Jocelyn Baratheon

Jocelyn

### Titles

Hand of the King, Princess of the Iron Throne, Lady of Casterly Rock, Castellan of Dragonstone

## Other Information

### Username

/u/origami13

Princess Jocelyn Lannister (nee Baratheon) elder sister of the king, was named his Hand at the beginning of the Second War of Reclamation. As the wife of Aubrey Lannister, she is also the Lady of Casterly Rock.

## History

The king and queen had three children, and the truth is this: none of them were suited to rule.

One was entitled and vindictive. One was unambitious and lazy. And one was a woman.

Jocelyn Baratheon was the eldest child, and she grew up with the knowledge that if not for the whims of fate deciding she had to be born a woman, she could have ruled the Seven Kingdoms. Instead, though, she was forced to watch her younger brother raised to one day be king, and always settle for second best, despite her intelligence. However, her mother, Queen Hanna Hayford, recognized and encouraged the young girl’s ambitions and potential, instilling in her a confidence and a simple rule: *family above all.*

Jocelyn grew up in the halls of the Red Keep, learning the inner workings of the castle and the city that surrounded it from a young age. Aside from her brothers, she had many companions in her girlhood, mostly noble girls who had been sent to the Red Keep to serve as her friends and handmaids, including young Allyria Velaryon, who developed a close bond with her brother Otto. She learned much from them, the highborn and the low, about their lives and the worlds they lived in.

Her favorite of these companions was a lowborn serving girl named Delena. She showed her many of the hidden passages that ran throughout the Red Keep, taught her how to sneak out into the city and the best places to listen in on conversations from (espionage). It was Delena who was her first love, and less than a year after they shared a kiss in the hidden basements of the Red Keep, Delena was married to a stablehand and would no longer look Jocelyn in the eyes.

Ever since she was a child, she was watching out for her little brothers, keeping track of where they were and what they were getting into (investigator). She helped them out of trouble, covered their backs, bandaged their scrapes, shared teasing nicknames with them- her youngest brother, in their childhoods, dubbed her "Joy." It was a dynamic that wouldn’t change as they grew into adulthood, when their troubles and mistakes had ramifications across the whole of the Seven Kingdoms, and enemies were brewing in every corner.

When Jocelyn reached her teenage years, she began to receive marriage proposals, from lords and knights eager to wed a lovely princess. Jocelyn, feeling trapped and sick at the thought of being bound to a husband, went to her mother for help, and it was then that the Queen taught her daughter the value of lies (sabotage). They fabricated an excuse, that King Steffon was already making plans for Jocelyn’s betrothal, and the Queen turned all the lords away with kind, smiling apologies.

Later, the lie would be replaced with another, that she was too busy in her posting at her brother’s side to concern herself with marriage, but the end result was the same. She was blessedly free.

She was one of the only true and trusted allies her brothers had. Not long after Lord Velaryon was fired from his post as the Hand of the King, Orys installed her to replace him, claiming he needed a Hand he knew he could trust unequivocally. Throughout the War of Reclamation, as her brother battled in the field, she held down the fort at King’s Landing, running the city and the realm in his stead. After his return, she continued to serve as Hand, sitting on his Small Council and attempting to mitigate the damage his furies and fancies threatened to bring down on the realm.

In a different world, Princess Jocelyn Baratheon might have made a splendid ruler, but that wasn’t the hand fate dealt. In this world, she dwelt in the shadows behind the throne, administered the realm in her brother’s stead, and tried to ensure that her brothers in their carelessness didn’t tear down everything their ancestors had built.