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dreadwulf · 5 years

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A Man for All Seasons: Chapter 10

Only because the wait for today’s episode has been excruciating, and this last hour probably the most painful of all, I’m sharing with you my Tumblr followers a draft of the next chapter of my Jaime fic.

I reserve the right to revise wildly before posting it to AO3 - that will be the final, “canon” version - okay, here we go.

In the darkness of the Long Night, hundreds of men and women from all walks of life and many corners of Westeros share a strange, feverish dream. A dream of endless night and fire and monsters. A dream that yields for a few hours at a time to eat, bathe, and sleep, but then resumes right where it left off, as if it had never stopped. Though they dip into and out of it in turns it never really stops, not for a moment; this long and continuous nightmare.

That nightmare is the Siege of Winterfell.

From the very first day, when the sun set and the Army of the Dead attacked, and the giants started flinging wights over the walls, the battle has gone on unceasingly. There are relatively quiet moments when nothing is coming over the walls, and at those times the men atop the fortifications rest and watch while the archers take up the task of picking off targets, but even then there are still creatures battering against the walls, attempting to scale them, bashing against any weak point they can identify. There is no break in the attack, not at noon or midnight or anytime in between.

They have to take up shifts on the walls, to be certain someone is always fresh. At first two shifts, “day” and “night”, and eventually three or more, when all of their forces are too tired and injured to carry on for 12 hours at a time. Anyone who can hold a sword will take a turn at least once, man, woman or, in a few cases, child. They drop heavy stones on creatures climbing the walls and kick them off when they come close to the top. When they begin to pile on one another they douse the wights in wildfire and burn them. And when some terrible new creature appears, things with wings and teeth that flap over their heads, things that bore into the ground, they will have only moments to determine how to stop them, or else they will be quickly overrun.

Their enemies do not tire, they do not stop to eat, they do not break off to confer with one another. They just keep coming. On and on and on.

At first they are fighting for the North, for Westeros, for their Houses and families. This is motivation enough to push them onward through the endless hours of fighting. Eventually, when nerves are worn to a nub and hopes of victory outright dwindle to nothing, they are fighting for tomorrow. For the next few hours. For their lives.

Jaime and Brienne bear it better than most. They are soldiers, and in a way they are in their element. The both of them have trained their entire lives for this moment. They are experienced, among the best fighters in Westeros, and in the prime of their lives. The Valyrian swords they carry seem to have been forged for precisely this enemy. Perhaps they were too.

Brienne leads by example, much as Jaime once did when he headed the Lannister forces. She expects her squadron to fall in around her and offer support, fall back when she does, focus on the targets she indicates. They never falter. With other soldiers he might suspect that they don’t want to be shown up by a woman, but the wildlings seem to be unaffected by Brienne’s gender. They follow her enthusiastically, eager to fight, and leave her room to do her own fighting. They leave room, too, for Jaime at her side, once it becomes clear that he will let no one else take his place there.

For the first time since they drew swords against one another they have opportunity to fight together, but this time as allies. He will catch her eye as they face an opponent -- like the giant who scaled the wall and stood over them twice again as tall -- and they will move together in concert to take it down, and share in the victory after.

Brienne’s fierce grin when they fell the giant together is one of the great treasures of Jaime’s memory.

He seems to move faster with her at his side, his strikes growing more confident. All his instincts that had kept sending him to the right have switched left. Brienne reliably stays to his right and with her as solid and impenetrable as a wall on that side, this leads him to rely on his left hand more quickly than any practice sparring ever has.

At times fighting with her is more like play than work, especially in the first days when they are not so driven down by futility. They find a rhythm together, learn to work together and play to each others strengths and weaknesses.

The profound connection between soldiers in the face of death grows all the stronger between them in these hours. Some friends and comrades chafe at one another under fire and stress, but Brienne and Jaime grow only closer, so that they each know exactly what the other is thinking, what the other one will think, even before they have thought it. The bond between them was already forged in fire; more fire will only strengthen it.

Day and Night have long since ceased to have meaning. The North tries to maintain that fiction for a while, marking “sundown” and “sunrise” in the passage of time, referring to a day and a night shift on the walls, but it doesn’t stick. It is always night in Winterfell now, and a day is a marker of hours only, the passage of hours marked by candlelight as close to 24 hours as they can measure. The Lady of Winterfell stubbornly keeps to counting the days, marks them at their meals and in their communications, perhaps to emphasize that the siege is not endless, that they can count the days since the sun last shone and know that it will shine again.

Other daily activity finds new patterns as the siege settles into routine. There are two great meals every day and they are both dinners, though for some folk it is midday and others mid-night. Before taking the walls the soldiers break their fast with bread and water, and men just coming down from the wall will join them to drink ale. The cooks and cleaners and craftsmen work similarly around the clock, but staggered, so that the kitchen is always cooking and the armory is always hot. In this way there are two Winterfells, a first and a second, and they overlap only by an hour or so at each end, so that people in the second shift will only rarely encounter those from the first.

It is a strange way to live, but it very quickly becomes normal, as days stretch into weeks and the attack continues without respite. Even endless night and an unending waves of monsters can become a routine with some determination, and solid leadership. For this they can credit the Lady of Winterfell, who governs daily life in the Keep and is largely responsible for keeping as much normalcy as is possible within its walls. She enforces the common laws of behavior despite their crazed circumstances, plans meals, keeps the castle clean and orderly. She sets aside places for small children to play inside so that they are not racing about underfoot, and people to mind them while their parents work and fight. Seamstresses switch between fletching arrows and mending clothing so that they will not run out, and cobblers take a large portion of the stables to repair boots while their owners sleep. The War Council had given little thought to these details, and Sansa takes them up in admirable fashion.

Outside the walls, nothing is normal.

The black sky above hangs low, increasingly oppressive and close, seems to be pressing down on them directly. Not a single star shines in the inky blackness. What feeble light they can create from the ground with torches penetrates only a little into this unnatural night, where the darkness is an actual, tangible presence around and above them. A man can’t look at it long without feeling he will go mad.

The snow falls relentlessly, piles on top of the walls so quickly that men must stop what they’re doing and use their shields to shovel it over the edge. Even in the North they have never seen such snow. Had there not been so many living and dead to trample it down and melt it beneath their activity, it would easily stand at a dozen feet. And still it is falling. They carry it inside with wheelbarrows and melt it for clean water as fast as they can, and still they must shovel paths through the rest. If a man fell asleep in the outer courtyard outside the well-trod paths and swept areas he would be buried entirely and lost within hours, and no one would find him before spring.

