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in a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.
- jenny holzer.
King’s Landing is a filthy place. Every time the wind shifts there’s a new knife in somebody’s back, fresh blood soaking into the weeds that are uprooted and regrown by the next round of wine. The streets stink of piss and shit and conniving immorality, but those beautiful people with their golden hair and golden robes have turned their noses up so high that they can’t seem to smell it. The poor wait in legions with their hollowed cheeks and harrowed eyes, beaten for bowing crookedly and, apparently, killed because of a fat king’s wild lust.
They still talk in the brothels—one of the city’s saving graces, and those are much, much harder to come by than any gold or jewels—of the armored men who came in the middle of the day, who beat the women and threatened the men until at last they found their prize like pirates on the high seas. The difference is, real pirates plunder for themselves; in King’s Landing, they hide behind strong men too thick to say no. And these strong men came, the women say in whispers, and ripped the baby from the mother’s arms. She was shrieking, howling like she was burning at the stake, and the strong men rose their blades and slaughtered this infant, this pink, wailing, helpless thing, and then they were simply gone.
Honor-bound and duty-ridden, sworn by the blade slick with a child's blood.
And they hate all their bastards here, not just the ones sired from a Baratheon. There’s no logical explanation for it, not really, but when has that stopped anyone from casting their stone? Perhaps the taboo was born from the wrath of jealous spouses, a long time ago—after all, the lover scorned is a vindictive creature. Or perhaps it is simply one more step to help all these lords and ladies up onto their high horses, just for the sake of it. They are always looking for a new reason to hate each other here.
King’s Landing is a filthy place, and not even the people who made it this way are happy. They drink and hate and bow politely to those they wish dead, and they’re screaming inside, most of them. Curious, the way the snake learns to be satisfied eating its own tail. So as he watches the Kingsguard seize Tyrion Lannister and drag him off from the discolored body of the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Oberyn Martell thinks that at least the weather is lovely today.
He leans toward Ellaria and says, “They did promise us a wedding to remember.”
Of all the things he has heard of Petyr Baelish, at least one is true: he knows how to keep his customers happy. Even miles away, he is keeping Oberyn very happy, naked against the soft mattress and luxurious bedding. The wine is—well, it isn’t good, but it never is up North, and Oberyn is a forward thinker. So he lounges, drowsy with sex and Southern wine, and he is very happy. But he is also troubled. These are things that can and do co-exist, if one allows them to, and Oberyn has been forced to make this adjustment; otherwise, he would not be happy a day in his life.
Ellaria, attentive lover that she has always been, sees this early on. She has long since learned to read his body, navigate his shifting moods, and in turn he has done the same. In this way, as in many ways, they are two parts of a whole—neither of them halves, but both of them entwined with the other. So she sees him now at her side, with his legs tangled in the sheets and his eyes closed but not asleep, and she knows that he is deep in thought. He doesn’t often allow himself to be swept into the tide of quiet contemplation. No, he much prefers to feel his feet planted firmly on the ground, present in every second and sensation.
So she draws him out. She raises herself up on an elbow to look down on his resting face, hand coming to lie across his chest. She only watches him for a moment, with his dark lashes lowered and skin made honey-gold in the soft light of candles, because it doesn’t take any longer than that. His eyes open slowly, meeting hers through the swooping shadows of the late night, low-lidded and sharp even in their tenderness.
Oberyn stares with a supposed impassiveness for a handful of seconds, then hums obligingly, answering the unspoken prompt. “I wonder, who will be the Imp’s champion?” he drawls, his voice a low buzz beneath the heat of the air. If men like Tyrion Lannister speak with the stressed enunciation of an axe through dry wood, then men like Oberyn Martell speak with the fluid grace of a snake cutting through water.
“He has no friends here,” she supplies, hitching one shoulder in half a shrug. “None with two hands to hold a sword.” She skims her hand down his side, fingers dipping gently into the valleys between his ribs. “What do you care about Tyrion Lannister?”
“He didn’t kill the boy king,” Oberyn replies mildly, and that is answer enough. He has always loathed to see the sword of judgment fall upon an innocent man, but there is nothing to be done here. He is a prince of Dorne; this is not his castle, and these are not his people. Tyrion Lannister is not his to save. He has reached his last chapter, and it is beyond Oberyn to rewrite the ending.
Unless, unless, unless.
“And the Lannisters?” he says, sitting up against the headboard and snaking an arm around her waist. He pulls her closer, dark eyes meeting hers with intent. “Who will be their champion?”
And now she understands. Ellaria regards the hunger in his gaze, and she follows this thought to its logical conclusion. “Anybody can beat him,” she temporizes, middle finger following the line of his collarbone. “But not anybody will get the honor of killing the king’s murderer. It will be brutal.”
Oberyn’s eyes turn to obsidian. His voice has grown as quiet as death as he says, “And who is the Lannisters’ most brutal killer?”
