𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔟𝔬𝔯𝔫𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔦𝔤𝔫.

[reignfall]

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?"

Comments

[reignfall]

"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."

[borntoreign]

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.

[reignfall]

"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."

[borntoreign]

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?"

[reignfall]

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.

[borntoreign]

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."

[reignfall]

"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.

[borntoreign]

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.

[reignfall]

"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."

[borntoreign]

"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?"

[reignfall]

"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?"

[borntoreign]

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.

[reignfall]

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?"

[borntoreign]

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.