A Lions Flower |J.Lannister|

• Chapter 43 •

The ash began falling heavily around the city as the fires began to smother themselves and the dust was slowly setting. A city in ruins. Those left alive were faced with the wrath of the Unsullied, Dothraki, and the Queen herself while the screams and bodies of their loved ones lie as charred ghosts on the cobblestone streets. 

Rose and Jaime watched as Drogon, with Daenerys on his back, flew around the city in a victory lap; roaring valiantly in the sky as the Dothraki screeched from the ground. Jaime winced from behind Rose and she quickly turned to see him gripping the stab wound from Euron Greyjoy.

"We have to get you out of here," she told him, taking a hand and wrapping it around his back to usher him out of the room but he stopped her, holding her in place by her shoulders before she could even begin.

"You go," Jaime looked stedfast in his determination. "Daenerys will want to see you, I'm sure. By the time you reach her she will find out you've helped a prisoner escape. She won't be kind to you but perhaps without me, she'll spare you." Jaime said and Rose knew he was right, yet she truly didn't care what Daenerys would think of her.

"Jaime, she just burned an entire city to rubble. She murdered tens of thousands of innocent people down there and that's not the Queen I pledged my support to. That's not who I want ruling if she burns her own people. We need to get out of here."

Rose walked over to Cersei, her body pale and lifeless but ever evil and present.

"What are you doing?" Jaime asked her quietly. He was still angry at Cersei, but saddened at what he had to do.

"We need something to wrap your wound. I'm not letting you die here." Rose took the dagger that was sitting on the ground and cut a long enough piece of cloth off of Cersei's dress to wrap around Jaime's wound to stop the bleeding.

"It's one last piece of her to help you. I know what she meant to you and I am forever in your debt for protecting me, always, but she was also your sister. I can't take that away from you."

The duality of their positions–a lover and a sibling and a foe–could never escape the palace walls. The stone crumbled around them; windows blown wide, the smell of metallic blood and pungent fire cascading a city where lives were never peaceful but destroyed for the sake of power. Death granted new wishes. It brought forth a freedom that was still lingering on a loose, thin thread of uncertainty yet the future seemed clear enough to see through the storm. 

Jaime would dispose of that fabric the first chance he had. 

Cersei was gone. Cersei was dead and while he had loved her–in ways he should and should not have loved–she was a sickness. The former queen was the crux of his vile behavior and like chains being lifted from a man imprisoned, Jaime Lannister felt free. 

Rose's hands tended to his wounds softer than Cersei's had ever touched him. He gazed down upon her, hair muddied with elements he could no longer identify, dust covering her cheeks and against it all, he could see the tremble of her fingers as she tied the fabric tightly–working to help him survive when his family had done much to help her wish to greet her own in eternal life.

"I do not need her," Jaime had not looked at her body since her fall. "She may have been my sister, but I feel..." He shook his head, turning away as she looked up. "I feel relieved." 

Rose nodded carefully. She observed the way his eyes trailed over the remaining structures of the great hall and tried to imagine it in a time where it was intact but his mind could not picture it. Life here, in King's Landing, was over. A new Queen had taken it–as was her right–and for Jaime, it was not home. 

"I will not tell you how to feel," Rose replied. "That is for you to decide... however, I do feel if we do not leave now, we may never make it out of this castle alive."