Brienne
The Great Keep is full of people bleeding, screaming and dying. In any other fight, Brienne would have been railing against deserters: cravens that in breaking the line were risking the lives of everyone else present.
Today, in her first role as a commander of an army, she had led the whole damn army to a stampede back, almost as soon as the battle had begun.
Her face hurts. She hasn't dared to touch it, doesn't want to make it worse, but blood is pouring into her mouth. Enough that she's taken to just spitting it on the stone flags. It's cut all the way through her cheek, at least in one place. She's not even sure how it happened, but she knows when; trying to get to Jaime, trying to pull that thing off his head, she had felt a slice of heat from her forehead to her chin. She had just kept going, but now they're inside the Great Keep, now there's some form of temporary defense between them and the dead swarming into Winterfell, she has time to feel the pain.
The worst part is, despite the fact that they're almost certainly going to die, perhaps within the hour, the thing she can't stop thinking about is how it's going to scar. Whether Jaime will kiss her again if it twists her mouth into a snarl.
She's run like a girl from the fight. Now she can't stop thinking like one. Pathetic. Coward.
Jaime's pushed up to the staircase, up past where they can see any doors or windows, and he's sat down with his head to his knees, shivering. She can hear the Mormonts, still clean from their lack of battle, wrestling against the crowd to try and shut the doors to the Keep. She can't find it within herself to help. She sits down next to Jaime and stares into space as people run past, lie down, vomit, hide. Just beneath them, lower down on the staircase where it turns a corner, an Unsullied drags his fellow soldier into the space, sits him upright, speaks to him desperately in Low Valyrian. The soldier is only responding in laboured breaths. Sounds to her like blood in the lungs. He won't live long.
She holds her sword in both hands. Points it straight ahead of her. Studies the patterns of Valyrian steel dappling its surface, white-black-red. She's done this many times before, knows every ripple and the order of its colours, but it's never been coated in the entrails and skin and black rotten liquid of a corpse before, so it adds some variety to the image.
She would ask where Pod is, but even if he's alive there's nothing she can do to help him.
The quality of the light filtering through to them in the close-to-black corridor changes. Where once it was a flickering orange, it shifts to a sickening blue. Outside, she can hear only noise, formless.
The Night King's dragon. She only caught a glimpse before she had run for the Keep, but it had smashed through the walls like a blade through flesh. Her last glimpse of the outside, she had seen the dead streaming through the hole it had created, and she should have kept fighting. Coward, she had run, and if the Seven took her tonight, she would be going to the Seven Hells, she was sure of it.
And if the old gods have a hell, she thought, I am certainly already there.
Beneath her, the ragged breaths shallow, and then slacken, as the Unsullied soldier's body slides sideways from the wall. His compatriot shudders out a cry of anguish and holds the body close, cradling it against his chest as he sobs.
"Brienne!"
Arya. She's standing before she can feel the urge to, her sword held close and ready, looking up as Arya Stark takes the stairs down two at a time, barges past someone ascending them, stands above Brienne. She's breathing fast, her eyes are wide, but she has all the ferocity and determination behind it that Brienne currently lacks. She's staring at Brienne's face as she talks, not her eyes.
"The walls are down," Arya says. "We need to get to the crypt, now."
Brienne is too shocked to reply. Isn't even sure what Arya wants from her right now. Can't she see that we're all going to die? Can't she see it's over?
"Brienne," Arya prompts, making eye contact, all tenderness lost in a sharp, cold voice. "You swore an oath to protect Sansa. And me. Sansa's in the crypt."
Brienne doesn't say anything.
Arya tries once more, her clear bright eyes giving way to a flicker of vulnerability.
"And I'm right here."
Brienne's face is throbbing.
Arya blinks, breathes in and out, shakes her head, and then rushes past her, down the stairs.
Brienne feels Oathkeeper in her hand.
Brienne's after her before she can even take a breath or spit out all the blood in her mouth, her desperation not to see Arya's death winning over the fear of her own. Behind her, she can hear a movement and clatter that she knows with absolute certainty is Jaime, following behind. She glances back. His hair has stuck to his forehead. He's clenching his teeth so hard she can see his jaw straining, but his eyes seem firmly stuck on her, following without question. It hurts to smile, she's not even sure if she's doing it, but she tries, and his eyes slide from gritted fear to that strange, unguarded look he gave her before he kissed her. She doesn't like looking at that, not like this, and she has to turn away.