The army of the dead seems to neither retreat nor advance - they batter the walls and are crushed against them and yet there are always more. The horizon is invisible in the distance, swallowed by the dark of the Long Night, but one senses that the dead would still fill all the land around Winterfell with no noticable diminishment in their numbers. In his darker moments Jaime thinks on the last five years in Westeros and how the War of the Five Kings has left the continent a graveyard ripe for the plucking by the Night King, and then he is sick again, and must redirect his thinking. Those fields lie mainly to the South, and as Tyrion would say, they will jump off that bridge when they get to it.

When the dead forces swarm over the walls they are met by Winterfell’s defences and beaten back and burned away. New waves of enemies take the forefront at intervals: men of the various northern holds, giants of old, animals, creatures they have never seen before. Furry things with long tusks, teeth, horns. Skeletal monsters with scant flesh clinging to their bones that one images were once bears, or perhaps large cats, with great gleaming teeth. The walls of winterfell stand high and strong and they find ways over, they batter at the gates with horns and fists while the wood splinters and archers frantically carpet the snow with arrows to halt their progress. Some great creature will collapse before the gates or beside the walls and their compatriots will tear right through it, sometimes clamor over it to better reach their living targets.

The enemy is mindless and heartless and behaves like nothing human and it scatters one’s wits to see it. It makes them fight back just as ferociously and senselessly, and when the soldiers come down from the walls it takes some time for them to remember how to be men again.

Much like in a dream, familiar faces will appear and disappear unpredictably. Jon Snow will consult with Brienne and Jaime, about their numbers and supplies, and if they are interrupted in this conference he will draw out Longclaw and fight at their side. The King in the North seems to go wherever the fighting is thickest and the forces most inadequate and try to bolster them. Jaime has always believed that one commands from the vanguard, and approves of him more strongly for this.

If he is long away Davos will appear instead and ask for a report, and most often Jaime will brief him while Brienne leads the fighting. Her squadron is one of the most stable on the wall, with the fewest casualties. He suspects it is because she leads the fighting, and is too stubborn to lose. She takes most of the hardest hits herself and is seemingly invulnerable -- though Jaime knows, from helping her out of her armor, that she has many cuts and bruises beneath her steel. Davos seems impressed with her, and will stop to watch her fight with a satisfied expression, which makes Jaime fonder of him in turn. him better, too.

From time to time the Hound will appear, and drag the bodies of their dead down from the walls. He has little to say to anyone, but he will nod to Brienne before he shoulders a dead wildling and carries him down the tower steps to the Godswood, where the dead will be burned before they can turn to wights.

But not always.

Sometimes they rise faster than anyone can predict. A man can die on his feet and be reborn a wight before anyone has noticed the gaping hole in his neck, and turn and kill his former companions before they know what’s happening. No one knows why it goes so quickly at times, and at other times they can lie dead for hours without moving.

It takes him by surprise the first time the man next to Jaime had fallen, and gotten up again with horrible blue eyes and started biting his arm. He had just gotten done realizing he was dead, and he has to kill him again. It isn’t as easy as he'd thought, killing a wight sprung from their side of the wall. There is always a moment of hesitation before stabbing a man he has just been fighting beside for as many as six, ten hours. He didn't even know his name, the first man, but he had coughed every time the smoke rose and offered Jaime a hand up when he stumbled, and he had a knack for kicking a wight’s legs out from under him. Abruptly, the same man was trying to eat him. There is a disbelief that comes with that - its too absurd, it makes no sense. You think you must be mistaken. That wrenching hesitation is just long enough to get a man killed, if he does not fight past it. It earns Jaime a bite on the meat of his arm before he cleaves the wight’s head from its shoulders, and topples the body over the wall with a kick.

You think you will kill anything that attacks you on the walls, but there is a moment. When it’s someone you know, there is a moment. Every time.

Jaime learns the man`s name later. He asks Brienne. Brienne knows everyone’s name. His name was Wendell Snow. Jaime writes it on the inside of their tower using a piece of slate, so he won’t forget it. Wendell Snow and a date, the only dates they will have anymore: Day 3.

Other soldiers take up this habit, writing the names of the dead. By the end there will be many names written on the walls, up and down and around the doors and along the stairs. Day 5, and Day 20, and Day 36, and beyond. Manderlys and Reeds and Royces and Stones and many, many Snows. The names flicker in the torchlight at you when you climb to your place on the walls, and you think about where your name will go, when it’s your turn. There are still blank places on the stone, but they are filling in.

Jaime hopes that they will burn him quickly when the time comes, or at least kick him over the side, so that he doesn't rise up on the walls and start clawing at people. It feels undignified, and he doesn't want Brienne to see him that way. He wants her last memory of him to be a human one.

Jaime is holding up better than he might have guessed after that reckless first night, when he had come at the fighting in a frenzy and collapsed afterwards under Brienne’s care. Her knowing about his “going-away” problem has not been so shameful as he imagined, and her watchful eye prevents him from self-destruction.

Wildfire is too much for him sometimes. They bring out the wildfire to burn down the bodies of the enemy, and to stop them piling up against the walls. The smell of the green fire and the burning flesh makes him dizzy and sick, and if he does not remove himself from it physically his awareness will try to flee it without him. He has to go into the tower and sit down on the steps and take deep breaths, and sometimes he will be flung back helplessly into terrible memories, but at least inside the tower he will not be cut down while he is frozen in place.

He fights so fiercely the rest of the time that nobody seems to mind his taking a few minutes rest. Once he can reliably feel it coming on he can go inside straight away and calm himself, potentially head off these absences, and recover more quickly. Sometimes Brienne can tell before he can when he is nearing the end of his rope, and alert him. She can’t explain how she knows, but it has to do with his stance and the way his face goes slack. She only has to grasp his shoulder and he will fall back, usually, most of the time.

Jaime's getting a reputation of an entirely different sort on the walls of Winterfell. Somehow everyone here knows about how he slipped out of the Keep to challenge the dragon Viserion, how he had faced the giants on the first night of the siege and commanded their scorpions to shoot them down even as they rained wights and wolves on his head. They said he had faced down the dragon queen who wanted his head. They even knew how he had wanted to fight the Night's King himself and would have ridden beyond the walls to challenge him alone had the Lady Brienne not stopped him.

The conclusion the soldiers have come to is that Jaime Lannister will fight anything.

It's becoming somewhat of a recurring jest out on the walls. Anytime some strange new creature appears someone will immediately suggest, “Lannister will fight it.” The strange elephant-like creatures with long fur and tusks, “Lannister will fight it.” If an unusually large group of wights reaches the top, “Somebody get Lannister over here.” After a moment of shocked silence, when some new horror arrives, one of the soldiers will speak his name, and they will laugh instead.

