#failed robert's rebellion

[mariuspompom]

Continuing my post about Jaime and Rhaegar’s respective roles in the sack of KL, let’s talk about Jaime and Rhaegar’s last conversation which I didn’t mention in that post and it deserves its own analysis. I find it extremely funny how both (some) Lannister stans and (some) Targ stans seem to think that the last convo between Rhaegar and Jaime was actually like this :

"Jaime, a sack is about to happen very soon. Elia and my kids are in a high risk of getting brutally murdered inside the very capital by the orders of your father who has ghosted us for some time but is deep down an enemy planning all of this in secret. Meanwhile, my father is planning to blow up the entire city any minute now because reasons. I’m leaving you here, alone, to take care of all this and keep all these people, my wife, two kids, father and the people of the city, safe from harm. If you fail to do any of that at any point, you’re incompetent, a traitor and a coward. Now I have to leave to do my thing with the others, don’t forget your duty and your vows, bye".

While it was actually like this :

"Jaime, there’s a war, we are in a pretty tight position and I gotta go to battle taking some men with me. Unfortunately my father wants to keep you close because he believes Tywin will not turn against him this way, and he’s kind of insane so there is nothing we can do about it without risking an even bigger outburst. Give me some time to get out of this mess, and then I’ll come back and we’ll fix this. All this will be over soon, bye".

So the first reading of Jaime and Rhaegar’s last convo completely misses the mark in many ways.

Some Lannister stans are screaming crying throwing up that Rhaegar left a literal cHiLD with all tHiS rEsPoNSIbILIty he doesn’t give a FUCK about anyone how dare he what kind of tHOUGhT PrOCesS is that !!!! Some Targ stans say that Rhaegar gave specific orders to Jaime to protect his father, wife, kids and city against multiple and opposite threats and thus honor his vows, and Jaime failing to do that means he is basically a traitor and a coward. And incompetent.

None of this is correct, because this isn’t what Rhaegar asked him to do, at all. Rhaegar did not know, could not know, could not possibly conceive or imagine or suspect that a sack was about to happen at the orders of Tywin no less and that his family was in immediate danger in.the.very.capital. Nobody.knew. That is why this sack is so horrifying. Also he may have been well aware that his father was insane but not to the point that he could expect him to literally want to blow up his own city. That is a whole other level of insanity he very legitimately didn’t expect. Thirdly, Rhaegar had no power to take Jaime or his family away at this point (« I dare not » is not an epheumism. He literally dares not. We’re talking about Aerys here).

All he asked Jaime to do is wait for Rhaegar to come back and in the meantime try to keep his father at bay. That.is.literally.it. Rhaegar said : « Give me some time, I’ll come back and fix this » And Jaime did wait and he did hope that Rhaegar would come back, but Rhaegar didn’t come back not because he decided to go on vacation with his new chick but because he got killed. Nothing went according to plan, and Jaime had to take matters in his own hands.

So :

Rhaegar did not leave """""all that responsibility""""" to a """"literal child"""".  He left his father the king with the one member of the Kingsguard the king specifically wanted with him, and he told that member of the Kingsguard to literally, wait it out and be a KG. Apart from the fact that Rhaegar couldn’t take Jaime away because Aerys wanted him there, Jaime was not a random child, he was a member of the KG. Him staying with Aerys is technically what he was supposed to do as a member of the KG anyway, there is nothing abnormal or particularly stupid or outrageous or naive in this """"thought process"""", despite Jaime’s age. That order seemed both inevitable (it was Aerys’ order) and reasonable (Jaime was a KINGSguard after all), at the time.

Likewise, Rhaegar did not reasonably expect Jaime to go all Superman on both his father and Tywin’s men and save like the entire population of KL including his own family, all by himself. Again, what he actually told Jaime to do was literally wait for him to come back and try to keep his father at bay. He hoped Jaime’s presence would satiate his father until he comes back. That’s all. He did not know that Aerys would want to blow up KL, he did not know what Jaime would be forced to do and he did not expect the sack and the fact that his family would be murdered in the capital. He didn’t entrust Jaime with all these things simply because he wasn’t expecting these things. All these things were definitely not part of """the job""" Rhaegar gave him. Rhaegar’s GHOST saying to Jaime in his dreams "I left my wife and children in your hands" is manifesting Jaime’s guilt for not being able to save the family. It is a ghost in Jaime’s dream. This doesn’t mean that Rhaegar literally expected Jaime to prevent his father from blowing up the city and simultaneously protect his family from an entirely different threat that wasn’t even remotely a possibility then. Jaime failing to do all of the above by himself doesn’t make him a traitor, an incompetent loser or a coward.

The distortion of their actual convo led the entire fandom to engage in a strawman argument ad nauseam. Lannister stans are attacking Rhaegar for leaving "all this responsibility" to Jaime and Targ stans are attacking Jaime for failing to honor this responsibility, while "all this responsibility" was never part of their actual conversation to begin with because none them had the slightest idea of what was about to happen in the first place.

It is such a pity because this last convo between these two men is so tragic and haunting and beautiful, Jaime (grrm) describes his last visual memory of Rhaegar in an unusually poetic manner, and the fact that deep down he is still waiting and hoping for Rhaegar to come back makes me insane. « The day had been windy when he said farewell to Rhaegar, in the yard of the Red Keep. The prince had donned his night-black armor, with the three-headed dragon picked out in rubies on his breastplate ». « So the Prince of Dragonstone mounted up and donned his tall black helm, and rode forth to his doom ». « It is not Aerys I rue, it is Robert ». « I almost mistook you for Aegon the Conqueror ». « How much can a crown be worth when a crow can feast on a king? ». And instead of focusing on that and the symbolism of it all and that fact that it’s literally foreshadowing Dany’s or Jon’s « return » and their meeting with Jaime (Rhaegar will come back in the end in some form or another, all hope is not lost) we’re reiterating bad takes about a supposed conflict between them ad infinitum. It is boring, reductive and uninspired.

Be serious, read the text and stop spreading misinformation about either side. This is not a football game. We all love a fandom fight occasionally but it is important to actually engage with the themes of the story from time to time.

[sunderingrivers]

The Queens Who Never Were 〚18 / 17〛

╰┈➤ ❝ Robert will never keep to one bed. I hear he has gotten a child on some girl in the Vale. Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man's nature. ❞

The only daughter of Lord Rickard Stark, Lyanna was described as iron-willed, wild and free-spirited. She loved horse riding, the scent of winter roses, and may have even practised tilting; with her brother, Ned, telling his own daughter that Lyanna would have picked up a sword if she could. She is remembered not just fondly but also vividly by many of the Northmen for these things, and those memories seem to be the truest indicator of her nature separate from the romanticised descriptions of the South.

As she grew up, she began to develop what is described by most who knew her as beauty, so much so that it remained fabled and honoured decades after her death. Robert Baratheon became infatuated with her, and after bringing his suit to Lord Rickard, secured their betrothal. Despite this, she remained mischievous and tomboyish, attacking the squires who bullied Howland Reed with a tourney sword and even being rumoured to have ridden in his honour as the Masked Knight of the Laughing Tree - beating the knights those squires served.

During that same Tourney, Prince Rhaegar, a man of 22 years, passed over his own wife and named Lyanna his Queen of Love and Beauty at 14 years of age. The following year, he abducted her with the help of two knights of the Kingsguard, spurring Robert's Rebellion as the Starks, Baratheons, Arryns and Tullys all raised their banners in her name. It is unknown what Rhaegar did with Lyanna; some, such as Robert, claim he r***d her, while others claim they were in love. All that is known, is that when Eddard found her at the Tower of Joy, she died "in a bed of blood", weakened by fever. Her last words were "promise me Ned".

Perhaps the ultimate Queen Who Never Was, both of Lyanna's hypothetical paths to becoming Queen are mutually exclusive. Had she married Robert and lived with him peacefully, he would never have rebelled and become King; were it true that Rhaegar took her with the intention of marrying her, and himself become King and thus her Queen, Robert would never have rebelled, or may have failed. A near-mythological figure in the current ASOIAF timeline, it is widely theorised that Jon Snow is her son by Rhaegar, as is shown in the Game of Thrones TV Show.

[jon-sedai]

We don’t appreciate enough how GRRM made House Targaryen the poster children for his de/reconstruction of the fantasy chosen family trope, and we don’t appreciate how Jon and Dany are the main lens through which he does that. House Targaryen is fantasy on steroids—magic swords, magic look, magic lineage, perhaps the most magic pet one could have in the genre, and a magic destiny that’s specific to them and only them. There’s a foretold magical conflict and its main hero (as many would think), “the prince that was promised”, specifically has to be a Targaryen. This House’s history is so rich, but from a genre perspective, it is Aerys II’s reign and Robert’s Rebellion that’s the most interesting to analyze. Aerys isn’t special himself, but he is to sire the future savior of the world. Then Rhaegar is born and tragic as they are, all the signs point to him being the promised messiah. And Rhaegar becomes THE fantasy hero on steroids. He’s the perfect heir to House Targaryen’s legacy because not only is he to be the best of them, and many think he would have been had he lived, but he is the most perfect manifestation of House Targaryen as the personification of fantasy. There’s absolutely a point to him living and dying as the heir, the inheritor, the eternal symbol of what could have been of the Targaryen’s old glory.

Part of Rhaegar’s legacy extends to his son Aegon. Aegon had everything Rhaegar didn’t. A comet was seen at his conception—and this is an most important herald for the chosen one. So he is given a song, “the song of ice and fire”, and a king’s name to match his status as the new messiah. He didn’t live long but he inherited Rhaegar’s look in his youth too; the fantasy protagonist look. But Aegon died before he could be the hero.

You see Jon and Dany as chosen ones only works so well because of their House’s history, especially as (anti)parallels to Rhaegar and Aegon. They are the unexpected inheritors and challengers to their house’s legacy but in different ways.

Dany is the most immediate and obvious heir. There’s a beauty to her being the last of them and thus, the one bearing the entire house’s legacy. Dany is THE Targaryen. And in being that, she becomes THE hero. She’s got the hero’s look, the hero’s magic and destiny, and better yet, she got the hero’s sword and pet all in one. And, she’s legitimate! She is House Targaryen. But there’s a problem….shes a girl. And we all know House Targaryen’s history with girls.

Maester Aemon’s “no one ever looked for a girl” is quickly becoming my favorite Dany-related quote because it pretty much encapsulates her entire arc, especially as an inheritor to her house’s legacy. The hero they died knowing and expecting was the boy: first Rhaegar, then Aegon. But father and son are dead. Yet Daenerys lives. She inherits everything else they did and more! The Targaryens tried and failed to bring dragons back, but it was Dany who ultimately did it.

Now, Jon is Dany but flipped. From a meta point of view, he’s more fantasy protagonist than she is. He’s a boy, he’s got a big magic sword that he can swing about, and he’s perhaps fantasy’s most prolific trope in action—the magical hidden prince. But within this story, GRRM flips these two characters. Jon’s fantasy protag-ness doesn’t go away, it just morphs into something else. Unlike Dany, he may be a boy and he may have a sword, but he lacks literally everything else. He doesn’t have the look, his magic powers are from his other family, so is his magic pet, and his magic destiny has thus far developed outside his immediate association with House Targaryen. Dany is “what if Rhaegar was a girl?”, but we can’t even begin to ask these types of questions with Jon because there’s so much that precludes him from the fantasy hero role in story. He’s Rhaegar’s heir…but he doesn’t look like him…and he’s not even legitimate. So what do we do now?

GRRM destroyed his fantasy protag house and decided to build up again from the ground up, but did so by challenging the two most critical points—primogeniture and exceptionalism. With Dany, he makes a girl the Targaryen’s outward successor. This works really well because the Targaryens have a history of denying their female heirs. But now what’s left of them is a girl, and she is literally everything they could have hoped for. And she is a a reflection of her house, but her arc has at many times seen her be the antithesis of her ancestors. And I can’t help but think of the oncoming meta-textual showdown between her and Young Griff. On the surface Young Griff, a boy, is the preferred heir. But Dany is, in truth, the one.

Jon is interesting because, in my view, he challenges the Targaryen idea of exceptionalism. He’s easily the fantasy protagonist from the outside looking in. But he doesn’t have the Targaryen name, nor does he have the look. He has the blood, but what makes him special is that it is mixed with the other major fantasy protagonist house’s blood—he’s special in that he’s a hybrid. And this is interesting because if Aegon conquered the seven kingdoms because of a prophecy regarding him or one of his princely descendants, it’s quite the twist to have this messiah not even be a Targaryen prince (not in name anyway). That’s why all the hand wringing around “is Jon legitimate?” or “no one cares because he doesn’t look like Rhaegar” really isn’t the point. The point is for Jon to be the manifestation of the hero—the king—outside of that narrow framework. And if he succeeds, then GRRM would absolutely still be subverting prophecy and genre conventions.