She's struggling to catch up as they cross the entryway to the Keep: there are so many bodies of injured and dying littering the ground, you have to pick your way across. Brienne manages to step on a few hands and swords and legs as she makes her way through, but she doesn't particularly care. Two objectives: protect Arya, protect Sansa. She's just going to lock onto those two objectives until she's dead. She can at least fulfil her knighthood in the process.
Arya looks back, from across the Keep, already at the doors of the Great Hall, and smiles grimly to see Brienne coming closer to her, flips her dragonglass spear in her hand.
"Speed up," she says. "We need to get through past the Guest House—"
The flare of blue flame washes out Brienne's vision for a moment. By the time she's stumbling back, the Great Hall is scorched, crumbling, and Viserion is inside of it.
She surges forward, sword up, and Arya wheels back from the doorway, but it's too little and too late. The jaws of the undead monster close around Arya's small body and crushes it before she can even cry out. Flings the broken body across the Hall, behind its seething bulk. Brienne screams, and it turns, mouth opening, boiling blue.
A hand gripping her arm, pulling her sideways, and they're running, running as a creature from only her nightmares snatches away one of her wards, she'd promised to protect her, she'd promised to protect her.
She's part of a retreat again, further and further into the bowels of the castle with a crowd of increasingly desperate and exhausted people. She can hear the unholy sound as it readies itself, not far enough behind, and the corridors light up so bright, so searingly hot, she can barely see or breathe. It's not screaming she hears now, it's the guttural sound of someone's flesh sloughing off of their throat as they scream. The only things keeping her from collapse are Jaime's hand on her arm and her legs propelling her forward towards the Guest House. Sansa. That's all she has left. Protect Sansa.
The blood pouring into her mouth almost chokes her and she stops to cough, spit and gasp, and Jaime drags her along before she's even taken a breath.
"Come on," he screams, voice cracking with the force, and the anger in his voice, finally unrestrained, is so frustratingly familiar that she starts overtaking him, even though her face feels like it's ripping apart, and her lungs are burning. And Arya Stark's ragdoll body, crushed in a thousand teeth, is seared behind her eyes.
They turn a corner, and find that people are rushing from a building into the open air. The Guest House is a gaping, smoking crater filled with bones, rocks and corpses, and the ceiling above them as they run for the outside is tilting alarmingly. A crack from above, a rush of air behind them. She can hear the sounds of bones breaking and air escaping lungs. They don't look back to see, they just keep running. When Jaime finally lets go of her arm to draw his sword, she feels abandoned to the chaos, has to run forward and drag Oathkeeper through a wight, less decomposed than most, perhaps an Umber, before she feels like she's here again.
Above, she hears a screech, and prepares to run back for the collapsing walls of the Keep, but the dragon above her is green and it barrels through the air, lands over in the courtyard on top of two dozen wights and swings its tail around as it breathes fire. As the wights catch light and drop, Brienne takes half a step back, inhales, then rushes directly for the courtyard, past the green dragon, slams every step against the flags as fast as she can until she makes it to the crypt's eastern entryway.
The doors have been forced open.
"Sansa!" she screams, can feel she's torn her mouth saying it, and she's barrelling down into the darkness, sword up ready to strike, and when the first wight screeches in response and sprints for her she cuts it in half. There's a rustling sound and now there are twenty wights, perhaps more, all turning the corner and running for her at top speed, and she swings with enough force to break bone, forgets all technique and just hits until it's dead. She doesn't stop to breathe, can feel blood running down her throat and choking her, just keeps running into the thick of the crypt until she's tripping over Sansa's prone body and falling to the ground.
Jaime vaults over her to cut a wight's head off as she crawls up, takes in the sight. Men, women and children, slumped over tombs and on the ground. There are none left alive, at least none that she can see in this dank hallway. She drops Oathkeeper to the ground, kneels, takes Sansa's face in her hands.
Sansa's not dying. She's dead. Her skin is still warm but there's no intake of breath. Her brows are uncreased, she looks unstressed, her beautiful face is unmarred even by blood, but her bowels have been torn from her body and one of her legs has been broken backwards.
Brienne stares and stares and stares down at the beautiful face in her hands.
She's not crying.
When Renly died, she had lost all control, had gripped his body in her arms and wailed in the anguish and fury of having been so close and not protecting him, like she had pledged.
For some reason, as she looks down at Sansa, thinks of how she died down here in pain and in the dark, she can't find the tears. She can't find anything. She's failed Catelyn Stark and she's failed both her daughters, and all she can feel is empty.
