the soiled knight

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Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:26:42 -0500

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Sun, 09 Dec 2012 15:43:06 -0500

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Fri, 02 Nov 2012 22:39:23 -0400

m-baratheon: blood and glory memesix quotes [ 1/6 ]: “You look...

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:59:57 -0400

m-baratheon:

blood and glory meme
six quotes [ 1/6 ]:

“You look after yourself, princess. And your mother if she’ll let you. I’ll be there before you know it.”

cersei-lnnstr: blood and glory thread | six quotes[4/6] arys...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:23:47 -0400

cersei-lnnstr:

blood and glory thread | six quotes
[4/6] arys oakheart

“You look after yourself, princess. And your mother if she’ll let you. I’ll be there before you know it.”

m-baratheon: terribleandred: b&g meme five friendships -...

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:52:47 -0400

m-baratheon:

terribleandred:

b&g meme

five friendships - Myrcella and Arys [5/5]

His voice over the receiver is fuzzy from the feedback; but it’s enough to bring her comfort. He’s okay.

“You look after yourself, princess. And your mother if she’ll let you.”

She nods, and she tells herself how silly she is, worrying about him when she knew he could take care of himself.

“I’ll be there before you know it.” [x]

sevendeaths: B&G meme • Six quotes in no particular order:...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 05:26:17 -0400

sevendeaths:

B&G meme • Six quotes in no particular order: [1/6] [x]

History would have this day pencilled in great detail, even when the only witnesses were guilty or dead or stone. Some would argue that this was the start of the war. Some would argue still that the war, after all, had been between the state and its people, not of families braying against each other for power or for might. For legacy, for name. But a country that freed itself from a fever-dream, and bled itself dry.

m-baratheon replied to your photo same, bb m s a m e

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 12:40:29 -0400

m-baratheon replied to your photo

same, bb m

s a m e

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Sat, 22 Sep 2012 08:27:19 -0400

yet, like the sea and the gallows, london refuses nobody | july 30th, 10am | robert, joffrey & arys - long shot

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:55:00 -0400

The Blitzkrieg that came the summer of 1945 was less fist than finger. Like a machine-gun fire from the heavens, stitching London every which way until the city’s hemlines bled into the Thames. Threads tore from their chokeholds; the fabric fluttered in the wind, made lost and Northless.

Incoming! shouted a passerby, relinquishing his hold on his top hat in favor of grabbing the man beside him.

The air whistled; the crowd parted.

The Old Bailey burned.

Minutes before then, it had been a sanctuary. Sacks filled with gravel and debris pushed up against the wall, lending centuries old stone with the little strength of crude chunks of lime and shale. In its desperation, the city packed earth. Dry concrete. Car parts, burnt rubber, dead bodies.

Incoming!

The ground trembled; the street groaned.

The Old Bailey burned.

——-

A day later, after the worst of the thunderstorm of powder and ash, London’s splinters were unearthed beneath the layer of its dead. Where the Old Bailey once stood, proud and strong, ominous throughout history, lay its ruins. Scattered around the ghost of the main entrance, a stone chunk of DEFEND, splintering skull and bone. A few ways away, PUNISH drove its sharp head through the cobblestones.

“Time to go,” said one of the bodyguards, whispering into Robert’s ear.

Around the Prime Minister, a ring of similarly dressed bodyguards, their faces in similar sets of grimness and urgency.

Where Joffrey stood next to Robert, he heard. And he listened. Yet he kept his eyes forward, where the flash of cameras blinded his eyes, kept the periphery in sunspot-darkness and scattered colors.

“Fine,” Robert grunted around a mustered smile. One last handshake from an athlete, and he was off.

Joffrey trailed after him.

That morning, he’d listened in just as keenly when Robert roared in his office. 6:30AM and his father was already out of bed, bleary-eyed and messy-haired, half in his work clothes, half in his robe. His suit jacket in his secretary’s hands as a trail of people hurried down the stairs after him.

“What happened?” Joffrey had asked the bodyguard that passed him by.

——-

The Old Bailey burned.

——-

Joffrey knew little about the specific history. It was easy to get the swing of its wide sweeps: discovery, foundation, imperial might, inevitable fall. That was the natural thread of fate and fortune, and Joffrey was well aware of it. The specifics, however, the little things that led up to it, the gap between each puncture, the loop between each stitch—they were both unfamiliar and irrelevant.