There’s something to Jon and Dany being born as or after House Targaryen falls. House Targaryen has no crown, no throne, and their prophetic mandate has been usurped. But GRRM is so attached to them, and he certainly wants to rebuild them and hold fantasy to account. But to do so, everything we know about the Targaryens, everything the Targaryens knew about themselves, has to be challenged and put to the test by the personifications of all that a Targaryen hero couldn’t be: a girl, and a bastard.

[brookghaib-blog]

Silence between hearts - V

Pairing: Robert ‘Bob’ Reynolds x reader

Summary: After Project SENTRY fails, Robert Reynolds is declared dead and sealed in a glass coffin to be hidden by O.X.E. Y/N, a doctor who secretly fell in love with him after a complicated path between them, refuses to believe he’s gone—fighting to save what’s left of him while grief and denial consume her, the path to look for him would ruin her, but to what extreme.

Word count: 8,8k

Warning: emotional abuse, suicidal intentions, eating disorder, depression, character death, attempt homicide

--

The Manhattan skyline was suffocating.

Not because it wasn’t beautiful—because it was—but because it was familiar. Familiar in a way that tied chains to her ankles. The glittering lights that once meant hope now only glared like judgmental eyes, watching her every breath as if waiting for her to mess up.

Y/N had been back in New York for three weeks. Her return had been marked with nothing more than a silent car ride from JFK to her parents’ towering brownstone, the driver quiet, the air thick with the unspoken grief that clung to her like second skin. Her father didn’t meet her at the airport. Neither did her mother. They were waiting at home like she had merely gone out for groceries.

"Finally back to your senses," her father had muttered during dinner, inspecting her like one of his lab specimens. "Now let’s work on something real."

Real.

Apparently, the man who had loved her in silence, in quiet nights and fleeting glances, wasn’t real. Apparently, the beat of his heart recorded on her phone and played on loop when she couldn't sleep wasn’t real. The project she built from nothing, the theory she bled over, wasn’t real. Bob wasn’t real to them.

She didn’t correct them.

Most days, she spent in her father’s lab, shadowing projects she had no interest in, half-listening to meetings, giving data evaluations she didn’t care about. Her work was lifeless, an echo of the passion she used to carry like a torch. At night, she went home to her parents’ house where the air always smelled of lavender and too many expectations.

“You’re getting older, darling,” her mother said just the other night, pouring herself a glass of merlot with the grace of a socialite. “All this science, this lab work, it’s lovely and all but men want something soft. Something elegant. Not… equations.”

Y/N had stared blankly at her.

“Mrs. Dempsey’s son is coming back from Yale soon,” her mother added, as if that was the answer to everything. “He’s in banking. I told her we’d attend the fundraiser next week. I’ll pick a dress for you.”

She didn’t respond. She just left the room.

That night, like every other, she lay in the dark on her childhood bed, curled beneath crisp, cold sheets, clutching her phone like it could anchor her. She hit play on the audio recording, the only one she hadn’t had the heart to delete.

It was static at first. A few distant clicks. And then it came.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Bob’s heartbeat. Strong. Measured. Human.

The only thing left of him that hadn’t turned to ash.

She didn’t cry that first night. Or the second. But by the end of the first week, the silence of her room cracked her open. She wept into her pillow, careful to muffle it, careful to keep her sobs quiet so her mother wouldn’t hear and come knocking with a lecture about composure. About feminine dignity.

Bob’s voice sometimes joined her in her dreams. Sitting on the sterile edge of the lab bed, smiling that crooked, shy smile, fingers brushing hers when he thought no one noticed.

“Thank you,” he had once whispered to her, forehead pressed to hers after one of those nights they shouldn’t have shared. “For letting me feel human again.”

She hadn’t felt human since he died.

Every day she forced herself out of bed and went back to the lab was a betrayal of what she had wanted. The project in Malaysia had been hers. It was her idea. Her rebellion. Her desperate need to prove that people didn’t have to be monsters to be powerful. That trauma didn’t disqualify someone from salvation.

Bob had been that proof.

And they took him.

Now, the lab was a mausoleum of voices that didn't listen, charts that didn’t mean anything, and experiments that forgot humanity. Her father never asked what went wrong. Just told her the data was lacking. His disappointment wasn’t new—but it had new weight now. Because she was too tired to care.

She had become a ghost in her own life. Wandering.

Every now and then, she’d glance in the mirror and barely recognize herself. There was something dull in her eyes now. Something sunken. And when she touched her chest, where her heart used to beat fast in Bob’s presence, it only ached.

One night, while her parents were out at yet another society event, she crept into the kitchen, barefoot, hair a mess, wrapped in one of her father's old lab coats because it reminded her of Malaysia. She poured herself a drink and sat by the window, gazing out over the city.

A whisper of a memory hit her.

Bob’s laugh, rare and rough, as she dragged him down the lit streets of Kuala Lumpur. “You’re going to get us both caught.”

“Then don’t walk like a super soldier,” she had teased, grinning.

He had looked at her with those eyes then—soft gold in the dark—and said, “You make it easy to forget what I am.”

She downed the drink.

--

The chandelier above her head glittered like judgment. Sharp-edged crystals, refracting light the same way her mother’s voice did—bright, hard, unforgiving.

“Stand up straight, darling.”

Y/N blinked, caught between sleep and obedience. The silk robe around her felt foreign, like a costume someone else had chosen. Her mother circled her like a designer evaluating a mannequin.

“You’ve always had such good bones. The weight loss has helped them show. Your cheeks are finally defined. Maybe all that humidity in Malaysia did something to your metabolism.”

Y/N didn’t answer.

If only she knew the real reason the weight had disappeared—because food had lost all taste, because even hunger felt pointless now, just another reminder of being alive when the man she loved wasn’t.

Her mother moved to the vanity, sifting through powders and lipsticks like a surgeon selecting her instruments. “Now, we need a dress that shows off your waist. Something elegant, but not desperate. That blue one from Paris. The one you’ve never worn.”

Y/N stared at herself in the mirror. Pale skin. Dull eyes. Hair pulled into soft waves she hadn’t touched herself—her mother’s stylist had come in earlier that afternoon, humming and tugging and transforming her into a version of herself that felt utterly distant.

“You’re lucky,” her mother continued. “You still have time to marry well. Most women your age in this city have either sold out or given up. But you—you still have that glow. And tonight is important. The Patersons will be there. Their son just got promoted. Vice president, darling. At thirty-one.”

Y/N tried to respond, to summon a nod, a word. Nothing came.

“God, don’t give me that face,” her mother sighed, brushing a rose shade onto Y/N’s cheek. “You’ve always had such a sensitive expression. I swear you were born frowning.”

“Maybe I was,” Y/N whispered.

Her mother paused, mascara wand in hand, and gave her a look—equal parts disdain and worry. “What does that mean?”

Y/N didn’t answer. She couldn’t say what it really meant: that she was born into a world that already felt like a cage. That she had tried to run from it—across oceans, into research, into Bob’s arms—and now that cage was smaller than ever.

Her mother went on, ignoring her silence. “When you walk into the gala tonight, you need to radiate grace. No slouching. Don’t talk about science. Just smile. Men don’t care about molecular theory. They care about charm, about softness. Don’t bring up Malaysia unless asked—and even then, keep it light.”

The mention of Malaysia tightened something in her throat.

Softness. She had been soft with Bob. Gentle. Vulnerable. It wasn’t charm. It was real. It was warm skin in cold sheets, whispered jokes between test results, his lips brushing her forehead in the dark like a prayer.

She hadn’t smiled like that since.

“You’re quiet tonight,” her mother remarked, fitting earrings into her ears—blue sapphires to match the dress. “Not that I mind. You get so argumentative when you’re tired. Or hormonal. Are you eating properly?”

Y/N’s stomach churned. She’d survived on tea and water for days. The idea of food was nauseating. She thought about the chocolate Bob used to steal from the lab pantry just to get her to eat something during late-night analysis sessions.

He would nudge her with a grin, holding it out like an offering. “I heard chocolate’s good for genius brains.”

That same chocolate had sat untouched in her nightstand drawer since her return.

“I miss when you used to dress up like this more often,” her mother said wistfully, smoothing the bodice of the gown. “Before all that lab nonsense. Before you went chasing ghosts in jungles and locked yourself in basements.”

They hadn’t talked about what happened.

Not really.

No one in this house had asked what she’d lost. What she had risked. The name "Bob" never passed their lips, as if by ignoring it, they could will it out of existence.

“You could still turn this around,” her mother said softly, finally meeting Y/N’s eyes in the mirror. “A good husband, a proper home. You’re not lost. You just got distracted.”

Y/N looked at her own reflection.

A beautiful stranger stared back. Perfect makeup. A designer dress. Collarbone jutting like a blade. Her eyes betrayed everything. She looked like a woman wearing a corpse.

“You don’t have to stay long tonight,” her mother added, mistaking the silence for agreement. “Just enough to be seen.”

Y/N nodded once, slowly, like her neck was made of glass. And her mother smiled, satisfied, kissing her on the cheek like she was proud.

“You’ll thank me for this someday.”

Maybe. Or maybe, Y/N thought, she'd look back on this night as one more moment she disappeared a little more. One more time she smiled through the ache, pretended the heartbeat in her phone didn’t play in her mind like a funeral song.

She gripped her phone in her hand and whispered to herself, just once, under her breath:

“I miss you, Bob.”

--

The ballroom was gold.

Gold chandeliers, gold filigree on ivory columns, champagne bubbling like liquid gold in tall flutes held by men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns so crisp they rustled like expensive paper.

Y/N walked through it like a ghost.

The heels her mother insisted on pinched at her ankles, but she barely noticed. Her spine stayed straight under pressure—years of training at dinner parties and galas taught her that. Her lips curved into a passive smile. Her eyes scanned, but didn’t linger. She was moving, presenting, nodding. Floating above herself.

People she didn’t recognize greeted her with polite delight.

“Oh, you're Henry’s daughter!”

“I heard you were in Asia for a project. How fascinating.”

“Still working in science? Good for you, my dear. But when are you going to settle down?”

Every question felt like a brick to her chest.

She stood next to her mother near the Patersons’ table, nodding as the man—Harold, she thought—launched into a monologue about fiscal expansion and generational investment. His son, Nicholas, was tall and clean-cut, polite but not particularly attentive. He asked about Malaysia once, but didn’t wait for an answer. He offered her champagne, and when she declined, he raised a brow.

“Too strong?” he asked with a laugh.

No, she thought. Not strong enough.

She excused herself before dessert.

The powder room was all mirrors and orchids. Y/N locked herself in the furthest stall, heels clacking quietly over marble. Her hands shook as she opened her purse. The sound of her breath quickened.

She pulled out her phone.

Opened the voice memo app.

"Heartbeat_Recording_Bob_023" Timestamp: 3:12 a.m. Duration: 0:21 seconds

She hit play.

That sound—that low, steady, rhythmic beat—played like a lullaby through the speaker. A sound once meant for scientific observation, logged during a midnight scan just weeks before everything unraveled. His heartbeat had lulled her to sleep back then. Now it anchored her grief.

She pressed the phone to her chest, eyes shutting.

A heartbeat that had stopped. A man who had died in front of her. And yet here it was—proof that he had been real. Not a dream. Not a delusion.

Her breath hitched.

A sob broke loose—quiet but sharp, like the snapping of a violin string. She stifled it with the sleeve of her dress, but it didn’t stop. Her chest trembled.

She had been pretending for weeks.

Pretending to be alive.

Pretending not to remember how his breath felt against her collarbone. How he mumbled her name like it tasted too good to lose. How they used to hold hands in the dark, afraid of what morning might steal away.

Another sob escaped.

The sound of her heartbreak, reverberating in gold-tiled silence.

The door creaked open—soft footsteps outside.

“Y/N?”

Her mother.

Y/N didn’t answer. She held her breath. The footsteps hesitated.

“I hope you're not hiding again,” her mother said, voice low but irritated. “The Paterson boy just asked where you were. Honestly, can’t you make an effort? For once?”

Y/N didn’t respond. She waited until the footsteps retreated, heels clicking briskly against tile.

Only then did she allow her knees to give in.

She sank to the floor.

She stayed there, in the stall, her gown bunched around her, listening to the heartbeat of a dead man.

Outside, laughter erupted like fireworks. Champagne glasses clinked. A string quartet played a waltz. But Y/N remained in that tiny room of mirrors and marble, mourning a man no one knew she loved.

She couldn’t stay much longer—not at the gala, not in this life that wasn’t hers.

She wiped her face with trembling fingers and whispered to herself, like a vow:

“I can’t keep doing this.” She says as she gets out of her stall.

The mirrors betrayed nothing.