Blood drips from her face onto Sansa's. She's marred her. She swipes it away with a thumb and only manages to smear it, and she rocks back onto her heels, breathing fast and harsh.
She hears something, behind her, and looks back to see Jaime crouched down as well, surrounded by the bodies of the wights he's killed, Widow's Wail flung to the side. He's clinging to a body in his arms, and she doesn't need to ask which one. He's shaking.
She sits back and doesn't look at Sansa, looks at Jaime's back instead, stares at him.
The screaming above them gets quieter, over the minutes. The candles in the crypt burn lower. Jaime slowly loses all decorum as he clutches at Tyrion's body, starts to cry audibly. Brienne can't comfort him, right now, but she keeps watching because it's easier than looking at Sansa.
For a single moment, as Jaime's sobs subside to nothing, there is blissful silence where they sit.
In the corner of her eye, she sees flat blue eyes open.
She's screaming as she stands, fumbles back for her sword and is pulled into a crowd of staring eyes. She knows half the faces, knows Varys even with his face torn open as he bites hard into her shoulder. She kicks him back but children are surging forward to take his place, and she punches into them until she has enough space to turn back and go for her sw—
Sansa.
Sansa's intestines slide from her body as she—it— drags itself over the top of Oathkeeper, grasping its arms at Brienne's legs and crunching its broken leg back and forth. Brienne has to jump over the top of it, can hear herself screaming but can't feel it in her face anymore. Looks to her right and finds Jaime backing away, sword in hand and eyes wide and wet, and he looks at her and looks back at the crowd of wights as they start to break into a run and she can see Tyrion, neck broken and tilted, starting to run—
The next few minutes are silence, to her. She can feel that she's screaming herself hoarse, yelling even though it hurts her mouth to speak, she doesn't have her sword, and Jaime's pressing Widow's Wail into her hand and yelling at her but she has no fucking clue what he's saying, and they're out into the courtyard and it's swarming with the dead blue eyes of their own people, and they're running, she can feel a crowd at her back and they keep running forward, forward, forward, she swings Jaime's sword down over and over, even as hands grasp at their backs or attack from the front and try to pull one or both of them down.
They've left through the western entrance to the crypt instead, and she barely knows where she's going or why, why she doesn't just pick a place to stand her ground and die, but fear is driving her forward, the fear that if she stops, Jaime will stop, and Jaime will die without anything to defend himself, and she'll have lost everyone she ever swore to protect, and she cannot, will not, live with that.
Overhead she hears the awful painful scream of the ice dragon again but this time there are two of them, green and black-blue, chasing down the dragon Daenerys rides upon, and she can see a stream of silver hair on its back. The two dragons erupt ice blue flame and hit their mark and the great black-red dragon roars as it spirals down above them, crashes outside the walls of Winterfell. The other two spear down for the kill.
It takes Brienne a moment to realise, as she looks back down, that all the wights around her have stopped still. Jaime and her stumble to a halt, exchange a hasty glance, look where they're looking. They're looking to the crushed gates of Winterfell.
The storm overhead swirls and grows colder, freezes the blood on her face, and a demon walks through the castle gates.
Clad in black, bald but for its horns spiking to the sky, blue-skinned, eyes- the eyes aren't emotionless, like the rest of the dead blue eyes of its children.
They hate.
Wherever this creature is, it's come with several hundred of its own kind, martial and long-haired and all carrying swords of ice, that march behind it. Their legs all move in unison with their King.
The Night King walks into the courtyard of Winterfell. Brienne and Jaime are frozen in place where they stand, watching from across the destroyed castle grounds as it strides slowly. Not exactly in their direction. Not in the direction of any of the very, very few survivors that she can see dotting the battlefield.
Straight for the godswood.
"Bran," she forces out in a whisper. The look Jaime gives her, tears frozen to his face, eyes open and desperate— it's hell and hope in one lot. One last Stark child to try to defend. Fail to defend.
A scream.
Jon Snow, face bleeding, left arm broken and swinging, bastard sword in hand, charges from the Great Keep across the courtyard, barrelling straight towards the Night King and yelling so loud the world seems to reverberate with it, and the Night King looks up and regards Snow as he crosses the distance so fast that the Night King doesn't even have time to raise his sword, and swings Longclaw to the Night King's neck.
The sword shatters.
Jon Snow stares at his own empty hand.
The Night King observes Jon Snow a fraction of a second more, then pushes the ice sword through his chest.