The sun is at the peak of its ascent, and beads of sweat roll from the base of his neck to the divots at the base of his spine. Ellaria kisses him ferociously and forces his stiff vertebrae to uncouple. She calls him lover and viper and Prince, tells him that he has been ready for this for so very long. And she’s right, of course. He has been ready for this from the moment he held Elia’s cold hands and a pit opened in his chest. He has hungered for this since his own hands shook as he ran them along the red chasm where she had been split in half, and he swore to make her whole again.
Every day he has seen his sister’s mutilated body, though it has long rested in the dirt. She came home in pieces, covered in blood. She had no face.
( She was so beautiful, wasn’t she? Her eyes were soft and kind, her hair coiled like hatchling serpents over her shoulders. She was so in love with the world.
Every day he has grieved her love. Only, mourning is not kind.
It’s a terrible way to burn, back against the wall and the sky falling down every day anew. No, he slid from the grasp of mourning early on. Rage is a much more comforting lover, and he lets it into his bed willingly. It is about as calming as a knife to the jugular and it ravages like famine, for it is the beast that devours but is never filled. So perhaps it starves him, but at least it lets him make sense of this new world, the one where Elia does not dance or sing or smile or breathe.
So he ripped his rage from the hands of the gods themselves and tucked it into every available space. Between his ribs, the joints in his hands, the gaps in the column of his spine. And when there was no more room, when he could not possibly be any angrier, he dashed it into the earth and made the new world bleed with it. He would find a way to make her whole again, and his hands would be slick with the blood of as many people as it took to do it. That is the only way for the world to make sense again.
There is no reason it should have happened, he thinks sometimes. But there is no sense in horror; it simply is. )
The crowd is tense and his heart is thunder in his chest and his veins are full of wildfire. His focus narrows and his world shrinks. How many years has he waited for this? The wine makes his limbs loose but his eyes are sharp, and they meet Tywin Lannister’s more than once. A promise. How many years has he dreamt of this?
There are so many Lannisters gathered in the stands that Oberyn thinks he can smell them, and that’s all the better. He wants them to watch their champion choke and bleed and die right in their golden capital, right in the den of lions. Today, they will learn that no man is untouchable. Even a mountain must return to the dirt.
Another man would have faltered at the sight of the Mountain. His knees would have buckled and he would have decided that it was not worth it after all, to die for Tyrion Lannister. No such thing happens. The Mountain is a beast of a thing, certainly, but he will fall like all the rest of them. His blood will run red and his eyes will grow distant and his heart will stop. To Oberyn Martell, this is fact.
The sun rises in the east, the oceans are blue, and today the Mountain will die.
The bells toll, the audience cheers for his showmanship, and Oberyn learns two things very quickly. The first is that the Mountain is predictable, swinging that greatsword in those lumbering arcs; the second is that his size alone nearly makes up for it. Nearly.
They call him the Red Viper for a reason. He moves beautifully and with brilliant strokes of violence, impossible to nail down and dizzyingly quick. He does not toil over some tedious plan in his mind, constantly anticipating what comes next and next and next. What he searches for is opportunity, and shows no restraint the instant he finds it. He strikes with purpose, feels the dirt shift beneath his feet, trusting his instinct to carry him the way a bird trusts its wings to lift it above the fox’s snapping jaws.
The first time his blade pierces that armor, he proves that the Mountain can bleed. The second time, that he can fall. And the third, that he can die.
Only, that isn’t how this is supposed to go. Not yet.
Rage trembles in the wake of his victory, but he knows he is not yet finished. A wounded animal is a dangerous animal; and a dying animal, a desperate one. When snakes strike, they don’t take their eyes off their prey, and his don’t leave the Mountain for an instant. This, he must sear into memory. He has waited for so long, so he circles like the lion that these people will never be, and he snarls and rages and demands confession. This is penance, this is a reckoning, this is a trial where he presides as judge, jury and executioner. There is silence all around them so that his voice cracks like thunder, shaking the earth with the depths of his conviction. This is what must happen. This is his new world order.
The Mountain begins to choke, lashes a hand out for the Viper’s ankle and loses it just as fast. He’s bleeding too much now and he’s going to die and he has to say it. He has to make her whole again.
( This is how it goes in the dreams: Oberyn holds a scythe forged in the sun and it blisters his palms and the snakes writhe beneath his feet. On the earth beneath him the Mountain bleeds so terrifically that even the sky has turned red, and the serpents coil so thickly around his crippled body that his limbs are their limbs, his heart their heart, and they scream his guilt to the heavens. They have to, so that Elia may rest, so that Oberyn may live without the breadth of his fury choking him in his sleep. In the dreams, there is peace. )
In the end, the Mountain spits blood and his lips move and whatever he says, Oberyn has to kneel to hear him. Then the spearhead tears through his throat with such brutal force that his head leaves his body.
And Oberyn remembers that this is not a dream. There is no peace to be had.