Chapter notes

Today is my birthday. Here is a present for you!

They went straight from the 'trial,' to the hanging, to the interment. Was that the way they did things in the North? Jaime watched the lid close on Ramsay Bolton's sarcophagus, remembered Yellow Dick's strangled yell as he dropped into the empty air with a rope around his neck, and decided that he did not want to know.

The worst thing of all was how none of it made him feel better. He had imagined that it would; knowing that he had murdered Arya's tormentor; knowing that she knew that it was him, and that he had done it for her. But all that he saw, all that he felt each time he beheld her or thought of her, was his own shame a thousand fold; her screams as they dragged her into the carriage and chained her up; her silent screams across the years that were the fault of his own excuses: people finding out, her finding out, Cersei finding out, and realising that he didn't love her anymore; that he hadn't for a good long while…

Cersei stood opposite him at the interment, with Margaery and Arya and Lady Walda and all of their ladies. Her golden hair hung undressed about her shoulders in a gesture of mourning, but her breasts peeped almost impertinently from the bodice of her black gown; her beauty almost defiant; and suddenly he wanted to embrace her, if only out of a desire to be embraced in return.

The boy Lucion had insisted on standing next to his mother despite Lord Roose's command that he follow tradition and stand with the men. Just before the interment, when the entire household had been assembling in the crypt and awaiting the arrival of their liege lord and their unaccountably-sobbing king, it had been Lucion himself who had marched up to Jaime and told him this; bobbing up and down like an eager child begging for a sweet.

'I won't do it!' Lucion had declared, 'I've said I'll stand with my mother, and that is what I'll do!'

For a moment, Jaime had been so flabbergasted at the child's speaking to him that he hadn't known what to say.

He had settled on a hearty-sounding declaration of 'good lad,' and on mussing the boy's hair in a gesture of imagined camaraderie; his heart choking on itself as he realised that the thick mop of black hair between his fingers felt the same, to the touch, as Arya's did.

'Thank you, Ser Rickard,' Lucion had squeaked, his pale face flushing with pleasure at Jaime's approval, and –

'Lucion!' Arya had barked, 'come here!' –

And the boy had scurried off before Jaime could tell him his real name.

The interment itself had been a sombre, mostly-silent affair. Joffrey had stood tearful, red-eyed and rather quiet in comparison to his earlier bawling (he can't have met Ramsay before – could he?). The king's appearance was in stark contrast to Arya's, who was deathly pale and dry-eyed; her son's hand in hers as a thousand conflicting emotions, including grief, flickered across her face: grief, and a total incomprehension of why she was feeling it. And Jaime thought back to the day that they had arrived at the Dreadfort; when she had ridden into the yard, cruel and indifferent, with a struggling child tied to her saddle; a child whose bonds she had cut, and whom she had watched fall into the mud as though he were a sack of potatoes rather than a human being.

Perhaps my initial instincts were right. Perhaps she is more like Ramsay now.

He pushed the thought away, felt ashamed and looked at her without wanting to.

Arya kept her eyes fixed firmly on the ground as the interment continued; her pale grey irises flickering constantly to the corners of her eyes as she felt Jaime's gaze boring into her, and when he finally looked away from her towards Cersei, he found his twin watching him with hard green eyes, as intently as he had been watching the girl from the North that he should have saved.

Then suddenly, the crypt was empty, and he was standing in the darkness with Arya, who was glaring at him from the other side of Ramsay's sarcophagus.

His abstraction alarmed him.

Did I really just fail to notice the departure of every person here?

Arya, however, gave him no time to consider the question.

'Don't talk to my son,' she snapped at him.

Jaime stared at her.

'He was talking to me!' he protested.

'Stay away from him,' Arya growled.

'Stay away from him?' Jaime chuckled, 'I doubt I could be anything but a spectacular influence on him, judging by what I've seen so far.'

'And what have you seen so far?' she spat.

You. You. Nothing but you.

'Get any of my letters?' he quipped instead.

'You wrote me letters, did you?' Arya asked; as though she didn't care a fuck if he had.

'I did,' Jaime told her in a similar tone, 'though now that I've discovered your predilection for torturing children, I'm beginning to be sorry I bothered.'

She looked blankly at him. That made him angry.

'That little boy, Arya,' Jaime darkly insisted, 'the one that was tied to your saddle when I arrived. The one that fell off your horse into the mud.'

'Oh, him,' Arya indifferently recalled, 'he's alive. His mother and I have discussed it at length. She understands that it was for the best –'

'For the best?'

'– though he'll probably never use his right leg again. One of the hounds got hold of it and wouldn't –

'He's a child, Arya!

'I know he's a child.'

She spoke that last sentence with a degree of tenderness and soft-hearted shock that made him want to stop, but he plunged on anyway; uncaring of her feelings, and knowing that he would hate himself for it later.

'What did he do to deserve what you did to him?' Jaime demanded.

'Nothing at all,' Arya nonchalantly replied.

'Apparently 'nothing' wasn't enough to stop you slinging him over your saddle like a side of beef,' Jaime plunged on.

'It was the best place for him,' Arya shrugged.

'And what gave you the right to judge?' Jaime insisted.

'Fuck you,' Arya spat.

'I know our lives are shaped by the people we live with,' Jaime coldly laughed, 'but gods, if I had known that you were going to be so devoted to Ramsay that you'd even go as far as torturing people for him –'

'Shut up.'

'– it almost makes me feel better about shoving Bran from that tower. If you're crippling children yourself, then you're in no position to judge me, are you?'

She struck him hard across the face; her palm making a loud, cracking noise in the darkness as it connected with his cheek. Her face was red as blood, and she was breathing heavily; as though making a concerted effort to stop herself from attacking him further; and his blood was beginning to sear and boil just like it had in the old days; only guilt was making it boil harder; made him think what he didn't believe and say what he didn't mean, to her, of all people, to the one person that he….

And he remembered some of the letters that he had written her; the ones that were full of hate and hurt and lies; the ones that he had written to provoke her into writing back, and that he had imagined her shattering over, like glass, as she read every poisonous word without writing back.

He remembered some of the others that he had written to her, and in a way, he was glad that she had never received them.

Arya was taking several deep breaths, then stepping away from him and putting her hands behind her back.

'Ramsay had a terrible memory for faces,' she calmly said, 'he had forgotten the boy's existence within hours.'

'Leaving the child to live out the rest of his days as a broken, traumatised cripple?' Jaime mocked.

'Leaving him alive,' Arya murmured.

Something changed, then: something in her voice and face; as if anger and vulnerability had suddenly become the same thing; as though iron had been born with silk at its heart. And he saw her as she had been before she came here. He saw her as she was: a young woman pretending in order to survive; pretending and hurting because of him; but at her core, remaining unchanged. Guilt flooded him anew: guilt at what he had done, and guilt at what he had assumed; guilt at how he claimed to know everything, when in fact he knew nothing at all, when his one true talent was seeing the worst in people, even if it didn't exist.

Arya was looking at him with something like fear; fear that grew as she watched him watch her, and she was stripped even though she was clothed, and deep within him, he felt his own walls crumbling to dust.

'Arya –'

'Don't go near my son again,' she told him, and left him with the stones and the dead.