Turning on the television, in his hurry to dress for the press conference at the Olympic Village, Joffrey watched as the BBC zoomed in on the damage.

Smoke lifted from the ground—the ground, when the Old Bailey stood much higher than that—sirens blared on in the background, and the newscaster, bags under his eyes, attempted objectivity. His hand clenched tightly around the microphone; at every breath his jaw worked stiff, and his eyes watered at the smoke.

Over the newscaster’s shoulder, Joffrey mapped out the gap in the sky, crudely filled in by the columns of smoke that would need years to retake the shape of what had been lost.

Joffrey had been there before, many times in fact. He was eleven when he first stepped through its doors. As the age-old mahogany-cast shadow swallowed him in its warmth, passing the threshold, overhead: DEFEND THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR & PUNISH THE WRONGDOER.

Each hour passed, boredom unto boredom, and he’d preoccupied himself by looking around. A trail of paintings to one side, spaced thinly by old wood and even older stone. Snippets of his memory recalled each chamber, the engravings that stapled one, then the other, in neat succession. First, The law of the wise is a fountain of life.

Next, The welfare of the people is supreme.

And on it went, deeper into the Bailey. Darkest, and heaviest in its belly—

BBC transitioned to the aftermath, the voiceover a dull noise in the background. The remains of the very last, the very heart of the Old Bailey, in a cascade of silt and smoke, in a breathhold of the past come again.

—London shall have its ancient rights.

——-

Robert passed Joffrey on his way out, and the assembled thousands of interviewers, diplomats, and athletes, all stood to their feet and watched his retreating back.

Joffrey followed suit. Outside the Olympic Village’s main building, his father was already in the car by the time Joffrey climbed into his. In seconds, the convoy was already moving. Joffrey blinked back the sunbursts behind his eyelids, remembering none of the questions he’d answered, or the smiles he’d given, just the Old Bailey, the newscaster’s voice that spoke so lowly that Joffrey barely recalled the words he’d uttered, just the silence it carried like an ode to the fallen.

At his mother’s behest, Arys Oakheart sat in the seat beside him, straight-backed and unresponsive. He wore a black suit, crumpled beneath the arms where it bunched around his gun holsters. His eyes were trained out through the opposite window where two plumes of smoke were meeting in the cloud-thatched sky.

In the wake of the furthest a golden statue of Justice used to stand, keeping her court over the city with sword and scales.

The trail of cars sped up when it met the Mile End Road, speeding through East End towards the old city walls.

Joffrey felt a twitch in his cheek as the car rolled over a bump in the road and let it disappear just as quickly. He felt no concordance with the man his mother had sent to watch over him. Arys had always been his sister’s guardian, never his. And if there was a mist in Oakheart’s eyes, he did not understand it.

The man had gone along with side-stepping Justice’s gaze before easily enough before. The attack on the Olympic Stadium had jolted the presses’ attentions, forced them to focus on the flames of disaster than the dying embers of Robert Baratheon’s lame duck incumbency. But Joffrey remembered. Oakheart had held a man out over a stairwell for his father then promptly turned tail and fled his responsibilities to the sound of his mother rattling her coin purse.

The silence yawned. The radio was turned off, taking after Robert’s tradition of keeping the car as silent as possible when the noise raged farther within the walls of his own head.

Joffrey was looking out the window, towards the skyline where there, too, farther eastward, a building buckled by its knees and toppled on its face.

London was steadily becoming a city of smoke.

Joffrey thought he could smell it, in the back of his throat, where his tongue met air, and he swallowed the stench of it. He tasted ash, light as snowfall: ash over the Bailey; ash over the stadium

“Oakheart,” he broke the silence, his heading turning slightly even when his eyes remained trained outside. “Have you—”

He tried again.

“How’s mum?”

Arys had not been expecting the boy to speak. From the time he’d arrived at Downing Street late the evening before to the moment they’d drawn up outside the Olympic Village, Joffrey had had as little to say to him as he had in all the time he’d worked for the family. Which was to say, not very much.

He turned his head to look at him. The lights from the police detail following the car flashed blue and red against the window.