Y/N stood before them again—composed, cold, elegant. Her makeup reapplied with trembling fingers, only barely concealing the red-rimmed eyes and the slight puffiness under them. Her lipstick, darker now, gave her the illusion of control. A crown painted back onto a woman who had long since abdicated.

She walked out of the powder room and into the cacophony of the ballroom—its laughter, its wine-soaked glamour, its artificial warmth. The chandeliers glimmered like stars over a world she no longer belonged to.

And then she saw her.

Leaning effortlessly against the edge of the bar, swirling a glass of something amber in a crystal tumbler—Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.

Y/N’s heart dropped.

She had seen ghosts. Heard voices. Dreamed in vivid detail of moments long gone. But Valentina was real.

A shark in satin. Wearing a gown as dark as oil, her hair swept up with deadly precision, as if even a strand out of place could ruin the lie of grace she projected.

“Well, well.” Valentina’s voice cut across the room like a razor wrapped in silk. “Didn’t expect to see you in lipstick and lace. Malaysia made you soft.”

Y/N stopped in her tracks. People moved around her, unaware. Uncaring. She could barely breathe.

“What are you doing here?” Y/N asked, voice cold. Strained.

“Oh, sweetheart. I'm always where the important people are,” Valentina said smoothly, taking a sip from her drink. “And you? Still mourning your little science experiment?”

Y/N flinched—visibly.

Valentina smiled. A slow, cruel thing.

“You know,” she continued, stepping forward now, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “I warned you. About getting attached. But you didn’t listen. You thought you could fix him. Mold him. Save him. Like some tragic little girl trying to rewire a bomb.”

Y/N’s jaw clenched. “He wasn’t a weapon.”

Valentina laughed—genuinely amused. “No, darling. He was a time bomb. You just didn’t like the sound of the ticking. But it was always there. I saw it. And you? You were so naïve. So emotional. Thinking you were tricking everyone being some cold doctor with a porpuse, when you are just a little girl playing daddy dearest. You gave him a heartbeat and thought it meant something.”

Y/N looked away, but Valentina stepped into her path, blocking her retreat.

“They say you ran to him the second he lost control. That you shoved people out of the way. That you screamed his name like a madwoman. Romantic. Pathetic. Sad that you did all that just to find a corpse.”

Y/N swallowed the lump in her throat, but the pain in her chest was volcanic. “You don’t know anything about what we had.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Valentina crooned, tilting her head. “I know everything. I read every file. Watched every feed. You think I didn’t notice when you started cutting the camera at night? Or how he looked at you like a goddamn puppy? It was adorable. But in the end... you couldn’t stop him. And he still died in your arms. So tell me—how’s that for powerless?”

The words hit like bullets.

Y/N’s composure shattered—just a flicker. Her hands trembled. Her breathing became shallow.

“You’re disgusting,” she whispered.

Valentina’s smile widened. “No. I’m honest.”

Then she leaned in, voice now like poison poured into honey.

“But you, darling... you’re broken. And no amount of red lipstick will make you look whole again.”

Y/N stood frozen. Humiliated. Grieving. Enraged.

Then, without a word, she turned and walked away—past the gold, the laughter, the polished lies. Out of the ballroom. Out into the night.

She didn’t stop until she reached her family’s car, her hands shaking so badly she fumbled with the keys. She sat there for a long time, in the back seat, staring at nothing. Letting the tears fall freely this time. No powder room. No mirrors. No mother’s voice hissing about appearances.

Just the cold silence of grief.

--

The sun had long since risen, golden streaks bleeding through the sheer curtains of her childhood bedroom. But Y/N hadn't moved.

Her body lay curled atop the ivory bedspread, sheets untouched, her pillow still damp from a sleepless night. She hadn’t even changed out of the dark dress she wore to the party. The satin now wrinkled, tight around her knees where she had drawn them up to her chest. Her eyes, bloodshot and hollow, were locked on the white wall ahead of her—blank, sterile, void. Like the lab. Like Bob’s room after he was gone.

She hadn’t cried.

Not since the party. Not since Valentina had shoved her grief into a corner of shame.

Not until now.

The shrill ring of her phone broke the silence like a knife to glass.

Y/N reached for it slowly, like underwater. When she saw her father’s name on the screen, a tightness formed in her chest. She answered with a dull, rasped voice, barely above a whisper.

“Yes?”

“Y/N,” her father’s voice came through, steady but strangely subdued. “You’ll need to make arrangements for tomorrow.”

She didn’t respond. Not immediately.

“Tomorrow?” she echoed numbly.

There was a pause. Then, quietly—too quietly for the man she had known all her life—he said:

“Ilari is dead.”

The words struck with no warning.

She blinked once. Twice. As if they hadn’t landed properly. Her breath caught in her throat.

“There was an explosion at the O.X.E. facility. Contained, but… he was in the wing when it happened. His body was… unrecoverable.”

Y/N sat up too quickly, her hand gripping the edge of the nightstand as the world tilted.

“No—no, no. What do you mean? Ilari—he—he was in the lab, he—” her voice cracked like thin glass under pressure.

Her father remained calm, factual. “I’ve spoken to the board. There will be a closed memorial. You'll attend.”

She could barely speak. Her lungs were tight, crushed under the weight of grief trying to push itself out.

“You knew—didn’t you?” she accused, her voice rising like a storm surge. “You knew the place was unstable, you—you knew it wasn’t safe—. How the fuck was there in explosion capable of this?”

“I’m telling you so you can prepare, not to argue,” he replied firmly, that cold edge back in his tone. But there was something underneath it this time—strained, brittle.

Before she could say anything else, he added, “I'm sorry,”—and hung up.

Two seconds passed.

Then five.

And suddenly—she screamed.

It burst out of her with no warning, guttural and sharp like a wounded animal. She hurled the phone across the room, the screen cracking against the far wall. She screamed again, this time louder, and collapsed onto the floor with her hands clawing at the carpet like she was trying to rip the pain out of the earth.

Dr. Ilari was dead.

He had been the only one who treated her like a human being. Not like a daughter. Not like a tool. Not like a disappointment. He had joked with her. He had listened. He had protected her from the worst of the project, from Valentina, from her own father’s looming shadow.

He had known—about her and Bob. And he had never judged.

He had called her “kid.” He had once danced like a fool when her protein synthesis had shown its first signs of success. He had made her laugh.

And now he was just—gone. Another name. Another file. Another burnt-out light in a hallway of ghosts.

She wailed, her nails digging into her arms, her chest heaving, sobs erupting with no rhythm. Pain was no longer something inside her—it was her. It had filled every cavity, taken her shape, worn her skin like a shroud.

The door burst open.

“Y/N?!”

Her mother’s voice sliced into the chaos. But it didn’t register.

Y/N was crumpled on the floor, shaking, screaming through her tears. Her mother rushed to her side, gripping her shoulders, trying to calm her, but Y/N flailed in her grip.

“Don’t touch me!” she shrieked. “Don’t—don’t you dare—!”

“What’s happening?! What happened?!” her mother demanded, suddenly pale.

“He’s dead!” Y/N howled. “He’s dead! He—he—he’s dead and I—I can’t—”

She collapsed again, curling into herself, sobbing so hard it seemed like her lungs might collapse. Her mother froze, unprepared for this kind of grief, for the rawness of her daughter’s agony.

The woman now sat in silence, watching her only child fall apart in a way that no silk gown or elegant husband could ever fix.

Y/N couldn’t stop crying.

Not when her mother finally stood and awkwardly left the room.

Not when the sun faded from the sky.

Not when her throat gave out.

Only when the silence returned—empty, brutal, total—did she fall asleep on the floor.

Her phone’s cracked screen still blinked with the last message she would ever hear from the only man who believed in her work, her mind, and in her heart.

"I'm sorry."

--

The calendar said two weeks

Two weeks since the explosion.

Two weeks since the voicemail that shattered whatever was left of Y/N’s resolve.

Since then, she had become a ghost in the house her parents still tried to call a home.

Some mornings she didn’t move from bed. Others she wandered into the kitchen in silence, barefoot in a shirt that hadn’t seen the laundry in a week, only to make tea she wouldn’t drink and stare blankly at the marble counter. She’d forget she had left the kettle on. She forgot a lot of things.

Emails from the lab piled up unanswered. Her father’s voiced irritation had long since turned into cold silence. Her mother still tried to coax her out of bed with forced smiles and harsh judgments. But Y/N no longer had the strength to push back. Not even the will to fight.

The only thing she did with purpose anymore was remember.

At night—when the house was asleep and her parents retreated behind their walls of money and legacy—she curled beneath her blankets and went through old photo albums. Not just of Bob. Not just of Malaysia. But older. Kinder. Safer.

Pictures of her and Dr. Ilari at O.X.E., smiling over papers, a coffee mug in his hand. Notes he’d scrawled in the margins of her research with dry humor and care. Images of her as a child—back before everything. Her fingers trailed over the faces of those who had once meant something. Her hands trembled like a patient with tremors too deep to medicate.

And that night was no different.

She sat in bed, laptop dim on her thighs, light flickering as she scrolled through digitized photos. A younger Ilari in a lab coat, smiling with one brow cocked. A candid one, Bob blurry in the background, caught mid-laugh. She pressed two fingers gently against the screen.

A tear fell to her pajama shirt.

She didn’t hear the window open downstairs.

Didn’t hear the soft tread of boots across hardwood.

Didn’t hear the deliberate way a shadow moved past the ornate staircase, or how it paused at the family portraits on the wall, eyeing them coldly.

Yelena Belova moved like a ghost. Silent. Efficient. Lethal.

She’d come in through the south side of the townhouse. She knew the layout. Valentina had provided it, along with the schedule. Parents in the master wing. Daughter alone in the west hall. Lights out by midnight. She was to be in and out in fifteen minutes. No mess. No witnesses. Only a file to close.

She didn’t expect the girl to be awake.

Yelena opened the bedroom door, gun raised, finger just resting near the trigger—not on it yet. Her blade was holstered on her thigh. Quiet work. Always quiet. But her eyes locked with Y/N’s the second she stepped into the room.

Y/N startled, breath catching in her chest.

She froze.

Yelena saw it all at once—the confusion, the fear, the way Y/N’s limbs curled toward her chest instinctively, like a wounded animal expecting the blow.

“Wh-who—” Y/N stammered, voice weak with terror. “Who are you? What—what are you doing in my room?”

The gun glinted in the low light.

Yelena stayed silent. Her green eyes narrowed as she approached slowly, cautiously. She had expected sedation. Sleep. Not this.

Y/N’s breathing quickened. Her hands flew up, shaking. “Please—please, my parents—if you want money, we—we can give you whatever you—”

“I don’t want your money,” Yelena said, flat and low.

That voice—it cut sharper than the metal she carried.

Y/N’s eyes flicked to the gun. She sank lower into the bed, almost folding into herself. “Are you going to kill me?”

The question hung in the air like smoke.

Yelena hesitated.

Valentina’s words echoed through her mind. “She's the daughter of one of my scientists, she has become a liabilly to my work, I need her gone, she's too dangerous.”

But this—this woman in front of her? She wasn’t some weaponized threat. She was grief in a human shell. There were bags under her eyes so dark they looked like bruises. Her body was thinner than the medical file had indicated. She was shaking.

She looked broken.

And Yelena had killed a lot of people. But she had never once enjoyed killing the broken.

Y/N’s voice broke again. “Please… did you hurt my parents?”

“No,” Yelena replied after a long silence. Her tone was clipped. “They’re asleep. You should have been too.”

“Why me?” Y/N whispered.

Yelena exhaled through her nose. She wasn’t supposed to answer questions. She never answered questions. But this girl—she had nothing. It bled from her like light from a crack.

“It’s not personal,” she said.

Y/N gave a small, bitter laugh. “It’s never personal, is it?”

The sound twisted Yelena’s stomach in a way she didn’t like. She stepped closer.

And that’s when she saw it—the laptop still glowing. The photo on the screen. Ilari. Smiling.

Yelena’s mouth drew into a hard line. She recognised the man in the picture.

“She probably won't fight back anyway, it will be fast.” That’s what Valentina had said.

Yelena knew what that meant.

She had lived it. She had been it.

Y/N noticed where her gaze went. “He was everything good about that lab,” she said hoarsely, referring to Ilari. “And she killed him too, didn’t she?”

Yelena’s jaw tensed.

Y/N’s shoulders dropped with a small whimper. “Then go ahead. Do it. There’s nothing left anyway.”

The silence stretched long between them.

Yelena looked at her.

She saw past the tears, past the fear. She saw a woman not begging for her life, but welcoming its end.

It was too familiar.

The gun remained raised—still and precise. Yelena’s silhouette framed by the soft gleam of moonlight spilling in through the old window. Y/N sat on the edge of her bed, motionless except for the trembling in her shoulders, her eyes wide and hollow. Her breath came in short, panicked bursts.

The room, a quiet monument of someone else’s life, felt like a stage now. Like a place that had never truly been hers.

