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janie_tangerine
Tyrion is nowhere near surprised she would, regardless of how many crocodile tears she cried when they got the news.
Yeah, not likely that she meant it. Not likely, when if this happened, it’s all her fault, even if Tyrion can’t prove it and most likely never will be able to.
Dirt is shoveled over the freshly dug grave.
If he thinks that it’s his brother down there, he wants to cry all over again, but he’s not going to do it in front of his fucking father nor his thrice-damned sister and her insufferable firstborn. No kid should be such a pest at barely four, except that Joffrey is and the fact that Tyrion will vote in two years and can’t even tell his sister to keep her fucking kid under check and stop him from tearing apart his books says enough.
For that matter, he thinks she is the one telling him to tear them apart in the first place.
His tie is suffocating him.
He thinks about how Jaime always used to smile down at him and ruffle his hair and tell him he couldn’t wait to read his first book.
He wants to vomit as he sees the grave filling up quickly, quickly, quickly.
His father wants to be done here as soon as possible, of course — he doesn’t want anyone talking about how his oldest son killed himself a month after his fiancé died in a car accident that no one has quite figured out.
Brienne always was a careful driver and she certainly was sober the night she crashed her car against a guardrail and flew some thirty meters from the edge of that road. The car took fire. She never had a chance to get out.
Given how Cersei smiled to herself when they got the news, he has another distinct feeling that someone might have tampered with the brakes. She never liked Brienne, of course, and she never liked that Jaime seemed to want a life with her and possibly without his sister around, and surely she hasn’t cried meaning it when she heard that her twin brother jumped from that same place where she crashed exactly a month after she was gone.
“I’m coming home later,” he says when things are said and done and what was left of his brother is interred six feet under the ground.
“And what would you even be doing here?” His father sneers.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Tyrion says, “maybe there’s other people I’d like to pay a visit to as long as I’m here.”
Joffrey screams that he wants to go home already. Cersei assures him they will soon with that honeyed voice he’s learned to hate since he was born.
“Oh, let him,” she says, all dressed in black, perfectly fashionable, her lips dark red with lipstick that to Tyrion looks entirely out of place at a funeral. “Just remember that when you get back home you have to get through Jaime’s crap in the basement, no one needs it lying around.”
Of course, Tyrion wants to sneer.
He doesn’t.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” he says, and when they all disappeared on the family limo, he sighs, runs to the entrance, buys a couple of bouquets at the flowers stand just outside the door and goes back inside.
They didn’t let him bring flowers this time, nor they let him go to Brienne’s funeral.
Maybe he can make up for it now.
——
He thinks they’d have wanted to be buried next to each other, so of course Jaime’s tombstone is on the damned opposite side of the graveyard. Tyrion doesn’t waste more time on it — he leaves the handful of yellow primroses he got for his brother because they were his favorites on the black, shiny tombstone with real gold lettering, because of course his father wouldn’t waste money when it came to his son’s funeral as much as he wants to keep it under wraps.
Then he wipes sweat off his forehead and walks towards the other grave.
It takes him some fifteen minutes when it’d have taken anyone else five, it’s not that big of a graveyard but it’s built on a hill and if your legs are short, well, it’ll take you a while to get from one side to the other.
Brienne’s grave is nowhere near as fancy as any of his relatives. It has a simple clear grey stone, with the picture being what she always jokingly referred to as the only good photo anyone ever took of me. Her blue eyes stare at you from the middle of it, and differently from any of his relatives’s’, it’s covered in flowers and small messages. Not from too many people, but there are new ones from her father and her friends, and when he recognizes his brother’s writing on two cards wrapped in plastic and carefully put inside the ground, he feels like bursting out crying.
He doesn’t need to read them to know that one had to be from the funeral and another from just before he joined her in death.
He places the small bouquet of forget-me-nots on the grave, letting it join the others — she didn’t like flowers much but they were the same color as her eyes, Tyrion thinks it’s worth something.