Even stuck doors and bad weather will bring the suggestion that they call Jaime Lannister over to fight it. He catches King Jon making this joke too, in the Great Hall at mealtime, suggesting he fight the cook to earn them a better dinner.

Jaime does not take this joking well at first. Jokes at his expense, in the past, have not been kind, and he has spent too long pretending that his reputation did not concern him to ignore such things now. Brienne has to take him aside and explain to him that it is well meant, that there is some affection behind these jests, and admiration too. This makes him feel a good deal better about the times he has seen her laugh quietly at it behind her hands, her eyes shining.

There are things that happen on the walls that none of them speak of, not then and not after. If you were not there, you could not understand, and those who were there don’t need reminding.

There is the day of the ice spiders. Soldiers of Winterfell will have many tales to tell after the war, but there are no tales of that day. If you ask of it to those who manned the walls that day, they might wordlessly take up a sleeve or lift their shirt and show you a ring of scars the size of a fist and scorched flesh around it, like an archery target with a crater at the center where once fangs dug in and held on tight.

Those with the scars are the lucky ones. They don’t speak of the unlucky ones. The acrid bite of the ice spiders burns through metal and leather down to flesh, with some terrible venom that makes a man swell like a sausage against its casing and stop breathing just before he could pop. Even killing them does not detach the terrible bite of those awful spiders. If you pierce them and pull their bodies off, their jaws will stay embedded in the skin, extruding their awful venom. You have to burn them, until the flesh around them burns and scars too, until their corpses swell and burst open and their fangs finally loosen. The spiders could cover a man entirely in mere moments. They would fasten themselves around a helmet and go in through the faceplate and at such times it is better simply to stab the man through the heart and hasten his death.

The spiders arrive all together in a moving carpet of legs, hundreds of them, some the size of hounds, and they could jump as high as a man is tall. Their hairy hides are coated with frost and frozen to the touch but for their hot hungry mouths. There would be spiders all through the siege after that, here and there, but never so many as that first awful day.

After that day Brienne wakes at night scrambling to get them off her, slapping wildly at the thigh where her own scar sits, where Jaime had to put a torch to her to burn one of them off and tried his best not to mark her too badly. When she wakes in a panic he holds her down with his own weight, telling her firmly it’s a dream, only a dream --

-- he does not tell her that it’s all right, they’re safe, because the siege still rages outside and they do not lie to each other --

-- until she stops fighting and stares at him as her breath slows and she understands she’s in their room, in their bed, and there are hours until they will man the walls next.

“I hate spiders,” she whispers then, shuddering. “Too many legs. Too many eyes. Horrible.”

Brienne complains of nothing else in all the War for the Dawn. Only the spiders.

They have never exactly agreed to keep sharing the bed. Nothing is said, no decision is made. It just goes on happening. She had lain with Jaime once to comfort him when he had broken down, and after that they do not sleep apart, never once in all the Long Night.

The first night coming in from the walls they are so exhausted, mentally and physically, by the strain of fighting and the horrors outside and the enormity of the task ahead that they more or less collapse. Brienne goes down first, as soon as she's shucked her armor and kicked off her boots. She’d been 16 hours on the walls, longer than anyone in her command, and only sheer willpower held her up long enough to undress. She starts dozing off sitting up, and tips over sideways already half-dreaming.

It takes Jaime somewhat longer to rid himself of his armor, unfastening all these latches with one hand, and he is half-asleep himself by the time he is done. He should have gone back to the barracks, but he simply didn’t, he walked here side-by-side with Brienne in a sort of stupor and he should have settled down on the floor beside the fire once he’d gotten himself unarmored, but it feels like the most natural thing in the world to push her gently aside and lie next to her on the bed, and by the time she finishes mumbling “what are you doing” he is already asleep.

He doesnt wake up shoved on the floor, so it must have been all right. Brienne’s already up and dressed when he blinks awake and she doesn't say anything about it, so he doesn't say anything about it, and it seems a perfectly ordinary thing to do.

It happens more or less the same way the next night, first her collapsing and him after, and she’s up and dressed before he even stirs.

The third time she lingers, lets him lie down first, fooling around with various little unnecessary duties though she is plainly tired enough to drop. Jaime takes a deep breath and makes a big production of getting into the bed and taking up all of the blankets and she scoffs at him, noisily, watching. She hesitates, but eventually crawls into the bed, yanks back one blanket for herself and curls up on her side beside him.

After that it is just something they do, without ceremony or thought.

If he ever did stop to think about it, it would be frankly bizarre that he would find himself regularly sleeping chastely beside a woman he adores after spending most of his life fucking a woman that he could never actually share a bed with. He's gone from one extreme to another. But he doesn’t think on that, barely even breathes in that direction so as not to upset this delicate balance between them, which has quickly become a cornerstone of his continued sanity during all this madness.

The desire is definitely there, a heavy presence between them. For Jaime, at least. But he is frequently so pulverized by the continuing siege that whatever thoughts might feint in that direction lack the energy to take any action. His body mostly hurts, is bruised and battered and cut, muscles strained from long hours standing and fighting, and to lie still is luxury itself. There is a safe zone of six inches between them, and he does not consider crossing it.

Though the space between them is breached from time to time, in their sleep, when warmth and comfort become too tempting for their unconscious selves to fight. He wakes with an arm around her waist, or with her breath hot against his neck where she has turned in to him, or her hands pressed up against his chest, and he has to reluctantly pull away, so that he will not be tempted to push further.

Twice after such an awakening he has to go out and walk in the snow until his blood cools, and the desires of his body fade enough to return, and one of those times she is awake and sitting by the fire when he does. She has a knowing sort of look then, but it’s not entirely clear what she knows. Does she notice that he wants her? Does she have urges of her own? She seems to lie easily beside him after he returns, so perhaps she is unaware. She seems wholly innocent, never showing the same need to cool any desires. Either she is not tempted herself or she is a lot better at concealing it.

It should be more pain than pleasure to lie beside her at night and not reach for her, not hold her close. In ordinary times, it would be. But during the siege, when all the world is upside down and their waking hours terrorized by unnatural creatures, people take whatever comfort they can. Soldiers in the barracks sleep piled up against each other to hear the sounds of living men, breathing and coughing and murmuring, as a bulwark against the dead outside. The physical press of bodies around them reminds them they are alive. The Wintertown whores have customers aplenty, but often only to hold them close and let them sleep against their breast.