And now, she would die in it.

Yelena took one cautious step forward, head slightly tilted in calculation. Her voice cut through the brittle silence.

“…Who were you to Valentina?”

It wasn’t the question Y/N had been expecting. For a moment, she just blinked—disoriented, scared, and unsure whether this was part of some mental torture. Her voice came out faint, like a fading echo.

“I wasn’t anyone.”

The answer made Yelena narrow her eyes.

Y/N cleared her throat weakly, then looked away from the barrel of the gun, toward the dark corner of her childhood room—toward the corner she used to crawl into when she had nightmares as a kid. Her gaze was distant.

“I… worked on a project. A biogenetic one. In Malaysia. It was mine—well, it was supposed to be. Valentina just bought it. Put her name on it, like everything else.” Her mouth curled, not in amusement, but in exhausted defeat. “That’s it. I was just a name on a report. Not even a good one.”

The air between them thickened.

Yelena didn’t move.

Then Y/N’s gaze snapped back up—slowly, searching the assassin’s face with sudden realization swimming behind her tired eyes. Her voice was soft, cautious. Almost frightened of the answer before she even asked the question.

“…Did Valentina… ahm…”

Yelena’s body tensed, her grip on the gun shifting subtly.

“…did you do something to a doctor in Malaysia?” Y/N asked. Her breath hitched. “By her order?”

Yelena didn’t speak.

She didn’t have to.

The silence—coupled with the barely perceptible flicker of regret in her eyes—said everything.

She hadn’t expected her to know the name. She hadn’t expected the file to include that kind of intimacy. But this—this girl knew. She knew what Valentina had done. And now Yelena saw it:

This wasn’t a project gone wrong. This was a woman standing in the graveyard of everyone she loved.

And she had dug every hole with her own bare hands.

Y/N didn’t scream. Didn’t curse. Her body just folded forward as if the air had been torn from her lungs. A long, guttural sob escaped her lips, one that cracked the fragile composure she’d worn like armor. She collapsed from the bed to the floor, arms wrapped tightly around herself, rocking with the weight of grief too vast for words.

Ilari.

It was her fault.

She had brought Bob into the lab. She had given Valentina the research. She had failed the project. And now Valentina was covering the tracks.

Erasing the names.

Erasing lives.

Y/N gasped for breath between choking sobs, clawing at the blanket as if she could tear away the reality sinking in.

Yelena watched her from the other side of the room.

Her hand—still holding the gun—shook.

She’d done this before. A hundred times, maybe more. But never like this. Never with someone who looked like a version of herself—lost, desperate, begging the world to give them one reason to stay.

Then Y/N looked up, her face soaked in tears, eyes swollen with despair.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please… just… kill me. Fast. No pain. Just—just make it stop.”

Yelena’s lips parted slightly.

She’d been asked that before. Some had begged. Others had cursed her.

But this? This was something else. This was a woman who didn’t want to die—she wanted the suffering to die. The guilt. The grief. The waking up to an empty silence that never stopped screaming.

Y/N began crawling toward her. Slowly. Almost mechanically. As if dragging herself through mud. Her knees hit the floor with heavy thuds. Her hands trembled as she reached the assassin’s boots, pressing her forehead against the ground in front of them like someone offering penance.

“I can’t…” she cried softly. “I can’t carry this anymore…”

Yelena’s eyes brimmed with tears.

It burned.

The thing inside her that Valentina had never managed to kill. That thing Natasha had once told her made her human. It screamed now—louder than protocol, louder than orders.

Her finger twitched against the trigger. But the shot never came.

Instead, she dropped her arm to her side.

The gun hung loosely in her hand, as useless as the lies they were all told to protect.

She reached down with her other hand and gently, silently, touched Y/N’s hair. Not to comfort. Not really. Just to anchor her. To remind her she wasn’t a ghost yet.

“I’m sorry,” Yelena whispered.

Y/N’s sobs became violent again, her whole body wracked with the kind of cry that only comes from knowing the truth and having nowhere to place it.

And the assassin who had come to kill her just left without her noticing. Unable to do a job that seemed so simple. Why? She never cared, it was a job.

Everything happens for a reason.

--

The gray wash of early morning poured faintly through the windows like smoke from a dying fire, casting long shadows across the floorboards. Dust hung in the air, visible in thin beams of light—suspended like time itself.

Y/N stirred.

She didn’t wake so much as return—to her body, to the memory, to the stench of grief clinging to her skin. Her cheek was pressed against the hard wooden floor of her childhood bedroom, the tear-stained pillow just out of reach. Her joints ached. Her breath came in shallow pulses. For a moment, she didn’t move.

The world was quieter than she remembered. But not merciful.

Nothing was merciful anymore.

Then it hit her again—the encounter. The intruder. The assassin with a gun and eyes like winter. Yelena. She wasn’t a dream. She wasn’t a hallucination conjured by too many nights without food or peace.

She had come.

To kill her.

And she hadn’t.

Y/N slowly rolled onto her back, her eyes locking on the ceiling fan above. It didn’t spin. Nothing did. Not the air. Not the clock. Not her mind.

Except one thing.

Valentina.

It all clicked into place like broken glass reassembling.

Bob—coerced, manipulated, stripped of his humanity.

Ilari—murdered. Silenced.

The O.X.E. project—scrubbed clean, sterilized, disposed of like a failed experiment.

And she—she was just collateral. A witness. A loose thread Valentina hadn’t clipped yet.

She’d let her spiral.

She’d expected her to break.

And she had. She broke beautifully.

But something stirred in the fracture now. A new, quiet burn that curled through her chest like a cigarette pressed to skin.

Rage.

It wasn’t hot or explosive. It didn’t roar.

It seethed.

And for the first time in months—maybe years—Y/N sat up.

Unwashed hair clung to her face. Her hoodie reeked of sweat and tears. But her eyes—her eyes were steady.

She stood. Slowly.

Her body screamed in protest. She hadn’t eaten in two days. Hadn’t truly slept in longer. But she made her way to the bathroom anyway, turned on the light, and stared at herself in the mirror.

What she saw wasn’t pathetic anymore.

It was haunted.

It was hollowed.

And it was dangerous.

Her fingers curled around the sink.

“I’m going to kill her,” she whispered.

Her reflection didn’t flinch.

“I’m going to take everything from her like she did to me. And it won’t be quick.”

She didn’t have a plan.

But she had access.

The lab.

Her father’s lab.

It was still state-of-the-art. Still partially funded by O.X.E. contractors before the explosion in Malaysia. Still stored data, blueprints, rejected prototypes that had never been tested due to “morality clauses.”

Y/N would find what she needed there.

Later that day

Her mother didn’t even notice her leave.

The housekeeper gave her a polite nod as she slipped out the front door, dressed in jeans and an old blazer, dark sunglasses covering the swollen bruises under her eyes.

The sky over Manhattan looked like dull steel. The city buzzed beneath her with no idea that something inside her had been lit like a slow-burning fuse.

She arrived at the lab by noon.

It felt strange to badge herself in after weeks of absence—stranger still to feel her heart beat for something again. Not love. Not even justice.

Just revenge.

Revenge that felt justified.

The lab was half-empty on weekends. Perfect. She moved silently past rows of beakers and data terminals, past the clean rooms and cryogenic storage.

And then she reached it.

Her old prototype archive.

She keyed in her passcode, surprised the clearance hadn’t been revoked yet. Her father probably hadn’t noticed—or didn’t care enough to follow up on her permissions.

Inside, it smelled sterile. Like frozen metal and memories.

Shelves lined with failed designs. Papers. Discarded samples. Nano-injectors. Sonically-charged disruptors. Things meant to disable mutant biology or super-serum variants.

Her fingers hovered over the drawers.

Which one would hurt her the most?

Poison?

Too easy.

Explosion?

Too quick.

A device that destabilized neural frequency?

Closer.

Something painful. Invisible. Slow.

She remembered one in particular—a failed device once imagined to sever a soldier’s sense of direction, leave them stuck in a state of perpetual disorientation, causing nausea, pain, internal hemorrhaging over days. It had been deemed unethical.

It had also worked.

She reached for the blueprint, unfolding it like a priest revealing scripture.

The lights buzzed softly above her. Outside, someone wheeled a cart past the door. But inside this little pocket of hell, Y/N smiled. For the first time in months.

Not because she was happy.

But because she’d found it.

Protocol V4: Neural Erosion Cascade.

She could build it. Refine it. Use it on Valentina when the time was right. Inject her with it and smile as the woman who took Bob, who erased Ilari, forgot how to walk. How to eat. How to breathe.

Y/N would make her beg.

Then she’d whisper, “This isfor Bob.”

Maybe she wouldn’t have to die.

Maybe this was what survival looked like now.

Not healing.

Just retribution.

--

The gala was everything Valentina Allegra de Fontaine wanted it to be—polished, decadent, and politically charged beneath the glitz. A celebration of progress, she had called it. The future of global intelligence, biotechnology, and security initiatives.

To others, it was just another elite event with crystal chandeliers, imported string quartets, and laughter bubbling through a thousand-dollar-a-glass champagne.

But to Y/N?

It was the stage.

And she was ready.

The doors parted with a hush of warm air as she stepped into the grand ballroom. Marble gleamed under her black stilettos. A low-cut velvet dress—charcoal, soft as ash—clung to her like a whisper. Her hair was pulled back, clean, elegant. Her lips were a dark wine. Her smile? Perfect. Hollow.

A glass of merlot danced in her fingers as she walked through the sea of diplomats, CEOs, and carefully curated influencers. No one recognized her at first—she’d been a ghost for so long. She wasn’t supposed to be here. Wasn’t supposed to be anywhere.

Which made her entrance all the more exquisite.

She sipped slowly, locking eyes with no one for too long.

Until she saw her.

Valentina.

Standing in her signature black suit, pearls draped around her throat like a leash she wore willingly. She was laughing—effortlessly, commandingly—with a congressman and two security heads from Eastern Europe. Her voice, always just a touch too smooth.

Y/N’s smile widened.

She raised her hand.

And waved.

Valentina froze.

The conversation didn't break. But the air did. Cracked like glass in a slow freeze.

The congressman turned, confused, to see who Valentina was suddenly ignoring.

Y/N walked toward them with a grace that felt sharpened by glass. The scent of her perfume—lavender, laced with iron—drifted ahead of her like a warning.

“Oh, Valentina,” she said, voice smooth as silk over steel. “What a lovely party. Everything about it is so… decadent.”

Valentina’s lips twitched, unsure whether to smile or call security.

Y/N extended her hand toward the congressman instead. “Y/N L/N. I used to work on one of Valentina’s favorite projects, back when the science was a little more… experimental.”

The man blinked, taking her hand. “Ah, yes—Malaysia, wasn’t it?”

Y/N nodded. “Such a tragedy, what happened at O.X.E. labs. But you know what they say—some things are meant to be buried.”

She turned then, slowly, with all the theatrical grace of a woman too calm to be unarmed.

Her free hand rested lightly, deliberately, on the back of Valentina’s neck.

Valentina didn’t flinch. She froze.

It wasn’t fear. Not yet. It was the realization.

She should be dead.

That’s what those eyes were saying.

Y/N leaned in, her smile tightening just a little—less teeth now, more war.

“Are you okay?” she asked softly, voice so low only Valentina could hear. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Valentina’s lips parted, but no words came out.

Y/N chuckled, brushing her thumb—casually—against the nape of her neck.

She could feel the pulse there. Sharp. Erratic.

“How long has it been? Since Malaysia?” she continued, sipping her wine. “I hear the body count's finally settled. But oh—what’s one more, right?”

Valentina tried to speak. “You—”

“I’m sure I have a seat somewhere,” Y/N cut in, feigning innocence. “Though I might crash the head table just for old time’s sake. It’s funny, though…”

Her hand slipped away from Valentina’s neck, but she didn’t step back.

“…I could’ve sworn someone tried to kill me.”

The congressman was clearly out of his depth now, watching the two women like they were speaking an entirely different language.

Valentina’s jaw clenched. “You’re mistaken.”

“Am I?” Y/N said, tilting her head with a theatrical sigh. “That’s the problem with power, isn’t it? You make enemies. You forget which ones remember everything.”

She tapped her wine glass against Valentina’s.

A soft clink that rang like a gunshot between them.

“Well,” she said brightly, stepping back with a dancer’s grace, “we’ll catch up later. I wouldn’t miss the closing speech for the world.”

She turned away, disappearing into the crowd.

Valentina stood perfectly still.

The congressman whispered something to her.

She didn’t hear it.

All she could feel was the cold shadow of a dead project come back to life—and the press of a hand, too warm, too gentle, that had delivered a message loud and clear.

Valentina slipped into the upper floor just moments after Y/N’s departure, her heels clicking sharply against the polished floor. The grand gala’s festive noise faded behind the heavy doors as she closed herself in with Mel.

