He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos. I know that now.
#I DON’T EVEN WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT #HE CAN’T EVEN SHARE THIS #he can’t even share the weight of his brother’s murder #he’s STILL IN HIS BURNING HEART ARMOR #she wants to peel it off him and step inside and he won’t let her #because this; this relationship with renly he can have #in his own twisted way he can reclaim something of the relationship they lost when they went to war #the grief and the guilt— he can carry that with him and he can carry it alone and that can be renly for him#he’s killed all the parts of renly he hated he doesn’t have to look at him anymore and see all the things he’s been denied #that a living renly would taunt him with #he can think of him as the five year old he kept alive for a year on dog meat and prayer #now that he’s murdered renly— murdered; done it himself— he can finally love him #’i did love him davos; i know that now’ #he couldn’t before because live breathing renly he could never love #and he doesn’t want to share it with her because this is steffon and cassana and robert and cressen #and all the love he never got in the world #this is the shadow of the family who should have loved him #who did love him (once) #and he’s too selfish to let her have any of that #even the guilt of it
After the battle, when I was lost to despair, the Lady Melisandre bid me gaze into the hearthfire. The chimney was drawing strongly, and bits of ash were rising from the fire. I stared at them, feeling half a fool, but she bid me look deeper, and…the ashes were white, rising in the updraft, yet all at once it seemed as if they were falling. Snow, I thought. Then the sparks in the air seemed to circle, to become a ring of torches, and I was looking through the fire down on some high hill in a forest. The cinders had become men in black behind the torches, and there were shapes moving through the snow. For all the heat of the fire, I felt a cold so terrible I shivered, and when I did the sight was gone, the fire but a fire once again. But what I saw was real, I’d stake my kingdom on it.
A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
Let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings and queens.
“Only Renly could vex me so with a piece of fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos. I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave think of my brother’s peach.”
#i honestly have so many feelings about how this scene was done because i think stephen played it so beautifully #he’s standing there fiddling with his brother’s tiny soldiers and ships and they look like toys #they’re these little toys reminding stannis that renly was his little baby brother who played at war and died because of it#because of him #and it’s so subtly done you can just see stephen little by little retract back into himself and this is what it culminates in this #tiny #tragic moment #of loss