It’s not even that he can blame anything on her. She showed up in Jaime’s life just after Joffrey was born and he was even more miserable than usual, and doesn’t Tyrion have suspicions about who was that kid’s real father. They bickered for a few months after meeting for a university engineering project and he saw the light go back to his brother’s eyes throughout that entire time, and when they finally realized they liked each other Jaime was back to the solar, kind person Tyrion remembered from his childhood, except without that cloud to his eyes that came down whenever Cersei was near him, and —
You know, Jaime told him at some point, just after they proposed each other, I did talk to her about — your situation.
My situation, Tyrion had quipped back, but he knew that Jaime meant that he wasn’t looking forward to be left living with his father, his sister and her son while he went off with Brienne somewhere smaller and less grand but certainly less horrible to live in.
Well, if we time it right you could actually live with us, you know, he had said, and for those few months after, Tyrion had contemplated it. Fine, he’s sixteen, not six, but still, the idea of the last two years before he comes of age being spent without his sister, his father and his insufferable nephew around on one side and with the one relative he had that he genuinely loved was sweet, entirely too much. Considering that Brienne never once looked at him wrong because of his height, gave him good advice when it came to planning the grand fantasy epic with dragons he has been wanting to write since he was six or so, and honestly, he liked her… wouldn’t it have been grand, if he could have gone with them?
Instead, she died burned alive, Jaime — Jaime jumped from that fucking height and Tyrion can’t even blame him because in that month after she died he had turned into a shadow of himself, and their father was pressing him to go work with Cersei in the PA for the family company and to quit the electronics repair shop he and Brienne had put on together, and —
No.
No, Tyrion can’t blame him at all.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, even if of course she can’t hear him. She’s dead. Same as Jaime. And now he is on his own having to deal with his entire fucking family without anyone to turn to, not when all of his uncles live in the US by now and he doubts he can ask Aunt Gemma to live with her until he’s eighteen.
He shrugs, wipes away tears he hadn’t known he had just shed, and goes back home.
After all, if he doesn’t go through Jaime’s stuff in the cellar, others will do and he doesn’t think Jaime would have wanted Cersei to be the person throwing away his earthly possessions.
At least he can do that for him now.
——
At home, he takes a quick shower, changes into more comfortable clothes, doesn’t even try to tell Cersei that if Joffrey leaves toy cars half-hidden outside his room’s door he might trip over them, because of course it wouldn’t be her baby’s fault, and heads straight for the cellar.
There are some ten boxes of stuff Jaime had packed up in prevision of moving out with Brienne just before they were supposed to marry.
Tyrion turns on the light, takes a deep breath and opens the first one.
——
Three hours later, he has put all the clothes aside — he’ll send them to some charity, he figures. The box with the records… he doesn’t know what to do with it. On one side, it makes him sad to just look at it, but to Jaime records were what books are to him. They always would go together looking for either when Jaime was sixteen and Tyrion was nine and he has too many good memories attached to that time to want to throw them away or sell it. He might keep them himself if only because while he didn’t like exactly the same music at least he’d have something to remember Jaime by, wouldn’t he?
He moves on to the fifth box.
Except that there’s a card on it.
What the fuck — oh, Jaime did leave a card on his bed, but no one noticed this one. He tears it from the box and turns it over.
Then he does a double-take.
There’s a for Tyrion written outside it in Jaime’s terrible penmanship.
What the —
He tears the envelope open — there’s a full-on letter inside, all written in caps, and for a moment he feels floored and he doesn’t know if he wants to read it.
But then he takes a deep breath and does.
Dear Tyrion, it reads,
I suppose that if you’re reading this, I’m long dead. I’m honestly sorry about that and believe me, I would have preferred any other way out, but — I paid some fifteen different people to triple-check what remained of Brienne’s car. Thirteen of them agreed that they thought the brakes were tampered with and the other two said it could have happened but they weren’t one hundred percent sure. It was nothing conclusive, and I couldn’t go to the police and say that given that and the fact that those Kettleblack brothers were conferring with Cersei all the time in the last week there might have been a link. But I think I know enough for myself. Also, I didn’t tell anyone because it would have made things even worse, but — she was pregnant.