Mel waited by the sleek console, eyes narrowed. "Your "visitors" have arrived,” she said quietly, pulling up surveillance feeds on the screen.

Valentina’s gaze hardened as the images flickered: a stark, concrete room bathed in harsh fluorescent light, with four figures confined and restrained, the heavy metal doors sealed tight.

“The incinerators have been prepped,” Mel continued, voice low but resolute.

Valentina nodded once, sharply. “Good. They’re liabilities. Each one carries too many secrets—too many loose ends.”

She folded her hands, the faintest trace of a smirk curling her lips. “Y/N is stirring the hornet’s nest. She’s alive. She’s playing a game.”

Mel’s eyes flicked to Valentina, concern threading her tone. “Something’s off. Yelena... she didn’t complete the job.”

Valentina’s eyes darkened, sharper than steel. “I know.”

Mel leaned in, voice dropping even further. “She hesitated, Val. She could have ended it when she had the chance. Now Y/N’s alive and breathing, and that means trouble.”

A long silence stretched between them, thick with unspoken danger.

Valentina’s voice was cold, a whisper of threat and calculation. “We will watch closely. The failure of one assassin doesn’t mean the mission fails.”

She tapped the screen, zooming in on Yelena’s face—the conflicted assassin who had once shown mercy to Y/N.

“No mercy for weaknesses. We’ll finish this, and soon.”

Mel nodded. “Everything is prepared. I have actived it already.”

Valentina’s eyes gleamed, resolute and ruthless.

“Let the fire purge the past. And if Y/N thinks she can hide, she’s gravely mistaken.”

--

Y/N stepped out of the glittering gala, her smile never faltering even as her heart hammered against her ribs. The soft click of her heels on the marble floor echoed faintly beneath the fading music and laughter behind her. Outside, the cool night air brushed her skin like a whispered promise — or a warning. She moved with purpose, her posture regal, her eyes sharp beneath the careful mask of calm.

The sleek black limousine idled quietly near the curb, its polished surface reflecting the ornate lights of the party. The door opened smoothly, revealing the front seat where a large man sat — Alexei. His broad shoulders filled the seat, and his expression was unreadable, a watchful sentinel cloaked in silence. He was clearly waiting, though his eyes flicked toward the crowd inside as if tracking someone.

Y/N slid into the front passenger seat with practiced ease, her gaze locking on Alexei’s. She didn’t recognize him. Her fingers brushed the edge of her clutch as she pulled out a thick envelope, pressing it casually into his hand without a word.

“Keep your mouth shut,” she said quietly, her voice steady but carrying an unyielding edge. “Wait for Valentina and Mel. When they come, you’ll do exactly what they tell you. No questions, no hesitation.”

Alexei’s eyes narrowed slightly, but the weight of the envelope was clear. He said nothing, only gave a small nod, the faintest acknowledgment of the unspoken bargain.

Y/N leaned back, her eyes drifting to the tinted windows, her mind racing beneath the calm exterior. Every second here was a step closer to the trap she had carefully walked into — the moment where she’d finally confront Valentina, face the woman who had shattered her world.

Alexei adjusted his seat, the faint scent of leather and something metallic surrounding them. Despite the quiet, tension hung thick between them, a silent understanding that neither fully trusted the other.

The heavy car door swung open with a soft hiss as Valentina de Fontaine stepped into the dim interior of the limousine, her stilettos clicking against the metallic footrest. Her sleek black dress shimmered in the faint light as she slid elegantly into the backseat, followed closely by Mel, whose expression was pinched and tense. The door closed behind them with a muffled thud, sealing them off from the world.

Neither woman noticed the silhouette seated quietly in the front passenger seat. Y/N remained motionless, barely breathing, her back rigid and her hands clasped in her lap as she stared out the windshield, listening.

Valentina exhaled, glancing at Mel. "Well?"

Melina didn’t waste time. "They’re working together. All four of them. Ava, Walker, Yelena."

Val raised an unimpressed brow. "That's three?"

"They’re not alone." Mel's voice dropped slightly, conspiratorial, layered with something that sounded like disbelief.

Y/N’s eyes narrowed.

"There’s someone else in the containment room with them," Mel continued, adjusting the data pad in her hand. "We ran facial recognition through the old Sentry project archives just in case. The system returned a match."

Val leaned forward. "Don’t play dramatic, Mel. Who?"

Melina hesitated, then spoke the name that split the air like thunder.

"Robert Reynolds."

A beat of silence. The breath caught in Y/N’s throat, but she didn’t move. Her nails dug into her palm.

Valentina blinked. Once. Twice. Her lips parted slowly in disbelief.

"That’s impossible. He’s dead. I saw the vitals. The protocol was enacted. We disposed of the body."

"We thought we did," Melina muttered. "But he’s alive. Or at least—he’s something now."

Valentina let out a low laugh. It was brittle. Unnerved. "So. The ghost comes back. We need to get him back."

The air inside the limo grew thick. Tense. Deadly.

In the front, Y/N’s entire body trembled. Her heart had stopped once tonight—and now it tried to restart in violent flutters. She stared at her reflection in the rearview mirror, her mouth parted as if she were silently begging the image not to betray her.

Bob.

Bob was alive.

Her pulse pounded in her ears, loud and consuming. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t ash in the wind or a ghost in her memory. He was alive.

She wanted to scream. To cry. To run.

But instead, Y/N kept still. Let the wave of revelation crash over her in silence.

Behind her, Valentina let out a bitter sigh. "We clean this up tonight, Mel. Kill the rest of them and take the project sentry back."

Y/N opened the door to the front seat and stepped out, the wind catching her hair as she walked with purpose toward the back. She opened the door and leaned inside, and the look in her eyes was something neither Valentina nor Melina had seen before.

"Where is he?" Y/N asked. Her voice wasn't loud, but it struck like a whip. Cold. Controlled. Laced with rage.

Valentina blinked, caught off guard. "Excuse me?"

"Bob," Y/N said, stepping one foot into the limousine, her body tense and shaking. "Where is he, Valentina? What did you do to him?"

Valentina recovered quickly, her mask slipping into place. She smirked, tipping her head. "Oh sweetheart, you're still on that little fantasy? You think you were special to him?"

Y/N didn’t flinch. Her eyes dropped for half a second to her own hand, now gloved in sleek, translucent film. Neural Erosion Cascade, coded and constructed in secret. It had taken her days to calibrate. But it needed direct DNA contact to activate. Which she had already.

"You know," Y/N said softly, voice trembling but not from fear, "I said I'd regret it. But I'm way past regret now."

She stepped into the back of the limousine fully. Valentina frowned, caught between annoyance and suspicion.

Y/N reached and seated with them.

Valentina opened her mouth to protest, but it was too late. Y/N pressed two of her finger together gently.

Then pain.

Valentina's eyes went wide as her jaw clenched, teeth bared. The Cascade activated, targeting neural memory clusters and pain receptors simultaneously. Not enough to kill. Just enough to shred composure.

Mel jerked in her seat, frozen, unsure whether to intervene or run. Her lips parted in horror.

"Where is he?!" Y/N demanded. Her voice broke with anguish as tears spilled without shame. "Where is he, Valentina? Tell me!"

Valentina let out a strangled, hoarse scream, clawing at Y/N's wrist, gasping as if drowning.

"Tell me what you did to him!" Y/N screamed again, voice cracking. Her whole body trembled from the effort to stay upright, to stay steady in her hate. "You buried him once! You used him like a monster! You made me bury him in my head and now he's alive and you will tell me where he is!"

Mel whispered, almost a plea. "Y/N, stop."

But Y/N didn’t. Not yet. Not until Valentina’s eyes flicked—desperate and swimming in pain.

"He’s... he's in facility four," Valentina gasped. "Coastal wing... reinforced cell."

Y/N pulled back, releasing the grip. Valentina collapsed against the seat, shaking, her breath ragged.

Y/N stood, her chest rising and falling, staring down at her like a ghost. Mel didn't say a word.

"You are going to take me there, and you are going to give him to me. And you put your funny business towards me and I'll make sure your little slave here will take a shower with what's left of your brain. Remember you have you're position because of you're money and the one's you make do your dirty work. I can have whatever I want because I have the brains. Don't make use your skull as a vase."

Valentina wasn't scared, but she had lost control for once.

All her actions and one mistake, and she had created her own death. She doesn't even remember once seeing Y/N smiles this hard.

"You've gone mad."

[amaltheas-garden]

What's fun about the succession crises in ASOIAF is that grrm really tries to present a murky narrative of who is in the right for pressing their claim, which makes it fun knowing that most sides have at least some bit of evidence to support them, regardless of how we feel about the characters. Stannis, despite being viewing Rhaenyra as a traitor, names his only daughter heir, though for the same reasons the Greens saw Aegon as legitimate. Sons before daughters, daughters before uncles, bastards cannot inherit. Ned Stark, despite being loyal to a fault with Robert, went against his deathbed wish to see his "son" Joffrey inherit, and instead falls back on law and tradition, throwing his support behind Stannis. Renly decides that if Robert can win the throne through conquest, then why can't he? He'll worry about legitimizing his reign after he takes the throne. When Robert's Rebellion ended, maesters spoke about the connection between Houses Targaryen and Baratheon, Robert's Targ blood (I believe from his grandmother), though none of it really mattered in the end, with every Targ save 3 dead and far far away from the throne. Cersei is committing treason by placing bastards on the throne, though even for her it could be argued it was Ned's fault the Joff v Stannis v Renly conflict broke out to begin with when he revealed Joffrey's true parentage. Placing bastards above trueborn heirs breaks the strenuous social contract of sorts that maintains some modicum of peace amongst members of the ruling class. But then Joffrey goes and cuts Ned's head off--> definitely a poor move, resulting in Robb's rise as an independent King, echoing the start of Robert's Rebellion. And in Dorne, Arianne admonishes Criston Cole for usurping Rhaenyra in favor of her younger brother, though this only holds up legally based on Dornish law, when Dorne wasn't even a part of the 7K. Though Arianne views Rhaenyra's claim as stronger, she herself almost become a Criston Cole 'Queenmaker' figure, looking to crown King Tommen's elder sister *cough* pitting brother against sister *cough* Myrcella, in the hopes of provoking a war of succession amongst the Lannisters. And now with Aegon VI and Dany, both will have to claim Westeros through conquest, though both still fall back on the idea of being Rhaegar's rightful heirs, and the Baratheon dynasty as illegitimate usurpers. How the rest of Westeros will view their claims remains to be seen...

The point is, succession in ASOIAF is meant to be muddled and confusing and not clear cut. It's what makes the story juicy and HOTD just completely failed to deliver on those dynamics. Alicent seems to have crowned Aegon by mistake, the rest of the Green council are mustache twirling villains, the Andal law argument is never brought up, and Rhaenyra is consistently framed as not only the rightful heir, but a divinely ordained one. A Queen who must rule because she has a "higher purpose" in doing so than simple desire for power. Yawn.

[ladyofchroyane]

lysa and lyanna are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin—both victims of their father’s ambitions (and their society) who share some very important parallels: they dared to get pregnant out of wedlock. they dared to want their bastard child. they dared to (try to) pick the man they’d share their lives and bodies with.

they committed the grave and oh so terrible offense of being active agents in their own lives. and for that, they were punished. women are commodities in westeros—their value resting in their marriageability, and their marketability for marriage depends on a few important factors: their virginity, their beauty, their status, and their fertility.

so a highborn woman having a bastard in this world is a massive f u. it disrupts an entire system dependent on women’s submission and forced participation where men benefit from their oppression and the idea that women exist to secure alliances through their bodies. it shakes a patriarchy that relies on control—control of bloodlines, inheritance, and legacy.

the tragedy of lysa and lyanna is that they were always doomed by the narrative—they were part of the generation that couldn’t overcome their rotting and oppressive society. theirs was the generation of the false spring, not the true one—their fates are ones the next generation is meant to overcome.

but what truly interests me is the way lysa and lyanna contrast.

both characters belong to the bael/stark maiden archetype. lyanna and rhaegar fit this mold almost perfectly. but lysa and petyr are a failed, mismatched version. petyr wanted catelyn (who became lady stark), but ended up with her sister instead. lysa wanted petyr, a bael-ISH figure, but he never loved her.

their failed reiteration of the archetypal relationship was solidified by these facts: petyr thought he’d taken catelyn’s maidenhead, not lysa’s. their first time wasn’t even consensual. and their child was killed in the womb. it was no romance—it was never real the way lysa wished for it to be.

and yet, the most significant contrast between lyanna and lysa lies in their relationship with their fathers.

lysa trusted her father. she told him about her pregnancy, hoping it would mean she could marry petyr. i doubt she ever imagined he would harm her, but that’s exactly what hoster tully did—he gave her moon tea to abort the child, to preserve her value, promising her trueborn children. then he married her off to jon arryn—a man even older than hoster himself—who married lysa for duty, for the swords of house tully to win the rebellion for his boys (ned and robert), and because he needed a fertile wife to get children on. lysa had made a grave mistake by trusting her father, her patriarch.

lyanna, on the other hand, clearly understood that her father would never prioritize her happiness over what he could gain by marrying her off. her clear lack of trust in the men of her family is paramount to understanding why she escaped.

but lysa stayed, and went from her father’s hands into jon arryn’s. lysa married for politics and suffered for it, losing child after child. so when jon arryn tried to take her last child from her, she did what was once done to her: she poisoned him. lysa reenacted the violence of her past to protect her son.

lyanna ran, and later died giving birth to her son. it was a gendered death, but it was also her choice. love didn’t save her, but duty wouldn’t have either. and at least she died in the tower of joy, surrounded by winter roses, making ned finally see, forcing him to not ignore her wishes, forcing him to promise her... in the end, she still had to rely on another man—on the new stark patriarch—but this time, she was heard. basically, she got lucky here.

the themes explored through the bael/stark maiden archetypal relationship are about agency, loss, and how the westerosi patriarchy twists the relationship between fathers and daughters—a mesh of love and objectification as this is a system that demeans women to a life of commodity.

lysa and lyanna’s stories are having a conversation about the violence of the patriarchy and the risks it poses to women if they trust or defy it. these two female characters are reminders of what happens to women who dare to want, and their ends are ones the current female protagonists are meant to avoid and overcome—to prevail where lyanna and lysa lost.

if lyanna’s defiant choice to run helped spark robert’s rebellion, then lysa’s trauma fueled actions helped spark the war of the five kings (to be clear: i don’t think either of them actually caused these wars). i’d say the critical focus of the narrative is on the world that made lyanna and lysa’s choices fatal and catastrophic in the first place. and the fates of these two female characters were direct consequences of the commodifying of women.

