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Compared to Winterfell, Braavos is a paradise. The ocean is a vast and brilliant blue, a gemstone sea; scents of flowers and spices from the markets announce themselves with a heady aroma, all florals and resins. He stands by the window that overlooks the city and the bay, and the wind is warm and playful.
Nobody knows him here, except perhaps the Many-Faced God's attendants in their temple, but their business stands concluded, for the time being. No doubt they would, with soft smiles, assure him that their master returns to claim his due from everyone eventually.
He's no one at all here. Certainly no lord, true or false, no man of much influence nor holdings besides comparatively modest quarters (he would be mad to try and rebuild, as such efforts draw far too much attention). Baelish keep stands lonely and uselessly at the furthest edges of the Vale, and for all the world knew and muttered, Petyr Baelish (at least in name) had joined his once-adored Catelyn Stark in death, throat opened in a grotesque mirror image, his body burned before he might rise again with the coming of winter.
He'd sometimes wondered if the House of Black and White begrudged him the loss of their agent. Doubtful, given their beliefs, but it sometimes still feels like a waste of a favour -- the things he could've done with it otherwise. But in the end it had bought him, at least for a little while longer, his life.
Or what is left of it these days.
As a child, he'd never understood why his great-grandfather had left Braavos in the first place. Every land is in want of sellswords. It is, after all, one of the oldest and most honest of professions (besides the obvious, with which he would grow to become more than familiar with age). Why not remain one here? Why leave it all for a pittance and a patch of rubble in Westeros?
Ambition, maybe. (He knows so very much about ambition.)
Or ambition's bastard child - hope. Which he'd thought was a thing for simple idealists, and he'd only realized far too late had knitted itself into him when he hadn't been paying attention. He'd only come to recognize it in its absence.
He'd never stopped telling himself a children's tale, he'd realized. One of the oldest ones of all. That one who is clever enough, and bold enough, and willing enough to do anything, could claim every treasure and the world entire.
But there is a new king now, and it isn't him, and new lords in every corner, and none of them are him, and flocks of little birds, and none of them are his, and the world is forgetting him a little more day by day, and the day will come quite soon that outside of certain circles, nobody will remember him at all.
He holds the mockingbird brooch in the palm of his hand, the metal warm as the air. It had been dangerous to keep it. Pointless sentiment. Potential evidence. By all means he should've thrown it into the Narrow Sea while crossing, and let the waves swallow it whole.
It is one last memento. One last, remaining little indulgence. Something to remind him that it had all truly happened and had not been an idle fantasy. Taking a new banner, a new reputation, commoners and lords and kings living and dying because he had willed it so. An entire realm tearing itself apart into bloody pieces --
-- All because of one little mockingbird.
Watching the brooch glint in the sunlight, he smiles, which he still does sometimes, just not as readily as he used to. It had been dangerous to keep it. But it would have been worse to cast it away.
But that is all a matter of the past, and there is nothing left. Nothing safe for an entire life as a man who'd lost his name, and lost everything else, too.
It eats at him. He feels mostly tired these days, and still has trouble sleeping. The girls (and boys, and otherwise) stop by often, offering the usual for coin. When they speak, they often watch him curiously, on account of him still knowing his manners around people of the trade. There's sometimes coin for guarded conversations, and more coin for guarded conversations that strictly did not happen. There's rarely much of anything else, given that any glimpse of the godforsaken scar would give the game away immediately as word spreads like wildfire. Disrobing is of course hardly mandatory for all sorts of these exercises; he simply finds himself barely missing them. And besides, in his experience, the girls had always been quite relieved to have a customer who only wanted to speak, and still paid handsomely.
At least coin he still has, and a talent for maintaining the expenses, if nothing else.
Without his network, the news had come piecemeal, as it comes to every other citizen of Braavos with an ear to the ground and a few regular bedfellows. The winter that wasn't. King's Landing in cinders. That Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons, slain. The king-elect. King-elect! He'd barked laughter at the thought. The world truly had gone mad.
He'd secretly known the answer before he'd asked a girl (soft-featured but boyish, short-haired, painted eyes and a simple tunic; one of his favourites, if that's a word for the arrangement) to inquire.
What of the Targaryen's Spider?
She'd looked at him quizzically but not pressed the issue, and left him, as requested.
Gone. Simply ... gone. In a heartbeat. Maybe two. Fire beyond imagining. From a beast beyond imagining.
Oh, old friend, what were you thinking?
He imagines King's Landing rendered brittle by dragonfire, collapsing in on itself. Walls and towers hundreds of years old, falling. A city in ruins. And Varys brought to an end by the same creature. He feels something rise up in his throat and his eyes are stinging. He notices that his breathing has gone irregular and hurts, too. His throat feels dry. It's only then that he realizes with something like anger that he is crying, and has been since the girl had closed the door to leave him to his thoughts.
There's your precious "realm". Was it worth it?
A thousand thoughts and possibilities race through his mind. Surely a man from the Free Cities, a man who knew so well the hearts and minds of others, who had been both servant and victim to individuals mad and powerful before, who had every connection Petyr could imagine and more, would have had a coin on him and known a Faceless Man to give it to.
He'd sent correspondence. Brazen, in a way.
Invisible ink and ciphers locking away simple messages only Varys would immediately recognize. Most shamelessly (and far more encrypted), one that simply read: "Old Friend, Do Not."
But whether Varys had ever received any of these messages or paid them mind, he does not know; there had never been any response.
Unless the man had still clung to the idea of living and dying in the name of order.
And this is the worst thought of them all.
My friend, I wouldn't have taken you for such a selfish bastard, he thinks, angry at himself for his devolving state as he feels his breath come heaving and his eyes burn more insistently, and even angrier at Varys and his insistence on playing the realmkeeper. Maybe in the end --
He remembers kissing with a passion and intensity (to say: love, though he hadn't admitted it then -- and yet struggles to call it anything else now) he'd showered no one else with, not even in his imagination, never in a thousand years. Body against body and philosophy against philosophy, and maybe a philosophy of the body inbetween those, too. All things he'd long pushed aside and thought he'd had no desire for anymore.
He leans against the windowframe, trying to steady himself, to calm himself, but it's barely working.
Maybe in the end, it comes as no surprise.
"I suppose," he says (no one, speaking to no one), "When it came to your affections, a contest between the realm and I was hardly a contest at all."
He does not call the girl back, nor anyone else, for a while. A matter of courtesy and vulnerability. Worse than an artless client is one who weeps. Worse than company that knows your desires is company that sees your wounds.
The sun over Braavos illuminates the coast in a shimmer. Somewhere across the Narrow Sea, a realm lies broken and humbled. Maybe it will recover, maybe it will not. Likely it will become so much worse before it grows any better. The world turns of its own accord, and the man who is becoming no one feels something like his heart tear at and knot into itself, and watches the sea and sky just beyond the window.