Tyrion feels like throwing up as he reads it and notices that the ink is smudged on that page. As if Jaime was crying as he wrote it.
She only had told me and we had decided to hold on informing others for a while, but — she wanted it, same as I did, and now that I think about it, she did take the test when she spent the night here. I don’t know if someone found it in the trash and told Cersei or not, but what I know is that I can’t live with knowing that she most likely was behind those brakes not working and that even if I found anyone else — which I doubt, because I don’t know if anyone could have been Brienne — she’d tamper with it at best and do this at most. I can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t particularly want to leave, but I also can’t go on knowing that she wouldn’t ever let me have a life. I hope you can forgive me.
Also, the only thing I regret at this point is that I’ll never read that first book of yours. But I thought I’d leave you a little something to help you out with it. This was supposed to be your birthday present, and I know it’s two months from now, but — you understand, I hope. I finished it this last week and it was the only thing I didn’t want left hanging before joining her. Please try to be stronger than I could be and I hope you remember me once in a while. And write that book you’ve been talking about since you were five or you can be sure I’ll haunt you from the other side.
I love you.
It’s not signed, but there’s no need to. By the time he’s done reading it, he has to put it on the side because he’s crying so hard he can barely see the letters, and — he shakes his head and tears the box open.
Oh.
Tyrion always told Jaime that he’d have liked one of those new word processors things to write down his ideas, but regardless of being able to afford it, Tywin Lannister would have never splurged money on buying him a computer to write books when he’s already laughed at the idea the two times Tyrion ever said that was what he wanted to be.
And now — fuck.
Jaime admittedly never was into reading as much as he was. Tyrion always suspected that he might have had some kind of learning disorder, but it’s not like their father ever admitted he might have a problem and got him help. But, he always had a knack for electronics and fixing things up — there’s a reason why he got into engineering after he finished high school. And —
Holy shit. Tyrion stares at the word processor in the box with fresh tears spilling to his eyes as he tears apart the box and brings it out completely. It’s cobbled together from at least ten different pieces of electronics, one of which is definitely his father’s old one that he threw away a few months ago, and it’s mismatched and with the screen a different color from the keyboard
(same as my eyes, he thinks bitterly)
but it’s — a word processor.
That Jaime spent most likely a while putting together and then finished up before fucking killing himself just so he would have it, and —
He buries his face inside his t-shirt, trying to not make anyone hear how hard he’s crying against the soft cotton, and when he thinks he’s done, he pockets the letter, then touches the screen reverently and moves down to the keyboard. It has all the letters as it should be, and then a DELETE button and an EXECUTE one. He doesn’t know where Jaime found it, those look like weird commands, but —
Never mind.
It’s five in the afternoon. No one is in — Cersei most likely brought Joffrey out for his usual walk in the park that consists on terrorizing any other kid around the place, his father is at work and won’t be back until seven.
Tyrion decides to leave the other boxes be for now and sets on bringing the word processor upstairs.
——
It takes him three trips — one for the bulk of it, one for the keyboard and one for the screen, and by the time he has it in his room he’s sweated even more than this morning, but he’s too excited to actually take a shower again before turning it on. He places it on the ground, near the plugs, moves the screen on top of the CPU block, makes sure everything is attached and plugs it in, then presses the ON button.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then the screen jumps back to life, and a string of green letters appear on it.
Happy birthday, little brother, they say, and then — execute?
Tyrion wipes fresh tears from his eyes and presses EXECUTE. The message disappears and he’s in front of a flashing line.
Right.
It’s most likely not refined, and if Jaime put it together on his own then obviously it doesn’t have any of the fancy programming those new processors have, but it’s going to be good enough, he thinks.
