Author's Notes: Another modern-day Jaimsa nobody knew they needed. The title and some wording in the summary are from the song "Caught Out in the Rain" written by Beth Hart and James House (performed by Beth Hart).
Myrcella is aged up a few years to put her closer to Sansa and Margaery, who in canon are two years and five years older than her, respectively.
During her first months in King's Landing, Sansa had been so homesick that she had called home nearly every day. The city was too big, with too many people crammed into too little space. And even in the relative haven that was the campus of Red Keep University, Sansa could not escape the smells or sounds of the city below.
It hadn't helped matters that she had not gotten along with her roommate. Marissa Frey was probably a nice enough girl most of the time. Sansa was certain that there was nothing inherently incompatible about them…. Except for the fact that Sansa's brother, Robb, had announced a month before his wedding to Roslin Frey that he had gotten another girl pregnant. Sansa had never once tried to defend her brother (What he had done was indefensible!), but Marissa was determined to be hostile on her cousin's behalf.
Sansa counted herself lucky that Marissa had stuck to being cold and rude and making sure her friends ostracized Sansa, rather than resorting to messing with Sansa's things or pulling pranks on her or worse.
As if her living situation weren't bad enough, Sansa had the misfortune to draw not even one class she enjoyed for her first semester. She probably could have tolerated her biology and High Valyrian classes, if she had not also been placed into calculus and chemistry during the same semester. But she had, and she had struggled.
All the negative things happening to her all at once had been nearly too much for her to bear.
Sansa had seriously considered dropping out and reapplying to a school closer to home for the following year. At the end of Christmas break—the first time she had been back to Winterfell since traveling to King's Landing the prior September—she had begged her parents to let her stay home. They'd practically had to drag her to the airport in January, and she had cried the entire flight back south.
Then she had run into Myrcella Baratheon on the first day of the new semester, and things had turned around.
Cella was bright and bubbly and kind, not at all how Sansa had imagined the daughter of Robert and Cersei Baratheon would grow up to be, based on her childhood memories of their families meeting, before their fathers' friendship had grown apart. SMyrcella was studying at Red Keep's prestigious music academy. And she took to Sansa immediately.
Whereas before Sansa had always eaten alone in a quiet corner of the cafeteria, now she usually sat with Myrcella, at least when their schedules aligned. Rather than spending most of her time in the library to avoid going back to her dormitory, Sansa found herself hanging out with Myrcella and her roommate, Margaery Tyrell, in their private off-campus apartment. She was invited out to dinners and parties and, although she did not always go, she began to develop friendships and a social life with their other friends as well.
And her classes that second semester included art history and literature, which she enjoyed immensely.
By the time spring break rolled around in the middle of term, Sansa had immediately accepted Myrcella's invitation to spend it at Casterly Rock, the ancestral home of her friend's maternal family.
The North was a beautiful, untamed land, incomparable to any other. Sansa loved it dearly. But she had realized, as soon as Cella had asked her to go west, that sometime between the end of Christmas break and the beginning of April, her desperation to return to Winterfell had subsided into almost nothing. And, of course, spring break was traditionally supposed to involve warm locations and sandy beaches, which was one thing Winterfell could not provide.
Her parents had been less enthusiastic about her plans. However, Sansa had no cause to regret her decision as she got her first feel of the warm sea breeze across her skin and the first taste of the sea air on her tongue as they walked across the tarmac to the terminal.
The trio made their way to the baggage claim area, because Margaery had insisted on checking a full-size suitcase. Myrcella had assured her that Casterly Rock did have a laundry room and even housekeepers to do the washing for them, but such assurances had fallen on deaf ears. Margaery was dating Joffrey Baratheon, and she was determined to enthrall him during the week they would have together in person. For her part, Myrcella had only stuffed a few essentials into a designer backpack, claiming that her rooms at the Rock would have most everything she needed anyway. Sansa had made do with her schoolbag and a carry-on suitcase, which she had to move out of the way for the third time in as many minutes when another person tried to shove past her to what was evidently Lannisport Airport's only working baggage carousel.
"Hey!" Sansa called, her clear voice ringing over the general din to get her friends' attention. "I'm going to go wait by the door."
