Stannis Baratheon & Shireen Baratheon
They will tell you that your father lied to steal a throne, to plunder a realm.
I was never that grasping, that greedy. I never wished for a single drop more than what was rightfully mine.
They will tell you that your father was ensorcelled by a sorceress; bewitched, misled, misdirected, led astray by the red woman.
I was never that spineless, that weak-willed. I was never anyone's puppet. I am my own man. I made my own choices. They may have been the wrong ones, at times, with dreadful consequences, but I chose. I have always chosen. As someday my daughterwill have to choose. When you wear the crown, on your own head be it, the weight of all your decisions, all your mistakes, all your blunders. If we deserve the praise and the admiration for the good, then justice dictates that we deserve the blame and the reproach for the bad as well.
They may even mean well, some of them, when they tell you how I was ridden like a horse by the Lady Melisandre, how I was not culpable, how I did not know any better, how it was all her fault, her doing. You will not believe in that lie, because you are my daughter, and you must know that a lie is a lie and must be taken out, even if it is meant to defend, to justify, even to comfort. Even when it comes out of undiminished loyalty.
Even when it comes out of love.
There is no such thing as a harmless lie.
You are the Princess Shireen of House Baratheon, you are my daughter, and you do not belong with the ranks of self-deceivers.
But I fear that you will believe what you wish to believe, about the distant father who had been like a ship passing through the dark night, about the stranger waiting to be visited by the Stranger.
And how could I blame you, when I have never taught you to know your own father?
You will have your mother still, the mother who loves you and will protect you at the cost of her own life. She resents a great many things, your mother; we have that in common, she and I. But she does not resent her daughter and she does not hate her only child, despite the lies spread by a few unscrupulous fools. You know the truth of it far better than anyone; you who have known the tenderness she had never shown elsewhere.
You will have your mother still, if not your father; and for that, I could have almost forgiven the gods who were so monstrous as to drown both my mother and my father while their young sons stood watching, praying for mercy and justice that never came.
Forgiven, but not forgotten.
AO3 Mirror
gotfic stannismonth Stannis Baratheon Shireen Baratheon Selyse Baratheon