It was all too romantic and Cersei loathed it. Loathed her, more like. The way her prince carried her off to who knows where, the way she abandoned everyone she loved in order to be with him, the way no one saw this coming and everyone was surprised. Perfect little Lyanna, pretty young maid––how could she betray her kin, to be with a married man no less? That was what they said. Cersei was glad they judged her. She only wished they would judge harsher.
What she wanted to know was why no one was chasing after her and why no one wanted to abduct her because she may not have been as pretty as Lyanna but she was a Lannister and Lannisters always were a prize to be won. No one wanted the Starks, who even cared about those wintery bastards except when something was going on at the Wall?
She stewed for days and days and then even more once word came that Jaime might be in danger. Of course Brandon and Rickard went up against the Mad King and paid for this foolishness with their lives. When Cersei had heard it she laughed. How stupid it all was that people should die for one pretty girl whose dowry wasn't worth even half of Cersei's. She hoped Lyanna burned for it. She hoped she cried every night she lay with the Silver Prince in a bed of sin and she hoped she rued the day she ever set foot at the Tourney at Harrenhal, the day she betrayed her entire family with––as Jaime said––hardly a backward glance.
It all happened so quickly after that. They were plunged in war lead by Robert Baratheon the man Cersei was beginning to fancy out of spite to Rhaegar and the man who Cersei consequently wanted to win. She worried for Jaime but she knew him and she knew he would survive and she prayed every day for his sake and she never prayed but she did for him.
But she prayed hardest that Lyanna would get what she deserved.
To this day she is still unsure whether that prayer was answered.
.
He couldn't be sad for Ned as much as he wanted to. Rickard and Brandon were dead and suddenly his brother's wife was his but Robert felt only a touch of pity when he extended his arm to Ned and clapped his back and told him it would all be alright in the end. It would be alright in the end when they killed every single Targaryen bastard that crawled over the face of Westeros. It would be alright when Lyanna was returned to them, everything would be alright as soon as she was back. Bringer of the light, the hope, she was supposed to be. Instead, the bringer of the scourge, the death.
Robert was not sure if he wanted her back or if he wanted her back the way she was two years ago before they were engaged before they went to Harrenhal before she had pushed him away and decided not to love him. Sometimes Robert wondered if the part of Lyanna he missed so terribly existed in reality or in fantasy. Sometimes Robert wondered if she existed if she was really there if this war was really happening or if she was just a phantom of his imagination just a ghost of his desires.
If he had known the tourney would have been the last place he'd seen her he would have tried to prove that she was real that she was going to stay that she wouldn't disappear.
After all the blood and sweat and tears and grime and rain and muck and aching and bruises Robert needed to know she was real. As he looked in the eyes of a Targaryen loyalist before he gutted him Robert needed to know that he was doing the right thing. He killed and butchered and hacked away at the limbs of those who would have bent to the Mad King and he did not spare them. They called it Robert's Rebellion but what was he rebelling against? They called it Robert's Rebellion but he did not want to be king. They called it Robert's Rebellion but he felt like it was more Robert's Lament than anything else. He wanted justice, vengeance. But most of all he wanted proof that Lyanna loved him, if only a little, if even at all.
In time he had convinced himself that she did love him and not Rhaegar and that he had taken her had stolen her from Robert and she was pining for him and he had to save her.
He told himself these things because he needed the will to keep fighting for a cause that wasn't already lost.
.
The more time he spent with her the more he hungered for her, needed her, felt such stirrings within himself as he had never felt before. Lyanna was the fire of his loins, the ardor of his heart, the pilot of his desires. All throughout Robert's Rebellion––so he had heard them call it––Rhaegar thought not once of Elia or Rhaenys or any of those he had left behind. He felt like they burdened him and now that they were gone he could be free to exercise his birthright, take Lyanna to wife, get his Promised Son on her.
With her everything was heightened. His appetite, his thirst, his senses––above all, his sensitivity to Lyanna, the way she felt, the way she breathed, the way she was.
He knew her better than he knew himself and thus he knew just how deep her misery was.
He tried to plead with her, to beg with her. 'You are carrying the Promised Son, you are my true love, my light, my flame,' he told her. 'Your brother and father were but a small price to pay for the love we share.' He tried to reason with her. He tried to reach the world where she had withdrawn but he couldn't and that meant he had to try harder.
Things were broken and he tried very hard to fix them.
The beatings came maybe once a day and Rhaegar hated them to the extent that he often tried to block them from his memory. Flashes of blood, a split lip, Lyanna crouched and trembling on the ground, eyes filled with fear, the taste of salt tears on her face when he coaxed her into lovemaking afterward. Bruises yellow purple green. Terror on her face, in her blood. 'Just love me,' he would plead, 'my Queen of Love and Beauty.' But things had changed and Rhaegar knew this. He was complete but she was not and there was nothing he could do to complete her, no matter how hard he fucked her, beat her.
