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It's half-nine. Surely it's too early?

I haven't slept yet so technically it's really, really late for me and I have a meeting with what's his face and I have a hard time staying awake when I've had sleep- Oh, fine, just coffee, then.

...you're not going into a meeting blabbering like this, are you?

I'm not blab-

Are you making coffee or what?

Yes m'lord. Right away. [He didn't look half as annoyed as he might have sounded, putting the kettle on. He was more concerned - he was always concerned, some might say - but he didn't inquire as to why Bobby had stayed up all night and just made coffee like a quiet, obedient little kitchen slave.]

[Slumping into a chair, Robert merely waved a hand imperiously at his obedient coffee slave. He was exhausted from tossing and turning in bed, trying to catch some sleep but sleep remained elusive these days for which the bloody company was to blame. The first-born of the Baratheons simply wasn't cut out for this kind of work - and everybody knew it. Yet here he was, running that thing, pretending to know what he was doing.

If that didn't drive a man to drinking - that he'd been merrily drinking even before he took SEP over didn't matter - then he didn't know what would.]

It doesn't matter whether I'm coherent at those meetings. They do all the talking anyway. My presence there's just a formality.

[He would have told Robert not to go anyway - he knows those meetings, and he knows that really, what you had to say didn't matter much at all - but he'd gone along to great many himself and it wasn't nearly as simple and deciding that you didn't need to be there.]

Get some rest afterwards then. [He dumped some coffee powder into the plunger and let them swim in the hot water for a while.]

[He was screwing up little by little, day by day, and everybody just stood by and watched. It wasn't so different from the last few years in America, except he'd cared about his day job back then - during those few and precious moments when he was semi-lucid.]

After lunch. Let's do lunch together. Let's eat curry so hot our arses will hate us tomorrow, eh?

...alright. [You'll forgive him for not sounding utterly convinced as he held a cup of coffee out to Bobby. He'd rather not do anything his arse would hate him for, but it did mean an opportunity to pick up the poor bloke and put him to bed after having something to eat.]

You look like you're already regretting it. [Bobby's mouth curled into a grin around the rim of the cup, the smell of hot coffee in his nose. Small pick-me-ups be they pills, rich Italian dessert or spending time doing something foolish with an old friend were what helped him get through his dull days.]

Cheer up, Ned, my friend. They don't make it as hot here as they do in India.

I don't know why you think to do the silliest things abroad. [So, Ned does too, and his adventures can be more dangerous, but there was a different level of stupidity involved in deliberately giving yourself food poisoning in India when you didn't speak a word of Hindi compared to, say, deciding to fly into Rwanda two days after the genocide.

Well, at least, to Ned there was a difference.]

Oi, I was just getting to know the local food. When in Rome and all that shit.

[He'd been there for a movie shoot. Small independent thing that didn't pay well and was only shown in a handful select theatres. Still, Robert had mostly fond memories of that one because they had been so piss poor that it had felt like being with a small theatre company again.]

Didn't I send you a postcard? With posing elephants?

You did, but Cat got to read it before I did. [Robert should really know by now to stop writing obscene things on the back of things that most everyone can read. He had children in his house who would get to these things weeks before he did because he was away on some trip, for God's sake.

Still, Ned kept them. He had a stack of all of Bobby's letters and postcards that he's ever received, even from their much younger days when the love letters had been hand-delivered rather than posted and he couldn't spell to save his life.]

You know, most people would have just flicked an e-mail over to confirm that they're still alive out there.

She really shouldn't read other people's mail.

[Well, she really shouldn't read things penned Robert Baratheon and neither should Ned's little brats. Acting indignant and outraged whenever he said something 'inappropriate' or just showed his face got old after the first time. And it didn't really endear them to Bobby who usually forgot Ned had Cat and children until the next time he saw them.]

But e-mails are so impersonal and lack a nice motif on the front.

[What really bothered him was that e-mails like texts lacked materiality. They were just squiggles on a computer or mobile screen, easy to delete with one tap or click. It was disturbing, really.

Fingers curled around the cup, soaking up the warmth, Bobby tried to remember the last time he'd sent Ned a letter or a postcard. Must have been ages ago, before he admitted defeat (after ODing and nearly dying) and came back home to run the family company. He took another sip of coffee, looking terribly exhausted for a fraction of a heartbeat, and lifted a hand to rub it across his face.]

Besides, spell-check and auto-correct drive me crazy.

I'm not home enough to open my mail. [Besides, as Robert ought to know, there was an element of sharing, or at least some level of openness involved when it came to family.

Ned sat down next to Bobby, trying and failing to not look concerned about this insistence on killing himself in the slowest and most torturous way he could think of. Something happened to Bobby somewhere along the way, and while the Stark boy had never approved of the Baratheon boy just not showing up to things he didn't feel like going to, they weren't boys anymore and Ned's unwavering sense of black and white had long ago been tainted with splotches of grey.]

I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but I don't think showing up like this would be one of your better ideas.

What's the alternative, Ned? Will you go in my stead? You'd hate it even more than I do.

[Robert laughed silently into his coffee.]

But I bet everyone'd love having you there. Well, everyone except Cersei but she doesn't like anybody so I wouldn't take it personally.

I don't think so. I wouldn't have a clue what to do. [That and he had a complicated relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. He didn't support the way drugs seemed to be expanding (invading) into everyone's lives, but he couldn't deny the role the industry played when he was helping administer vaccines in Sudan.]

Cersei would eat me alive. [It was supposed to be a joke, and Ned was grinning, but really, she would.]

[After over ten years of 'running' the company, Robert might not be as clueless as when he started out, but on most days he still had no idea what he was doing. Attending important meetings where important matters were discussed and signing things preceded by meetings with various department heads played a major role in his day-to-day routine.

It was kind of sad when you thought about it. Which was why Bobby didn't think about it too much. Which was why he continued his deep and meaningful love affair with the bottle and his on-and-off flirting with pill-shaped happiness.]

She can try but she'd have to get past me first. [Bobby chuckled softly. He and his wife didn't see eye to eye on anything these days but Robert had yet to lose an argument against her. To be honest, arguing with Cersei was one of the few things he still enjoyed doing.]

If she gets her Daddy involved, we'll have to leave the country, though.

I'm not in the country more than half the time anyway. [Which wasn't to say that Tywin Lannister was not a terrifying man - Ned has had a few close encounters, and that was a few close encounters too many - but simply that he wasn't too worried about Bobby's father-in-law in the proverbial 'grand scheme of things'.]

One would hope he's being kept busy with his own company to want to branch out, so to speak.