Jaime and Brienne have each other every single night. Whatever is between them, they know they are fortunate to have it.

He does think sometimes that she wants him to touch her.

It’s how she leans into his body sometimes, when they are huddled close together, and the way she stills herself when he puts his hand on her shoulder. He tests it sometimes, brushes closer than necessary, lets their fingers touch over the table. Lingers a moment when she hands him things.

It’s very slight. She is so difficult to read. Her face betrays nothing like approval or pleasure at such moments, and she certainly does not make any attempt to touch him in return. She is as aloof and reserved as ever, entirely self-contained and apart from everyone; the walls around her as fortified and guarded as Winterfell.

And he has thought many things, in the past, that were only what he wanted to believe, and not the truth.

Jaime can’t quite tell what the others believe is going on between he and Brienne. They get knowing looks and whispers sometimes, typical gossip. Even at the end of the world there is still that. It has not gone unnoticed that they share a room together, and that he is ever at her side. But other times he hears only about her engagement to Tormund, which the wildlings they fight beside heartily approve of. They consider Brienne practically one of them, part of the family, because of their leader’s attachment to her.

Rarely does anyone say anything directly about it. Perhaps unsurprisingly it is Sandor Clegane, on his grim rounds, who stops to watch Brienne hurling an enormous piece of stonework over the wall and onto some target below.

The Hound shakes his head, looking askance at Jaime. “All the women in the world, and he wants that one.”

“Funny, is it?” Podrick says sharply, prepared to defend his lady.

“It’s a laugh. Except,” he shakes himself up and down here, sending snow flying off his furs in little clouds, “except I like the lady. And it’s a bit cruel, what he’s doing.”

Pod looks between the two of them warily. “Cruel how?”

“Coz she’s meant for the likes of me. Or that wilding fuck that wants her. Cunts like him,” he gestures rudely at Jaime, “they get the beautiful ones. Like the Queen, like Lady Sansa. That’s how this is gonna end up, you see. Sure, he wants your friend now, and he’ll probably get her. Cunts like him always get what they want. But before long he’ll have a prettier wife lined up, and he’ll put her aside. She’s better off with some bloke who can’t do no better.”

“Even if she doesn’t love him?” Pod asks, and Jaime holds his breath.

“Specially then,” Clegane emphasizes. “That one, she’s not going to let any man hurt her except she loves him. She marries, she should marry a bloke she can be mates with and no more. Then she won’t get her heart broken.”

“Everyone is full of opinions about courtship. But I cannot help but notice,” Jaime speaks up with much of his old acidity, “that not one of those people has been successful in love themselves.”

“Not like you, Lannister,” the Hound retorts.

Sometimes, alone in the dark, they talk. When the fire has burned out and they are only the outlines of shapes turned towards each other in the bed, and they cannot see their faces a few hands-breadths away, they talk.

She asks him, in the dark, about the weight he is carrying, if it is any lighter. He had confessed to her before the regrets he has, how nearly every decision he has made has turned out wrong. Years of his life lost to a terrible mistake, sometimes one after another. But he does not like to speak of it, even to her.

“You cannot understand,” he tells her, trying to shut down the conversation and get some sleep.

“I have my own sins,” she says thoughtfully.

Jaime is amused. “Your sins. The sins of honorable knight Brienne. They must be dark and terrible indeed. Tell me, did you fail to rescue a kitten from a tree? Trample some flowers?”

Brienne glares at him, he can feel it in the dark. It angers her, clearly, to be so dismissed. “I am no septa, Ser Jaime. I have things to regret.” Much to his surprise, and perhaps to hers as well, she continues on. “I abandoned my duties on Tarth, my family, my father, for my own selfish reasons. Whatever your mistakes, you have been true to your house. That is more than I can say.”

She stops short, gathering herself again. It upsets her, this admission.

“Tell me,” he asks her. Suddenly he is very awake and alert.

“It’s difficult to explain,” she says awkwardly.

“Try,” he urges her. “That is, if you would not mind confessing a few regrets to someone with far worse on his conscience. I’m sick of my own problems – distract me, will you? You know all my secrets. I know so little of you, it seems a bit unfair.”

Brienne sounds perplexed. “So little? There is not so much to know. And it’s not very interesting, I’m afraid.”

“I’m interested.” Just how interested, he tries not to reveal, keeping his tone carefully neutral.

He has to wait for her to begin. You can’t interrupt Brienne if you want her to tell you anything, at the slightest provocation she will wall herself up and you’ll get nothing more from her that night. He’s learning some patience for this, waiting for her to talk.

A long breath.

“My father... is a very stern man, very serious and proud. Except not with me, not always. To me he is softer, when he can be. For a while I was the youngest child, and he was fond of me. I had two elder brothers who would carry the family line, and it did not matter so much that I was… well, me.”

She is quiet far too long, gathering her thoughts. Jaime waits as long as he can manage. “You have never mentioned brothers?”

“They died. One quite young, when I was a child, the other older, when I was twelve. Poor Galledon... He would have made a fine Evenstar if he only lived.” She smiles fondly, and he can hear the smile in her voice. “I adored him. He was kind and gallant, a fine swordsman. I thought he was the bravest and best knight in the world.”

“Was he a better fighter than you?”

“Hard to say. I did not play at swords so much then. I took that up in earnest when he died.” She shifts, turns onto her back, one arm flung up across her face. “But I know he would have been better. He was all that I am and much more. Strong, clever, quick. Graceful. I sparred with him only once and he did not go easy on me. I didn’t get a touch on him. But he didn’t laugh at me either, even though I had no earthly idea what I was doing. Galladon never laughed at me like the others did. Even then I was almost this size – 12 years old and larger than grown men. I thought I’d never stop growing. I prayed it would stop, and the gods did not listen.”

She turns her head back only briefly, to see if Jaime is still listening. He is, raptly.

“Anyway, Galladon drowned in the sea when a storm arose more quickly than he could find shore. It took days to find him and even then we could hardly believe it. And then there was only me...”

A plaintive note enters her voice at this last word.

“Suddenly everything fell to me. The last of my line, the one to carry on the name. Imagine my poor father. I must be matched to a suitable house, but none would have me. What matches were made ended… poorly.”

Brienne shifts uncomfortably, and skirts over that subject.

“After a few… disasters, I simply refused to continue. No more engagements, no more parties, no more court. It wasn’t just the marriage prospects that were a disaster, I was terrible at all of it. The clothes, the manners, the…” she trails off, gesturing helplessly.

“Lying?” he suggests, archly.