Burns across her belly. He had to know if she was the carrier of the Promised Son, to test the blood of the dragon growing within her. Shattering screams and stifled moans. Torches and bubbling flesh. Agony that claimed their hearts and bodies to the point where they did not know where it began and where it ended, if it ended.
Then war broke out and Rhaegar was called away. He vowed to her that he would be back for her and she would remember their love and he would take her to wife and they would rule together one day.
He didn't know it then but the second he left she wished he was dead.
And later that was a wish she knew was granted.
.
Help me she would say and she didn't know who she was saying it to only Help me and Please help me and Save me and sometimes Robert.
Everything was monochrome, her world became black and white and gray and she would just close her eyes and lay in bed to shut it out to stop her mind to hide from the guilt. 'Oh Gods,' she would sob as she laid in the bed where she had for months now and could not tell if the sheets were pink or if they were bloody, 'Oh Gods what have I done?'
Lyanna had no company in her final days save suffocating shame and contrition, the judgmental eyes of the Royal Guard who held her hostage under Rhaegar's instruction.
Sometimes when she had been younger Old Nan would tell her stories of princesses locked away in towers and their princes would come and save them but she did not feel like a princess and she did not deserve to be saved.
The thought that was most threatening was that she knew Robert was coming for her. He had to be because he loved her even though she did not love him. She wanted to love him, Gods how she wished she did now, but Lyanna could not feel love anymore, she could not feel anything. Stirrings of motherhood beat in tandem with the tiny fluttering soul buried in her womb but they came and went and more often she would look upon her swelling belly with rage and hatred and wish the thing was out of her that it was dead that there would be no lasting proof of the misery she had caused.
When she heard that Robert had slain Rhaegar at the Trident and had stolen the Iron Throne, she was disgusted by the pride she felt––as if she deserved to feel it, as if she deserved anything. She had seen Rhaegar and felt a pull she couldn't understand and then she had followed it and look what it had given her.
She would die without ever having known true love, true happiness. And it was no one's fault but her own.
Lyanna thought she could hear Brandon's and Rickard's voices, some nights. 'We forgive you,' her father would say because he was expected to but not because he meant it. 'How could you do this to us, to everyone?' came Brandon's, more angry, more accusatory. She had taken more from him than her father for she had taken his future, his bride, his life, his honor.
She had taken everything, ruined everything, and for it she was given nothing but a lonely bed and a heart more broken than her body.
Though Lyanna's beauty had once started a war she was not so fair now. Her cheeks had sunken in, she was gaunt and jaundiced and bruised and her knees buckled when she tried to stand from the beatings and the fuckings she had taken. It seemed like the little leech inside her, the bastard 'Promised Son,' sucked away all her energy her sustenance her pride. Her hair was beginning to fall out in large clumps and by the time she went into labor it was a month early because the child must have sensed she was dying and needed to save himself. At least he's smart enough to get out while he still can, she would tell herself.
When he did escape, Lyanna knew he wasn't a leech, or a horrid thing that she had once thought him to be, for he was saving her too, he was delivering her, he was letting her live by taking her life away.
She welcomed the puerperal fever that smothered her with open arms and blithely accepted the hallucinations of Robert and Ned and her mother and father and Brandon and took them with comfort. She screamed until her throat sent up blood, screamed Forgive me forgive me forgive me and clung with whitened knuckles to her bedsheets and squirmed with anguish. If the sheets were spotted pink with blood before they were bathed in red now.
As the labor wracked her body for what was soon becoming a second day, Lyanna's fantasies and hallucinations soon ended and she feared she might survive, until Ned appeared and she knew he was not real he could not be there, but then he touched her and kissed her forehead and he forgave her and wept and clasped her hands and she clasped back so tightly with her own frail ones that if she had been in normal health she would have hurt him. When she saw that he was there that the war was over that he had come to rescue her she was disappointed that he wasn't Robert but then knew what she must do.
'Promise me, Ned,' she said, desperately clinging to him as she fought to spit out the words against her numbing pain. Promise me she screamed and her back arched and she squeezed her eyes shut and felt the child slide between her legs into the arms of her brother. She saw her squealing pink child and beheld that he was a boy, that he was indeed the Promised Son, that he had liberated her, and in that moment she loved him more ardently than she had anyone in her life and she wanted to hold him to pet him to kiss him but she was too weak and fell back.
The will to live surged within her but she was beyond the point of fighting now and so she made Ned promise and as soon as he had agreed she laid her head on the pillow and felt an odd sensation as if her whole body was sighing in relief and then she smiled and was gone.
Lyanna the White Rose of Winterfell died that day in the Tower of Joy by the Red Mountains of Dorne and only as her soul ascended did she feel true bliss.
.
The war was over and Rhaegar was dead and Lyanna was dead and Jaime was in the Kingsguard and Robert was king and she was his queen.