"One of you has to stay with me!" exclaimed Margaery, planting her hands on her well-formed hips. "I can't drag my bag off this thing by myself!"
Myrcella rolled her bright green eyes. "What did you pack, your entire wardrobe?"
"Only the necessities!" defended her roommate.
"Well, if all that is necessary for you to seduce my brother, then maybe he's just not that into you."
Sansa smiled and left them to their bickering, only hearing Margaery's affronted gasp but not her rejoinder.
She found their antics amusing, but she was not really comfortable joining in. Not because she didn't feel secure in their friendship (She did.) or because she hadn't known them as long as they had known each other (It seemed like she had known them forever.), but because bickering was too much like fighting.
There had been too much of that between her mother and father when Sansa was a little girl, and even still every time Catelyn was forced to acknowledge Jon Snow's existence in more than a passing way. And even more of it between Ned and his brother whenever they were in the same room together for more than half an hour, and between Sansa and her sister all their lives for no good reason at all as far as Sansa could tell, except that they drove each other up the wall. And recently between her father and Robb when he had revealed Jeyne Westerling's pregnancy. And then between her parents again, after Robb had called out their father's hypocrisy to berate him for doing the same thing to Roslin Frey that Ned had done to Catelyn, and Catelyn herself had joined the argument on her son's side.
There were no seats available in the crowded waiting area, but Sansa made her way to an open space along the wall where she would be out of the way of people walking from the terminals to the parking garage and waiting for their baggage and coming in to greet arriving family members. From there, she had a perfect view of the door.
From there, she had a perfect view of him when he strolled into the airport as if he owned the place.
Tall, tanned skin, a riot of wavy golden hair long enough to brush his neck, and built like an absolute dream.
He was wearing a green t-shirt that visibly stretched around his biceps and shoulders and was too-tight in the chest, but Sansa could understand why he hadn't gone for the next size up when she saw the marvel that was his shoulder-to-waist ratio. It would've been a sin to conceal that body with baggy clothing. His dark-wash jeans fit him like a glove, showing off his muscular thighs and amazing ass to perfection. Letting her eyes trail lower, she saw that his feet were clad in well-worn but obviously high quality combat-style boots that went not at all with the weather of Lannisport but somehow managed to look appropriate when he wore them.
He took off his sunglasses and hooked them into the collar of his t-shirt in one smooth, practiced movement, and she got a clear look at his face. All square, chiseled jawline and high cheekbones and a strong, perfectly proportioned nose and full lips with the ideal amount of pout.
Glorious. Like a warrior prince come off the pages of Sansa's favorite storybook growing up.
By the gods old and new, Sansa wished she was still standing next to her friends so that she could call their attention to this magnificent specimen. She had always been a bit too shy to join in when Cella and Margaery had seen a hot guy and started in on the dirty talk, but Sansa Stark enjoyed eye candy as much as the next girl. This one took the cake—he was the most attractive man she had ever seen. And even if she was too embarrassed to say out loud what she would like to do to him (or, more importantly, what she would like him to do to her), she was sure Margaery would have no trouble verbalizing what Sansa was thinking.
And then she heard Myrcella's unmistakable voice shriek, "UNCLE JAIME!"
It was so loud that everyone in the baggage claim area stopped whatever they were doing to look at her, Sansa included.
She watched in horror as her friend ran through the crowd and bodily launched herself at the man Sansa had been ogling, winding all four arms and legs around him. He caught her with a laugh and seemingly no effort and spun her around twice, heedless of the people around them, before setting her gently back on her feet.
They embraced, Cella's arms around Jaime's waist and her face buried in his chest, and one of her uncle's arms wrapped around her shoulders while his other hand soothed up and down her back. He leaned down to say something into her hair, and Sansa could see Cella nodding in response. Whatever they were saying was obviously emotionally heavy, but Sansa couldn't bear to look away, not even when everybody else had turned away from the spectacle.
They parted, finally, when Jaime pulled back and motioned back in the direction from which his niece had come. Myrcella and Sansa both looked over in time to see Margaery try and fail to heave her enormous suitcase off the carousel with both hands. She gave up and put her hands back on her hips, then turned to glare at Myrcella and Jaime, who by that time were making their way towards her.
