She's haunting my dreamworld

Trying to survive

My heart is frozen

I'm losing my mind

The nights are the worst. Not just her nightmares, but mine. Every time I close my eyes, I see her there: lying on her bed screaming, her hands clutched to her chest, stemming the flow of blood from wounds that only she could see.

I didn't exactly want to lie there and hold her – it probably wasn't the smartest idea, particularly after she almost broke her neck on the wedding morning trying to get away from my tender fucking caresses. But she was wretched, and alone, and I hadn't much enjoyed the idea of her dying, so I did hold her. When she responded by turning immediately to me to sink deeper into my arms, it felt as though she'd torn my fucking heart out of my chest and eaten it. She was beyond what I had done to her; desperate for any form of touch that would make her feel safe, even for a few fucking seconds. That probably means I took advantage, even though it doesn't feel that way.

It made me think of the night the news of the Red Wedding came, when she was a little savage of three-and-ten. By the time I reached her after hearing it trumpeted out across the entire city, she'd broken every bit of furniture in her chambers and smashed most of the windows. I didn't dare offer comfort. I didn't dare touch her. I didn't even dare look at her for too long. But I stayed with her anyway. That was the nature of her fire: it pulled you in when everything in you told you that allowing yourself to be pulled in was a bad fucking idea.

She screamed at me and attacked me; her tiny fingers trying to claw my eyes out and her fists pounding on my chest in a way that she must have known could do no damage. Then she sat in the window seat and stared at nothing. I sat on the floor and pretended to.

Eventually, she came to sit next to me, exhausted with anger and grief. When I put a tentative arm around her, she decided to start crying. I didn't enjoy that. Wiping up tears is not what I was made for. To make matters worse, I couldn't even call myself sorry for what had happened: I had known her family, and had found them dull to the point of wondering how living with them for all those years had not made her want to scream with boredom. So I sat still as a statue as she cried against me; the awkwardness of the entire bloody situation twisting my insides in a far worse way than what I considered to be normal at the time.

And when she quietened down, I told her about Aerys.

I still don't know why the fuck I did it. I'd told no one else, for reasons that are none of your fucking business, so I took myself firmly in hand and told myself to stop. None of it helped. I just opened my mouth and talked; spitting out the innermost part of me, to be heard by anyone who might have been passing the door at the time.

To be heard by her.

She sat staring at me for a long while. She said something about my seeming better in her eyes, if no less stupid. And we moved on. She told no one else, and I never made such an outrageous bloody mistake again.

Then a few days ago, after I found her half-mad and screaming at the empty air; after I lay next to her with my arms around her and the maester's words that 'her heart has stopped, my lord' still beating away at the inside of my fucking head, she asked me why I was helping her. And once again, I just opened up my mouth and talked, without hesitation and with total honesty, as though I were saying nothing of any great importance.

I don't know whether or not she heard me. She didn't reply at the time. When I looked down at her, I saw that she had fallen asleep again. She did not speak of it afterwards, and now, it is the least of my worries. If the girl has anything resembling a brain, then she has always known.

The nights are the worst. Not just my nightmares, but hers: her life as it is without milk of the poppy; with three small doses per day; with being 'weaned off it', as the bloody maester likes to call it; as though she were some dog suckling at her mother's teats.

Every night I feel her bolt out of bed beside me and retch into the nearest vessel she can find: the basin, the water jug, her chamber pot, if she's lucky. Sometimes she doesn't even get that far. She refuses to keep a pan next to the bed.

As she retches, I go to her. I hold her hair back so she doesn't get vomit all over it. Sometimes she cries and vomits at the same time. I sit beside her on the floor and keep my mouth shut as she gags.

Sometimes in the night, she soils herself. She refuses to have a handmaiden, and she's too weak to do anything about it herself (not that she hasn't tried – the first time, she almost broke her neck). I sit there like a moron with my hands that were made for killing; prodding and poking as she sits in the tub half-conscious, naked and covered in shit; trusting me not to bend her over and fuck her from behind. And even though my cock is hard as a fucking tree branch for every minute of it, I find myself…not wanting to bend her over and fuck her from behind. No, don't laugh. It's true, and it makes my bloody head ache. I can't fucking explain it. It's as if my desire for her has become something else, or been added to something else: another layer in the hundreds of layers that make up her and me. I can tell that she knows it too, and is even more confused than I am, with her mind half-alive and her body half-living. Sometimes, when I've been wringing out a rag, or towel, or sponge, or whatever the fuck you call it, I look up to find her staring at me across the length of her nakedness with a strange look in her wolf eyes; her teats rising and falling with her breath; her nipples hard and red like those tiny fruit in the castle garden that drop into your mouth when they ripen, if you lie beneath the branches that keep them fixed to earth.

In her sleep, she speaks non-stop of her dead husband, screams, threatens, pleads for her son and never for herself. Her small hands will move to shield her face, or to clutch white-knuckled at whichever part of her body she dreams is being mutilated. She screams for her father, her mother, her brothers. She screams names that I don't recognise – Weese, Yoren, Mycah, Jaqen, Gendry, Hot Pie (if that's even a name at all). She screams plenty of names I do – Joffrey, Cersei, Ilyn Payne, Meryn Trant, The Mountain, The Hound…Tywin Lannister. Sometimes she screams for me. The same words, again and again. How could you let me go.

When I wake her –and I always do – she'll lash out and scream not to be touched and stare aimlessly at the ceiling until sleep claims her again; or huddle against me like a frightened animal; whimpering if a single inch of her skin does not touch mine.

In the daytime, she is barely rational. She never stops trying to get up; never stops falling. She has monstrous waking dreams that are part-memory, part-nightmare; her hair plastered to her forehead from the cold sweat that permanently covers her boiling skin. The retching doesn't stop. She is barely strong enough to move, until her little bottle of milk of the poppy arrives, and she flies across the room like an arrow launched from a crossbow to drink it down too quickly.

She always wants more. We always refuse to give it to her. Sometimes she attacks the maester, sometimes me, sometimes both. Sometimes she simply lies in bed and cries for her son, and it has to be explained to her that he isn't here, that he can't see her like this; that I sent him to stay with Addam at Ashemark until she is well again: apparently Addam has a bastard daughter of three-and-ten who can fight with a sword as well as any boy; and Arya always smiles weakly at that: 'I'd give anything to be a fly on the wall,' she'll say.

Sometimes she'll forget her name. Sometimes she'll forget mine. And I am helpless. I'm run through. I can't kill to make her happy, and I can't kill to protect her. I can only watch her die each day, and ask the old gods – hers – for whatever mercy they may have to give.

I'm a fool.

Chapter notes

It is exam time once again, so updates will be sporadic, short and very likely non-existent over the course of the next month. I'll try my best to update when I can. Thank you for all the amazing support and enthusiasm: you are all awesome!