“… Politics,” she substitutes. “Sitting at a table full of people who despise you and smiling at them. Making speeches. I was hopeless in every way.”

“You are honest and straightforward,” Jaime says.

Brienne fights his attempt to soften her words, grows markedly more passionate. “I was dull and unsuitable. Bad enough to be ugly; worse to be thick on top of it. I’ve since seen other women – wildling women, the women of Bear Island – that fight as I do, but command respect in a way I cannot. I cannot charm people, or make pretty speeches. So imagine it. Me at court, pretending I belonged there. Being trained to lead the Isle, sitting on negotiations with bannermen, granting petitions. It was torment, all of it. None of them wanted me there. I was an embarrassment to the court, and to my House. They said I would be the Evenstar someday, but only because there will be no one else when my father is gone. are no other heirs, not even distant cousins. I was all they had.”

He can imagine that all too clearly. A miserable teenaged Brienne, shy and awkward, burning with humiliation under all those eyes. It must have been awful for her.

“You seem to know the histories of all the houses, so you must know we were once a great house. We had our own kingdom, and the Evenstar was a King. The Stormlands were ours, and more besides. Now we have only the Sapphire Isle, and soon enough not even that. To name me Evenstar would surely be a joke. No one would listen to me. Our bannermen would flee us. Even now, with a sword in my hand, none will credit me until I hit them with it. If I took the family seat, they would only laugh at me. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Fighting, that I can do. I’m strong, and I took to it. I worked hard – my master-at-arms taught me how to use men’s expectations against them, and it has served me well. Swordplay is the only thing I have ever excelled at. I thought perhaps, if I could be good enough, it would be a way to honor my house. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Tarth, never that. I love it more dearly than I can say. I just knew that I could do more to help people with a blade than by sitting uselessly at court. Joining the war, maybe I could make things better somehow, in some small way.

“And if I should die in it, it would win honor for my house. Perhaps it would be enough. We could end in some kind of glory, rather than the shame of ending with me.”

Brienne trails off. She rarely speaks so much all at once, and clearly it is strange to her.

“So I left,” she forces herself to finish. “I rode off to war with Renly Baratheon, and thought if I died at his defense at least I would have been of some use to someone. Father, he… he tried to stop me. He is growing old and his only living child was leaving him. I’m afraid I was not kind. I prepared in secret. Gathered what arms I could beg or borrow. Cut off my hair – it used to be quite long, all down my back. I stole away in the night, in secret, without a word to anyone. I rode for the shipyard, intending to take the first boat at sunrise.”

“Unfortunately,” she sighs, “I cannot disguise myself, however I may try, and stealth is not one of my skills either. I was seen leaving, and was easy to find at the docks. By sunrise, Father caught up with me. He begged me not to go. Begged. No one should ever have to see their father beg, Ser Jaime. It was awful. But I hardened my heart and did not listen.”

She is quiet a long while after that, and pulls in a shaky breath to continue.

“He only wanted to preserve our family, to keep the Sapphire Isle under the Tarth name. All I had to do was stay, sit in a stuffy room now and then, marry and have a child. No more than women everywhere do every day, no more than Lady Catelyn and so many others have done. It is not so terrible a thing. I could have done it. But I was selfish and I chose my own way, and now there will be no more Tarths. My father will die knowing he is the last Evenstar.”

That’s the finish of her story, he knows, but he wants to hear more. This is a rare opportunity, to hear her talking about her past. She has never done it before.

“Is that why?” he asks.

He can’t bring himself to finish the thought. Saying the words “why you’re marrying Tormund” makes it too real. He thinks she will understand him anyway.

She thinks it through.

“My father is... He is unwell. I learned of it before the dragon attack. They took him off the island to shield him from Greyjoy’s marauders and he has not borne up under the strain. The fear is that he will not long survive as a fugitive, moving from one place to another. Even if I were to come to his aid, and protect him from Euron’s forces, I could not protect him from illness. He is simply old, and not what he was.”

“When I learned that, I thought… If I return with an heir -- a legitimate heir -- it would make up for what I’ve put him through. Put all of Tarth through. It would settle everything. Father could die knowing that his legacy is secure.”

Jaime grimaces. What she put them through - by existing? By being herself? By pursuing her own dreams? But he bites his tongue, fearing she will stop talking if he tries to interrupt.

Tentatively, she adds: “Tormund offered marriage and he promised our firstborn to Tarth. It strengthens the North’s bond to the wildlings and makes them more willing to follow my command. And he actually desires me, unlike the political matches that my father made for me. It seems a fair arrangement, sensible.”

A fair arrangement. That is an infuriatingly low bar to wed the Maid of Tarth. He grinds his teeth at it.

“Is it truly necessary though?” He chances disagreeing with her. “What if you went back now? Surely you will want to see your father before he passes, if you wait until you have born him a grandson it could be too late. After the siege, with all of your success in the field, having lead men in battle -- couldn’t you take up Tarth yourself, and think of heirs later? Surely they would be proud to have you now, with all you have done.”

“I can’t.” She shifts again, restlessly. “I can’t go back. I will only shame him, returning like this. I haven’t done anything worthy yet. I’ll have failed, and I’ll never be deserving of Tarth. They would take me back regardless, and make do if they must, but I would know. I would know.”

Then he is angry -- at Brienne’s father, at her bannermen, at all these people who made her feel inadequate and worthless. They’ve hurt her terribly, when they should have protected her, treasured her, like the wonder she is.

Jaime speaks up suddenly. “Is he stupid?”

“Excuse me?” Brienne draws back sharply.

“Your father. I’ve never met the man. How foolish is he? Has he his wits?”

“My father is no fool,” she says coldly.

Don’t insult the father. Noted.

“Good.” Jaime raises his voice, and puts all of his easy confience into his words. “Then you will have nothing to worry about. You have already made him proud. Brienne, you were raised to one King’s guard and served him faithfully. You killed another King yourself on the field of battle. You rescued Sansa Stark and served under the King in the North. You fought a dragon and blinded him. You challenged the Dragon Queen. And, of course, you escorted Queen Cersei’s foolish brother to King’s Landing and saved his life on more than one occasion. When they write the histories of the War of the Five Kings and the War for the Dawn, you will be all over them. How could he not be proud of you, if he is no fool?”

Brienne stumbles over her words. “But I -- you exaggerate --”

“If anything, I understate the facts. You are a hero. They will be writing songs of you before this war is done.”

Brienne’s voice is strange. “No one will write songs of me.”

