The Kingslayer
Fandom: Game of Thrones
Character: Jaime Lannister
Warning/Rating:
Summary: Jaime Lannister the "Kingslayer" is a character of wonderful contrast. Like all characters of this nature,
They called him the Kingslayer which for a Knight was one of the worst things that could besmirch his reputation. For when your job was to protect the King, your word was your honour which bound you to all eternity. It would forever taint Jaime in the eyes of the world, people would point at him and whisper.
"There goes the Kingslayer, the man who stabbed his King a man with no honour!"
It didn't seem to matter to people, that there was another side to the story. That the King was at the time threatening to burn people alive. Or that he had demanded to Jaime to kill his father and to burn Kingslanding to the ground.
"Burn them, burn them all..." Aery's had cried out in all his madness.
So, Jaime had done the one thing he could in that moment, he had put his sword in the old man's back, stopping Kings Landing from being burnt to ashes. But of course, by the time the King had laid at his feet, there was no one around to back up his story.
The moment Ned Stark and the rest of Robert Baratheon's men had arrived, all they saw was the Mad King lying at Jaime's Lannister feet. In the very same moment that Jaime's father's Tywin was ransacking Kingslanding outside. In Jaime's eyes he had been condemned and never given the chance to explain the circumstances. From that time onwards, his reputation had disappeared into the mud.
Wherever he walked the whispers followed him around, condemning him where he stood. His fellow Knights looked at him with different eyes, as suspicion reigned among what his motives had been. In the beginning, he would try to explain himself but no one was that keen on listening to the words of a Kingslayer. In the end, he gave up even attempting to justify his act.
Instead he replaced the hurt and answered their angry looks with a smirk. It would convey to the world that he didn't care what they thought. He would wear it like an armour to protect him from their insinuations of his disgrace and fall from honour. He would not let on to them how he felt for that would give them more credence, to Jaime they ceased to exist in his world.
He would go back to the arms of his sister Cersei and bury himself into her love and passion. While there, he would tell himself it didn't matter, it was them against the world. No one else existed apart from them and the children they had secretly created. For a time, it would work and Jaime could ignore the cruel irony of the fact that the one good deed he did, was something he would never be admired for.
When Bran Stark had caught him and Cersei in a sexual act, he had thrown the young boy out of the window. For a second, everything that he and Cersei had was at risk, he acted without thinking. Not considering the consequences for Bran or his family. His only concern had been for his own.
He had expected Bran to die, but the child hadn't. A further attempt on the boy's life had failed after that. But Bran had been condemned to live the life of a cripple but luckily had no memory of how it had happened.
It was only when he'd been captured by Robb Stark's army and had faced Bran's blazing mother Catelyn, that his thoughts had gone back to the boy. When she asked him had he done it, he admitted it. Relieved to get his own self-loathing out in the open. He had stared at her horrified face and she had asked him why. He had asked himself the same wretched question many times over to no avail.
He could give Catelyn no answer because he knew there wasn't anything that he could say, to right the wrong he had done that day. Just as he could not write his own name in the Knights Code of Honour book, he was condemned a second time but, on this occasion, he was entirely at fault. Two very different acts had defined him in very different ways. But still he had been condemned in both situations and that was the ironic twist of fate for Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer.
Once Catelyn Stark has accused him of being a man of little honour and not taking his vows seriously. He had thought for a moment and then fixed her with a nonchalant stare, before saying.
"So many vows. They make you swear and swear... Defend the King, obey the King, obey your father, protect the innocent, defend the weak. But what if your father despises the King? What if the King massacres the innocent? It's too much. No matter what you do you're forsaking one vow or another."
He could see the horror on her face at his words, but he could see the irony had been lost on her, just as it had on everyone else, who saw him only one way. Through all the years of hurt, frustration and self-loathing that he had thrown on himself, it scarred him because he did want to be a man of honour. He did want to protect the innocent and the weak. He did want to write in the book that he had served with honour, but he knew that life had always had other plans for him. Maybe one day he would have the chance to rewrite his own past, but for now he would remain what he'd always been, the Kingslayer.