She had everything she had ever wanted; a king, a crown. Power so tantalizing and vast it throbbed in her veins as thick as blood.
She had everything and still Lyanna had more even though she was cold and dead.
She still had more and Cersei would never forgive her not as long as she lived no matter how long it was no matter how happy she could ever conceivably be in the future.
Cersei may have married him but Robert was still Lyanna's. He climbed in their marriage bed stinking of mead and piss and he mounted her and he whispered Lyanna in her ear and was so drunk that he did not even see her tears nor try to dry them as he once did what seemed a thousand years ago.
In that moment she decided if he would be unfaithful to her with a corpse than she would be unfaithful to him as well but with a living breathing love of hers. She met Jaime as often as she could and he held her in his arms and rocked her to sleep and told her she was beautiful and perfect and that Lyanna was dead and the only thing she still had was Robert and who wanted him anyway. Cersei survived the first few years of her marriage in Jaime's arms and bed and when Prince Joffrey was born she knew by his downy tuft of golden hair that he was a Lannister and only a Lannister.
Then Cersei knew for certain that Lyanna had taken many things from her but she had not taken everything and that is how she learned to smile again.
That is how she learned to play the game of thrones and win.
.
By the time Robert had sat on the Iron Throne with Cersei at his side he was a shell of a man. Lyanna had died, by some fever Ned had told him, and he knew that he would never experience anything close to true joy again. Never before had a man wanted to turn back time as much as Robert Baratheon had when he learned of his betrothed's death. The part of his heart that controlled his sentiments, his affections, his essence, was diminished so strongly that he scarcely ventured to say he was capable of conscious expression.
There were times when he would sit in his study and stare for what seemed like hours and hours, stare at the wall and imagine he felt the rock, the cement, the tar holding it together, for it was the rock, the cement, the tar that comprised his heart now. He would stare at the wall with such focus that he would indeed become the wall and so when he agreed to marry Cersei Lannister and when he agreed to this tourney or that feast he felt it wasn't he making those decisions for he was no longer him, he was floating somewhere in the air suspended between the past and the inescapable reality that so afflicted him.
Never was a man as empty as Robert Baratheon the night of his marriage.
Never was a man as empty as Robert Baratheon who tried and tried to fill his void with victuals and whores and hunting with such little success.
Never was a man so empty as Robert Baratheon as to be filled again only on the brink of death when he knew he would once again see that which made him empty.
Never was a man so empty as Robert Baratheon as to greet death with a smile and not care whether or not those he left behind would miss him.
And when he died, he died in a kind of peace that he'd never known in life.
.
He had always imagined his death to be something celebrated and eminent. The stuff of legends. He imagined he would die while fighting a great beast or while defending his kingdom. He did not imagine he would die before his kingdom even became his, he did not imagine he would die at the hands of a Baratheon and not a giant or a leviathan, he did not imagine he would die before returning to his lady love and child.
The Silver Prince fell at the Trident, he hoped they would say, slain unjustly at the hands of a jealous suitor of Lady Lyanna's. Or perhaps, the Silver Prince was murdered by a Baratheon fool, let his supporters take arms against the usurpers in his honor.
They would say he died for love, they would write songs about him, he would live on forever and perhaps Lyanna and the Promised Son would hear these songs played at court in memory of him. She would pull him aside, their son, and tell him of his father, fill his head with the wonder and awe that Rhaegar had filled her head with in turn.
They would not say that Rhaegar had been distracted, that Robert had caught him by surprise, that he had fallen and been unable to rise under the weight of his armor and the stag had towered over him and Rhaegar had never felt such fear in his life. They would not say that Rhaegar's last thought was not of Lyanna as it should have been, but of himself and how ashamed he was of the fact that he was about to die after having lived so short a time. How it was unfair that the prophesied fathers never did seem to live to watch their prophesied sons flourish. No they would not say these things in the songs about him, they would not say the last thought in Rhaegar Targaryen's head as he died was of himself and how cheated he felt he had been. They would say he fought valiantly, struggled valiantly, died valiantly, for love.
They would not say his last words were wasted beseeching Baratheon for mercy. Please he had said Please for Lyanna's sake please and not sooner had he finished his appeal than steel bit through his neck and the world was swallowed by blackness.
The Silver Prince had lived a selfish life and he had died a selfish death, but they did not say this in the songs.
.
There aren't any songs about Rhaegar, just as there aren't any about Robert, or Cersei, or Lyanna. Only stories like this one, told truthfully only by those who know the truth.
The truth about the story that began and ended in a lie.
A lie that defiled love and tainted every life of those who it touched. A lie borne from selfishness and deceit cleansed only by the deaths of its progenitors.
Lies are interwoven so tightly in the thread of time that it is impossible to tell where they began and where they end but it is known that this particular lie has been carried like a blight in the survivors of its wake.
Perhaps this is a lie that will never end.
Or perhaps it doesn't matter because the damage was already done, and the lie is remembered in blood.