God. He has talked to Jaime for years about this epic fantasy series he’s been wanting to write for as long as he can remember and the one thing he always was sure of is that he wanted dragons to be in it from beginning to end (he did like dragons when he was a kid, damn it, but can you blame him if he just wanted one to jump on and fly away from his damned father and sister when he wanted?), and to think that now at least he could write it on a machine Jaime made for him —
He breathes in and out, in and out.
Right. Maybe he should try it before starting to copy all his badly cobbled together notes.
He sits cross-legged in front of the processor, then decides to just go for something obvious.
I HAVE A PICTURE OF MY FATHER ON THE WALL, he writes, glancing at the portrait of the man looming above him from the opposite wall — of course his father’s ego is large enough that all of the room have a picture of him looming from one of the walls. His kids’s included. His nephew’s included. Fuck, but doesn’t Tyrion hate his guts.
The typewriter works perfectly, the CPU humming as he writes it down on the screen. Not a glitch, not a thing. All right then.
He deletes that line, then clicks EXECUTE when the processor asks him if he’s sure.
Then something in the air turns colder for a second — his back shivers for a moment, his bones suddenly feeling icy for a split moment, and then it’s all gone and he can breathe normally again. But something feels changed. Tyrion looks back up at the wall.
His father’s picture is gone.
——
All right, he thinks. All right, this isn’t — I’m making this up. This isn’t possible. That picture can’t have just fucking disappeared.
Except that it has. It hasn’t fallen to the ground, it hasn’t somehow appeared back on the other side of the wall. Five minutes after combing behind the nightstand it was hanging upon, Tyrion is sure it’s just gone into nowhere.
He swallows, moving back to the computer. The flashing line is still looking at him innocently.
Except that apparently you deleted that photo out of existence.
Right.
It sounds ridiculous, but — he’s read enough Sherlock Holmes more than once in his life to know that you leave out the impossible whatever’s left, however improbable, is the truth.
Well.
Going with that, Jaime’s processor has canceled that photo, very radically. But if it can delete things, maybe it can also… create them?
Tyrion sits back down, crossing his legs. His tiny fingers are shaking as he types, I HAVE A PICTURE OF MY MOTHER ON THE WALL.
He presses the EXECUTE key instead of the DELETE one.
ARE YOU SURE?, appears on the screen.
He presses EXECUTE.
He feels that weird something in the air, all over again.
He looks up at the wall.
His mother’s face
(the mother he never knew, the mother who died in a car accident six months after he was born and that his father survived, the mother whose death his father always blamed on him because they were discussing him when they crashed, and Tyrion never dared ask why they were discussing him but he can imagine just why, he always could, he always could)
is staring down at him, a sweet smile on her lips.
Cold sweat breaks all over his forehead.
——
He tries it again. First he writes MY FLOOR IS DIRTY, then presses DELETE, then EXECUTE.
A moment later, when he touches the ground under the carpet it’s sitting on, it’s so clean it shines.
Then he writes, THERE ARE FIFTY QUID IN THE SECOND DRAWER IN MY NIGHTSTAND. He presses EXECUTE twice, then he stands and opens the drawer.
There are fifty quid inside it.
Tyrion slams it closed, turns the processor off and goes back to the basement.
——
The rest of Jaime’s things aren’t nowhere near the same importance. As he goes through them mechanically, dividing what he wants to keep (not much, other than the records) from what he should try to give away, he can’t help thinking, that thing can change reality.
His fingers are shaking as he brings up Jaime’s records, stacking them carefully inside his room.
On one side, he doesn’t know what he should do with it. Would it bring dragons to life, if he wrote about them and pressed execute?
Did Jaime have a clue of what he was doing with that thing?
Most likely not. He honestly doubts it.
Still. He has fifty quid in his pocket that did not exist before yesterday, and sure as fuck his father never even let him close to a picture of Joanna Lannister, he only ever knew how he looked because Jaime had some pictures of her left, and now she’s hanging over his bed like the mother he never had.