“If they have any decent singers in the North, they will. If they’re too slow about it, I’ll write some myself.” He grins at her. “But no one will want to hear me sing them, I’m afraid. Tyrion has always said my singing could strip the paint off of a fence.”

“I can confirm that,” Brienne says dryly, with an amused tone. Probably remembering his rendition of Two Maidens in a Pool, on the road to King’s Landing.

“If I should meet your father, I will sing your praises - in words if not actual song. Bring me to him and I’ll make him see. Tarth will be proud of you, Brienne. They should have been honored to have you in the first place, but it will be blindingly obvious when you return.”

He can see only her outline against the embers of the fire, and the shape of her holds very still. Perhaps she is considering his words.

Brienne starts to say something, perhaps to contest him, but stops. Instead she says quietly, “Thank you.”

Then one night she doesn’t return to their room with him after their shift, doesn’t appear even though he waits and waits. He sits up watching the door for her return. How is he supposed to get any sleep without her? It’s unacceptable. He puts on a coat and goes out to look for her.

Jaime searches for her all through the Great Keep, every room of which is crowded with people taking shelter, Winterfell is crammed from cellar to rafters, and he knows he will not find her anywhere there are people. If she is hiding herself she will not want to be in the way or to disturb anyone. He finds her in the Rookery where the ravens wait restlessly through the endless night and no more messengers come to give them purpose. She thinks no one would think to look for her here, or perhaps that no one would look for her at all, except he does. He freezes in the doorway when he sees her, still armored, sitting on the floor in the dim candlelight beneath a hundred shivering black wings.

Tears roll down her cheeks silently. She does not move to wipe them away, only stares miserably up at the ravens with her jaw clenched tight.

She never turns her face to look at him, even when he crosses the room and sits down beside her. She only wipes hurriedly at her cheeks.

“I’ve ruined it,” she says softly, and the ravens flutter quietly above their heads.

“Tormund?” he guesses. She sees the wildling sometimes, when they come down from the walls, before she comes back to their room. He never asks her where they go or what they do together; doesn’t want to know.

“Yes.” She looks down at her hands wringing each other in her lap. “He has broken off our betrothal.”

He should be elated. Some shameful part of him is.

But Brienne is crying, and this is the worst thing that could ever happen. He has never seen her cry before, not when the bloody mummers threatened to rape her or when Catelyn Stark died or when she took wounds that would set most men to wailing for their mothers. Brienne crying fills him with a helpless kind of panic.

She’s keeping her voice low, perhaps so as not to rile up the ravens. He can hear it quivering slightly, trying to contain more tears.

“This is four. The fourth time I’ve failed an engagement. It must be some sort of record.”

“He will change his mind,” he says, with some reluctance. “He would be a fool not to.”

“No, he won’t.” She sounds completely certain, and there is note of something -- pride perhaps? -- that he cannot quite identify. “I wouldn’t give him what he wanted.”

A sudden stab of anger pierces him at those words. “He wasn’t ungentlemanly with you, was he? I’ll kill him.”

She snorts at his tone. “No, it’s nothing like that.”

She still isn’t quite looking at him. Her eyes are red-rimmed, but by now they are dry. She can turn back her tears so quickly when she is observed. He wonders if there have been other times, with other tears, that she has hidden from him.

“Is it me?” He hesitates to ask. He’s not entirely sure what he’s asking, really. Perhaps Tormund got the wrong idea, seeing them together. Perhaps he knows that Jaime wants her, and Brienne has not pushed him away quickly enough. Or perhaps he knows that there is something between them that is more than either of them can explain.

She doesn’t answer that. She only wraps her arms around her knees and hunches over them.

“I’ve been going about this wrongly,” she says. “I think I’ve been cruel to him.”

Jaime immediately disagrees. “You could never be cruel.”

Cersei was cruel. He knows real cruelty. Brienne is not capable of such things.

She seems to grow sadder, and bows her head into her arms. “I would like to be alone please,” she says in a small voice that tears at his heart.

The ravens shiver again, restlessly.

He finds Tormund in the great hall, where between the daily meals one can find ale and mead. He sits with his own band of fighters, who serve the West wall, on the same shift as theirs. That red beard shines out across the hall, and Jaime rushes straight over.

“There he is,” Jaime announces himself, once standing beside his chair, “the stupidest man alive.”

He hurt Brienne. He made her cry. Jaime’s inclined to club him in the face with his gold-plated hand for that. It made a very satisfying image all the walk here from the rookery.

But the red-haired barbarian goes on drinking from his flagon, uninterested in anything Jaime has to say. His compatriots at the table look up, over to their leader, and then shrug and resume their drinking.

Jaime gets his first inkling that this isn’t going to go quite the way he had envisioned.

Still, with slightly diminished force, he goes on accusingly. “I cannot imagine what would possess a wildling lucky enough to be engaged to Brienne of Tarth to cast her aside. Have you lost your senses?”

“Might have,” the wildling mutters. It may be literally true, Jaime realizes. Tormund is deeply, blisteringly drunk.

“You don’t understand what you had.” Jaime's hand fists at his side. “If you did you could never walk away from that woman.”

Tormund looks vaguely irritated. “Right. That's why I’m sitting here guzzling this weak southern piss you call ale when I should be asleep in my bunk. Because I don't know what I had.”

He drains the rest of his flagon and slams it down on the table, wiping at his mouth. The other wildlings don’t seem to take much notice of that; such gestures are commonplace among this unruly bunch.

“I went too fast, I think.” He’s more mumbling to himself than actually speaking to Jaime. Even for a wildling, he’s sozzled. “These southern girls want you to marry them first; say the words, switch your cloaks. I can do that, okay. Seemed to please her I offered. I think she liked being engaged to me. It's everything else she don't really want. I thought I could persuade her but all she really wants is to be with you.”

Jaime must have looked startled at this claim, because the ginger man points at him accusingly.

“M'not an idiot. I got eyes. I see you two together all hours of the day; fighting together, hell, you share the same bed. I thought she'd forget about you once we were on the walls, I could make her forget. But it's only gotten worse.”

Damn. It’s true then, he's ruined this for her.

“Listen…” Jaime has to steel himself. Brienne's tears, he reminds himself. Brienne hurting. “I've had some… difficulties and she's been watching out for me. She lets me share her bed to help me sleep. But there's nothing untoward about it. We are only friends, nothing more than that. I've never touched her.”

The ginger man looks, if anything, more exasperated. “But that's worse! Don't you see how that's worse?” He shakes his head disgustedly and takes another gulp of ale. “If you were just fucking it’d be one thing. But that's something else. What even is that?”

