King's Landing stunk of ash, rubble, and spilled blood for a long time.
Like most things about the realities of his new title, Jon got used to it.
The reconstruction was slow. Dany had succeeded in destroying most of the city, and even in these southern climes winter did its best to ravage the people who had survived. Jon, Jaime, and Brienne found small pockets of the remaining buildings in which to establish quarters and set up rebuilding the kingdom bit by bit.
Jon thought he would hate being King, but he didn't. Most of his friends and allies were here with him, and he often visited those who had survived the wars and settled in various parts of Westeros to rebuild their own lands. He may have instituted Jaime as his Hand to limit his power, but that power never felt like it was something that belonged solely to him: it was shared, between Jaime, Brienne, and himself. Somehow between the three of them, they had managed to make the bloodshed and war stop.
The city was painstakingly rebuilt. Marriages took place. Babies were born. Winter came and went, and gardens were planted in the spring. The air felt safe to breathe again, and it didn't smell like anything close to death.
It would never take root in his lungs like the breezes of the North, either of the kingdom that his sister ruled or of the sprawling villages that contained the Free Folk that felt like a truer sort of home to him. But sometimes when he walked the streets and saw the once devastated survivors of Kings Landing flourishing, he felt something close to peace.
His heart may have belonged to someone who lived beyond that wall deposited in the north of Westeros, but Kings Landing also felt like home. He felt fuller for belonging to more than one place or people. When he walked in the godswood outside of the newly reconstructed (if smaller) castle, it almost felt the same as it did back in Winterfell. And he didn't feel guilty about it anymore.
Was this how it was supposed to work, ruling five kingdoms at once? He didn't know. He didn't feel like a Targaryen, even after all of these years. And sometimes when he thought of how he had gotten to this position, he was at even more of a loss.
Luckily, he had the younger generation to remind him of these things.
"Why do they call Papa the Kingslayer?"
Jon froze.
He looked down at Selwyn's earnest brown eyes staring up at him as they strolled around the outer reaches of the godswood. He had taken a rare afternoon off to give an exhausted Brienne a few hours of peace, and now he was confronted with Jaime and Brienne's children's favorite pastime – asking endless questions.
If Jon can ride dragons, why is it a bad thing?
What does Uncle Tyrion mean when he says you should never be too close to your sister?
How come we can't learn to throw knives like Gendry and Arya?
How exactly did Jon's brother become a tree?
"Who – who has been saying that?" Jon choked out. He looked back a few feet to where the children's nurse was trying to charm a couple of his guards. They didn't seem to be aware of their conversation. Jon didn't know whether he should be relieved or annoyed.
"They say he's not just a Kingslayer," Joanna piped in as she ran back to them. "All the children in the Keep say that Papa's a Queenslayer, too." She handed Jon a handful of lavender flowers. "Mama said we could make flower crowns."
Flowers crowns Jon could handle. This discussion? Not so much.
Selwyn let go of Jon's hand to trot a few feet ahead of them and pluck flowers from the grass. Jon led Joanna to a stone bench on the far side of the forest, and hoped that Joanna would become distracted from her current line of thought.
No such luck. They had spent about ninety seconds threading her bounty together before she asked again.
Jon sighed and watched as Selwyn ran back over, to them, trailing a line of dirt and scattered petals in his wake. "Isn't this something you should discuss with your mother?" he asked.
"Mama's tired all the time since the baby came," Joanna said, her chubby fingers attempting to tie one stem to the other. "And Daddy's in Biggarden – "
Jon smiled. "Highgarden," he corrected her.
"Mama says that it doesn't matter what everyone says about Papa," Selwyn said from the grass underneath them, where he had become distracted by a caterpillar. "As long as they listen to him."
"You mother's right," Jon said. He grimaced. "But I'm not sure I like hearing about this kind of talk."
"But why do they call him that?" Joanna asked.
Jon sighed. "Are you asking me because you don't want to ask your mother?"
"We want to ask you," Selwyn said, looking up at Jon.
"We know you'll tell us the truth," Joanna added.
"Jon, please," Selwyn begged.
He knew he was being manipulated by the little urchins and that he'd have to answer to Brienne later. But sometimes that was enough: just hearing his name said like that was enough to convince him. Just Jon.
He'd never gotten used to hearing "your grace" pour off other people's tongues when he was addressed, not even when he was ruling one kingdom as opposed to five. Joanna and Selwyn didn't see him as any kind of monarch, but merely as their parents' friend who taught them how to swordfight.
Who else did he have that with? Sansa, back in Winterfell, sometimes. Tormund, beyond the wall – but their relationship had long ago morphed into a bond that paid no heed to boundaries. When the weeks stretched into months and he was stuck here in King's Landing without the colder air to settle his lungs, and the responsibilities piled one top of each other, sometimes he ached for someone who didn't know him as what he was expected to be.
Jaime and Brienne ruled the realm as much as he did, if not more. But it had been a very long time since they had known him as someone without power or titles or authority.
"A long time ago," Jon began, "there was a war."
"There were lots of wars," Selwyn stated, seemingly unimpressed.
"This was before most of them," Jon replied. "You father was sworn to protect and follow the king. He tried to do the best that he could. But the war took its toll on the king. He wasn't in his right mind anymore. He didn't want to protect the people. He didn't trust them anymore. He thought that they were his enemies. He wanted to hurt them. And your father stopped him."
