The days before Titan came were the longest of your life.

Not dramatic. Not dangerous.

Just long.

You were heavy with him in every sense of the word. Your ankles swelled by evening, your back ached by noon, and sleep became a negotiation with pillows, temper, and the determined child pressing beneath your ribs as though already impatient with confinement.

“He is trying to escape through my side,” you muttered on the second night, braced against the bedpost while a maid rubbed your lower back.

The midwife only smiled. “He is settling lower, my lady.”

“He is staging a siege.”

Even Tywin, who treated discomfort the way other men treated weather—noticed.

He said little, of course. But chairs appeared where you needed them. Meals were sent sooner. Servants were dismissed more sharply if they hovered too long. Once, when you rose too quickly and had to catch the edge of a table, his hand was there at your elbow before either of you acknowledged it.

“You should rest,” he said.

“I have rested for three months.”

“You may continue.”

You laughed in spite of yourself.

The morning labor began, dawn had only just touched the windows.

You woke with a tightness low in your body—stronger than the practice pains, deeper, insistent. Not pain exactly. A pulling force. A certainty.

You sat up slowly.

Another came while your feet were still finding the floor.

This one made you breathe through your teeth.

When the maid rushed to your side, you only said, calm and clear:

“Fetch the midwife.”

The chambers changed quickly after that.

Basins carried in. Towels warmed. Candles trimmed though the sun was rising. Doors opened and shut in efficient rhythm while you moved through each tightening wave with growing focus.

It was not chaos.

It was work.

Hours passed, though strangely. Time in labor bent around sensation. There was only the next breath, the next grip of your hands on carved bedwood, the next voice telling you how well you were doing when you wanted instead to bite someone.

Tywin remained.

That surprised more people than it did you.

He did not hover. Did not offer useless comforts. He stood near the hearth at first, then nearer when things deepened, his presence solid and unspeaking.

Once, during a harder pain, you reached blindly for something.

His hand met yours.

You crushed it without apology.

He did not pull away.

By midday the room had narrowed to effort.

Your hair clung damp at your neck. Your gown had long since been changed for looser linen. The midwife’s voice became the center of the world.

“Again, my lady. Good. Again.”

You bore down with a sound torn from somewhere ancient and furious.

“He is large,” the midwife warned.

“I am aware,” you snapped.

A ripple of laughter broke the tension among the women.

Even Tywin’s mouth shifted, almost not at all.

Then pressure. Fire. The overwhelming sense of being split open and remade.

“One more.”

You did.

And suddenly—

Release.

A weight leaving.

A cry entering the world so loudly that everyone in the chamber stilled for half a heartbeat.

Then voices all at once.

“A son.”

“Healthy.”

“Seven above, look at the size of him.”

You collapsed back against the pillows, shaking with exhaustion, tears you had not intended slipping hot at your temples.

“Let me see him,” you whispered.

They brought him wrapped in linen already proving too small.

Titan was red-faced, broad-shouldered for a newborn, fists clenched in outrage at birth itself. Thick through the chest and limbs, heavy enough that the midwife adjusted her hold twice before laying him against you.

When his weight settled on your skin, something inside you went still.

There you are.

His cries quieted to harsh little grumbles as he rooted instinctively, turning his head with astonishing determination.

The midwife laughed. “Hungry already.”

“Lannister blood,” someone murmured.

“Tyrell appetite,” you corrected weakly.

That earned real laughter.

Tywin approached only when invited by no one and stopped beside the bed.

He looked down at his son for a long time, regarding him as precious.