It was obvious that Margaery had met Jaime Lannister before. He bent down automatically to receive her kiss to his cheek, as if he had expected it, and the two of them and Myrcella seemed to fall into conversation immediately. When Margaery's bag came back around, Jaime lifted it from the carousel with one hand as if it weighed nothing. Sansa watched him turn and say something to Margaery that made her laugh. She could well imagine it was a comment about what she had in her suitcase, which the airline had covered in red stickers indicating it was overweight.
"And here's Sansa!" cried Myrcella as they all met in front of the doors. She beamed up at her uncle and then back at her friend. "Uncle Jaime, this is my friend, Sansa Stark. Sansa, my uncle, Jaime Lannister."
Up close, it was easy to see his resemblance to Cersei Baratheon, whom Sansa had always considered to be the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. But his green eyes, a shade or two lighter than Myrcella's, glittered with something warm and full of humor, unlike his twin sister's. Hers had always seemed to shine with something cold and unapproachable. And he was much bigger than Sansa had thought he was from afar, probably three or four inches over six feet and seemingly carved out of solid muscle. Proximity did nothing to lessen the butterflies in Sansa's stomach or to dull the unfamiliar ache between her legs. If anything, he was even more gorgeous up close.
He reached out a large hand and quirked his eyebrows in a way that made Sansa think he knew she had been undressing him with her eyes for the last five minutes.
"Sansa Stark," he rumbled, and another shot of desire pulsed through her. "It's a pleasure."
Sansa determinedly ignored the blush she could feel rushing up her neck and across her cheeks. She took his hand, noticing how warm and rough it was and how large it was wrapped around hers, and offered him a smile that she hoped did not look stupid or deranged.
"Mr. Lannister, it's so nice to meet you."
"It's Captain Lannister, actually," he corrected her, and her blush deepened. "But please, call me Jaime."
Before she knew what had happened, Sansa had blurted out, "Captain? But surely you should be a colonel or at least a lieutenant colonel by now."
Her uncle, Benjen Stark, was a major in the army, one rank above captain, and expected to make lieutenant colonel in a couple of years, and he was at least five years younger than Jaime.
If she had offended him, it didn't appear in his expression, which seemed rather to be laughing at her.
"Captains lead teams of men out in the field," he explained, something dark and dangerous and vibrant flashing in his eyes. "Once you let them promote you to major, you can pretty much kiss your combat days goodbye."
"Uncle Jaime has been turning down promotions for years," Myrcella informed her friends as they followed the man out the sliding glass doors and into the hot, damp air outside. "It's driven Mother and Grandfather to distraction knowing he's still putting himself in danger."
Jaime grinned back at her over his shoulder, but Sansa didn't think the smile reached his eyes.
"Ah, sweet Cella, the day they promote me to a desk job is the day I retire, and nothing would bring my father and sister more joy." He shook his head, whether to get his hair out of his face or to encourage the dreadful thought of a desk job to leave his mind, Sansa couldn't have guessed. "Anyway, I thought I'd take you girls out for dinner before we head back to the Rock. Unless you've already eaten?"
"That sounds lovely!" his niece responded with more enthusiasm than Sansa thought the idea warranted, but Myrcella had always been a particularly expressive girl.
"But I've so been looking forward to seeing Joffrey," cut in Margaery.
Jaime gave his nephew's girlfriend a look that Sansa couldn't immediately read.
"Joffrey won't be here until Monday. "Something came up," he explained plainly, clearly trying to hide the peculiar edge that had creeped into his voice and not entirely succeeding.
Margaery's entire face fell. "But I just spoke with him a few hours ago, before we took off! He said he would see me tonight!"
"It came up very recently," Jaime revised his prior statement.
Sansa did not appreciate the hint of sarcasm in his tone. It sounded as if he were mocking her friend for being upset that her plans had been upended without warning. And it was just cruel to leave things so vague and not at least tell Margaery any details about why Joffrey would be three days late. She took a step closer to Margaery and grabbed the other girl's hand, hoping to provide some sort of support and comfort. For Jaime Lannister, Sansa had only a glare.
"It'll be okay, Margy, you'll see!" chimed in Myrcella, far too happily for the situation at hand. "We can spend the weekend just us girls. And you can actually relax, because you won't feel like you constantly need to have full hair and makeup to impress Joffrey, or like you can't have ice cream or cookies because he'll think you're getting fat."