“She's a good woman,” Jaime emphasizes. “Honorable. She would not be unfaithful, not ever.”

“Ain’t worrying about that.” Tormund refills his flagon, dipping it into the barrel on the floor behind him. “Look, I know she dont like me much - but I can work with that. Give me time and I’ll charm her. I’ll win her over. I can do anything you can do better, Lannister. Hell, if it's fucking I can do that better too. I'm good at fucking. But this? I don't fit into this. I want a contest I can win outright, not by forfeit. I don't know why she even said she’d have me, when she’s only got eyes for you. And you're just as bad. What are you doing here?”

Jaime shifts uncomfortably. “I’m asking you to reconsider.”

“For fuck's sake, why? Everybody knows you want her for yourself. But you’re here all politely asking me to take her back; why? Because she was sad and you couldn't take it? What the fuck is that?”

He has no reply to it; put that way, it’s plainly ludicrous.

“What's she even sad about? It ain't me, friend. I’m just jumped in the middle of you two. You go back and ask her what she's really sad about.”

Jaime swallows another ounce of pride. “You're the better option. She needs to bring home a husband to Tarth and the Kingslayer is not going to win them any allies. It might actually lose them some.”

“Not my problem.” Tormund slams down his mug and steps back from the table. “Yes, I'm the better man for certain. You're probably gonna fuck this up before the war’s even over. When that happens, you better believe I'll be right back at her side. But you think I'm gonna take a wife who wishes she was somewhere else, you think wrong. I’m not a training dummy for you two to put between you, and I don’t much like being used. I got feelings too, you know.”

Jaime stares back at him, startled, with sudden sympathy. He knows, after all, how it is to be infatuated with Brienne of Tarth.

‘I've been cruel’, Brienne had said. Perhaps they both have.

Tormund sees his expression change, and scoffs. “Now don't start getting honorable at me too. Go back to glaring at me from a distance like a proper rival and let me drink in peace. Fucking southerners.”

Jaime walks along the top of the inner walls just after this, deep in thought. The walls of Winterfell come in layers, with inner walls providing additional defense should the outers fall. The battle still rages along the outer walls of winterfell, but the inner walls are nearly abandoned at this in-between hour, leaving him a lot of room to pace.

Often Jaime struggles to identify what he is feeling. When there is a lot of it his emotions are mostly indecipherable to him. He wouldn’t bother trying to figure it out except Brienne keeps asking him how he feels, and if he says he doesn’t know she gives him a worried look, and then he has to come up with an answer. Generally he’ll pick one candidate out of the howling pile of terrible feelings and try to give it a name for her. Angry. Sad. Exhausted. Frustrated. Ashamed. He’s getting better at that, slowly.

Jaime tries it now. He leans against the stone and closes his eyes and picks at the knot of hot acrid emotion churning in his gut until something comes loose and he can see what it is. What he comes up with is fear. A useless emotion; he just about throws it back. But that’s what most of it is, it seems like -- he’s afraid. He thinks of himself as fearless but here he is, scared to face a woman without the shield of some other obligation between them. This is exactly what he wanted, to have Brienne to himself, and he’s afraid of it. Why?

Because he doesn’t know for certain how she feels? Because she might not want him? Because she might think she wants him, but once she has him, might feel otherwise? Because he’s useless to her? Because he’s an aging disgraced knight and even Cersei had tired of him eventually? Because he doesn’t know a damned thing about how to love somebody, and what he thought was the great love of his life was a grand delusion?

This is the heart of it. In the middle of everything else he has been given to understand how many things he had gotten very, very wrong in his life and chief among them is Cersei. He will never fully understand how wrong it had been. He had loved her. He can’t take back all the years of his life he had given her, for he’d done it freely and out of love; but that it was wrong, it was terrible and it was wrong and it should not have happened, he knows it, even if he will not understand it. She was his sister, his twin sister, and he should have loved her as a sister and not as a lover -- he should have, but he didn’t. If you followed them back into childhood and innocence they had loved each other rightly once, before it all went wrong, but there is no going back, it’s too late.

But what if.

What if he should not love Brienne that way either? What if Sansa is right, and Sandor Clegane and essentially everyone is right, and it would be as wrong for him to be Brienne’s lover as it was to be Cersei’s? Maybe the right thing is what they have now, a friendship, and pressing for more would be crossing a line that they can never un-cross? Brienne is a good woman and a true knight and probably the best person he will ever know, and she deserves a man who can love her rightly. Someone who isn’t broken inside, and a cripple, and a sister-fucker, and a man without honor. Even if it feels right to him, more right than anything ever has, he has been wrong before. He cannot trust his feelings. No matter what he tells himself -- that they have a bond, that he knows how to care for her, that he will be a better man with her -- they may be only more delusions, the way he had been deluded about what he had with Cersei.

It may be that he should go on loving Brienne the way he always has, secretly. Keep things as they are. Protect her when he can, make sure she survives the war, make her laugh and patch her armor and threaten to murder anyone who gets in her way but never touch her as a lover, let her marry someone else.

It may be that he cannot ask her to love him back. That asks too much.

It makes him angry, that thought. It’s so fucking unfair. If he had been another man, or if he had been himself and had no love in his heart, then surely he would have lived a happier life. Instead he is choking on it, all this love he has had, that no one has wanted.

It all turns around and around in his mind as he paces along the walls until he is near the Guard house, and he notices he is shivering. He’s gotten used to wearing his armor outside under his coat, and the wind is picking up.

It must be due to the wind that he doesn’t notice Brienne coming until she is nearly upon him. Still in her own armor, wearing her fur cape. Perhaps she returned to their room eventually and couldn’t find him. They have been looking around for each other all night, it seems.

She joins him quietly at the railing, standing just at his shoulder.

He sighs and bends over the ballistrade, looking down at the East Gate. He should convince her to return without him. It has caused trouble enough, their sharing a room, and a bed, and he suddenly feels foolish for it.

This indefinable something has been left unnamed for too long, he fears. It could ossify into a shapeless form that serves neither of them, and drives him mad with longing. Even he can only torture himself for so long in this way.

He turns his head to look at her sidelong and see that she too stares straight ahead. She would cross to the opposite end of Winterfell to find him and then stand beside him and not talk, not even look at him. They want to be near each other and they cannot meet each other’s gaze, and he cannot explain it at all.

Still, despite all he had told himself earlier, he can’t stand before her and feel nothing. He can only think how ludicrous she is, towering over him in the starched wool cloak and fur collar that makes her shoulders look even more broad and sturdy, with her hands behind her back so formally. Her hair is a mess of tiny pale curls that needs more combing, flattened by long hours underneath a helmet.