“Worried,” he said, blandly. “About you. Being in your father’s care.”

Joffrey let out a faint snort, and it just as faintly collapsed in on itself.

The car turned, entering Newgate. Idly, Joffrey noted the thin stream of people along the sidewalk. Heads turned as the convoy went past, in synchronized effort to be mute audience to the presence of their Head of State.

Times like this, Robert once said, when he won his second term. In Downing Street, during the victory party, with a glass of champagne in one hand, and several preceding beers reddening his face. When you’ve won, and people see that you have. Then, too, his audience had been mute. Except their faces were smile-split and jovial. Warm.

You look at their faces, and you know—

Outside, the crowd thickened. They didn’t smile.

—You know you’re on top.

“Myrcella and Tommen?” Joffrey asked again, glancing briefly at his fingers, thumbing over the neat squares of his nails, affecting indifference.

Arys watched him a moment, trying to distinguish the reason why he might be asking now and not earlier but coming up trumps. The clouds through the skyroof were indiscernibly black now, mixing with smoke and fog and the threat of a hard rain. Over the seamless purr of the tyres against the road, he heard the bells start to ring in the Cheapside. Only true Londoners were born to that sound, of metal striking metal like labour made music. He was deaf on one side where the Old Bailey’s voice used to join them.

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.

“Fine, I think,” he said, soberly. “I haven’t seen them.” Cersei had given him little reason to worry about her daughter’s safety, but, still, he did.

You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s.

The bells hit the notes. The song came together in his head, quite unbidden. Joffrey had never joined in the game when his young siblings had started singing it. Tommen and Myrcella would lace their hands together and force the members of the household to track through the arch made by their little arms, catching them out one by one and falling apart laughing to start again. That had been in the early years when Arys first worked for them. Downing Street had rarely been host to childrens’ games since.

When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.

He’d seen them all grow up, heard them fade away. The bells stopped ringing. Joffrey seemed lost in the glass.

Arys jerked his chin up and looked back out the window as the car began to slow. There was another roadblock at the bottom of Aldgate Street, diverting traffic through the City around the blast zone and the streets mauled with centuries old stone. Through the windscreen before them, he could see the back of Robert’s jeep, shined black and license plate wiped clean. The police lights drew attention, he realised, seeing how the street seemed full and the faces pinched and confused. With each pulse he saw the shades of them multiply in the varnished black paint. Turn off the sirens, he thought.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed.

“Joffrey,” he found himself saying, but if there was a thought attached to the end of it, his voice never found the words.

Something cracked up ahead. Arys never saw the stone coming, but it ricocheted back from the rear window of the Prime Minister’s car and nearly took off the wing-mirror of theirs. Someone cried something in the crowd, words breaking into a caucus of half-hearted shouts.

“Get down,” he hissed, one arm thrown across Joffrey’s shoulders, pushing him back against his seat.

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

The sudden swerve, the rush of wind, momentum barreling them forwards, then back, to the side against the car door; the rhythm stoppered in Arys’ head as the car lurched, then stilled.

They breathed. Arys’ arm across Joffrey’s chest, both of them pressed back.

They breathed and they watched.

Outside, the crowd swayed.

Smoke in the wind, smoke in the eyes. The crowd drifted, as one, from a wisp to a thunderclap.

The driver had his hands clenched on the steering wheel, the bodyguard right next to him already pulling out his gun.

“What—” Joffrey choked out, and he would’ve moved as well. It was only right, to move as the tide swept, and carried, but fear and surprise kept him there. Arys’ hand did not stir from his shoulder, though the grip might have slackened slightly, for a moment.

A moment of stillness. Downing Street on Sundays was not so dissimilar. When it rained, the patter on the roof overhead was a distant sound. Within, the fire would burn, and all was well. Time yawned in between movements, in between limbs, and the lethargy that settled was like a blanket over the street and, farther out, over the city.

The car’s windowglass was thicker than No 10’s. Snowfall tapped at windowpanes. Rain rapped at doors, ran down the roof, shook the drainpipes, and they would know that they were safe. Within, they were dry and warm, and they would be thankful for it.

In the backseat, the windows deafened the noise. They might have even missed the sound of the bullet for the buzz of blood in the eardrums, but they saw the officer pull out his gun and raise his hand in the air. And they watched.

