The Unyielding Stag (Game of Thrones AU/Invincible)
Chapter 7: Littlefinger

A/N: Back to King's Landing for yet another person who wants Axel dead!

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The dim, candlelit chamber is filled with soft, feminine moans of pleasure. The air is thick with the scent of incense and the musky aroma of arousal. In the center of the room sits a large bed, illuminated by the flickering light of numerous candles.

There, two women lay entwined in a passionate embrace, their naked bodies glistening with recently applied oils as they move their hands up and down one another's curves. One of them is a petite brunette with porcelain skin, a Northerner and a rarity this far South. The other is a raven-haired beauty with dusky skin marking her as Dornish, sporting a figure that would make any man weep with desire.

The first is all over the second and it wouldn't be surprising for an unpracticed eye to appraise the situation and assume the brunette was in charge. This couldn't be further from the truth, however. In fact, the Northern woman is the student here, and the Dornish woman is the one gently but firmly providing guidance to her junior.

Across the room, sitting in shadows with a wine glass in hand, is Lord Petyr Baelish, Master of Coin and well known whoremonger. Truth be told, for as many brothels as he owned these days, Petyr couldn't be there for every audition at every whorehouse spread across the city.

… But he made time when and where he could to ensure quality control and the coin continued to flow. And in this particular case, it amused him greatly to do so. The northerner, a woman named Lyra, reminded him vaguely of the long departed Lyanna Stark. The similarities were admittedly quite distant, but there was a certain pleasure in watching any woman from the North debase themselves for his entertainment given his history with the region's men.

Rotating his wrist to swish the wine in his goblet too and fro, Petyr brings the rim to his lips and takes a small sip, even as he continues to watch Lyra's education in using that supple body of hers for the delicate arts of debauchery and depravity. At the same time, the Master of Coin is multitasking as well, contemplating the recent plans he's set in motion.

Life… was made up of opportunities. Even when Petyr was younger, he'd understood this well enough. From an early age, he'd believed nothing mattered except for finding your next opportunity and seizing it with both hands. Born to House Baelish, in such a minor holding that it had neither a name nor a maester, Petyr had spent his early years in a small tower on the rocks of one of the Fingers, bereft of such opportunities.

Until finally, he was given a chance. Petyr owed much to his father for the opportunity to eventually leave that place. To be fostered at Riverrun under the auspices of Lord Hoster Tully was not something that most lesser houses could ever hope for. It had been a great honor… but more than that, it had been a greater opportunity, one that Petyr had tried his best to grasp onto and not let slip away.

However, back then he'd only really understood the true nature of the world on a surface level. The younger Petyr Baelish had grasped that life was simply a collection of opportunities, but he hadn't yet comprehended that there were many more layers to it than just that.

Opportunities were not just about the benefits one could gain from them. They were not a singularly positive thing every time they cropped up. Sometimes opportunities came with costs. Sometimes… they came with consequences.

A young Petyr Baelish had learned this the hard way when he'd tried to win an equally young Catelyn Tully's hand. It had seemed like a golden opportunity to him at the time. Here he was, a young man who had grown up alongside the Tully Children. Sure, the Lord's Heir, Edmure Tully had saddled him with the rather insulting nickname of Littlefinger, one that had stuck all the way to present day. But in stark contrast, Petyr had bonded quite closely with Lord Hoster's daughters, Catelyn and Lysa Tully.

So closely in fact, that he'd truly believed he'd fallen in love with Catelyn, even though she never once returned his affections. In the end, Petyr had convinced himself that all he had to do to win Catelyn's heart and hand… was defeat her betrothed in a duel. An opportunity to both have the love of his life AND raise his station farther than ever before. How could he resist?

… Brandon Stark taught Petyr a valuable lesson that day about opportunities and costs. He'd thought he could win through simple pluck and courage, but the Wild Wolf had defeated him easily and only spared his life after Catelyn begged her betrothed not to finish Petyr off.

After that, Petyr had been cast out of Riverrun for daring to try to rise above his station. He'd been sent back to that nameless tower in the Fingers in disgrace, where his father had fortunately already passed away by that point of time. Petyr had been left as nothing more than a minor lord of the most minor holding in all the Vale.