He wants her hands on his chest and not behind her back. He wants to comb through those curls with his fingers and watch them fall into place beneath his hand. Standing here he wants so badly to kiss her. Wants in a way that isn’t sweet anymore, it’s heavy on his chest and he can’t breathe for it. Wanting something within reach is one thing; wanting something you will never have is agonizing. He can tell himself that he will forget it in time, but looking at her he knows he won’t. He is not that kind of man. He will want this forever. For the rest of his life he will wonder what she would taste like, what would have happened if he had kissed her.

Brienne takes a deep breath, as if to say something important.

Suddenly the air shivers with tension, as though anticipating her words. But it isn’t her words at all that break the icy quiet.

A sudden increase in volume from the walls, with much shouting and alarm, catches both of their attention instead. The shapes of men along the tops of the walls are moving, suddenly moving very quickly, and all in one direction -- towards the East Gate.

He hears Brienne take a sharp inhale and hold it, much as he holds his own breath. A heavy, black dread enters his body and sinks all through it, down to his feet. Whatever is happening out there, it is nothing good.

Then there is an enormous crash at the East gate. It bends; the gate bends inward as though struck by a battering ram. But they haven’t got battering rams, have they? That has been one of the few things they have not had to worry about in this siege.

The crash issues again, with many subsequent smaller creaks and groans, the sound of wood and metal shearing and tearing.

The both of them grip the ballustrade tightly, unable to see what’s happening but only envision it with a creeping dread.

Then the East gate shudders and breaks through. Pierced by the horn of some abominable creature that sticks out a foot or more through the door, black and solid and huge.

All of the breath leaves his body at the sight. This is it. We’re done. We’re out of time.

The terrible black horn pulls back and leaves a gaping wound in the gate, its doors parted just enough to allow the smaller creatures through. The great horned creature charges again, and blasts the doors completely open.

The wights will be in the outer courtyard now, and the living will have to move to the inner, and they will only lose ground from there. This the beginning of the end, and the end may be very short indeed.

The bells in the watchtower are ringing, a constant alarm call, calling every soul to arms. Below them, any living men in the courtyard are racing for safety wherever they can find it. Those closest to the inner gates rush to them before they can close and bolt them. Those less lucky, too far to make it, rush for other shelters.

Jaime can see Sam Tarly below, where he has been tending the wounded, where his small band of men are now rushing injured men to the nearest shelter in the Crypts of Winterfell. A red-haired woman aids them, the Lady of Winterfell shouldering a limping man towards the door. Several of the girls who had been running supplies as well. They run for the Crypts as fast as they can, just ahead of the wave of wights that is just beginning to come through the gate.

They won’t last long there. The Crypts are not meant to keep things out. Once the courtyard is overrun they’ll beat down the door and they’ll all be slaughtered.

Brienne looks at him, horrorstruck.

He looks back at her. We’re out of time, he thinks again, with considerably more anguish. Gods, what fools they have been. All these weeks and months, and years before that, and all that time they could have loved each other, and now it is too late. They will all die here, and soon.

Her blue eyes are wide and aghast, turning back to the rent in the main gate. Her jaw works silently for a moment and her whole body freezes, rigid with despair.

“No,” she whispers, denying it, her breath coming in short shocks. He can see her already gathering herself to go on fighting, looking for some way to stop it. There’s no way to stop it. But she’s going to try.

She is in the same danger we all are, but it will be worse for her. Brienne of Tarth will face the most terrible of the horrors to come. And you know she will take as many blows as she can, to protect the rest of us. She does not value her life as we do. It will kill her, if you cannot stop it. You are the only one who can.

All at once Jaime thinks of Bran’s prophecy, and he thinks of Sam Tarly, one of the only friends he’s ever had, and Sansa Stark, who he is responsible for, and he decides.

He grabs Brienne by the shoulders and kisses her.

A hurried kiss, but passionate. Her lips part in surprise and he captures them between his own, clutches at her with all the strength he has to hold her firmly against his body.

When he lets her go she is awestruck, speechless. Her pretty blue eyes have never been so enormous before, and they are ringed with confusion.

“I love you,” he tells her, with complete conviction, looking directly into her eyes. He has to make sure she knows. “I’ve always loved you.”

Brienne looks even more bewildered at his words. “What?”

There’s no time for anything else. Jaime shoves Brienne backwards over the wall, into the Inner Courtyard, away from the invading wights. The breach is on the other side. She will be safer there.

She lands flat on her back in the snow banks that line the walls and sits up immediately. “Jaime!”

He turns away from her and runs along the top of the wall. She won’t be able to catch him now. They’re closing the gates, she’ll have to find a tower nearby and climb to the top, and by then it will be too late.

“JAIME!”

He hears her scream powerfully from over the wall and lets it carry him down, down to where the fighting is, sword drawn and ready.

It takes only two minutes to reach the crypts door, but it is a very long two minutes. In that time he slashes and rends and pushes past a dozen wights in succession, and finds the door shut firmly when he arrives. He pounds loudly at the door.

“Open up!” He has to turn to slash again at a press of the creatures around him. “Hurry!”

“For gods sake!” he shouts again, knowing that he has only seconds left. “I’m not a wight, open the door!”

The door opens a crack and he throws himself against it, shouldering the door open and stumbling into the darkness beyond it, never seeing who had opened it for him.

He descends into darkness, down the stone steps, screams echoing at him from every direction. There is something familiar about this place, though he has never been here. He had a dream very like this once.

He’s still feeling that kiss, the taste of Brienne’s lips, and he is lighter than air. That wasn’t how he had wanted to do that, he’d really have liked a more detailed declaration of love and a less rushed kiss, but it’s done. If he should never set foot outside this place again, at least he has that kiss to go on, at least he told her the truth. The kiss was for him; his death is right over his shoulder and he can’t die without kissing her at least once. But the words were for her. He wants her to know. She should live on knowing that she was loved, loved completely and without reservation.

Above him the army of the dead pounds into Winterfell, and Jaime follows the steps down into the crypts of Winterfell where the injured and defenseless living under the charge of the Lady of Winterfell take shelter amongst the dead.

They have no way of knowing that all around them, already dead Starks are stirring in their graves, and the Kings of Winter are about to awaken.

#amfas #this kept me busy today and for that I am glad #mostly I am trying to technically hit my stated goal of posting before this episode airs #also just in case the episode goes badly we may all need fic after #and either way I'm not going to be in a shape to finish this for a few days yet #okay enough stalling press post

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