Something dangerous and monstrous and rageful passed across Jaime's face, but it was gone so quickly that Sansa almost thought she had imagined it.
"Forget I said anything," he told them in that same half-mocking tone. He cast one last glance at Margaery's tear-filled eyes before turning to manually unlock the rear door of the classic white Bronco he had led them to. "I'll take you straight back to the Rock, and we'll have the cook make you something. With cookies and ice cream for dessert."
Sansa did not see Jaime Lannister again that night or the next day. He had, true to his word, deposited them in the kitchen upon their arrival on Friday evening. After another round of hugs and kisses for Myrcella, he had made himself scarce. That was not a difficult thing to do in Casterly Rock, as enormous as it was.
Sansa had heard about it before, both from books and from Myrcella herself, but it was simply impossible for descriptions to do the place justice. The Rock was actually a mountain, six miles long from east to west, two miles from north to south, and nearly half a mile tall. Inside, carved directly out of the rock, were at least three times the number of rooms Winterfell had, even if Sansa were to count the uninhabitable rooms in the broken tower and the defunct First Keep of her home. And that wasn't even counting the Rock's various stables and balconies and gardens as "rooms."
Not to mention the port and shipyard at the base of the rock.
Or the gold mines.
They had entered the Rock through a grand, cathedral-like cavern that was as wide as a four-lane highway and at least two hundred feet high, then taken an elevator up to the residential area. There were, apparently, dozens of elevators throughout Casterly Rock. There were also normal staircases and corridors, if one only intended to move around one part of the castle. The family primarily made use of a block of rooms that were all near each other, including a kitchen, several dining rooms, a few living rooms and dens, a large library, and many bedrooms, all laid out over three stories rather like any normal mansion would have been.
But besides the elevators and stairs, there were also wide passageways that wound up the mountain like enormous ramps, where they drove literal golf carts to get to different parts of the castle. Myrcella had told her that in the olden days her ancestors had ridden horses around inside the mountain to get from place to place. As a result, there were stables littered everywhere inside the Rock, although they were used for golf cart storage nowadays.
Sansa would have loved to spend days and days exploring, but so far she had only seen the main living quarters.
Margaery was nearly despondent. Sansa hadn't intended to spend her spring break indoors, moping around watching cheesy romcoms and stealing junk food from the kitchen, but she felt too bad to leave Margaery to her own devices. That's what friends were for, right? To be there for each other, even when there was a castle to explore and a beach to visit?
Early on Sunday afternoon, when it was Sansa's turn to make another snack and drink run, she left her two friends curled up on the sofa debating which Disney movie they wanted to watch and made her way downstairs. Sansa didn't think anything of the voices she heard in the kitchen as she approached. After all, the cook and other members of the household often spent time there. She only realized her mistake when she rounded the corner and caught sight of Jaime Lannister's sweaty, naked chest and bare shoulders.
"I don't know what you want me to do about it," he was saying, exasperation clear in his tone.
Sansa would probably (almost certainly!) have turned around and gone back the way she had come, if she had not been arrested by the sight of so much bare, golden skin.
"Father clearly isn't doing enough!" spat a female voice. "They should be home by now!"
Even if Sansa had never heard it so full of venom before, she recognized Cersei's voice. A moment later, the woman stepped into view next to her brother. She looked like she had dressed for a photoshoot or a gala rather than a quiet day at her childhood home, and her striking, expertly made-up features were screwed up in anger.
Jaime lowered his water bottle from his lips with a sigh and set it down on the counter next to him, the expression on his face making it clear that he had resigned himself to the conversation but was participating very much against his own desires.
"Cersei, it's the weekend. Even Tywin Lannister does not control the opening and closing of the courts."
Courts? Sansa wondered. What exactly has Joffrey done?
"But if you would only go yourself!" replied his sister, her frustration obvious.
Even from as far away as she was, Sansa could see the roll of Jaime's eyes.
"I don't know what good you think my going would do."