The crowd thickened, descended upon them, the sound of the warning shot like an engine firing. Joffrey was seized was terror—then it passed, just as quickly as the crowd moved past their car and overwhelmed the one in front of them. Robert’s car.

A herd after the predator.

On closer inspection, their faces were not so different from the one that shouldered past along the streets. But where indifference cast a mask then, anger twisted them now. All of them, hollering, shouting. In their hands, stones, rocks, bottles. Anything within reach.

The breath rushed out of Joffrey’s throat, his mouth agape. He twisted himself roughly out of Arys’ hold, and he leaned forward, elbows braced on the front seats.

“Oh my God.”

Robert’s car rocked. Windows smashed. Two were already stomping on the roof.

Behind, beside, in front: sirens blared mutely, lights brighter than the midday sun made the crowd awash in the colors of the sea, the colors of blood. Like waves upon the shore, the lights cast a beat.

Chop.

“Joffrey-” He heard Arys’ voice.

Their car swayed, pressed against the mass of hate-twisted faces, and hate-armed hands.

Chop.

The passenger’s side door of Robert’s car was ripped open. Ripped, rather than pulled—the same could be said of the men within. First, Robert’s bodyguard, pulled by his feet, a neat-black line swallowed by the tide.

Then: Robert himself, pulled out of his car by the scruff of his neck, his face a grimace of pain and anger both. If Joffrey strained to hear, his voice would roar in his ears, stay there, take root, and if he were younger, or lesser than what he was, he would cringe in a corner until it stopped.

“Oh my God. What are they—” Joffrey flung his gaze to Arys, then back to Robert.

Robert was on his feet. They said that to fight the sea was to succumb, to be as pliant as buoy, to weather out the waves as they drifted, and pulled. Surged and retreated.

They watched as Robert went under, the sea lapping over his head. Arms outstretched, to remain afloat, and still the current pulled, until Robert stopped resisting, and went with it.

With an intelligible cry, Joffrey pushed the door open. It pressed back against him, trapping first his foot, then his calf, and still Joffrey pulled, until he’d wrenched himself free.

Chop.

The tide claimed him as well.The swell and surge of bodies, tight around him, tight against him. He kept pushing.

“Dad!” he shouted over the din. “Dad!”

—-

Sickening panic lurched in Arys’ stomach. His bones felt like ice. He reached to grab out at the back of Joffrey’s coat, at his arm, his wrist, anything, but his fingers seemed to dissolve like water. This isn’t happening. Thirteen years living and knowing and watching in preparation for this moment and the void of resolution in his chest makes his blood run cold.

——

“Joffrey!” he shouted, throwing himself across the seat and into the sharp clasp of air. The sound roared in his ears like blood, the air beat like an organ. “Joffrey! Joffrey!”

No point in thinking that would have been me as he heard the screams as policemen were dragged down by the crowd and held under. Bullets rained against the walls, piercing stone and brick. The mob snapped and shook like a beast. It cried out something and Arys felt claws scratching against his arms, his face. Nails snagged on flesh. Joffrey was an arm’s length away.

Experience trained his eye to Robert. No one could miss the shape of him, even through the crowd. He’d been a fighter once, a champion, bear-black and hulking, but no longer. His skull came up against the curb, his eyes rolling between the boot-heels of his people.

“Dad!”

The waves pushed Joffrey back but dragged at his ankles, forcing him forwards and backwards on the tide. Arys reached him, forcing him back by the arm.

“Shoot them! Shoot them!” Robert’s son screamed into his ear. Something caught Arys under the leg and he stumbled back, pulling Joffrey along with him, back towards the car. His ribs pressed against the holsters, sharp between the bones.

What happened to the guns? Arys thought. All those men had guns.

The answer came too soon.

——

All it takes is an fool with a gun, a match, a bat. The stadium goes up in smoke. Justice falls from on high. A bullet found its home in the Prime Minister’s head.

——

Chop.

——

The world seemed to go dark, like a theatre. Every statue watched from on high as Joffrey screamed again, their faces serene and their ears deaf to the noise. His voice broke sharp across the sea until it gave out completely. Sirens cawed like ravens and flashed in the smoke, their engines abandoned.

