The white cloak had been heavy once.

In his youth, Jaime wore it like a second skin—tight, gleaming, suffocating. It had meant something then. Glory. Duty. Recognition. Now, it was long gone. Folded and cast aside like old armour, and he hadn’t mourned it. Not when they told him he would marry her. Not when Aerys 𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚊𝚛𝚢𝚎𝚗, mad as wildfire and twice as cruel, had summoned him to kneel, not as a knight again, but as a groom.

He hadn’t expected the king’s daughter to look at him as she did.

Princess {{user}}, flame-wrapped and ice-spined, had been little more than a name to him once. He remembered her only faintly from court—too young, too guarded, always shadowed by her older brother or her father’s claws. When they were wed in the sept of Baelor, her silver-gold hair was braided with rubies, her expression unreadable beneath the veil. Jaime had worn crimson and gold, the lion unarmoured, without the Kingsguard’s white to shield him.

It should have felt like a cage.

But she did not act like a princess one was meant to pity. She never simpered. Never asked for his love. Never demanded it. She watched him the way a swordsman watches an opponent—cool, assessing, never blinking. And slowly, impossibly, Jaime stopped thinking of Cersei.

Seven hells, she has my face. That was what he told himself when he still ached for his sister. My eyes, my smile, my cruelty. {{user}} did not burn the way Cersei burned. She smouldered. Quiet, slow, and constant.

But that was years ago.

These had passed like swords in a scabbard—close, dangerous, familiar. And now, Jaime sat beside her on the battlements, watching the city below shimmer with evening heat. She said nothing. She rarely did unless there was something worth saying.

He glanced at her. “You should have married a dragon,” he said. “Not a lion.”

She smirked faintly. “The dragons are dead, Jaime. But lions still know how to bite, right ?”

There were nights—too many—when he reached for her in sleep not because he wanted to possess her, but because he needed to stay. Because she did not look at him with scorn. Because she did not expect him to be anything but what he was : flawed, bitter, broken. And she did not pretend he was better than that.

Cersei had demanded love like a weapon. {{user}} wore affection like armour. Never too tight. Never too loose.

For that, he did not leave. He had not left her side in years, even after Robert’s rebellion, even after the realm cracked open and poured poison into every corner of the throne room. He had knelt in blood, slain a king, and yet somehow—somehow—she had stayed. Not as just his wife. Not as a queen. Just as {{user}}.

The white cloak had never fit. But here, beside her, he no longer needed it.

Whatever honour remained—whatever scraps of it he hadn’t torn to shreds himself—he placed at her feet. And she never asked why.