[syndrossi]

Hello syndrossi,

Regarding Restoration, how do you imagine the other kingdoms/houses react to all that happened?

Probably about how you'd expect. Initially, everything is pure "WTF is happening???" The initial reports must sound wild: Robert Baratheon is dead, killed by a man claiming to be a Targaryen on a dragon, and the Starks immediately bent the knee + revealed that they were protecting the man's children.

Tywin is surely going to be trying to figure out if his children + grandchildren are even alive and I expect him to be leading the war effort against House Targaryen, given his house's likely fate should Daemon ascend.

Despite similar stakes, I don't know that House Baratheon will be allying with him. I believe at this point Stannis is already skeptical that Robert's children are actually his? Perhaps they ally out of necessity, hard to say.

House Tully is gonna be discreetly trying to ride House Stark's coattails to safety. "Hey, we're allies by blood to House Stark, your ally. Pay no attention to our role in Robert's Rebellion..."

Who the heck even knows what's going on in Lysa's head. I don't expect Daemon to have much patience with her, given his feelings about the Vale and Jon Arryn's part in the rebellion. I could see Lysa deciding that he's a threat to her son and trying to throw her lot in with House Baratheon.

House Tyrell is SALIVATING over the opportunity because they're sitting very pretty. Loyal to House Targaryen originally, no current real power in Robert's government, so lots of power to be gained. And they're got Margaery, while Daemon has 2-3 sons in need of a wife.

I expect a looooottt of attempted subtle inquiries into which of the twins is the eldest, because that's very important for angling to get one's daughter on the throne! Also inquiries into Daemon's availability. He has no wife, obviously, unless he intends to marry Dany.

As for House Martell, they're also loyalists who stand to benefit. And must be loving the prospect of House Lannister's demise. Like, Daemon is happily taking suggestions for how messy it should be. (He's very upset about the fact that Rhaegar's ADORABLE BABIES WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN HIS GRANDBABIES were brutally, violently murdered.) I could see them trying to arrange an Arianne/Daemon match, or failing that, one with his heir (even if the age difference is more extreme). Sure, it's a bit annoying that their original plans with Viserys fell through, but this guy has a dragon while Viserys had...nothing, really.

(There are plenty of other houses with reactions, but I figured I'd focus on the "main" seven.)

[novaursa]

Could you write something about Robb Stark x Targaryen!reader?

For some background information: this would take place in an au where Robert's Rebellion failed and Rhaegar is king and is determined to mend the damage done from his father's reign and the rebellion and to get House Targaryen back in everyone's good graces. Years after the failed rebellion, Rhaegar visited the North with his family and discussed with Ned the possibility of an arranged marriage between Rhaegar's daughter and Robb and Ned reluctantly agreed. Maybe the plot could be about Robb and Targaryen!reader first meeting, getting to know each other, and their thoughts on each other.

(it also doesn't really matter to me who the daughter's mother is. It could be Elia, Lyanna, or someone else, but I would prefer if Rhaegar's daughter has a Valyrian appearance).

Bethrodal of Ice and Flame

- Summary: You are promised to Robb Stark, to mend the wound inflicted to the realm by events of the past.

- Pairing: targ!reader/Robb Stark

- Note: Robert's Rebellion has failed and Rhaegar rules.

- Rating: Mild 13+

- Tag(s): @sachaa-ff @alyssa-dayne @oxymakestheworldgoround

The Great Hall of Winterfell is alive with the warmth of firelight and the din of voices raised in celebration, but something else thrums beneath the surface of the merriment. It’s an uneasy peace, born of necessity rather than desire. You sit at the high table, your gaze drifting over the gathered lords and ladies, all feasting and drinking beneath the Stark banners. The air is filled with the scent of roasted meats and the murmur of conversations, but your thoughts are elsewhere.

Beside you, your father, King Rhaegar, speaks in low tones to your uncle, Eddard Stark. His silver hair gleams in the torchlight, a sharp contrast to the dark hues of the Northern lords around him. He’s regal and composed, as he always is, but there’s a careful politeness in his words tonight, a measured tone that speaks of delicate negotiations. You can see the rigid set of Eddard Stark’s shoulders, the tightness around his mouth. The man who was once your father’s sworn enemy now must play the role of reluctant ally.

“Lord Stark, I understand your reservations,” your father is saying, his voice smooth, almost gentle. “But your niece is a link between our houses. Her blood is both Stark and Targaryen. This union with your son would strengthen the ties between us, ensuring peace and prosperity for the North and the realm.”

Eddard’s eyes, grey and stormy, flicker to your lilac ones briefly. There’s something unreadable in his gaze—grief, perhaps, or bitterness. It’s no secret that he still mourns his sister, Lyanna, your mother, who died bringing you into this world. Your very existence is a reminder of the war that tore the realm apart, of a love that should never have been.

“The past cannot be undone,” Eddard says, his voice rough and low. “But what’s done is done. My son will do his duty, as will I. If this betrothal is what’s needed to secure the future of the North, then so be it.”

Rhaegar inclines his head, acknowledging the words without a trace of triumph. “I thank you, Lord Stark. Your son will be a good match for Y/N. And I hope, in time, you will see that this is the best path for all of us.”

Eddard’s jaw tightens, but he nods curtly. “We shall see.”

You turn your attention away, feeling the weight of their conversation pressing down on you. This is your life they are discussing, your future, and yet you feel like a pawn being moved on a board, your fate sealed by men who speak of duty and honor while ignoring the desires of your heart.

Across the hall, Robb Stark is speaking with his friends, his face flushed from the warmth of the hall and the wine in his cup. He glances your way, catching your eye, and for a moment, there’s something like uncertainty in his expression. You stand, smoothing the folds of your dress, and make your way through the throng of guests towards him.

As you approach, others fall silent, their eyes flickering between you and Robb. You offer them a polite smile, and they excuse themselves, leaving the two of you alone amidst the bustling crowd.

“Robb,” you say, his name unfamiliar on your lips. He’s taller than you remember, broader too. There’s a steadiness to him, a quiet strength that you can’t help but admire.

“Y/N,” he replies, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “I—well, I suppose we should get to know each other, shouldn’t we?”

You nod, feeling an awkwardness settle between you. “I suppose we should. We’re to be married, after all.”

He shifts his weight, looking around the hall as if seeking some escape from the conversation. “I’m not sure what to say,” he admits, a touch of color rising in his cheeks. “This isn’t…what I expected.”

You smile, a small, hesitant thing. “Nor I. But it seems we have little choice in the matter.”

He looks at you then, really looks at you, as if seeing you for the first time. “It’s strange, isn’t it? To be bound by the choices of others. But I—I want to do right by you, Y/N. I want to be a good husband, if you’ll have me.”

There’s an earnestness in his voice, a sincerity that touches something deep inside you. You’ve heard stories of the young wolf, of his prowess in battle and his loyalty to his family, but this—this is something different. This is a boy on the cusp of becoming a man, trying to find his way in a world that seems determined to shape him into something he’s not.

“I appreciate that, Robb,” you say softly. “And I will try to be a good wife. Perhaps, in time, we can find our own way through this.”

He nods, relief softening the lines of his face. “I would like that.”

The music swells, and the lords and ladies begin to take to the floor for the dance. Robb hesitates, then offers you his hand. “May I have this dance?”

You take his hand, feeling the warmth of his skin against yours, and allow him to lead you to the center of the hall. As the music begins, you move together, the steps familiar but strange with him as your partner. There’s a tentative grace to his movements, a carefulness that speaks of his desire not to misstep, not to falter.

As you dance, the hall fades away, the faces of the gathered nobles blurring into the background. For a moment, it’s just the two of you, spinning and turning in a world that is all your own. And in that moment, you think that perhaps, just perhaps, this union might not be the prison you feared it would be.

When the dance ends, Robb holds you close for a heartbeat longer than necessary, his eyes searching yours. “We’ll make this work, Y/N. I promise.”

You nod, the words you want to say caught in your throat. Instead, you offer him a smile, a real one this time, and squeeze his hand gently. “I believe you, Robb.”

And for the first time that night, you feel a flicker of hope, fragile and new, but there all the same.

[thekyuusims]

The princesses of Westeros (books)

Just for fun !!!(also I aged marcella, Shireen and Arya up a few years)

Daenerys Targaryen , the daughter of King Aerys II and Queen Rhaella a princess at birth, Named The princess of Dragonstone by her brother Viserys . Is a claimant to the iron throne and queen of meereen via conquest and a Khaleesi for the Dothraki. Known for her liberation of slavers bay and bringing dragons back from the dead. She is currently in the Dothraki sea with drogon.

Arianne Martel , princess of the principality of Dorne ,heir of prince Doran Martell. she plans to marry "Aegon Targaryen " also known as young Griff and become his queen. also fails to incite a rebellion against the Lannister's using marcella .

Shireen Baratheon, named a princess and heir to King Stannis Baratheon and is a claimant to the iron throne. As Stannis's only surviving child he hopes his men would fight to put Shireen on the throne if he dies.

Marcella Baratheon , the "legal" daughter of queen Cersei Lannister and King Robert Baratheon, a princess at birth .A claimant to the iron throne and is named the rightful heir over Tommen by Arianne Martell and conspirators .

Asha Greyjoy ,made a princess After her father Balon Greyjoy named himself king of the iron islands also her fathers chosen heir and is referred to as a princess.She attempts to claim her father seat however is forced to flee the iron islands after her uncle euron greyjoy wins the vote to inherit in the kingsmoots.

Sansa stark, After rob declares himself King of the north ,All of his legitimate siblings are referred to as princes and princesses by Him his mother and the northmen. After he father ned stark was captured and beheaded for treason she has held as a political hostage by the Lannisters and was betrothed to King Joffrey Baratheon however this was broken and she wed Tyrion Lannister instead , at the purple wedding she esapced with little fingers help and is currently in the vale posing as Alayne Stone as baelish plans to marry her to  Harrold Harding the heir to robin Arryn. With her brothers assumed dead she is regarded as the rightful heir to winterfell

to King jofferey baratheon

Arya stark, Same reasons as Sansa.She flees to red kept before she is captured and witnesses the beheading of her father , she attempts to head to castle black but is captured and taken to Harrenhal and meets a faceless man. she is assigned roose Bolton's cup bearer going by the name "Nymeria" , she escapes and is captured again...This time by the hound where they go on a wild goose chase attempting to ransom her off, she witnesses the red wedding , goes to the vale but her aunt Lysa Arynn is dead she eventally leaves the hound for dead after a fight at the cross roads inn and sails for bravos to join the faceless men .

Val, Not technically a princess instead the sister in law to Mance Rayder King-beyond-the-wall, However has gained the nickname "The wildling princess" Is is regarded in high esteem amongst the free folk. When stannis offers Jon snow Winterfell he also offers him Val's hand in marriage

[atreeinthemoonlight]

Robert was a terrible king by nearly every metric, and his death directly preceded one of the most destructive conflicts in history. Given that, it’s not surprising that some people start looking backward for alternative outcomes, especially ones that never had the chance to fail.