The tide was pulling Joffrey away again.

Arms about his head, arms around his throat. He struggled. Arys saw, from the thick of people around him. Eyes blown so wide, mouth open, breathing in the water, filling his nose, filling his throat—

In the end, the boy was a boy.

He was afraid.

“Dad!” Joffrey screamed.

In answer, the crowd roared, in a bellow pulled deeper than Robert’s anger ever did, and it caved about Arys’ ears. He watched in mute horror as Joffrey was pulled down, ever down.

Shots rang anew. Someone fell by the wayside. The crowd parted for a moment, before the poor man, too, was swallowed whole.

Joffrey followed soon after.

As one, the crowd swelled, like a shark breaking through the surface, prey between its teeth. Arys watched as Joffrey was held aloft, overhead, limbs akimbo, his head lolling brokenly. The scream had gone out of him now, followed by his breath, and his blood.

——

Joffrey was afraid. His skin tingled, from leather-rough hands pulling at his arms, his feet, pulling at his hair. He tingled, and may have mistaken it for the sensation of being afloat: airborne and falling and stuck mid-air, all at once.

A shudder ran down his spine. Fear caught him cold, seized his breath in his chest and refused to let go.

The sky bore down on him, unassumingly gray.

It was like being underwater, looking up at the thin film that separated wet from dry, the current down below, from the cold air up above.

There was nothing else to think about but the air stuck in his throat. He needed to breathe; he was winded already, his mind numb by the pain that dripped heavily down the back of his head, wetting the very hands that help him up.

As he fell, as the wave’s crest bore him down, the warmth made him think of his mother. There were many times when he was lulled the same way, with a soothing whistle to his ears, her breast to his cheek. When he slept, he would dream, and when he awoke, Cersei said, all would be well.

The crowd swelled over his head, and the sky was hidden in shadow.

His eyes were closed for him, like Cersei’s thumbs over his eyelids when he refused to sleep.

Come, Joffrey, go to bed.

“Yes,” he said, in the breath that chased out his last.

——

The Guard had an oath, known only by their hearts, broken only by death.

To abandon the Prime Minister was to abandon honor.

To abandon Britain was to abandon dignity.

To abandon the Guard…

What came after that?

Jaime would know; he was their leader, but he’d left. Barristan Selmy would know, but he’d left too. With the Targaryens he’d left and Robert took his place, usurping the law of the oath and taking it for his own. Corrupting their honor, corrupting their trust.

Or was the Guard ever borne from honor? Or had it always been about power?

To be alone against a mass of people—there was nothing powerful about that. Noble, perhaps, or painfully illusory, that it was him against everyone else, but the gun in his hand was a lesser shot than the guns that met him straight on. And they were all fools.

The herd had consumed; as the earth was laid waste behind them, so they moved. They shifted. Until all eyes were on him, the only prey left.

——-

A good knight never dies screaming. He dies slowly, beautifully. His enemy, quelled by his virtues, retreats and sheds a tear. His armor gleams clean, never blood stained. He has last words. He dies well.

Arys Oakheart was not a good knight. Not a knight at all really.

But even a poor man might love a princess.

——-

History would have this day pencilled in great detail, even when the only witnesses were guilty or dead or stone.

Some would argue that this was the start of the war.

Some would argue still that the war, after all, had been between the state and its people, not of families braying against each other for power or for might. For legacy, for name.

But a country that freed itself from a fever-dream, and bled itself dry.

——-

The rhythm started anew.

Oranges and lemons.

Bells.

Chip.

Chop.

The last roar of a maddened crowd, the last swing that rented what he saw of the sky. Thunderclap in his ears, thunderclap down his cheek, wetness down his neck. His knees go first.

——-

The last man’s dead.

——-

☎ → myrcella baratheon → (july 27th, 10am)

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:53:06 -0400

m-baratheon:

Mother’s not pleased with many people right now. Don’t worry. [Grins] You with Arianna, then?

[Bites down on her bottom lip] Okay. Be safe.

[Lowers her voice] And Joffrey too, I guess. Make sure he’s alright.

Yes, but… you don’t repeat that, even if she knows.

You look after yourself, princess. And your mother if she’ll let you. I’ll be there before you know it.

