Chapter Text
He shouldn't have this. He doesn't deserve it. Stannis knows it's petty and childish to hate Robert for being here, for being in charge of the funerals and for being the new Lord of Storm's End, but it's true. Robert doesn't care about it, he's feckless and even if he wasn't he's gone. He's gone back to the Vale, with Lord Jon Arryn. Stannis knows, of course, that the reason his brother's still being fostered now is to learn to be a lord, since their father is no longer there to teach him, but it still seems like a terrible idea, to have the Lord of Storm's End not in Storm's End. Leaving them with no one but Maester Cressen and their castellan.
And it is them, because scant months before they died, Mother gave Father one last son. The day Robert leaves for the Vale, Stannis goes to the nursery. He was here, once, with Robert who was only a year older. Robert, who was never the kind of elder brother Stannis could look up to. He used to laugh when his little brother slipped and fell because he was trying desperately to catch up to him. Stannis is thirteen now, too old for those things, and probably too old to still be angry about it. But he is, he cannot help it.
Still, he studies his little brother, and thinks that Renly won't ever know their parents. Luckier for him, he won't know Robert that well either. All he'll have for family is Stannis, and Maester Cressen. The maester is in the doorway, looking concerned, and Stannis offers him a thin-lipped smile. Better Cressen than that irritating septon who wants Stannis to return to the sept. He never will. The gods do not exist, he learned that when he watched his parents drown.
He looks back at Renly, seven months old and now awake and sitting up, blinking at Stannis with the blue eyes of all the Baratheons. He's not a warm person, Stannis, even at thirteen he's already distant and formal. He doesn't know how to talk to people, how to charm them like Robert can. He hates being among people, would rather be alone. It's not shyness, he tells himself – proper young ladies and small children are shy, half-grown men are not. He just doesn't like it. And he doesn't know how to be a brother, but Renly doesn't have anyone else.
If there is one truth about Stannis, it's that he accepts his responsibilities. He has one to those wide blue eyes that belong to a boy who doesn't yet know what he will never have. “I won't be good at this,” he informs Renly, ignoring for the moment how idiotic it is to speak to a baby, and grateful that the maester has left them alone now. “I will probably be terrible at this and you're going to hate me. But I'm not Robert. I won't leave like that. I will at least... be present, for what it's worth.”
It probably won't be worth much, but Stannis is going to try. At least he won't laugh at Renly if the boy tries to follow him around when he's a bit older and takes a tumble on the flagstones. It's not much, not much at all, but perhaps it's enough to be going on with.