"He killed him?" Selwyn asked, gazing at Jon in rapt attention.
"He did," Jon said, trying not to contemplate how Brienne would be planning a kingslaying of her own when she heard that Jon had been the one to relay this information to her children. "He did it because he had to."
"Was the king bad?" Joanna asked.
"He didn't start out bad," Jon said. "He became dangerous. Your father didn't want to do what he did. And he suffered from it, for a long time."
"What about the queen?" Selwyn asked. "Was she bad?"
Jon remembered Cersei and Joffrey, his crippled brother, his dead father and brother. Something still clutched in his heart when he thought of Ned and Robb, long ago felled by this war between his family and the Lannisters. Somehow the pain of those old betrayals never went completely away, even as the new alliances had shifted and morphed as his family's enemies multiplied.
Jaime had become an ally during the war for the living, and Jon had grown to know and trust him enough to not let that old pain linger. He still wondered if Ned and Robb would have accepted Jaime's help, if they would have been willing to sit as king knowing that someone who had conspired against their family was sitting beside them. That they would have trusted someone who had murdered his sovereigns twice, and that they would have trusted that man not in spite of the things he had forced himself to do, but because of them.
Ned and Robb hadn't had to fight the battles that Jon had. They hadn't had to watch their lover be murdered by the people fighting beside them, hadn't allied with her side afterwards and been murdered for it. They hadn't fallen in love with a woman they thought they could trust to fight beside them, only to see her turned into someone who would rain death and destruction upon innocents before her adversary could get there first. They had died with their moral certainty intact, but Jon hadn't had that courtesy.
Because he had come back.
Would Ned or Robb approve of Jon taking a male lover from the Free Folk years after taking a female one when he was expected to marry a highborn girl to solidify his authority? Would they have approved of Jon keeping Tormund in his life as the years went by? Would they have approved of Sansa marrying a Lannister not once but twice, the second time because she wanted to?
Jon had loved Targaryens and Wildlings. He had lain with men and women because he had chosen it. Sansa and Tyrion were raising Lannister sons in Winterfell. Arya's daughter had (technically) been born out of wedlock on a ship with a Stark sigil before she and Gendry could make their way back to Storm's End. Ned Stark's children may have ruled kingdoms, but many of the old systems of honor had proved to be quite flexible once the old enemies had been vanquished. Their unwillingness to live up to the old standard of behavior no longer seemed significant.
They had learned that honor was no longer the ideal it had once been. It was a personal test forged in blood and sacrifice and the loss of your name. Jon knew far too much of what it was like on the other side of that loss to condemn Jaime for what he had done.
Of course, there was no way to explain that to two children who hadn't reached the age of seven in the midst of a conversation you shouldn't have been having in the first place.
"She didn't start out bad," Jon told Joanna and Selwyn. "I don't think anyone does. But the wars stretched on for many years, and she lost a lot of people that she cared about. She stopped caring about the people. She wanted to hurt them. And your father had to stop her. And this was hard for him, because he had once cared about her very much."
"She was related to us," Joanna remarked.
Jon gulped.
How was he going to explain that?
"She was," he told the children.
"She had children," Joanna said. "Did she want to hurt her children?"
Jon breathed a sigh of relief that at least one troublesome topic had been successfully averted.
"They had died a long time before we went to war with her," Jon said softly, remembering how the light had gone out in Jaime's eyes the few times they had talked about his first lost family.
I wanted to believe Cersei was a different person before they died, he had confessed. But I know that isn't true now.
"She missed her children very much," Jon added. "But it didn't make the things she did right."
He thought of Loras Tyrell, incinerated in the Sept along with so many others, and the one survivor who had emerged years later, her face scarred, her ambition shattered. He had made it his mission to make sure no one had to suffer the same fate that they had ever again.
"So did Papa do the right thing when he killed the Queen?" Selwyn asked.
"Aye," Jon said. "I think he did."
He didn't know how it was possible, but whatever gods existed had somehow granted him a mercy in sparing him from having to make the choice that Jaime did.
He thought of Dany the last time he had seen her in the ruins of the Great Hall. He remembered the look on her face, her blue eyes blazing and undefiant as she had ordered Drogon to melt the Iron Throne before flying off towards the horizon.
He remembered waiting fearfully for months to hear of news of the return that had never come. He remembered feeling relieved that she had survived, and was safe and happy far from the reaches of power.
He remembered that the first decision he had made on his own since he had been crowned had been to leave her that way.
He remembered how Jaime hadn't fought against it.
"It was the right thing," Jon affirmed. "It was a horrible thing, but it was the right thing to do."
"But you're the king now," Joanna said, frowning.
"I am," Jon affirmed.
"Are you scared of Papa?" Selwyn asked.
"I'm not scared of him," Jon said. "Your father is a good man. It's his job to remind me that the people aren't my enemies. That I have to work to protect them instead of them protecting me. He's done a very good job so far."
"I don't think you're like them," Selwyn said. "Like the other king and queen. I think you're good."
Jon smiled and handed the flower crown to Joanna as they finishing threading it together. "I'd like to think so," he said. "Your Papa's there to make sure I stay that way."
Joanna stood on her toes and placed the flower crown on Jon's head. "I think this will help," she suggested.
Jon smiled at her, wishing it had only been as easy as the little girl imagined it.
He knew that his next conversation with her mother wouldn't be.