bakerstreet | Make you love me

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Make you love me

Love and lust are all very well and good, but this meme is for when that white-hot desire tips into something darker, an all-consuming fire that licks at your every thought, that clenches around your every breath. It may be one-sided or it may be reciprocal, you may be the object or the subject or both simultaneously, but at least one of you is obsessed.

You can think of nothing but them. Your world, your heart, your very existence revolves around them.

Subject
1. Innocent yearning - They are unreachable, untouchable, or perhaps you're merely too shy. You're resigned to the certainty that they will never be yours, but you'd still dedicate your life to make them happy. Little gifts, remembering their birthday, you'll be their best friend, their Cyrano, you'll be their shoulder to cry on or maybe you'll only ever watch them from across the office and make sure that one of the morning donuts always makes it anonymously to their desk before they're all eaten.
2. Win their heart - You're going to marry them. Sure, they don't know it yet. Sure, they don't even know you exist. But you've got a plan, and you're going to use every resource in your power to win their heart. No matter what it takes. Their happiness is all important, and the best way to ensure that is to make sure they know how worthy they are of being loved.
3. Stalker - They belong to you. They may not know it, they may even disagree, but they are yours. It's okay. You're content--at least for now--to watch them from afar. To deliver notes and gifts--threats, if they dare to object to your ideas of romance, if they dare to date anyone else--to oversee their safety and even to mastermind minor adjustments in their life to ensure that everything goes... according to plan.

Object
1. Innocent yearning - You have a secret admirer. Little gifts, love poems and notes, and they're always perfectly sweet, perfectly timed, and they always make your day. You're half in love with them already, whoever they are, this person who cares for your happiness above all else. If only you could figure out who it might be.
2. Win their heart - Out of nowhere, one of your friends--or perhaps an acquaintance you hardly noticed before now--has begun trying to court you. It's flattering, but also very intense. They seem convinced that you'll fold to their affections sooner or later, and... maybe. Why not? It's nice to have someone who thinks you're worth the whole world.
3. Stalker - You're being followed. Maybe you know this person--an ex?--maybe you don't. They know you, though, or they think they do. Worse, they think they have some claim upon you. They dog your steps, bother your friends and romantic partners, leave you haunting and unwelcome gifts.

Requited
A. The sun in my sky - Your everyday existence may be dull and drab, but you have one glittering prize in your life. Your love, your partner, your everything. You can get through the daily grind, through the indignities of your life, because you know you're coming home to them.
B. Forbidden - You're in love and it's requited, but that doesn't make them any more accessible to you. Wealth, class, or perhaps an inconvenient marriage is keeping the two of you apart. You'll have to conduct your affair in secret, with your obsession compelling you to take greater and greater risks, until you find a way to run away together -- or until you're caught.
C. Partners in Crime - What's more romantic than a crime spree? You're partners in crime, and what a thrill that is! It certainly spices up your love life. You trust them entirely, they're the other half of you, and they're every bit as wicked as you. It feels as though you're both untouchable, and surely you are. You'll never be caught. Neither of you will ever be hurt.
D. On the Run - You're young, you're in love, and you're free, but you know it can't last. You're on the run, and your stars are crossed. Sooner or later you're going to come to a bad end, but until then you've got this hotel room, this night, this car and the open road. If anyone wants to separate you, they're going to have to catch you first.

Wildcards
Enchantment - A love spell can serve to create obsession where none existed before, and now you have a devoted slave, as long as the spell doesn't backfire.
An Unholy Bargain - You've sworn yourself to an angel, a devil, a cause, a country, a witch, a place, and they are the embodiment of that vow. You're sworn to them inescapably, and the terms of your bargain press you with the sweetest compulsion. It may not be real, but it's love, and it's undeniable.

Feel free to run with your own interpretations of the theme!

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[[Can take either role!]]

A trinket for her brother; that was the sum of what she knew of the girl they'd had shipped in from Rohan. An alliance sealed in gold, as so many others before it. A fair woman she would have to be, whichever wench would one day presume to name herself Lady of the Rock. Fair enough to win Tywin Lannister's approval, which was itself no simple feat. How anyone could feasibly measure against - not to mention beyond - Cersei herself in this regard was an ongoing and wholly unrecognized insult. There would be no other Lady of the Rock, for there was no one deserving of so ancient and splendid an honor. How could the lions ever esteem their lineage as pure if they were too craven to do as the dragons had done, and wed brother to sister? There could be only one Lord and one Lady of the Rock, and she had been dead certain of this since she was a child, when she was young enough still to chase her most resplendent thrills across the tops of the cliffs. It was at the foot of those same cliffs that that mad dream was dashed, broken as easily as waves and wayward skulls.

