Time stops existing somewhere between the blood starting to drip its way down Myrcella's face and her body collapsing into his arms like a limp doll.
She breathes fast, eyes wide open with fear as he calls her name, trying to make her focus on him, trying to calm her down, trying desperately to calm his own racing heart and wild terror.
It might be seconds, or minutes, or hours later, but Jaime understands, eventually: poison.
Myrcella was poisoned.
His daughter has been poisoned, and there is nothing he can do about it.
The ship explodes into an uproar after he screams for help, the guards in a frenzy to find the assassin, the Dornish Prince in a panic to find a way to save his fiancé; Bronn, the only man here with any actual sense, assists the doctor in looking for a cure that might save her.
Jaime would help them, means to help them, wants to help them, but once he laid her in the infirmary bed, she had blindly grabbed onto his metal hand in her fevered haze.
He does not leave her side after that.
He knows, without even having to think about it, that the killer will not be found; and if she is, there will be nothing he can do to her. Ellaria Sand is a dangerous woman surrounded by dangerous daughters; with only one hand, he will never be able to touch her.
But he can't focus on any thoughts of revenge for long; Myrcella, with her long golden hair sticking to her damp forehead and the lovely Dornish dress she'd gushed over before they'd left torn away to help her breathe more easily, rasps, "Father," and the hatred mutates into sorrow before the anger can truly fester.
Perhaps he should shush her, with Bronn and the ship's physician still in the room, but one look at her dazed, teary eyes banishes the thought before he can act on it. He doesn't care anymore. Let them talk. It can't make things worse.
Jaime sits beside her the entire time, listening to her gasping breaths, holding her fragile little hand in his one remaining flesh hand, awkwardly pressing a cool cloth to her forehead with his clumsy metal hand and just trying his best to keep her comfortable.
He can't lose her, he can't, not now, not when he can actually be a father to her and Tommen, not until he's apologized for not being there for her until Robert was gone-
She coughs, and gasps, and goes suddenly, horribly silent, and then all he can do is scream.
Time doesn't move forward for a long time in the quiet.
It takes six hours for his daughter to die.
A/N: Why can my faves never be happy?
~Persephone