Strength of the Realm Found in Bonds: Robert (291 AC)
Robert combed his fingers through the whore's raven hair, imagining that he had just slept with Lyanna instead. Make no mistake, Robert knew that what he was doing was a grave disservice to his late love, clinging to her memory for far longer than was appropriate and imposing it on woman after woman with every fuck he made. But her memory haunted him like a ghost, and this was all he could do to keep it from tearing apart his mind in madness through its grief.
"She must have been a beautiful woman, to hold your heart hostage for so long."
The illusion broke with the sound of Bella's voice. She might have been fair and dark-haired enough to pass for a Northerner, but her accent spoke of extended time spent amongst the Braavosi. And despite how sultry and passionate her green eyes could get, they could never match up to the powerful and unbound spirit that gazed out from Lyanna's gray eyes.
"She wasn't to a lot of people, but she was to me," Robert replied sadly. "I appreciate the beauty of a woman more than any other man alive. But there are millions of women and girls with nice faces and figures. But none have ever made me feel so… alive, as she did. That's the only thing that can make a man like me fall in love with someone."
Bella leaned up over the King, her hair draping down to tickle his beard. "And what a love it is, Your Grace. What would you have done if she had been your Queen instead?"
"Huh," Robert only had to wonder then for a moment, as he had been wondering about it for eight years now. "I'd have given her half of the Kingswood for starters. She loved being out below the open sky more than she ever did beneath a castle roof. Tall forests, meadows filled with flowers, that's where she'd be – never in the Red Keep, except to sleep.
"I'd also-"
A crash, and commotion out in the rest of the brothel.
"ROBERT YOU FUCKING BASTARD!"
Bella leapt aside as Robert sat up abruptly in bed with a look that was a mixture of shock, fear, and anger.
"YOU BETTER GET YOUR FUCKING ASS OUT RIGHT FUCKING NOW OR I'M GONNA FUCKING DRAG YOU BACK TO THE RED KEEP BY YOUR FUCKING BALLS!"
"Damn that girl's lungs," Robert growled as he stepped off the bed, threw on a robe, marched over to the bedroom's oaken door, and threw it open with as much grace as any other man whose afterglow had been so rudely interrupted. "Her shouting's going to get me killed one of these days, I swear."
He stalked out past his Kingsguard, Ser Meryn Trant, into the darkened hallway as half-dressed and nude patrons and servicers of the pleasure house either poked their heads out in a stupor of lust-fueled curiosity or rushed past him in suddenly sober fear.
"She sounds angry, Your Grace," Ser Trant idly remarked.
Robert looked sideways at him. "Really? I couldn't tell from all the racket she's causing just to get me."
Clanking metal and stomping feet caught his attention, and he turned to see Strength turn the corner up ahead. In the dim lighting of the secluded passage, her orange eyes burned bright with an ethereal glow, and the anger in them was made all the more menacing from the shadows that obscured her figure and silhouetted her form. Meryn would've stood before his King against anyone else, but in the face of the Doll ahead, he chose to stand behind him.
"How dare you?" Strength rumbled as she approached Robert.
"How dare I what?" Robert challenged, surpassing her stride.
"How dare you abandon your Queen again, and now of all times?"
"Because she's a viper, always looking for another way to sap me of my time and energy to shorten my life."
The two stopped before each other, and though Robert towered over Strength, the pair's gazes bored into each other like equals meeting on the battlefield.
"And your children?" Strength countered. "You would leave them without their father in their lives?"
"They're very young," Robert rebuffed. "These are the years they'll forget."
"And when you're not there to welcome their new sibling into the world?" Strength suckered. "Is that an impression you want to leave with them?"
Robert's anger dissipated and the shock made him take a step back, as if he'd actually been struck. "My child is being born?"
"Yes," Strength advanced. "And I don't know about you, but I think that the first things a baby should see are their mother and father, and not have to wait for either of them to get past their childishness in order to go see them."
Robert knew that it was a damn cheap shot she'd just given him. And he didn't want Strength to get one up on him – he hated letting anyone get the better of him in anything. But there was a very good reason that people went for cheap shots: they ended fights quickly when they worked.
"Losing Lysa and Robyn hurt you that hard, didn't it?" Robert answered quietly.
The anger that burned in Strength's eyes mixed with the bubbling up of the sadness from the memory of bitter loss. Robert didn't know exactly what Strength had seen when she returned to the Eyrie with Black Rock Shooter beside her to retake it from the hill savages. But he could certainly imagine it.
Cracked masonry and piles of rubble from the vandalism of the tribesmen and the fighting by the Dolls. Hallways filled with brave and good men who fought and died in vain Rooms filled with sobbing and violated women and girls.
But it was below the Eyrie that the broken bodies of a mother and her infant son were found.
Robert didn't know Strength's pain, but he saw Jon's, when after learning of their deaths, the man fell to his knees and let out a wail that was reportedly heard everywhere in King's Landing from the Red Keep to the Sept of Baelor. And based on what he heard later, Strength had done the exact same thing when she discovered Lysa and Robyn's fates.
Strength grabbed Robert's shirt and dragged him down to her eye level. "Do you really think your suffering is so great that no one else can understand? Huh?! You think that just 'cause you're the King and your life is so miserable that you have to drag everyone else down with you?!"
She threw him so he almost sprawled out on his back. "I lost my little brother! Someone who would be there for me when Jon is gone! Someone I was Bonding with, so that I don't go mad from Severing! And now I have to live with that pain forever! LITERALLY!"
She stuck her giant finger in Robert's face. "But in spite of that and other pains we've received, Jon and I have been cleaning up the messes in YOUR Kingdom for eight years now! Eight years of you wasting your fucking time with drinking, hunting and whoring! You have no excuse for not doing your duty! You're the fucking King, and for the sake of the Seven Kingdoms, IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME YOU LET LYANNA REST IN FUCKING PEACE!"
Robert's Fury rose up at the sound of Lyanna's name, but then his eyes met Strength's. The powerful wills of the Crowned Stag and the Falcon's Fist met, and Ser Meryn Trant would later testify that the air seemed to tremble at the tension that filled it.
Then, for the third time in his life, Robert found himself conquered by a woman, and dipped his head in defeat before he stood up. "There'll be no more need for dragging. Trant! Grab my clothes, we're leaving!"
"Yes, Your Grace!" Ser Meryn Trant scurried off.
Robert sighed. "You do know that you didn't have to make a spectacle out of this."
Strength rolled her eyes. "One, you're a King, and that means everything you do draws attention. And two, I can't my fists be my only source of compensation."
Robert let out a small laugh at that.