Forged
Author's note: Prompted by discussion of that final look on Tyrion's face before he falls unconscious in 'Blackwater.' Let's all pretend GRRM didn't already write this mmkay?
A line of fire splits his face, and in the span of a moment, Tyrion's world shrinks to pain and a scream he thinks might be his own and the squelch of mud as his knees threaten to give out beneath him. Everything is cast in a hellish green glow, and he is blinking back blood, his stomach rebelling at the shock - though somewhere in the part of his mind that can think beyond I'm going to die here he realizes he should have expected this. Untrained as he was, he shouldn't have made it this far, but that is a cold comfort when Tyrion knows full well that his charge dies with him. These people die with him. His city - the one that scorns him and spits on him and chants for him when their cause is all but lost - dies with him.
The world is moving sluggishly around him, men dying in stages, just as he is. The heat of battle had been on him only a moment ago, but he shivers now, wildfire-licked air cooling the sweat that breaks out on his skin. It is only his face that feels hot now, his skin slipping away as it melts and slides down his skull. Forged in the fires of R'hllor, Tyrion thinks hysterically, clawing weakly at the wound, and he could almost laugh, but instead he thinks he might be sobbing.
No one can hear him anyway; there are so many screams that his pitiful noises drown among them, and Tyrion thinks it only right, since those screams are his work as well. His work, his men bleeding and burning and dying. His work, and for what?
It had not been enough. He had not been enough, had never been enough. The thoughts are old and jumbled and frantic; Tyrion cannot keep a hold on them long enough to put them together into something coherent, but he knows the sick feelings that come with them well enough. If anyone wanted him, it was only when every other course had been exhausted. When he was the only hope remaining to them. A last resort, and a poor one at that. Acceptance of that comes easier now, with his vision swimming in blood and dizziness bringing him to his knees.
Some truths are not worth denying, the work it takes to uphold the facade too great. Once, Tyrion had wanted to live simply because no one else wanted him to - once he had made himself laugh because he had been expected to be miserable - but that seems a long way off now. Even kneeling is a struggle. He hurts, and his city is falling, and he is a disappointment and a grotesque and a joke. Tyrion's throat aches now too, tight and raw with something over the taste of blood flooding his mouth. There are a thousand men dying around him, and he is alone, and he wonders why.
Why he tried to make himself a place in a world that wasn't his. Why his father hadn't dashed his head into the nearest rock at birth - the way he'd so clearly wanted to do. Why he'd ever wanted to prove them wrong when it was so bloody much work.
Too much work. Tyrion is so tired it takes all he has not to fall face-first in the mud. He is so tired he cannot remember what it was like not to be. He is so tired.
Survival seems a poor prize to strive for - overrated and exhausting. Death may be final - and Tyrion had once thought that the worst of all things - but now he knows. Death may be final, but it is easy.
And Tyrion is so tired of fighting. It is the easiest thing in the world for Tyrion to close his eyes, what strength he had left failing him as his head lolls to the side. (This is what they want, he thinks, but that doesn't matter as much now. He'll give it to them.) There is a joke here somewhere, about dying knee-deep in pig shit, but Tyrion is tired of jokes, too. (His whole life has been one, after all.)
Unconsciousness does not come swiftly enough for his liking. There are arms supporting him as he falls, someone sinking to the ground with him, and he thinks this must be madness - the kind of thing people are said to imagine as they cling desperately to the last vestiges of life. (But Tyrion is not terribly concerned with living. He knows only that he is tired.) In the last moments before the welcoming dark consumes him, he opens his eyes just long enough to catch a glimpse of his father's destrier charging toward him. That must be madness too - or perhaps not, because Tywin Lannister does not stop to even glance at the near-dead body of his dwarf son. Certainly if this had been a fantasy, he could have come up with something better than that.
But, Tyrion supposes, barely managing to focus on the familiar face hovering above his own, even fantasies have their limits. The boy does not love him, but he doesn't hate him either -and that is more than Tyrion dared hope.