Work Text:
When Robert Baratheon faced Rhaegar Targaryen on the battlefield, he was filled with righteous anger. Here was the man who had stolen his betrothed. Whose father had murdered his friends. Whose bannermen had sieged Storms End. Robert’s little brothers might starve to death and it would be all Rhaegar Targaryen’s fault.
In that moment, Robert felt like the Storm God come alive. Every swing of his hammer was the thunder; every time it met with Rhaegar’s sword he saw lightning. When he knocked Rhaegar’s sword out of his hand, Robert considered it his divine right. In a fit of desperation, Rhaegar rushed at him, but instead of hitting the prince with his hammer, Robert just threw him on the ground, away from his sword.
Robert looked at Rhaegar on the ground, the fear of death blatant on the dragon's face. Robert smiled, and Rhaegar relaxed. The fool.
“Was it not enough, Rhaegar?” Robert asked the fallen prince.
“Was what not enough?” Rhaegar replied, starting to sit up.
“Was it not enough,” Robert began again, gathering the head of his hammer in one hand and the handle in the other. “That my parents died looking for your perfect bride, that you needed to steal mine?”
And in that moment, the fury was indeed Robert’s. Because even a dragon cannot defeat the St.
---
When Tywin Lannister presented the dead bodies of Elia Martell and her children - wrapped in Lannister cloaks, no less - to him, Robert didn’t know what he was supposed to feel. On the one hand, Robert understood that he could not successfully establish a new dynasty with Rhaegar’s son still alive. On the other hand, Robert hadn’t given much thought to Rhaegar’s children. And neither had their father apparently; leaving them in King’s Landing with only the Lannister boy to protect them. And what a shitty job he’d done with that!
Still, they were children; war or not, Robert didn’t think they had needed to die. Thinking on it now, if Robert had had a choice he probably would have allowed Elia and her children to return to Dorne – after renouncing their claims of course. He might have even allowed the girl to marry his eldest son by Lyanna-
Lya.
Rhaegar.
Robert knew now how he felt. The Dragon’s Whore and the two little beasts she’d borne him all deserved to die.
---
When Joffrey was first presented to him, with pomp and circumstance entirely unbefitting of a father meeting his child for the first time, Robert had expected to look into the bassinet and find a reflection of himself. Joffrey was a healthy baby, his lungs could attest to that, but he looked nothing like a Baratheon. He was too pale. His eyes were not Baratheon blue or Estermont brown, but Lannister green. His cry was a baby’s roar, but it was cat-like, not thunderous.
Mya had been black of hair and blue of eye, like the Storm Queen she was named for. Renly had been a robust, pink-faced baby from birth. They did not look like it now, but Stannis and Robert had been almost identical as children had it not been for their eyes. Then there was the boy in King’s Landing who could pass for an even younger Renly; the girl conceived during the Battle of the Bells who was almost the spitting image of his mother.
But Joffrey did not look like them. He even cried when Robert tried to pick him up – Mya had never cried.
Of course, Cersei immediately snatched Joffrey away, but in that moment, Robert knew.
Joffrey was not his.