.

TWO

Through A Mother's Teat

The act of vomiting deserves your respect. It's an orchestral event of he gut.

- Mary Roach, "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void"

When Lucan reminisces about this one silent prayer he had made once upon a lifetime (while sat upon a whore's lap, his lips wrapped around her tits), for the Gods to grant him a life in which all he needed to do to remain alive was to suckle on a woman's breast, he can't help but think that what he had asked for then wasn't quite something like this.

For one, there was absolutely no milk involved in the making of said prayer.

Breast milk is, in not quite so many words, utterly vile — he admits he shall forever wonder how newborns force themselves to swallow the horrid liquid whenever it pollutes their tongue, for he surely wants nothing more than to vomit after each disgusting mouthful — and were he not certain of a grisly death by starvation without it he might have prayed to the Gods to chop the breasts off of every woman in the world as well, since They seem so well inclined to grant his wishes anyhow.

However, as much as he loathes his "feeding time," it is the most interaction he gets with his mother — or with any other human, truly — for his parents are both busy with managing affairs concerning the death of a character whose name Lucan finds far too flamboyant and far too troublesome to remember, though he does recall from his parents' arguments that said flamboyantly-named character was quite the deplorable excuse of a lord. Though Lucan might never say it out loud (never mind that he can't, had he wanted to), he actually looks forward to those short periods of time in which all he has to think about is the infernal punishment that is the milk in his other-mother's udders. He is ever so bored, and boredom for him means indulging in long bouts of rumination, which he is now finding to be the most unproductive of activities, as he cannot act on his ideas in any manner other than by crying, wiggling, pissing or shitting — all of which he already does on a disturbingly frequent basis, mind.

As it is, his ideas matter very little, if at all. It matters not what he thinks had caused his own rebirth, or whom, for that matter, and it matters not what he presumes he had done to deserve it. It certainly matters not what he might conclude this new life to be — is it his reward or his punishment? — for all that does matter is that he was reborn, that his name is now Lucan Selwyn, and that breast milk isn't quite as amazing as he had once fantasized it to be. Why, he reckons horse piss might even taste better!

He shudders to think of how much longer he has to suffer through the torment that is infantile food.

Not for the first time, he takes a reluctant suck on his mother's tit — lecherous thoughts all but impossible to conjure now that his tongue is quite intimately acquainted with a breast's true, nefarious purpose — and he painstakingly pretends he's suckling the spiced wine that his palate misses so, from those jugs that his Queen sister had prized and guarded so jealously, made infinitely sweeter and much more intoxicating by the accomplishment of its theft. A bit on the warm side, perhaps — as if left to air in a goblet for hours under the heat of the summer sun in the most southern reaches of Dorne — and about a quarter as smooth and ten times as thick, like congealing blood maybe.

No. Not congealing blood. Seven Hells, why had he thought that? Now it shall be forever and a day before he banishes the image from his mind.

Wine, he thinks to himself. Dornish wine. From the Red Keep. Stolen from Cersei.

Now, if only he were a mindless, idiotic halfwit so easily fooled by self-inflicted, make-believe imagery, then his problem would be half-solved.

Alas, it seems some challenges shall forever remain insurmountable, for Tyrion Lannister has nothing if not a sharp mind, no matter the new life, the new name, and the new body proportions.