If Rhaegar had won at the Trident and suppressed the rebellion, we’d likely see the opposite narrative emerge. Every time he made a questionable decision or when any crisis happened, related or not, people would invoke the memory of Robert: the bold rebel who fought for love, the wronged lord who might’ve changed everything. His legend would grow precisely because he never got far enough to disappoint anyone...though Rhaegar died early enough to avoid public failure, he still managed to let down the only people he was actually responsible for...

Rhaegar is considered a potentially good king not because of anything he actually governed,it’s all about who he’s being compared to. While he was alive, they compared him to Aerys.After he died, they compared him to Robert.Two of the worst kings in Westeros history,and against them, Rhaegar will always come out as “the good king who could have been.”

He liked reading, playing the harp, and quiet contemplation—unlike his mad king father, who was violent and cruel. Naturally, people idealize him as a “cultured and enlightened ruler.” This contrast makes it easy to overrate Rhaegar without actually examining his actions or judgment. He didn’t need to actually do much of anything—just not being Aerys was enough to make him a god in the eyes of many. Many readers don’t evaluate him by the standards of a statesman, but rather through the lens of a romance novel protagonist—Tragic, melancholic, always seeming to carry some secret burden,he gives off that aura that makes you want to get close, to ease his sorrow for him. Readers mistake that emotional pull—the desire to comfort him, to believe in him—for proof that Rhaegar must have had a grand plan, that he knew exactly what he was doing and would’ve succeeded if only he’d had the chance. Some readers even treat his extramarital affair with Lyanna as a qualification for being a good king—as if a male character who isn’t toxically masculine or boring must naturally be fit to rule.

But did the books even mention a single concrete example of him making sound political decisions or showing leadership in state affairs? Winning a tourney and enjoying books can qualify someone to govern a kingdom? Of course not.A tourney proves skill in combat, not military strategy.A love of reading might suggest a poetic soul, but it doesn’t mean he had a coherent political philosophy,vision or statecraft. Ruling a realm takes strategic thinking, political savvy, organizational competence, and a deep sense of responsibility—not a good harp solo or a brooding stare.

Unfortunately, many people mistake “prince-like charm” for actual kingly ability. Even if Rhaegar had lived, I still wouldn’t see him as a good king. The fact that “dying early” is considered both his greatest political achievement and most devastating kind of defeat says it all.

You don’t even need to bother wondering what would’ve happened if Rhaegar had won at the Trident—because he was never going to win.The idea of him winning is so far-fetched, I’d write my name backwards if it actually happened lol.

[mariuspompom]

Hi! Just dropping by to say that Elia Martell's death has one main narrative purpose, and that is to make us question the previously almost undisputed legitimacy of the new post-Targaryen order! Thanks bye

[jon-sedai]

I find the Da’shain Aiel, and later Tuatha’an, “Way of the Leaf” to be equal parts fascinating and infuriating. To swear off any form of violence is, on the surface, a noble thing. It takes enormous courage to face oppression and brutality and still refuse to spill blood in return, no matter how justified it would seem. It is a kind of radical hope: a belief that suffering can be endured without perpetuating the same cycle of violence.

But the more I sit with it, the more I cringe.

Because individual people, especially women, are sacrificed at the altar of the group’s ideal. The Way of the Leaf demands endurance, not justice. It demands survival of the soul at the expense of the body. And in doing so, it allows systemic rot to fester unchecked. In a world that grows harsher, crueller, more violent by the day, clinging to absolute pacifism becomes less a courageous stand and more a death sentence; not just for oneself, but for those who cannot choose for themselves. Sometimes, a worthy stance against systemic violence means fighting back, literally. Sometimes, peace must be defended, not merely endured.

Maigran. Colline. Rhea. Kirin.

Girl pay the greatest price for the Da’shain Aiel’s stubbornness. Young girls brutalized and harmed, while the adults around them tell themselves that nonresistance is the higher virtue. And who decides this? Men. It is men who are the leaders, the ones who set the path and demand the rest follow it. It is old men who decide that young girls are not worth fighting for.

The scene where Lewin and the other boys find Maigran and Colline is chilling. As a woman reading it, the signs are immediately clear: torn dresses, bruised bodies, vacant, hollow stares. These girls were not merely kidnapped; they were sexually assaulted. And what makes it even more horrifying is the realization that the girls’ fathers have already made peace with this. They have decided, whether consciously or not, that their daughters’ suffering, their daughters’ bodies, are an acceptable sacrifice for the sake of an ideal. That preserving the Way of the Leaf is more important than protecting their own children. It is disgusting. And it is the price of clinging to a long dead dream.

How poignant than that it is young Lewin, a boy not yet fully molded by their poisoned ideals, who first dares to question what the others accepted without thought. Why should he sacrifice his sister? Why is her life worth less than an unattainable ideal? It is a simple, instinctive rebellion, born not of logic or philosophy, but of love and anger. And it changes everything. Through Lewin’s defiance, and through Morin’s later courage to break away from a system that demanded women’s silent suffering, a new path is forged. A path where women no longer endure violence in the name of ideals that can no longer be realized. A path that will one day give birth to the Maidens of the Spear.

So far, this has been Robert Jordan’s most nuanced and brilliant critique on the intersection between culture and gender dynamics: so often, female victimhood becomes the invisible backbone of cultural practice. That women’s pain is not just collateral damage, but the silent currency that traditions are built and maintained upon. A world that preaches passive endurance without accountability does not merely fail women. It feeds on them.

[longliveblackness]

John Brown was a controversial figure who played a major role in leading the United States to civil war. He was a devout Christian and lifelong abolitionist who tried to eradicate slavery from the United States through increasingly radical means. Unlike most abolitionists, Brown was not a pacifist, and he came to believe that violence was necessary to dislodge slavery. He engaged in violent battles with pro-slavery citizens in Kansas and Missouri and led a raid on the federal munitions depot at Harper’s Ferry. Although the raid failed spectacularly, it helped precipitate the Civil War and turned Brown into a martyr for the abolitionist cause.

John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut, on May 9, 1800, into a deeply religious family. The family was led by a staunchly anti-slavery father, Owen Brown, who was an agent for the Underground Railroad. Brown grew up in a frontier Ohio town in which whites were the minority and where his father taught him that all people should be treated equally. When Brown was 12, he witnessed the beating of a slave boy. This violence had a profound impact on him and helped lead him to his fanatical opposition to slavery.

In 1851, he established the League of Gileadites, an organization that worked to protect escaped slaves from slave hunters.

After Congress passed the Kansas and Nebraska Act in 1854, five of Brown’s sons left for Kansas, and he joined them the following year. He and his sons were heavily involved in “Bleeding Kansas,” defending the city of Lawrence, Kansas, against pro-slavery raiders from Missouri. Brown then led a raid into the pro-slavery town of Pottawatomie Creek, Missouri, during which five pro-slavery men were killed.

On October 16, 1859, he and 21 men raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on the theory that slaves would rise up against their masters when word spread of Brown’s actions. Although Brown gained control of the arsenal, the slave rebellion failed to materialize. Brown’s rebellion was swiftly crushed when U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Lee and 100 Marines surrounded him. Brown was captured, quickly tried, and convicted of treason. He was hanged on December 2, 1859.

His execution was marked by the tolling of bells at many northern churches, and Brown’s actions were looked upon increasingly favorably in the North as the nation headed towards civil war. A song, “John Brown’s Body,” was written about him and was popular in the North during the Civil War. Julia Ward Howe would use the same tune when she wrote the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

•••

John Brown fue una figura controvertida que desempeñó un papel fundamental en la guerra civil de Estados Unidos. Fue un cristiano devoto y abolicionista de toda la vida que intentó erradicar la esclavitud del país mediante métodos cada vez más radicales. A diferencia de la mayoría de los abolicionistas, Brown no era pacifista y llegó a creer que la violencia era necesaria para erradicar la esclavitud. Participó en violentos enfrentamientos con ciudadanos esclavistas en Kansas y Misuri y dirigió un asalto al depósito federal de municiones de Harper's Ferry. Aunque el asalto fracasó, contribuyó a precipitar la Guerra Civil y convirtió a Brown en un mártir de la causa abolicionista.

John Brown nació en Torrington, Connecticut, el 9 de mayo de 1800, en el seno de una familia profundamente religiosa. La familia estaba liderada por un padre firmemente antiesclavista, Owen Brown, quien era agente del Ferrocarril Subterráneo. Brown creció en un pueblo fronterizo de Ohio donde los blancos eran minoría y donde su padre le enseñó que todas las personas debían ser tratadas por igual. A los 12 años, Brown presenció la paliza de un niño esclavo. Esta violencia lo impactó profundamente y lo condujo a su oposición fanática a la esclavitud.

En 1851, fundó la Liga de Galaaditas, una organización que trabajaba para proteger a los esclavos fugitivos de los cazadores de esclavos.

Tras la aprobación por el Congreso de la Ley de Kansas y Nebraska en 1854, cinco de los hijos de Brown se fueron a Kansas, y él se unió a ellos al año siguiente. Él y sus hijos participaron activamente en el "Sangrado de Kansas” , defendiendo la ciudad de Lawrence, Kansas, contra los invasores esclavistas de Misuri. Brown lideró entonces un ataque en la ciudad esclavista de Pottawatomie Creek, Misuri, durante la cual murieron cinco hombres esclavistas.

El 16 de octubre de 1859, él y 21 hombres asaltaron el arsenal federal de Harper's Ferry, Virginia, bajo la teoría de que los esclavos se rebelarían contra sus amos al correrse la voz de las acciones de Brown. Aunque Brown tomó el control del arsenal, la rebelión de esclavos no se materializó. La rebelión de Brown fue rápidamente aplastada cuando el coronel del ejército estadounidense Robert E. Lee y 100 marines lo rodearon. Brown fue capturado, juzgado rápidamente y condenado por traición. Fue ahorcado el 2 de diciembre de 1859.

Su ejecución se celebró con el repique de campanas en muchas iglesias del norte, y las acciones de Brown fueron cada vez más bien vistas en el Norte a medida que la nación se encaminaba hacia la guerra civil. Se escribió una canción sobre él, "El cuerpo de John Brown", que fue popular en el Norte durante la Guerra Civil. Julia Ward Howe usaría la misma melodía al escribir la letra del "Himno de Batalla de la República".

[warsofasoiaf]

Did Roberts kill all Targaryen policy apply to bastards

Robert having a "kill all Targaryens" policy is overstated. He largely ignored Viserys and Daenerys in Essos after the lightest of consultations by Jon Arryn - only doing something after Viserys declared his intent to raise an army and attack Robert. He never bothered about Maester Aemon at the Wall. Rhaegar's children weren't killed by Robert's men or ordered to be done so; Tywin did it to secure himself with Robert in the aftermath of the Rebellion (you can easily criticize him for failing to punish Tywin, but that's not the same as ordering it done himself).

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[mariacallous]

“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When you cross the border to Canada, you are allowed to say “liberalism” but are asked never to praise “liberals,” since that means implicitly endorsing the ruling Trudeau government and the long-dominant Liberal Party. In England, you are warned off both words, since “liberals” suggests the membership of a quaintly failed political party and “liberalism” its dated program. In France, of course, the vagaries of language have made “liberalism” mean free-market fervor, doomed from the start in that country, while what we call liberalism is more hygienically referred to as “republicanism.” Say that.

Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name. Liberal thinkers hardly improve matters, since the first thing they will say is that the thing called “liberalism” is not actually a thing. This discouraging reflection is, to be sure, usually followed by an explanation: liberalism is a practice, a set of institutions, a tradition, a temperament, even. A clear contrast can be made with its ideological competitors: both Marxism and Catholicism, for instance, have more or less explicable rules—call them, nonpejoratively, dogmas. You can’t really be a Marxist without believing that a revolution against the existing capitalist order would be a good thing, and that parliamentary government is something of a bourgeois trick played on the working class. You can’t really be a Catholic without believing that a crisis point in cosmic history came two millennia ago in the Middle East, when a dissident rabbi was crucified and mysteriously revived. You can push either of these beliefs to the edge of metaphor—maybe the rabbi was only believed to be resurrected, and the inner experience of that epiphany is what counts; maybe the revolution will take place peacefully within a parliament and without Molotov cocktails—but you can’t really discard them. Liberalism, on the other hand, can include both faith in free markets and skepticism of free markets, an embrace of social democracy and a rejection of its statism. Its greatest figure, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, was a socialist but also the author of “On Liberty,” which is (to the leftist imagination, at least) a suspiciously libertarian manifesto.

