halfamoon | Day 2 fic

Title: The Throne
Prompt: Day 2 - The Empress
Fandom: Game of Thrones
Character: Cersei Lannister
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 451
Summary: It had taken a long time, but she'd found her place.

Today was the day. How many times had she walked past it over the years? How many times had she stood beside it- someone's subject, someone's wife, someone's mother? Always so close and yet so far. It took all her willpower over the years to pretend it was something else, to act like it was just a chair.

Cersei had watched her fat husband, sitting there, laughing like the lout that he was, seething that she could aspire no further than to be in the room with him. She made suggestions from time to time that he ignored, preferring instead to get his counsel from men. She learned that the suggestions could take flight if they were whispered in the eunuch's ear- just another rumor that would help to advance her cause. She didn't weep when Robert died. Instead her heart flew as she watched her son Joffrey take his place.

Joffrey was marginally better than Robert, but there were times when he still felt the need to put his mother in her place. And that place was never here, at the seat of power. Her own father had made sure that the patriarchy was still established in the Council, by installing her freak of a brother as the Hand of the King and then offering her to that mincing Loras Tyrell. She thanked the Seven that the imp had killed that partnership with a crossbow bolt through her father.

Tommen was the easiest of all. At least he was until that horrid wife of Joffrey's got her claws into him. They needed the alliance with Highgarden, she told herself again and again, watching as another woman slinked closer to the throne. All it would have taken was a baby in Margarey's belly to further displace her. Now, Tommen and the Tyrell girl were gone, sacrificed for the greater good.

She stood before the chair- chair no longer. She ran a hand over the seat, saw the beauty of the Valerian steel that curled around her back. It was hers now. She sank into it, the weight of the crown less noticeable than the weight of the throne that supported her. This seat was a symbol of the power she now held and her subjects and enemies would soon feel the force of it.

She thought of the sacrifices that she'd made to get to this point- a husband, two sons, a lover that would have to be kept further in the dark when she made a necessary political alliance and took a husband. Were they truly sacrifices or merely stepping stones to what had been written all along?

The throne was her place now and she would never relinquish it.