He’s there, wondering if he should just never turn that thing on period because he’s read enough books and seen enough movies to know that fucking with this kind of thing is a very bad idea. But on the other side —
He glances at Jaime’s pile of punk-rock records in the corner, and he thinks, what if I could bring him back?
His hands shake so hard he has to sit on his bed and breathe in and out inandout inandout for a good five minutes before he has a grip on it.
One thing is materializing fifty quid out of nowhere.
Another is bringing back to life people who have chosen to leave it.
He’ll sleep on it, he decides. He’ll sleep on it, and then —
Then the door slams open.
“What is that?” Joffrey asks, barging inside Tyrion’s room and staring at the processor in the corner.
Fuck.
Tyrion jumps from the bed and puts himself in between it and his fucking nephew — at least he’s still taller than Joffrey is… for now.
“That’s a thing your uncle left me,” he says. “Now scram.”
Joffrey doesn’t seem too convinced. “It looks old. Does it work?”
“I don’t know,” Tyrion says. “Will you get out already?”
He gets a sneer from eyes that shouldn’t look so cold at four, but they’re also the exact same as his mother’s, and for a moment Tyrion flinches — fuck, he never understood how Jaime and Cersei had the same eyes but they could look so wildly different, it would have been way too easy to tell the difference.
“Well, I’m telling Mother, then,” Joffrey says, and runs off the room, screaming Mom, come upstairs, he has something strange in his room. As if he could call him by his name —
But shit.
Shit.
If Cersei or his father see the processor, they’re going to throw it out, he knows it — and never mind what it can do or cannot, it’s the one thing he’s left of Jaime that’s not records or clothes or memories and he can’t let them take it away, he can’t —
He turns it on.
Happy birthday, little brother, the screen reads. He tries to not burst out crying at reading that.
He presses EXECUTE instead, his fingers shaking, Cersei’s steps quickly going upstairs, telling Joffrey they’ll check at once what it is that Tyrion’s hiding.
Then he types.
MY NEPHEW IS JOFFREY BARATHEON. His fingers shake as he types as quickly as possible, and then he presses the DELETE button.
EXECUTE?, the screen reads.
EXECUTE, he presses.
——
A moment later, there are no screams anymore. The toy car right outside his door is gone. The CPU is humming loud, Tyrion realizes as he stands up and carefully leaves the room. His sister is on the stairs, still dressed in black, but there’s something off about her. She asks him what the hell does he have to stare at, and Tyrion says he was just going to the bathroom and bypasses her.
He runs to Joffrey’s room.
It’s empty. There’s no unholy amount of unused toys in the corner, no bed with tailored linen sewn in gold (tacky, if you asked Tyrion, but that wasn’t the point), no toy cars or Legos for him to trip on anywhere. Not even the ever present picture of Tywin Lannister on the wall.
Fuck.
Fuck.
He —
Did he just delete his nephew from existence?
Well.
Seems like he did.
Fuck.
Well, if he wanted proof that the machine didn’t just work with menial things, now he fucking has it.
And now what?
——
He runs back to his room, and of course Cersei is inside it, glaring at the processor. Thankfully it only is showing the empty page.
“What is this piece of garbage?” She asks, sounding way more bitter than she usually does. Could it be because she doesn’t have the kid from Hell to spoil right now? Maybe so.
“That piece of garbage,” Tyrion quips back, “is something Jaime left me. It was in the basement. And you won’t like what I’m going to do if you come closer to it.”
“Oh, I’m terrified. What could you do to me if I did?” She smiles, taking a step closer, raising a foot as if she wants to kick it with her six-inch heel.
Tyrion moves in between the computer and his sister.
He’s not surprised when the heel hits him in the cheek.
“How cute,” she says. “It’s a piece of junk, same as everything else your brother came up with. How fucking pathetic.”
“Why,” Tyrion sneers back, “jealous he never made you one?”