Whatever liberalism is, we’re regularly assured that it’s dying—in need of those shock paddles they regularly take out in TV medical dramas. (“C’mon! Breathe, damn it! Breathe! ”) As on television, this is not guaranteed to work. (“We’ve lost him, Holly. Damn it, we’ve lost him.”) Later this year, a certain demagogue who hates all these terms—liberals, liberalism, liberal democracy—might be lifted to power again. So what is to be done? New books on the liberal crisis tend to divide into three kinds: the professional, the professorial, and the polemical—books by those with practical experience; books by academics, outlining, sometimes in dreamily abstract form, a reformed liberal democracy; and then a few wishing the whole damn thing over, and well rid of it.

The professional books tend to come from people whose lives have been spent as pundits and as advisers to politicians. Robert Kagan, a Brookings fellow and a former State Department maven who has made the brave journey from neoconservatism to resolute anti-Trumpism, has a new book on the subject, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again” (Knopf). Kagan’s is a particular type of book—I have written one myself—that makes the case for liberalism mostly to other liberals, by trying to remind readers of what they have and what they stand to lose. For Kagan, that “again” in the title is the crucial word; instead of seeing Trumpism as a new danger, he recapitulates the long history of anti-liberalism in the U.S., characterizing the current crisis as an especially foul wave rising from otherwise predictable currents. Since the founding of the secular-liberal Republic—secular at least in declining to pick one faith over another as official, liberal at least in its faith in individualism—anti-liberal elements have been at war with it. Kagan details, mordantly, the anti-liberalism that emerged during and after the Civil War, a strain that, just as much as today’s version, insisted on a “Christian commonwealth” founded essentially on wounded white working-class pride.

The relevance of such books may be manifest, but their contemplative depth is, of necessity, limited. Not to worry. Two welcomely ambitious and professorial books are joining them: “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (Princeton), by Alexandre Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, and “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society” (Knopf), by Daniel Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

The two take slightly different tacks. Chandler emphasizes programs of reform, and toys with the many bells and whistles on the liberal busy box: he’s inclined to try more random advancements, like elevating ordinary people into temporary power, on an Athenian model that’s now restricted to jury service. But, on the whole, his is a sanely conventional vision of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, one able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

The program that Chandler recommends to save liberalism essentially represents the politics of the leftier edge of the British Labour Party—which historically has been unpopular with the very people he wants to appeal to, gaining power only after exhaustion with Tory governments. In the classic Fabian manner, though, Chandler tends to breeze past some formidable practical problems. While advocating for more aggressive government intervention in the market, he admits equably that there may be problems with state ownership of industry and infrastructure. Yet the problem with state ownership is not a theoretical one: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of the widely felt failures of state ownership in the nineteen-seventies. The overreaction to those failures may have been destructive, but it was certainly democratic, and Tony Blair’s much criticized temporizing began in this recognition. Chandler is essentially arguing for an updated version of the social-democratic status quo—no bad place to be but not exactly a new place, either.

Lefebvre, on the other hand, wants to write about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed, in the tradition of William James, with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of any professional pundit. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous.

Yet, given that we may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War, both books seem curiously calm. Lefebvre suggests that liberalism may be passing away, but he doesn’t seem especially perturbed by the prospect, and at his book’s climax he recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to all anxiety, a stance that seems not unlike Richard Rorty’s idea of irony—cultivating an ability both to hold to a position and to recognize its provisionality. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.” However excellent as a spiritual exercise, a posture of reflective equilibrium seems scarcely more likely to get us through 2024 than smoking weed all day, though that, too, can certainly be calming in a crisis.

Both professors, significantly, are passionate evangelists for the great American philosopher John Rawls, and both books use Rawls as their fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Indeed, the dust-jacket sell line of Chandler’s book is a distillation of Rawls: “Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off). The emphasis on “justice as fairness” presses both professors to stress equality; it’s not “A Theory of Liberty,” after all. “Free and equal” is not the same as “free and fair,” and the difference is where most of the arguing happens among people committed to a liberal society.

Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.

Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South, given that, dropped into it at random, they could very well be enslaved. It also suggests that Norway might be a fairly just place, because a person would almost certainly land in a comfortable and secure middle-class life, however boringly Norwegian.

Still, thought experiments may not translate well to the real world. Einstein’s similarly epoch-altering account of what it would be like to travel on a beam of light, and how it would affect the hands on one’s watch, is profound for what it reveals about the nature of time. Yet it isn’t much of a guide to setting the timer on the coffeemaker in the kitchen so that the pot will fill in time for breakfast. Actual politics is much more like setting the timer on the coffeemaker than like riding on a beam of light. Breakfast is part of the cosmos, but studying the cosmos won’t cook breakfast. It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician. No F.D.R. or Clement Attlee, Pierre Mendès France or François Mitterrand (a socialist who was such a master of coalition politics that he effectively killed off the French Communist Party). Not to mention Tony Blair or Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Biden’s name appears once in Chandler’s index; Obama’s, though he gets a passing mention, not at all.

The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—compromised stories, in every sense. Both philosophers would, I think, accept this truth in principle, yet neither is drawn to it from the heart. Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.

Ideals can shape the real world. In some ultimate sense, Biden, like F.D.R. before him, has tried to build the sort of society we might design from behind the veil of ignorance—but, also like F.D.R., he has had to do so empirically, and often through tactics overloaded with contradictions. If your thought experiment is premised on a group of free and equal planners, it may not tell you what you need to know about a society marred by entrenched hierarchies. Ask Biden if he wants a free and fair society and he would say that he does. But Thatcher would have said so, too, and just as passionately. Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.

Both philosophers also seem to accept, at least by implication, the familiar idea that there is a natural tension between two aspects of the liberal project. One is the desire for social justice, the other the practice of individual freedom. Wanting to speak our minds is very different from wanting to feed our neighbors. An egalitarian society might seem inherently limited in liberty, while one that emphasizes individual rights might seem limited in its capacity for social fairness.

Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Show me a society in which people are able to curse the king and I will show you a society more broadly equal than the one next door, if only because the ability to curse the king will make the king more likely to spread the royal wealth, for fear of the cursing. The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture. We want to live on common streets, not in fortified castles. It isn’t a paradox that John Stuart Mill and his partner, Harriet Taylor, threw themselves into both “On Liberty,” a testament to individual freedom, and “The Subjection of Women,” a program for social justice and mass emancipation through group action. The habit of seeking happiness for one through the fulfillment of many others was part of the habit of their liberalism. Mill wanted to be happy, and he couldn’t be if Taylor wasn’t.

Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.

Where Kagan, Lefebvre, and Chandler are all more or less sympathetic to the liberal “project,” the British political philosopher John Gray deplores it, and his recent book, “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is one long complaint. Gray is one of those leftists so repelled by the follies of the progressive party of the moment—to borrow a phrase of Orwell’s about Jonathan Swift—that, in a familiar horseshoe pattern, he has become hard to distinguish from a reactionary. He insists that liberalism is a product of Christianity (being in thrall to the notion of the world’s perfectibility) and that it has culminated in what he calls “hyper-liberalism,” which would emancipate individuals from history and historically shaped identities. Gray hates all things “woke”—a word that he seems to know secondhand from news reports about American universities. If “woke” points to anything except the rage of those who use it, however, it is a discourse directed against liberalism—Ibram X. Kendi is no ally of Bayard Rustin, nor Judith Butler of John Stuart Mill. So it is hard to see it as an expression of the same trends, any more than Trump is a product of Burke’s conservative philosophy, despite strenuous efforts on the progressive side to make it seem so.

Gray’s views are learned, and his targets are many and often deserved: he has sharp things to say about how certain left liberals have reclaimed the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his thesis that politics is a battle to the death between friends and foes. In the end, Gray turns to Dostoyevsky’s warning that (as Gray reads him) “the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.” Hyper-liberals, Gray tells us, think that we can compete with the authority of God, and what they leave behind is wild disorder and crazed egotism.

As for Dostoyevsky’s positive doctrines—authoritarian and mystical in nature—Gray waves them away as being “of no interest.” But they are of interest, exactly because they raise the central pragmatic issue: If you believe all this about liberal modernity, what do you propose to do about it? Given that the announced alternatives are obviously worse or just crazy (as is the idea of a Christian commonwealth, something that could be achieved only by a degree of social coercion that makes the worst of “woke” culture look benign), perhaps the evil might better be ameliorated than abolished.

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

One turns back to Helena Rosenblatt’s 2018 book, “The Lost History of Liberalism,” which makes the case that liberalism is not a recent ideology but an age-old series of intuitions about existence. When the book appeared, it may have seemed unduly overgeneralized—depicting liberalism as a humane generosity that flared up at moments and then died down again. But, as the world picture darkens, her dark picture illuminates. There surely are a set of identifiable values that connect men and women of different times along a single golden thread: an aversion to fanaticism, a will toward the coexistence of different kinds and creeds, a readiness for reform, a belief in the public criticism of power without penalty, and perhaps, above all, a knowledge that institutions of civic peace are much harder to build than to destroy, being immeasurably more fragile than their complacent inheritors imagine. These values will persist no matter how evil the moment may become, and by whatever name we choose to whisper in the dark.

[ladyofchroyane]

Ned’s ill fated time as hand of the king was a really interesting exploration of how little even a highest lord’s wishes can end up mattering within the nightmare that is Westerosi feudalism. Ned became first among equals in the vipers nest that is King’s Landing—lacking the normal power he possessed at Winterfell—and later found himself a victim of the never ending politicking and machinations that ended up being the death of him. But I think the way he had to concede ground on his own morals in favor of what he considered the bigger picture perfectly encapsulated one of George’s central theses on rulership: ruling is hard.

On that note, this is why Ned’s decision to warn Cersei stands out as one of the most defining moments of his character. By this point, Ned had already conceded much—forced to compromise his values in order to function within the royal court—but this was his bottom line, one that he refused to cross, and one that had been recently tested by Robert with his assassination attempt on Dany. Now, once again faced with the prospect of children being slaughtered, Ned made his choice.

It’s easy to call Ned foolish for this, but I don’t think that’s fair. Yes, it was a poor political move, but it was also a calculated risk—one he believed he could afford to take at the time. And more importantly, it was a risk he was willing to take. Not wanting children to die and taking risks for that cause is always worthwhile, and the narrative constantly reaffirms this.

This is why I’m so fond of Ned, because he doesn’t buy into the nihilistic version of the Game. And frankly, Ned didn’t fail because he told Cersei. The real reason for his failure is much simpler—it’s because he bet on the wrong player: Robert.

Robert failed Ned from the beginning by putting Ned in such a situation. This quote exemplifies how Ned’s personal connection to Robert, which later turned into political and social alignment, led to Ned being forced to go against personal values:

Ned wanted no part in what he considered folly, yet his name was stamped on it regardless. Even in opposition, he was complicit. Janos Slynt’s casual “call it what you will” throwaway line underscored a brutal truth: Ned’s personal opinions on the matter were irrelevant. To the rest of the realm, that was his tourney, his responsibility.

This was a pattern throughout Ned’s time as Hand—he was trapped in a grey where his presence marked him as complicit in decisions he opposed. To be clear, I don’t think he lacked agency here as leaving would have always been an option, but for Ned, it was never a real option. Not when Ned needed to find out the truth of Jon Arryn’s death. Not when Robert, his friend, still sat on the throne despite how poor of a king he had become.

Though this begs the question: if Robert wasn’t so irresponsible, then would Ned have lost his head? At the end of the day that’s where Ned truly fails, he should have heeded the many warning signs and should not have connected himself so utterly to Robert.

On the topic of character’s failures, I really like how Ned resurfaces in Dany’s chapters. Dany serves as the perspective from the other side of the aftermath of the rebellion, meaning she’s only been privy to Ned’s worst side. So it makes sense that these two storylines converse with each other around themes of guilt and accountability, because that’s what their narrative relationship is defined by: Ned’s guilt over the aftermath of the rebellion and the life Dany’s lived in response to said rebellion.

A crucial question Dany asks is: does Ned bear responsibility for the deaths of Dany’s family? But that leads to an even more difficult question:

Is Dany responsible for Hazzea’s?

The answer is complicated. Neither Ned nor Dany directly caused these deaths, yet both acknowledged a degree of responsibility. However, accountability =\= punishment lol (I think people often conflate these two separate concepts together).

Both Ned and Dany came to understand that ruling meant bearing responsibility for unintended consequences. Just as Dany grapples with Hazzea’s death and her role in it, Ned carried the weight of the past, questioning his own role in the fall of House Targaryen and Robert’s reign.

And Dany, like Ned, experienced the confines of rulership, but unlike Ned, Dany didn’t commit the folly of killing her house’s sigil. Now she has the opportunity to do better after ridding herself of her floppy ears.

On a side note, (going back to Eddard vi), I also like how after Janos’s speech about the problems/deaths that had occurred in the wake of increased traffic in the city, most of the small council try to paint the tourney in a good light by speaking about the economic benefits. Economic gain outweighing the human cost to Those sorts of people is no surprise. Who really cares about the beheaded woman no one can identify? Well, most of the council clearly doesn’t. These tiny details contain so much good commentary :)