She has only one child, but sometimes he is her brother and together they are one and the same.
It's confusing, and as well as she hides it she knows he can see sometimes, in the tilt of her eye, the angle of her chin.
The hunger in her voice.
She remembers his hands on her skin and his lips murmuring her name, white cloaks and gilded armor.
She can see others, too, and she sneers at them because she cannot bear to see their happiness.
The little bird is grown now, all gold instead of copper, and the half-faced man shoots true.
Her husband is old, and she need not kill him in this life, her white knight does it for her.
He is not her husband.
The Starks are honorable no more, and she smiles as they sink. Lovely Angela sketches out a smile and her blood is as red as her hair once was.
Capone she doesn't remember. She doesn't care, he doesn't matter, never did. He only matters when he swoops in and saves them all, too late to save her Jaime- James- Jimmy- Joffery.
She thinks she is dying, sometimes, tiny pieces of time slicing her hands open from fingertip to wrist.
She hopes she'll bleed out, red and thick and empty, but she only bleeds rainbows and broken glass.
The lipstick is bright on her lips, and she marvels at the color.
The blood is thick on her skin and she smiles at the taste.
Her life is refracted through chandelier glass, broken up like light through a prism. She is here, and she is there, and she is Cersei and she is Gillian. She watches her hair fall to the ground like golden spirals, watches her son die in her arms, watches her brother love another woman, watches others take her place.
She seethes and hisses like boiling water, harmless enough until she boils over.
She begins to forget, once Jimmy- Jaime- James- Joffrey dies. He is poisoned and he is bleeding, he is shot and he is stabbed and he is gone.
She thinks that it is she who poisons him, sometimes.
Maybe she does, once or twice.
Margaery is Mary now, and both she and Sansa- Angela, now, lie bleeding together on the ground.
The man who is not whole (but has a hole) is not weeping now. There is a hole in his heart now, as well as his face, and she laughs at his foolishness.
He tears the world apart for the little boy, and she hears second hand how her son- brother- lover died.
The world is made up of is and was.
She was Cersei and she was Gillian.
She was a queen. She was a mother.
Now she is neither, nothing, none.
She is fracturing, shattering like light through a prism, and her world fades even as it grows clearer.