“Please, no one ever asked him to. If only he hadn’t met that little bitch,” she says, but then she shakes her head and flashes him a smile that makes his stomach turn on itself. “I’m sure Father will love to know Jaime left something to just you out of everyone. Look at that, it’s even smoking.” Then she turns on her heels —
And at least she is right on that. The CPU is humming louder and louder, smoke coming from it, and Tyrion realizes, maybe deleting a person isn’t the same thing as deleting a picture.
In a split moment, he realizes that even if he turns it off, there is no way that processor is going to survive much longer. Fuck, it’s going to go on fire soon, but the line is still flashing green, and —
He can do nothing and let it die, or do something that is wholly unethical and incorrect —
But honestly, since when has he cared about ethical? Or better… since when either his sister or his father ever cared about what was ethical, when it came to him?
Since never, that’s when, and so he’d just be paying them with the same coin now… wouldn’t it?
Tyrion scrambles to his knees and his hands move forward.
MY NAME IS TYRION LANNISTER, he types frantically, MY FATHER TYWIN AND MY SISTER CERSEI DIED IN A CAR ACCIDENT WHEN I WAS SIX MONTHS OLD. MY MOTHER SURVIVED. The screen asks him if he wants to EXECUTE.
He EXECUTEs, and the CPU makes a fucking sparkle. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Not yet, not yet —
I LIVE IN THE OLD FAMILY HOUSE WITH MY MOTHER, he types on, AND MY BROTHER JAIME AND HIS FIANCE’ BRIENNE AND I WILL BE AN UNCLE SOON.
EXECUTE?, the machine asks as he coughs because of all of the damned smoke coming from it.
EXECUTE, he presses, and a moment after the screen goes dark and the CPU dies after he sees more bright red sparks blooming inside it.
Tyrion thinks he’s never sweated this much in his life.
He wipes at his forehead again, clearing salt from his eyes.
Fuck, what has he done? What —
“What the hell is going on here?”
He jumps on his feet as the door opens and Jaime appears outside it. Alive, very much so, and definitely surprised at seeing the smoking word processor at the back of the room.
“Shit,” he says, “you found it before I could finish, didn’t you?”
“Uh,” Tyrion says, his hand going to the letter he still has in his pocket, “I might have. I wasn’t supposed to turn it on, did I?”
“Yeah, well,” Jaime sighs, “I could have hidden it better, I guess. But I guess I was too busy organizing the baby shower Brienne keeps on saying we shouldn’t have. Well, I can always make you a new one with better pieces.” He’s grinning now, and Tyrion can see that there’s something about him that seems lighter and more carefree that Tyrion could never quite remember —
Because Cersei died six months after he was born, didn’t she?
“Eh,” Tyrion croaks, “sorry about ruining the surprise, I guess.” His heart is beating so hard he feels like it’s going to jump out of his throat.
“As if you never snuck into the cellar all the time,” Jaime shakes his head, ruffling his hair again, and Tyrion wants to cry. “Come on, dinner’s ready.”
“Oh. Right. Sure.”
He follows Jaime downstairs, not knowing what to expect —
Well.
One thing is Brienne sitting at the living room’s table, looking at least six months along, her eyes glowing as they meet Jaime’s, and then smiling back down at him.
“What,” she asks, “too taken with planning the dragon epic?”
Right. Apparently he told her all about it in this reality, too.
“What if I was?”
“Then I want an update,” someone else says coming inside the room. Oh. It’s a woman, around her early fifties, tall, with long blonde hair and green eyes, who looks down at him as if she’s entirely interested, and — oh. Oh.
“Hi, Mom,” he says, hoping his voice doesn’t shake. “Sure. Sure, I will.”
She smiles back down at him.
There is no trace of his sister around the place, and it’s less grand than it was when his father lived in it, and Tyrion knows that it’s very, very likely that one day he’ll pay the price for this —
But right now?
Right now, he really can’t fucking care less.
He smiles and sets down to enjoy his dinner.
He doesn’t think he’s ever going to regret his choices.
Not at all.
End.