It was not, in fact, the grievous loss it had once seemed. It was not Lady of the Rock she truly wished to be; she was destined for titles far greater. She would be no mere lady, and she would, when she at last came into the grandeur she was owed, rule over more than crumbling cliffs. It was not the Rock she wanted, but she coveted its golden halls and its storied history if for nothing more than the principle of the wanting. It belonged to her and it belonged to her brother, and even after she had outgrown it, even after she had known she was to have something against which Casterly Rock would shamefully pale, she was loath to relinquish it. Not to any pallid maiden, who would be as undeserving of her brother as she would be of the cliffs themselves, and certainly not to a foreign strumpet, someone who had absolutely no inborn appreciation for the splendor of the West.

It was easy to scoff at her brother's wife, at first: here rode a woman who, by all appearances, fancied herself a warrior. A woman who knew also when to leave a man's trappings at the door, and when to resign herself to the thrall's fate of serving and pouring and hosting. A despicable Lady of the Rock she would be; all who laid eyes upon her would forget her just as promptly. This woman would succeed only in making a fool of herself. She would not rule.

And yet if she would be dismissed, if this strange excuse of a "lady" would be little more than a curtsying wife for her brother, why then did she linger so upon the mind? Only in the corner of her eye, Cersei had decided; it was only because she was fair, and this alone was cause enough to resent her, and venomously so. What fair face, after all, did not draw the eye? It was because she was lean and willowy, this woman, and proud in her bearing, even if she had done nothing to earn the renown of Lady of the Rock. A pretty enough furnishing for any keep.

She took to observing her brother's wife outside of the keep's walls, too, however; she watched this displaced woman find her footing here, on so distant a shore, with sword and armor and horse. Shamelessly, too, and not clumsily - as if she had in fact been born to two lives, and not the single one thrust upon most other women. Golden-haired, silver-plated; she scorned this vision, but she could not deny that it was a vision. Startling, striking. Disruptive, gleaming and inexplicable. And where Cersei's eye was drawn, a possessive hand was soon to follow.

For gold, yes - for jeweled chains and brooches, for chests of coin, for steel raised and swung in her honor. A coveting easily satisfied by the likes of her brother, where want was so easily funneled into bodily desire, to be denied by neither gods nor men. How to indulge this flowering preoccupation with his wife, then? Infuriating, the whole glinting fact of her: deftly did she keep a hall, and deftly did she navigate unruly lords and horses both, and radiant was she by mild candlelight as much as she was in the full splay of the sun. By whose leave?

The gods are slow in their arranging, but they do arrange: her brother rides forth on some foolhardy campaign from which he will return grinning and bloodied and brimming with glory, and in the meantime, the Lady of the Rock will rule in his stead. And Tywin's golden daughter will brighten the halls just as lavishly as does the promised Lady, and while once this would have reduced her to little more than a coiling serpent, seething and competitive, now she is something just as sleek, just as fixated, just as poisonous - but intent on something more than vicious lashing.

She comes to her lady's chambers unannounced, waiting on neither the welcome of the lady herself or the kindly servant who tends the room. Draped in red silks, half of her hair left to fall gold around her shoulders while the other half is plaited behind her head, she sweeps in as if on a sweet invitation, cat-green eyes touching the room from one corner to the other, a smile slinking at the corners of her lips, which have been painted a red deeper than her silks.

"Come, sister. This nightly ritual is one you ought not to take so carelessly."

The hesitating servant is dismissed with nothing more than a cool, cutting glance, and it soon becomes apparent that the ritual to which Cersei refers has something to do with any woman's nightly grooming. A presumption she will make true if it is not already, picking up a rather unadorned brush and then skipping her gaze from her acquired sister to the nearest empty seat, directing her to sit.

"Let me. You're in desperate need."

Éowyn has never been quite sure what to make of her sister-in-law. Truthfully, she has never been quite sure what to make of other ladies of her station, in general; for the greater part of her life, there has been a dearth of equals of her own sex. No mother, no sister, no aunt; she has been the sole lady of Edoras, and thence came here, to be sole lady of the Rock. But not so isolated, not so alone in her station; there is another lady of the Rock, even if she is not present much of the time.

A sister. It had seemed at first a joyous proposition - she loves her brother, after all, but who would not be glad to find herself at last with female company, too? Who would not wish for a sister, when her family has shrunk and withered away, and there was so little of it to begin with? And at first, she had been ready to greet her husband's twin with open arms, to be sisters indeed; but she found scorn and venom and barely-disguised resentment, and in hurt and stubborn resentment, she did not try very hard to mend the space that was immediate between them.

And yet.

She does not know what to make of Cersei; of how she is one moment spitting fury and the next coolly polite; of how her eyes linger in what no longer seems so transparent a hatred. Fire and ice, shadow and burning light. It is enough to make her wonder, in truth, whether it is Cersei she does not understand, or whether it is women: no man, she is sure, has ever so thoroughly baffled her in character.