A lesser man would have let that be the end for him. A lesser man would have withered away in that tower and let himself die forgotten and alone. But Petyr Baelish was different. He had taken the lesson he'd received that day to heart. He'd been far more careful going forward, looking at every opportunity that came his way with far more… caution. But he hadn't given in. He hadn't given up.

In the end, all he really had to do was wait. Brandon Stark and his father died at the Mad King's hand, sparking a rebellion that ended with the Targaryens deposed after nearly three hundred years and a new Baratheon Dynasty on the Iron Throne.

Catelyn had wound up marrying Brandon's younger brother Eddard Stark… but more importantly for Petyr's purposes, Lysa Tully had been wed to Jon Arryn, Lord of the Vale.

Lysa had always carried a torch for Petyr, something he'd pretended not to notice in the same way he imagined Catelyn pretended not to notice him. But now that Catelyn was out of reach and Petyr was without any other options… Lysa Arryn became his route back into power.

Through her, he connected with her husband Jon Arryn and made himself indispensable to the Lord Paramount. First in Gulltown, where he managed to increase the port's revenues by tenfold, and then on to King's Landing, where the Hand of the King had made him Master of Coin.

What an absolute fool. Arryn thought Petyr loyal simply because he was smart and useful and owed him for his benevolence. Little did he know that all the while, his handpicked Master of Coin was cucking him behind his back. Lysa might have taken Jon Arryn's name, but she far more regularly took Petyr's prick.

Admittedly, Petyr held no great attraction towards the lesser of the Tully Sisters. Lysa was… adequate for his sexual needs. However, she was instrumental to his long term plans. Her use to him came not from carnal pleasure, but from the way she whispered his words into her husband's ear, allowing Petyr to get away with all sorts of things right under the unsuspecting Hand's nose.

He might have managed the port at Gulltown perfectly with a spotless record, but Petyr had been far less judicious when it came to his time as Master of Coin. Everyone underestimated him simply because he was a 'nobody' in their eyes. He was from no Great House, nor any particularly old noble lineage. He could not trace his lineage to the blood of any Kings or Queens.

But Petyr had long since realized that true power didn't lie in one's blood or birthright. True power… lay in one's wealth. For someone like him, the only way to rise was to accrue money and as Master of Coin, that was… quite a simple undertaking. Especially with a King like Robert Baratheon spending so frivolously on his many sources of entertainment and distraction.

Truly, Robert Baratheon had been Petyr Baelish's greatest accomplice in all these years that he'd held the post of Master of Coin. Embezzling the amount of money he had from the Crown would have been impossible under a calmer and more levelheaded monarch. Especially with a man like Jon Arryn as their Hand.

But with Robert spending and spending and spending, Lord Arryn had his hands full. Between trying to prevent the King from bankrupting them and juggling the numerous creditors that wished to have their loans repaid, Arryn was stretched too thin. Whenever Petyr could work his financial 'magic' and alleviate some of the workload from Lord Arryn, the older man was grateful instead of suspicious, all because Robert's antics didn't give him the time to be suspicious.

… Really, it was a shame that the King had died the way he did. It was just so sudden. Even now, it felt almost like a dream. But then, even he with his expansive network of informants using the whorehouses of the city… had no clue that they were all sitting atop that many caches of wildfire all this time.

To know that all it would have taken is one incident to set the city aflame and kill them all… well, it gave Petyr a healthy appreciation for the chaotic nature of the world, certainly.

That said, Robert dying was one thing. His sons dying with him… that was something else entirely. All of the sudden, Stannis Baratheon was seemingly next in line for the throne for a moment there, and that was something that nobody wanted, least of all Petyr.

Fortunately, he'd known that Renly, the younger brother, would never let Stannis be crowned without some sort of a fight. However, before any plans to… stimulate the coming war between brothers could be put into place, the Hand of the King had brought everything to a standstill with his announcement.

Robert Baratheon had survived the initial explosion only to die a little while later, but before he did… he'd legitimized his bastard in the Vale with his dying breath and made him Heir to the Iron Throne.

Petyr believed it, to be fair. Some people had all the fucking luck and Robert Baratheon had most definitely been one of them. Likewise, while everyone's lives were built on opportunities, there were some who received opportunities of a far higher quality than others. Again, Robert Baratheon was one of those men, despite how much he'd wound up squandering those same opportunities throughout his life.

