DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN GAME OF THRONES

|PROLOGUE|

Tommen Baratheon lay shivering in bed, clutching a knife to his chest. He was fighting crashing waves of despair. His skin was pallid, and dread clouded his chubby face. He was on the verge of tears, and the moist luster of his golden hair was perhaps due to them

He breathed a deep sigh, then silently looked around. The room, overcome by darkness, was completely silent. While moonlight peeked through the cracks in his curtains to illuminate his bed, the rest of the room was close to pitch black. If his eyes weren't adjusted to the darkness, he probably couldn't even make out his own fingers.

His twenty-square-meter room was far larger than what a toddler needed. It contained a full set of furniture—a closet, a desk, a table, and so on—but somehow looked deserted. The chamber was simply too spacious for him.

I'm scared, Tommen whispered in his mind, and his body shrank into itself as if to vanish.

He wasn't scared of the dark, and he was used to sleeping alone, too. One word to the maid waiting in the adjacent room and she would stay by his side the entire night. But that wouldn't nearly quell the fear that nested in his heart.

Tommen gripped the handle of his blade, a paring knife pilfered from the kitchen when the maids weren't watching. It was the best he could manage in the way of self-defense against the terrible enemy from whom he had to protect himself.

Westeros, I am in Westeros... The fact was so shocking, that even now, after three years, it still caused him to feel faint.

Before his life was flipped and turned upside down, Tommen had just been Tommy. A normal kid born and raised on the east coast who spent most of his days on the playground after school playing b-ball. At least until a drunk driver decided to take a spin around the neighborhood.

Car crashes were a funny thing. Television and movies made it seem like you could get hit and be fine a few minutes later. That was only if you had Lady Luck on your side. If not then you'd end up like he did, broken and bleeding out on the asphalt until you were dead.

Dying was funny too. So many cultures and regions thought only "they" knew what came after. That only "their" God or Gods existed. The truth was that the only people who knew what came after were the ones too dead to spill the secrets of the universe.

And they weren't allowed to talk about it.

But Tommy could still remember it, clear as day.

#-#-#

He lay face down, listening to the silence. He was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. He was not even sure he was there himself.

What happens to your physical body after you die...?

A long time later, or maybe not time all, it came to him that he must exist, must be more than disembodied thought, because he was lying, definitely lying, on some surface.

Almost as soon as he had reached this conclusion, Thomas became conscious that he was naked. Convinced as he was of his total solitude, this did not concern him, but it did intrigue him slightly. He wondered whether, as he could feel, he would be able to see. In opening them, he discovered that he still had eyes.

He lay in a bright mist, though it was not like any mist he had ever experienced before. His surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapor; rather the cloudy vapor had not yet formed into surroundings. The floor on which he lay seemed to be white, neither warm nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be.

Thomas sat up. His body appeared unscathed.

He stood up, looking around. The mist that surrounded him pooled together like an enormous drop of water, and abruptly changed shape. What emerged was the form of a person, clad in a transparent robe with a hood.

But that wasn't quite right. Thomas was staring up at it from the ground, at an angel that should have given him a glimpse underneath the hood—but there was no face. It was an empty space, and the long, dangling sleeves also contained nothing but air.

For the first time, he wished he were clothed.

Barely had the wish formed in his head than clothes appeared a short distance away. He took them and pulled them on: They were soft, clean, and warm. It was amazing how they had appeared, just like that, the moment he had wanted them...

What is going on?

As if it could hear his thoughts, the right arm of the robe suddenly shifted. A white glove peeked out of the sleeve, but once again, there was a stark separation between robe and glove with no flesh to be seen connecting them.

Then the other sleeve rose in turn. The empty white gloves spread apart, and the faceless being opened an invisible mouth—or so it seemed. From all around, a calm deep voice cut the silence.

"You are dead, Tommy. Your life on Earth has ended and you are now in the next phase of your existence in the universe."

Dead? Tommy stared at the robe in disbelief. He was dead. Then did that mean he was in limbo? Where was he going to go? Heaven or...

"This is not the Heaven of Hell you were raised on."

"So, you can read my mind?" Tommy nodded. That made sense. If he was in the afterlife, then the "person" in front of him must be some kind of God. "If I'm not in Heaven or Hell...then who was right?"

The robed figure lowered its arms and continued speaking. "The Hindus were a little bit right. Muslim's a little bit. Jews. Christians. Buddhist. Every religion guessed about five percent."

"So where am I?" Tommy asked, and he wondered why he was so calm. Shouldn't he be freaking out? He was dead after all?

"At the moment, you are outside the Fields of Asphodel."

Imagine the largest concert crowd you've ever seen, a football field packed with a million faces.

Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beach ball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for the concert that will never start.

If you can picture that, you have a pretty good idea of what the Fields of Asphodel looked like. The black grass had been trampled by eons of dead feet. A warm, moist wind blew like the breath of a swamp. Black trees—grew in clumps here and there.

The cavern ceiling was so high above it might've been a bank of storm clouds, except for the stalactites, which glowed faint gray and looked wickedly pointed. Tommy tried not to imagine they'd fall on him at any moment, but dotted around the fields were several that had fallen and impaled themselves in the black grass.

I guess the dead don't have to worry about little hazards like being speared by stalactites the size of booster rockets. Tommy thought and he couldn't help but look for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead were hard to look at. Their faces shimmered. They all looked slightly angry or confused. They would come up and speak, but their voices sounded like background chatter, white noise. Once they realized he couldn't understand them, they frowned and moved away.

The dead weren't scary. They were just sad.

"Is this where I'm going to spend my eternity?"

"That is a possibility, but not the only one." The robed figure said, and it shifted to the side. "There are two others. The Fields of Punishment."