☎ → myrcella baratheon → (july 27th, 10am)

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:47:18 -0400

m-baratheon:

[Pouts] That’s true.

I just - [She stops.] My father has other guards. And Joffrey has Sandor. I don’t understand why she has to send you.

She might have figured out what I’m in Knightsbridge for. I doubt she’s too pleased with me. Maybe you’ll find out?

Just keep your phone with you, and I’ll keep in touch, okay?

☎ → myrcella baratheon → (july 27th, 10am)

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:34:51 -0400

m-baratheon:

What.

[Pause]

No.

You have to come to Lannister street.

I’ll come when I can. There’s a roadblock at the corner of Hyde Park and I can’t even get to Mayfair unless I walk. You don’t want me to walk do you? With the city this crazy? I’ll be eaten alive!

☎ → myrcella baratheon → (july 27th, 10am)

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:24:23 -0400

So change of plans - your mother’s sending me down to Downing Street to make sure your brother doesn’t get in any trouble. I’ll try and get back up to Lannister Street soon as I can.

this is the way the world ends | closed to areo and arys, 27/7

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 11:12:00 -0400

areohotah:

Areo works his jaw, deciding to sip at his very hot cup of coffee as Arys enters the room. It’s all well and good he’s okay and everything, Areo hadn’t expected him to be at the stadium tonight for any reason. “Yeah, I’m alright,” Areo replies in turn. He sips at his cup as the television continues to blare, as the newscasters talk of possible conspirators, possible motives, the significance of tonight instead of tomorrow.

He doesn’t look up at Arianne’s declaration. It is almost expected, after all. It’s useless pointing out that Doran would’ve stayed, but he would’ve sent his children out of the city, out of the powder keg of London. “They’ll lock everything down,” Areo muses, “or they will as soon as they get enough troops and everyone ready.”

“They might as well’ve already,” he grimaces, wishing Arianne’s smile did something to soothe him more. For now, he’s hardly thinking linearly - the idea that he’ll need to show up in Mayfair at some point with a Lannister car and be ready to shepherd Myrcella through the chaos should be at the forefront of his mind but it’s currently hanging out somewhere near whatever part of his brain stores his insurance numbers. He knows it, but he can’t care, not really - yet. Areo seems cool and calm, enough to make him feel utterly frustrated in comparison. He’s a little annoyed he hasn’t been offered coffee yet, but oh well.

“I guess it’s a good thing I never joined the army.” A useless addition to the conversation, but it tumbles forth anyway. He puts a hand out to touch Arianne’s arm, fingers curling around her elbow.

“Here’s probably the safest place,” he adds, hastily. “No riot ever started on the King’s Road.”

☎ → cersei lannister (july 27th, 2am)

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 06:53:35 -0400

cersei-lnnstr:

[Her voice raises, with anger] Well they will have to, won’t they? Perhaps you’re underestimating the power I still have over my husband when it comes to my children. [She pauses and breathes slowly] Arys, you should be glad I am this forthcoming, especially given it’s been hours since this whole stadium mess happened and you’re nowhere in sight. Traffic or not, you’re not here doing your job, Myrcella was home and we were lucky enough, but if something of this sort ever happens again, I’ll make sure it is the last time you work for my family. [Her voice is almost shaking, and it’s fury she feels, not fear] Now, please do as I asked, or we can consider our contract terminated.

[He’s quiet for a long time. This could be the moment it happens, that he quits and relinquishes his duties from Lannister claws. But Myrcella, his mind snags on her name. He wouldn’t have said goodbye, and even a clean break like that would never leave him satisfied she’d be okay in the long run. Especially with the world turning out the way it has now.] Very well, Ms Lannister, I’ll get there as soon as I can. [As it is, he’s still standing in Arianne’s hallway, trying to be discreet.] I can’t promise timeliness, but I’ll try my hardest to be there by the morning. Nothing will happen to him, I swear it.

☎ → cersei lannister (july 27th, 2am)

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 17:05:49 -0400

cersei-lnnstr:

Go to Downing Street. Joffrey is there and I need to know he’s safe. Myrcella is in the house, so I am positive she will be looked after, but Joffrey is alone with Robert. And Robert is not…Robert can’t…Just, consider this a reassignment. Consider Joffrey your new…whatever you call it, client, protegè, I don’t care, just make sure nothing happens to my son. Understand this, Arys, I don’t care for Robert Baratheon or anyone else. Just Joffrey. Just my son.