Not to mention, as foolish as Lord Arryn was for trusting Petyr, he was an honorable, honest man all the same. If he said the King's last words were to legitimize his bastard and crown him, then that was almost certainly what had happened.

Alas… it didn't quite line up well with Petyr's plans. That's why he'd taken the opportunity presented to him and hired a group of bandits to make sure that Lord Arryn and young Axel Stone never made it out of the Vale.

It truly wasn't anything personal, at least for him. Petyr recognized full well how much he owed Jon Arryn even if he felt no true loyalty over it. If there was a world where he could let the older man die of age in his sleep without ever finding out just how much Petyr had used him, then he would have preferred it.

But at the same time, Lysa has been begging him to kill her husband for YEARS now, ever since she gave birth to that sickly brat of hers. After all, if Jon Arryn were to suffer an accident, then Lysa and Petyr could rule the Vale together in all but name until the boy came of age. And if the boy NEVER came of age, well, wouldn't that just be tragic?

But Petyr had been putting Lysa off all this time for some very obvious reasons. First and foremost among them was that he hadn't been entirely sure how the King would take the death of his Hand. Even if it could be masked as an illness, Petyr didn't know what Robert would do next.

This opportunity though… was simply too good. With the King dead, there would be nobody left to truly call for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Lord Arryn's own tragic death at the hands of bandits. The fact that the King's bastard would die with him, well that was just the icing on the cake wasn't it?

After all, if the Hand of the King along with Robert's bastard never made it to King's Landing, it would give Renly Baratheon all the ammunition he needed to accuse Stannis of arranging the incident. If he didn't think of it himself, Petyr would be sure to put the idea in the younger Baratheon's head sooner or later.

And that accusation would be more than enough to spark a war between the two men, especially with the implied stain on Stannis' honor. No Great Council to decide who should be King, no peaceful transition of power. No… it was only in war that Petyr could continue his climb up the ladder.

Plus, Lysa would finally stop nagging him all the time and that… that alone was almost worth the price of those bandits without everything else he stood to gain from this.

"Lord Baelish."

Pulled from his thoughts, though he'd never allowed himself to be fully distracted, Petyr Baelish returns the full focus of his attention to the whores on the bed in front of him. Lyra, he decides, has not disappointed. Rising from his chair, he walks over to the bed with wine glass in hand, watching in amusement as they both tense up on his approach.

Taking his time letting his eyes drift up and down their naked, oiled, sweaty feminine forms, Petyr hums for a moment as if in thought. Finally, he smiles thinly.

"Acceptable. Begin taking her with you for clients starting tomorrow. Do not let them know she is still in training unless they ask outright. Otherwise, simply advertise it as a two-for-one special."

The more experienced of the two whores bows her head at that in easy acceptance. Meanwhile, the northerner blushes hard, her pale skin going bright red even in the dim candlelight. Petyr chuckles at her reaction.

"You'll want to work on learning to control that blush, my dear. It betrays your inexperience. Some men will enjoy that, while some will not. In the end, you will make more coin if you can cater to both."

"… Y-Yes Lord Baelish."

Left unsaid is that she would also make HIM more coin if she learned to cater to both. But Petyr simply turns and leaves the room. He spends a brief time speaking with the Brothel Madam, before eventually heading outside where his carriage awaits to take him back to his quarters in the Red Keep.

Truthfully, he didn't have all of his eggs in one basket, of course. There was every chance that his bandits would fail to kill Lord Arryn, or the King's bastard, or even both. Petyr would have preferred to hire the mountain clans to do the deed, knowing they would have gone above and beyond to kill the Lord of the Vale… but alas, there simply hadn't been enough time to contact them and arrange the attack.

He would hope that the bandits he did manage to hire wouldn't fail him, but even if they did, nobody would be able to trace their actions back to Baelish. Every opportunity came with as many costs and consequences as it came with boons and benefits. Part of playing the game was learning how to lessen those costs while magnifying the benefits.

And Petyr Baelish was nothing if not a master at playing the game by this point.

-x-X-x-

A/N: Littlefinger scheming away, having no idea what he or the rest of Westeros are now dealing with~

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