And now, her sister-in-law is here, in her chambers - a thing unfamiliar, how confidently she sweeps into these rooms, and again Éowyn must wonder if this is ordinary among Westerosi ladies. If it is ordinary among ladies at all. Nobody has ever made her so consciously aware of her ignorance in such matters as Cersei does.

But here she is, and she is smiling, and she is... well, she is rude. In desperate need? As though Éowyn cannot attend to her own hair?

Still, what is there to do but sit, reaching up to unpin the simple knot that holds her long hair in place? She will not be ill-mannered. Nor will she deny that there is a part of her, some simple and girlish part, that is happy for any semblance of friendliness from a sister she has never had. Her smile is, if a little wry, genuine enough.

"Do you find me so, sister?" There is only a slight edge in her voice. "I did not think myself unkempt."

How does she find her new sister, in truth? At first she had found her to be purely an annoyance; a grievance she must personally suffer. A jape, as befit the gods' cruel nature. She had found her, after a time, to be a hindrance: this woman had stolen her brother's attention, and evidently not even through any conniving wiles. Her queer existence alone had seemed to do the trick, though she would not think this a great credit to Éowyn; Jaime was, after all, hardly difficult to bait. An annoyance, all the same.

And what of her lately? She is docile enough, her new sister, and well-bred, as evidenced by her manners and her bearing. She is a rather lovely thing, too, a detail that Cersei had first only allowed as a benefit of certain lights. That beauty had soon seemed to transcend all varieties of lighting, however: the sunlight of midday, the grasping beams of the falling sun in the gardens, the shuddering cast of torches in a long, empty hall. A true beauty, then, similar to her own, though hardly of the same caliber.

She whirls lightly with the brush in her hand, sees that her sister sits as bid, and then steps to take her attentive spot behind her, where she will most easily have that unpinned gold flowing through her own fingers. Not yet; first the lengths must be brushed smooth, and she reaches to take upon her palm the unbrushed tresses that snake free. Unbrushed by her own standards - she does not know what hours her sister pays to the upkeep of her hair, but it does not gleam quite so golden as her own, as she is sure any sighted servant would agree. She draws her hand down, watches as Rohan's most precious gold glimmers against her fingers, and then sighs as if she suffers a fool's questions.

"Why should a woman who so fancies the company of horses ever think herself unkempt? Beasts do not look upon you in judgment. I, however," she is pleased to make the obvious distinction, lifting the brush now to begin sluicing through her sister's long hair, "am not a beast, and I will not spare your tender heart. You will benefit from a practiced hand."

Now she does begin to comb her fingers through so much wasted gold, bewitched even in her resentment, the fingers of one hand easing through the curtain of Éowyn's hair to find the curve of her neck, then lower to where it meets her shoulder, guiding her back, as if she can feel a rigid tension holding her forward. Whether or not it is there, she speaks as if there can be no question.

"I know you would not insult me with distrust, sister. Let me make you shine." Then, with a feline smile at her lips, she suggests with brightening interest, "Perhaps you have been wearing your hair this way on purpose, knowing I could not in good conscience allow it."

There is a swell of resentment in her throat, an irritability that Éowyn must sternly clamp down upon. But you will insult me, will you not, sister? In every way you can, it seems. As though Éowyn is some unwashed stray, as though Cersei's fingers find tangles and snags aplenty in the smooth fall of gold. As though it is laziness or a lack of attention that makes Éowyn wear her hair differently to her sister-in-law's, and not a lingering attachment to the styles of her own land.

As though any lady worth her salt should have time enough to waste on brushing her hair longer than a half-hour. It has never quite seemed to fit, how little work the ladies of this land do - as though a court will run itself, if its lady is but fair enough.

It stings, the suggestion that she is not fair enough.

There is, then, a genuine tension in her shoulder beneath Cersei's hand, although she does her best to soften it, to let herself be drawn back a little way. "My heart is not tender," she assures her sister, and she does not smile as she says it; there is, in her grey eyes, a hard glint that she cannot dismiss from view. "No more than yours, dear sister, I would guess; for what high and noble lady can dwell in her station for any years at all, and not armour herself?" Her eyes slide sidelong to the other woman, and there is a faint reproach in her tone. "Still, you must remember that I was raised to fashion my armour differently."

[He'd be the object. Especially interested in wildcard 'Unholy Bargain'. Here m/f is possible.]

Edited 2021-10-20 09:11 (UTC)

[For this, I'd prefer him to be the object. Anything else we can discuss!]

[ she can definitely become fixated or obsessed with things, and with her abandonment issues that obsessive trait can easily mix with possessiveness. for something with a darker tilt, she wouldn't be above using her power and abilities to keep the object of her affection close or "safe".

canon, cross canon, AUs, timeline shenanigans all welcome. good to play her from most any (18+) canon point for this. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Make you love me

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