M’am, do you really think- [he struggles with how exactly to phrase his inexplicably continued faith in Robert to his estranged wife] I don’t… [want to follow Joffrey, he adds, silently] I don’t think I’ll even be allowed near Downing Street…

☎ → cersei lannister (july 27th, 2am)

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 14:55:50 -0400

cersei-lnnstr:

Yeah- No, don’t ditch the car, are you out of your mind? I need you alive, Arys, just- stay in the car. Myrcella is fine. I mean, I think she’s fine, she is…around. She’s not going anywhere, the family was in the house when it happened. I need you to do something for me instead, something important.

I’ll do what I can with all this traffic seized up. ~~It’s not as if I can just flash my government credentials anymore.~~ It seems like they’re closing up Knightsbridge until at least the morning. What can I do?

☎ → cersei lannister (july 27th, 2am)

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 14:12:00 -0400

Hello, m’am? - it’s Arys Oakheart. I’m afraid I’m caught in the roadblock at Hyde Park Corner before Mayfair coming from the south. I could ditch the car and walk but it’ll take me another thirty-minutes to get there. Is Myrcella alright?

an ancient business, a modern piece of glass-work | (july 16th, martell industries) myrcella & arys

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:50:00 -0400

m-baratheon:

She had barely gotten any sleep the other night but she had learned that a quick fix of coffee and the perfect application of foundation under her eyes and eye shadow to match the blush she had powdered on her cheeks and the lip gloss to stain her lips, it was hardly noticeable. She was also in a bad mood but again, with the perfect application of a smile and a witty quip here and there and the every-so often small talk of how do you dos and a remark about the weather, it was hardly noticeable.

Her stomach turned at the thought of it (and that part she couldn’t even properly form in her mind; it remained a disembodied thought) and she had contemplated that maybe she should stay home that day - she could call into work, tell them that she must have had some bad sushi for dinner the night before, and just wallow in self pity in the darkness of her own room. So, she didn’t think about it - didn’t think about anything that her brother had told her - and decided that life went on; that her own woes were small in comparison to everything else.

Besides, she couldn’t stand the thought of slacking one day off because she couldn’t make herself face the world. She had a place in Martell Steel Inc and she was proud of it - at least, that she could be proud about. So, she went to work that day and all at once, as she stepped into the building (tugging every so often at her blazer from being self conscious) she felt a little better and started the day as she did with all the others, and the ones to come.

Myrcella had been sitting at her desk organizing some files when she heard Arys’ voice. The drumming of his fingers against the surface of her desk made Myrcella cringe from the pain coming from her head - was that the side effect of not sleeping, she wondered? Probably. She stopped what she was doing and managed a tight lip smile before looking up at Arys.

“The snake pit is much better than the lion’s den, I can tell you that much,” she said. She hummed, and leaned forward. “So, to what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprise visit, Oakheart?”

He felt his face contract slightly, recognising the tautness in her smile. Usually Myrcella grinned so easily. It was simple for him to tell when something was wrong. It might have just been the work load, though, and Arys didn’t want to push the matter like her mother might have.

“Boredom,” he said, lightly. “You know me, I’d much rather be standing guard outside someone’s office than sitting at a desk in one.” He shrugged, not minding so much now he put it in somewhat sarcastic tones. “What about you? You still liking it here?” Her expression had him worried, despite his desire not to stoke the issue. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen her look so pale and exhausted. The instances, punctuated by how often now he’d been sending her home in a company car in the evenings and skipping out to Knightsbridge on his own steam, made him feel a little worse with each passing kind. Something was wrong - he knew that as much, but maybe it was something she didn’t want him to know if she didn’t volunteer it alone. He thought about pulling up a chair to sit across from here, but this was Martell Industries, not Lannister Street, and they were both outsiders here. Welcome outsiders, but outsiders nonetheless.

“Arianne says you do a good job,” he countered, giving her a smile. “You impressed the CEO and I guess not everyone can say that. Did you meet any of her cousins yet? They haven’t been impressed with me.”