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“Is it a rock you want?” Cersei cast the rough-spun sheet aside as she rose, and stood just out of Jaime’s reach. Bathed in the golden light of dawn, she slowly traced her fingers down the map of her body, charting the still-unfamiliar valley between her gently-sloping breasts, where he had once known only flat plains. What else had changed since they had been separated? Her other hand traveled lower, to the thicket between her thighs. “Or me?” She moaned, trying for the sincerity they had shared moments ago, but with her question thrown like stone from a trebuchet, Jaime couldn’t think of pleasure. He thought of the first time they cut his hair.
“Never let your hair be cut. I love it so,” Mother whispered in his ear as she knelt to fasten the pin of his cloak and pull up the hood. It really was him, this time, going hunting, while Cersei was the one to receive Father’s parting kiss on her golden crown. Jaime had to remind himself of who he was each day. The boundaries drawn between himself and his twin had always been disregarded like warring kingdoms.
Another day, when they switched, Jaime pulled her aside and asked what Mother said to her.
“She tells me she loves my hair.” Cersei carefully straightened the velvet bow adorning his thick curls.
“That, exactly?”
Father was mounting up, and Cersei was impatient to join him. “Exactly? ‘Never let your twin’s hair be cut. I love it so,’” she said, before running easily in her breeches to a waiting groomsman, leaving Jaime behind in his heavy skirts with something that tickled him like a riddle. He might solve it, after repeated hearings, but for now he threw it away from him like the snowball he threw after his sister’s back as she rode out of the yard.
The riddle wasn’t repeated. Mother died a week later, and Father held him down while his barber sheared Jaime’s golden curls for Mother’s funeral. He and Cersei would never switch again.
Jaime could still remember it perfectly, even in this squalid inn on Eel Alley seven years later. He had expected it to hurt, when they cut his hair, but every snip of the scissors had been painless, just as Father had promised. The pain came when he no longer woke up every day and decided with his twin who each would be. Forever after, he was just Jaime. That was almost as bad as being alone.
“Well? Do you want to be alone?” Cersei asked, echoing his own thoughts. “Or do you want to be near me always?” Jaime pulled her into his lap in answer. Put like that, the choice to join the Kingsguard wasn’t hard at all.