I suppose if you truly turned against me, my chances of survival are low. The goal truly would be not to go alone." And that seems achievable, and she wonders if he takes comfort in this casual exchanging of threats.

"It would be better to cool your calves." This is what was done with Joffrey, when the fever kept him awake and glassy-eyed. A cooling, wet cloth around his lower legs, which gave him the relief he needed to sink back into a healing sleep. The window is pushed shut again – she cannot stand the ice-cold air coming in through the crack, and she turns back to him with a shiver. "How does anyone live here?"

He fixes her with an only somewhat glassy stare, and he will not admit to himself how grateful he is that the conversation has shifted back towards more solid ground. Not that anything feels particularly solid just now, with the world blurring and smearing at the edges and the bed seeming to shift queasily beneath him.

"By growing hard." If he has heard the part about cooling his calves, he does not seem about to act upon it. He has fixated on the latter part, instead. That is an answer that has no uncomfortable doubt associated with it. It comes with an answer to his current state, too, which he seizes upon. "That is the trouble with King's Landing. It is too warm and too peaceful, living is too easy, and you all grow complacent in it. See what happens when I spend too long in a soft place like that? Only a few years, and I am already falling prey to a cold on my return."

It is, perhaps, not the best argument he has ever come up with. It also doesn't exactly gel with what he has said up to this point, or with what he would like to express. In the moment, though, it seems very convincing.

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