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Chapter 2: My Children's Father Is Simply the Worst

"-. 245 - 265 AC .-"​

Rickard Stark was born in midsummer, grew up an only child, married when he was six and ten, and thought the Gods were good.

Then his mother and father both died of consumption within a year of his wedding, along with the old Maester and half the servant staff. The things he had to do to stem the spread were only less bitter than the vitriol he threw at the Citadel for the incompetence they'd foisted on his line. It was a terrible trial to overcome. A normal man it might have slain. Another lord it may have broken. For a sudden accessor to Lord Paramount barely into adulthood, it was as gruesome a test of lordship as they came and carved his face in stone.

A year later he had new servants, a new Maester and a firstborn son. He'd thought it a sign. A new start. Perhaps with a little more life than death this time, to fill the damned silence that now weighed down Winterfell's halls. He should have known not to trust so soon a hope. Not after such a blatant lesson in how the brightest of his days would bring on darkest night. But Brandon was as healthy, strong and active as a baby could be, sometimes fussy, sometimes quiet, rarely crying, and possessed of an astonishing appetite. Especially after that odd day when he up and refused to be nursed anymore and never accepted a teat again.

Everyone from the wetnurse to his wife and the new Maester had been confounded, and Rickard was no better himself. But the boy was fine and showed an even greater appetite after, increasingly so after his teething came and went. Without any cries or tears. At all.

He should have listened to Walys when he wondered at Brandon not putting on the plumpness he should have from all the cow and goat milk in his diet, never mind everything else. But he'd thought the Gods had tested him enough, and the failure of Walys' predecessor was still too fresh a wound for him to have an open mind. Doubly so when the implications were so dreadful.

So he blinded and deafened himself to whatever might have been a sign. Watched and listened instead as Brandon took his first steps at nine moons. Rejoiced when he started talking the day after. His first word was papa. His first word! Of course, then his boy immediately asked for more food. Rickard had laughed himself sick all day but really, what else was a father to do but watch and laugh and delight in it all? So that's what he did. He watched and delighted in his firstborn's life. His firstborn, and then his second a year later. Then both of them right up until Eddard's second nameday, when Walys judged Ned strong enough for the brothers to finally start playing together. Rickard would have allowed it sooner, but while Brandon hadn't shown himself to be particularly brash, he did have a strong and persistent toddler grip.

Usually on his beard. Anything to make his father spend more time with him. It was part of why it grew so thick so quickly, Rickard was sure of it.

Sitting with his wife and watching the two children play together for the first time in the Godswood should have been the best day of his life.

Then Brandon toddled into sight of the Heart Tree, looked at it and froze like a green boy borne down on by a boar.

Then collapsed like deadwood.

And that was how Rickard Stark finally, finally learned what should truly have been his first life lesson.

The Gods were cruel.

Why else would they strike down his son? He was barely more than an infant!

Brandon didn't die, but it might have been more merciful if he had. He didn't wake for over a moonturn. Instead he was laid out in bed, weak and sweaty and his brow burning hotter than the most blistering summer sun. Rickard tried to hope, tried to focus on what his son wasn't going through. He wasn't coughing, he wasn't wailing in pain, he wasn't coughing blood. But it was useless! What was the point in hope when his boy tossed, turned, moaned unintelligibly and grew more and more emaciated after sweating himself almost to death every damned night? He couldn't even take any of Walys' useless 'remedies' without puking out what little soup Lyarra could get him to swallow down!

It was all Rickard could do to wear his stone-cold silence and be strong for his wife, instead of cursing and screaming and hurling everything at hand against the walls. It wasn't enough it took his parents so early on, the wasting sickness just had to have his son? Curse this fate, curse the Gods, and curse every last, useless grey rat!

And curse him for still letting hope kindle in his heart when Walys came to him hesitantly one morning and told him the fever had passed and Brandon had woken at some point in the night. He should have waited. He should have let the Maester finish. Instead, the father rushed to his son's bedside and got to see the horrible truth for himself.

Brandon was weak. He couldn't walk. He couldn't stand. He couldn't feed himself anymore and he could barely hold down food half the time. If that was it, Rickard might have let it pass as after-sickness. But it wasn't. It was worse than that. Brandon could barely focus on anything, barely even noticed them in the room, and when he did bring himself together, he couldn't hold a train of thought for more than ten breaths without suffering severe moodswings. And when he tried to talk, oh Gods, that was the worst. No matter how hard and steadily and slowly he tried – and Gods he tried – all but one in ten words came out as total gibberish.

For the first time in his life, Rickard Stark could not be the pillar for his distraught wife.

And that was how, having secluded himself in his solar with his papers and audiences and complaints and his bitterness, Rickard Stark learned his second life lesson.

The Gods were fickle.

His son was broken.

If Lyarra hadn't clung to Ned all those fraught weeks wherever she went, including the Godswood while she prayed, he might have decided then and there to never let any of his children within sight of the Gods again.

The thought would haunt him for a sennight and then some, every time Walys – the only member of the household who could dare bring up his son in his presence anymore, and even then only out of duty – would come to give his twice-daily report. Rickard's young, gormless self might have still thought it encouraging: Brandon was adjusting, focusing ever so slightly better every day, putting meat back on his bones. He was even relearning to talk a bit more each day, thanks to Lyarra who barely ever left his bedside these days. She'd even moved Eddard's crib in the same quarters. Once, Walys even dared imply his boy was embarrassed. And that he used it toward striving to go without help to and back from the pot.