To the left, spirits flanked by security ghouls were marched down a rocky path toward the Fields of Punishment, which glowed and smoked in the distance, a vast, cracked wasteland with rivers of lava and miles of barbed wire separating the different torture areas. Even from far away, Tommy could see people being chased by massive dogs, burned at the stake, and forced to run naked through the barbed wire. And he saw worse tortures too—things he didn't want to describe.

"Or Elysium."

To the right, was a small valley surrounded by walls—a gated community, which seemed to be the only happy part of the afterlife. Beyond the security gate were neighborhoods of beautiful houses from every time period in history. Roman villas and medieval castles and Victorian mansions. Silver and gold flowers bloomed on the lawns. The grass rippled in rainbow colors. He could hear laughter and smell barbecue cooking.

In the middle of the valley was a glistering blue lake, with three small islands like a tropical vacation resort.

Tommy stared at the island in awe. "That's the kind of place I want to spend eternity."

"The Isles of the Blest," the empty robe explained. "You cannot enter there yet. Only those who have chosen to be reborn three times, and three times achieved Elysium are allowed entrance."

"Reborn?"

"If you choose to be judged and are judged to have achieved Elysium you will be given the choice to enter Elysium or be reborn and try to achieve Elysium again. If you are judged and are judged to be placed in the Fields of Asphodel or the Fields of Punishment you will not be given the choice to be reborn."

Tommy thought about how few people there were in Elysium, how tiny it was compared to the Fields of Asphodel or even the Fields of Punishment.

Did he really want to risk it?

He hadn't lived a very long life, and he hadn't done anything he thought would get him into Elysium.

"I would like to be reborn."

Tommy blinked and suddenly there were two slot machines in front of him. The kind that you would find at a casino.

One machine was labeled: WORLD.

The other was labeled: POWER.

"If you roll a WORLD where there is any sort of powers, you will then be given the choice to roll for a power."

Tommy stepped up to the first machine and grabbed the silver handle. He pulled down and watched as millions...or probably billions of words rolled like credits down the screen before landing on the world he'd spend his next life in.

GAME OF THRONES.

Okay, that's not terrible, Tommy thought. It wasn't an ideal world, but he was a fan of the books and the first few seasons of the television show so at least he wasn't going in blind.

"Would you like a power?"

"I absolutely would," Tommy answered and stepped up to the second machine. Westeros was a brutal world. If he was going to live there, he wanted some kind of edge.

Like before, he pulled the handle down and watched as the screen flashed.

C'mon, give me something good! Tommy crossed his fingers. He was hoping to get the powers of Superman or even a watered-down version like Homelander. With powers like that, he'd be a god in a world like Game of Thrones.

And if he couldn't get either of those, then anything that would make him even slightly impervious to swords would also work.

MCU TASKMASTER.

Shit. Tommy stared at the words. That wasn't what he was hoping for.

"Good luck." the robed figure raised its arms.

"Wait!"

#-#-#

When he opened his eyes after he was sure that the afterlife had been a dream. But he wasn't in a hospital either; no, he was somewhere dark and cramped, and it felt as if he was floating. He opened his mouth to scream for help, but a foreign, viscous-like substance flooded his throat. He tried swinging his arms and kicking his legs, but it felt like he was submerged in mud.

A soft bounce rocked where he was, and he stopped fighting. He could hear sounds, faint and distorted as if he was hearing them from underwater. Another gentle shockwave jostled his cramped prison.

Time passed; He knew that. How much time was the question? He had no way of keeping track. Not until the day he was freed.

A bright light had opened up in the darkness, and Tommy thought that it was death, finally calling him forward. His cramped prison shifted and tightened uncomfortably as an invisible force started pulling and pushing him toward the light.

When he fell into the light he realized what was going on. He was a newborn baby and his cramped, dark prison had been a womb.

And then he was staring into the green eyes of Cersei Lannister who was whispering his name.

"Tommen Baratheon."

It was hard to believe at first, but he accepted the truth after his first birthday came and went.

He was no longer Tommy, a kid from the US. He was Prince Tommen, second-in-line to the Iron Throne of Westeros.

Accepting the fact that he was now living in a brutal world like Westeros, had brought Tommen a terror he had never felt before. He knew quite well how dangerous Westeros could be. His memories of a series of books and a now infamous television show promised a deadly end for his family.

Him included.

A quick look through his new homes bookshelves was all it took to find a number of volumes on the tragedies of Westeros. It made him so scared of the world itself that he could hardly sleep.

He couldn't change his birth, his parents, or how people would feel about him once they knew the truth. Four Kings and a Queen across the Narrow Sea would want his head on a pike.

Tommen slid out of his bed, knife in hand, and slowly and silently made his way over to his desk. He lit the candle at the edge and sat down, opening the history book he was expected to read as a member of the royal family.

Dipping the tip of his quill in the ink bowl, he turned to a random page in the middle of the book and started to write in the margins. He was scared out of his mind, but he had to do something. Hiding in bed wasn't helping him.

Tommen didn't write in English, or the Common Tongue as it was called in Westeros. No, he wrote in morse code, a language that didn't exist in Westeros so that his secrets would be his, and his alone forever.

As he wrote, Tommen rubbed his chest. Even if he didn't have any lasting scars, sometimes he could still feel it; the phantom pain of the car hitting his body. The pain hurt, but it would serve as a reminder.

If he didn't fight, he would die.

He had seen it with his own eyes, on paper, and on-screen. If he didn't at least try, his life as Tommen Baratheon would be a short one.

Game of Thrones Self-Insert because why not!

Author's Note: While this story is mainly based on the television show, the timeline is from the books. So from the day that Ned Stark executes the Night's Watch deserter to the day Jon Snow is stabbed is around 3 years.

Thanks for reading!