Cersei closed the gap between them and splayed one of her hands across his impressive pectoral. She leaned into him, looking up at him through her eyelashes. When she spoke next, her voice had calmed considerably and had also dropped half an octave. Almost like a woman trying to seduce a man, at least according to the classic black-and-white romance films Sansa loved watching. But that couldn't be right.
"Jaime, everybody at the academy knows you and respects you. They're the sort of men who would listen to you, if you would only go speak with them. They're too honorable to be bribed to look the other way by Father's money, but they would do a favor for you, soldier to soldier."
"That may be true," he allowed with another sigh, "if I wanted to tarnish my reputation even more than I already have by asking for this favor of yours. But it's too late. It's gone beyond the school now. The police are involved, and, come Monday, a judge. Nothing father or I can do is going to get your son out of this one free and clear."
In the blink of an eye, the cloying, sweet Cersei Baratheon disappeared, and a hissing, scratching lioness replaced her. Sansa was terrified even to breathe, lest she be detected and that fury be turned in her direction.
"If you loved me or Joffrey you would go!" screeched Cersei. "If you cared about me at all, you wouldn't let this happen to him!"
Sansa couldn't tell whether Jaime gave her a free shot or just did not expect his sister to lash out physically, but she managed to sweep her fingernails across his chest once, leaving three bleeding welts in their wake. He caught her arm on her next swipe. When she attempted to scratch his face with her other hand, he trapped that one too, before she could strike him. He did not do anything else, not to push his twin away or to hurt her or otherwise, but his face looked as if it had been chiseled from stone and there was an equally hard look in his eyes.
"No one is letting this happen to Joffrey. He did it to himself," he scoffed, his ire barely contained. "I ask again: What do you want me to do, Cersei?"
It looked as though Cersei would try to respond, even though Sansa thought from his tone that the question was obviously rhetorical. She got out a single word before he gave her a good shake and she snapped her mouth shut again.
"Do you want me to infiltrate the jail and destroy the evidence?" he continued. "They already have the photos and reports on their servers and backup servers and backups of their backup servers, so that won't help. Do you want me to assassinate the judge? Maybe blow up the courthouse? That won't make the charges go away."
Sansa was stunned. Assassination? Blowing up the… What on earth had Joffrey done?
When his sister struggled to get out of his grasp, Jaime let her go. Cersei swept around the enormous island as if she were a queen and headed for the door, her beautiful face still twisted up into an ugly expression. Sansa scrambled back into the corridor, so that it might (hopefully, she prayed) look like she was just arriving and hadn't heard a thing. She did not get far enough away that she could not hear Cersei's parting words to her brother.
"You're useless, then. A disappointment. Impotent. Just like every other man in my life."
"I'll make you a deal, sweet sister," Jaime responded, his voice devoid of all emotion, which was, somehow, many times more terrible and more terrifying than when he had sounded angry. "I'll kill whoever you want me to, never mind that it won't do a goddamn thing to help your monstrous little son… if you'll kill Lancel and Osmund fucking Kettleblack for me."
"What? Cersei gasped, seemingly genuinely shocked at his words. "Jaime, I—"
But her brother cut her off with a dark laugh devoid of any actual humor.
"It shouldn't be hard. You're already a poisonous cunt…. Or should that be you have a poisonous cunt...? Well, either way."
Sansa turned and fled, not caring anymore that the siblings might hear her footsteps or know that someone had overheard them. She didn't stop until she was two floors higher and leaning against the wall outside of the television room, panting hard and trying to ignore her burning lungs and legs and forget what she had heard. Surely it hadn't been what it sounded like. What it looked like. She must have just misinterpreted Cersei's body language and Jaime's words at the end.
They were twins, that was all—twins were closer than normal siblings, right? Cersei was probably more comfortable touching her brother than Sansa would be touching Robb or Jon, because they had shared a womb and then grown up in each other's pockets. Jaime was probably more comfortable knowing details about his sister's sex life than Sansa presumed brothers normally were of their sisters', because they had grown up closer than a normal brother and sister.
Yes, that makes sense, Sansa thought to herself, relieved, though her heart was still hammering against her sternum.
That did nothing to solve the question of what was going on with Joffrey, but Sansa was only prepared to take on so many dangerous mysteries in one day.
She was already going to be in enough danger from returning to Margaery and Myrcella without the snacks.