But when Walys came to him one moon after his son woke up, the reality turned out to be as terrible as every time before.

"He survives, my Lord. With time and effort, it may be he will regain what he lost. Perhaps even catch up to where young Ned is now, in time, but…"

"…But?"

"But I fear there is little hope for more than that. The Citadel has many records on child sicknesses. They might kill and they might not. They can be cruel. They can be kind. But what they all are is fleeting. This is not fleeting. This was no childhood sickness, and if the brainstom hasn't cleared by now, I fear there is no natural way for it to ever do so. There are some scant entries of noble scions that survived some years after such an ordeal, but…"

"Speak¸ Maester."

"But all they did was survive. It was never more than that. And never without help, even for the base things."

Rickard clenched his fists hard enough that his nails punctured the skin on his palms. Gods, he must be letting himself go if they had time to grow so sharp.

He didn't know how long he sat there in the darkness, watching dully as the specters of his bitterness and grief-clogged rage swept in and out of the shadows.

When he finally came back to himself, he realized with some distant listlessness that Walys was still there. The older man regarded him with that long, slanted, knowing look that always preceded Rickard's latest and most humiliating defeat in cyvasse. And always a subsequent lecture that never failed to make him feel adrift and abandoned. By the times, by the Gods, by his father who had died well before he got around to teaching him so very, very much.

"Say what you want to say or leave me in peace."

"I will do the former, for the latter cannot be if there is no peace to begin with."

The younger, gormless him would have thought it mockery. The him of now just didn't care. "Say what you want to say."

"…Everything changes. The days. The years. The seasons. The world. But if there is one thing that can change quicker than all the rest, it is life. More than that, the men who live it."

"Speak plainly Maester, I've no patience for southron games today."

"Perhaps you should, seeing as we are dancing around the proof that the North perhaps hasn't changed as much as it ought."

The stupefied outrage at this intruder having the gall to even say such a thing… It barely sparked. Then it disappeared as if it had never been at all. "I should banish you for that."

"Now or never, My Lord."

Rickard Stark blinked, then slowly gathered himself and focused on the man before him. "What did you say?" Did the man just issue an ultimatum?

"A man's conviction is only as strong as his most weighty decision," Walys said, calm and steady like Rickard no longer seemed to manage to be for anyone. "We are what we are in the dark."

"… What am I, then?"

"I could not say."

"What can you say then?"

"That you have a decision to make."

Rickard Stark turned his eyes away and looked blankly at the wall behind the man.

"The Gods of Earth, Stone, and Tree are nameless and voiceless, but they are not the Gods of Men. They never have been. Perhaps they never shall be."

The flickering flames of the candle barely reached the far wall, but they did enough to expose the doom and gloom and dark monsters shaped like eyes amidst white branches.

"I will be the first to admit I was perplexed when I came from foreign lands into this fastness, bereft of monuments or indeed a clergy."

They leered at him as they sprung from the dark places in his imagination.

"Now, however, having seen what we have seen, perhaps that is just the least of their strangeness. It is said that only six things do the Old Gods abhor: oathbreaking, kinslaying, slavery, incest, the defilement of guest-right, and the destruction of their sacred Heart Trees. All good tenets for what not to do. But none, you will find, for what a man should do. They do not teach you how to live. How to love. How to rule. They do not teach you how to raise a scion. They do not tell how to bring up the firstborn who should carry all your hopes and dreams for the future. They do not teach what to do in this changing world when that vessel is stricken and lessened and left never able to change at all, if not in body then in mind."

They didn't teach him what to do when his son was struck down by their own kind.

Maybe it was for the best they didn't. He didn't know what he'd do if it were a man that came to him with the gall to lecture after they were the one who ruined his boy to begin with. For the Gods to do it…

There was nothing in their tenets that said They couldn't just claim who they wanted, but doing it like that…

In the Winterfell Godswood. His fastness. Where They were technically under guest right.

There was a noxious feeling at the back of his mind. It wreathed and clawed around the pillars propping up the precepts and beliefs that had carried him his whole life.

Maester Walys' words came as if through a fog, distant and low but crystal clear as they gave voice to the damning truth that Rickard was too craven to give way. "If not the Old Gods, then another. You needn't even look for him too far, I imagine. He wanders always, through near and far off places. And his gift is one that all receive in time. Only… Perhaps bit more gently this time."

There was so much else that had been left unsaid. But as always, the Maester said just enough for Rickard to dwell on everything else himself. Happiness that seemed too long ago now. Shock. Anger. Worry deep-set enough to keep him up at night. Hopelessness. Despair. The knowledge that he'd only half-managed to keep everything quiet. Which meant that everyone knew their Lord's son and heir had taken ill, but not that he'd recovered.

Except he hadn't, had he?

The candle went out and Rickard Stark realized that, at some point, his Maester had dismissed himself and left him alone with the darkness hanging over him like the world's last death rattle.

Then he went off to his son's sickroom, ordered Lyarra off to rest up, and went to give his precious son and heir his final bath.

And that was how Rickard Stark learned his third life lesson.

The Gods could do without him, he was a coward, and Brandon knew he was broken but he was still trying to fix himself.

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