She slept for weeks. It might have been months. He didn't know.

He didn't leave her.

He needed to be there to take care of her. He needed to be there when she woke up.

Every day, it became harder to endure the sight of her closed eyes; her pale face; her small, ruined body.

Every day, it became easier to despise the child his wife had died for.

Stark isn't dead, he thought.

She isn't alive either.

Uncle Kevan came many times, and said things to him about his duty to his household and his people. Aunt Dorna came many more times, and said things to him about a child needing parents; about Sansa and Tyrion, out of their minds with worry and delayed on the road south; about how Uncle Kevan wanted to stay, but had to return to King's Landing to resume his duties as Lord Regent and Protector.

Things. Things. Things.

Jaime hardly heard their voices at all. He hardly heard the child's voice either; despite Aunt Dorna's claims that it screamed day and night and never slept. The twisting, agonising guilt inside him was screaming louder than any human voice, and when it took him, he heard nothing else.

He had done this to her. It was him.

He should have thought. He should have known. Brought her moon tea, or kept his cock in his fucking trousers, or something, instead of allowing the two of them to fuck every day for weeks and weeks and doing nothing about it.

And yet that time together, after Riverrun – on the road to the Eyrie, on the road back to Casterly Rock – those weeks had been the best of his life, and he knew that they had been the best of hers. They had been freedom and togetherness. They had been release. And as he pulled his mind away from them, he found Cersei standing in the room with him; a ghost; her torso peppered with arrows; her eyes cold and triumphant.

'Too busy fucking your little Northern whore?' she spat; her lips dripping blood; her gaze shifting; first in anger, and then in pity, to Myrcella; a ghost alive; leaning gracefully against the opposite wall; and avoiding her mother's eyes while she clutched a Dornish longbow almost twice as tall as she was.

Jaime watched her look at him, Myrcella: the child that was not his child; her face bearing the look of vicious, disdainful condemnation that she reserved only for him.

She said nothing.

Her silence was worse than Cersei's words.

We were on the run, Stark and I, Jaime wordlessly told her, we expected to be killed at every moment of every day. Neither of us was thinking.

'You're the adult,' Myrcella spat, 'you should have been thinking.'

Jaime turned the words inward, watched mutely as the ghosts disappeared, then jumped as a small, frightened voice abruptly pierced the darkness.

'Uncle Tywin?' the voice said.

Tremours rippled across Jaime's skin as his hearing returned with a violent rush and his sharp, water dancer's senses collided brutally with the sound of the world; with the waves crashing against the Rock below; with the barely-perceptible sound of Arya breathing; with that child screaming unreservedly in the next room; as though it were being tortured.

Why is it screaming like that?

And Jaime's little cousin Janei, the one who had spoken, was standing behind him on the threshold; her curly hair hanging wild and undressed about her shoulders; her tiny, delicate right hand reaching above her head to clutch at the door handle. Her face was white with terror, and her golden green eyes – Father's eyes – were wide with innocent disbelief, until she recognised Jaime, and her face broke into a smile.

'Sorry, Jaime,' she said, with a guileless cheerfulness that only a six-year-old could manage under such circumstances, 'I thought I saw a ghost.'

Jaime blinked at her and said nothing; momentarily paralysed by the onslaught of sound that continued to assault his senses.

And with the burning return of sound came the memory of his father; a voiceless, bone-deep horror that gripped him hard as Janei pulled the door shut behind her and left him; her skipping footsteps echoing loudly down the corridor.

Jaime sat motionless, and remembered.

Arya lying on her chamber floor the morning after the Red Wedding; too distressed to cry. The light dying countless times in Tyrion's eyes at the cruel, untrue, eternal words: 'you who killed your mother to come into the world.' Father, doing horrible things to the people he loved, every day, until the day he died.

Arya's eyes were closed now; deaf to the sound of his breathing; deaf to the sound of his heartbeat; deaf to the sound of existence being screamed out, unacknowledged, in the next room: the existence of a child who was Jaime's by blood, but that he would much rather have dead if it meant he could have Stark back again.

Jaime drew a shaky breath. It came out sounding like a sob.

He was a true Lannister after all. He was his father's son.

And somehow he found his hand slipping out of Arya's and laying her hand softly across her chest.

And somehow he found himself at the inter-leading door: before the door, and opening it.

The child's screaming, he discovered, was made infinitely worse by the presence of four young nursemaids huddled around the crib in the corner; one shushing, one singing, one crying, and one (the youngest and apparently the most sensible) telling the others to shut up and leave the child alone.

'Excellent idea,' Jaime surmised; relishing the way that all four jumped out of their skins, 'now get out.'

As the girls mumbled their apologies and left, their skirts rustling as they approached the door, the child continued to scream at a pitch so unbearable and so potentially harmful to human ears that all thoughts of hesitancy or guilt or trepidation or whatever the fuck else he was meant to be feeling fell from Jaime's mind, and before he could stop himself, he was storming across the room and poking his head over the edge of the crib.

'Seven hells, will you shut up?' he snapped.

The shrieking bundle of flesh obligingly stopped screaming, and stared bemusedly up at Jaime as though he were a madman.

Jaime, no less confused, stared back at it.

The sight left him flabbergasted.

Her fingers and her toes…they were so fucking small – how could they be that small? Were they meant to look like that?

He put his hand into the cradle and gave the infant's hand an unceremonious poke– just to be sure that the appendage was indeed meant to be half the size of a pepper pot.

Quick as a cat, so quickly that Jaime yelped in surprise, the child snatched hold of his index finger and tightly imprisoned it within the bars of her tiny fingers.

Jaime tried to pull away. The child would not release him.

'Let go,' he snapped.

The child stubbornly tightened her grip and stared up at him with a steady, confident and oddly-familiar condemnation that made her seem far too stern for any baby, anywhere, and for the split second that he could bear to look at her face, he could have sworn that he saw judgment in her eyes; as though he were looking up at her and she looking grimly down at him. And in a painful flash of memory and regret and blame, he realised where he had seen that look before.

On the day of Tyrion's birth, Jaime had been taken in to see his mother. She lay pale and fragile in a bed of blood; her stomach distended and swollen and red from the brother or sister that wouldn't come out. Father stood at the window, half-looking-out, half-looking-in; his face a stone wall.

From the height of his eight-and-a-half years, Jaime had found that callous.

It was only today – two-and-thirty years later – that Jaime realised that the old bastard hadn't wanted to look weak in front of his son and heir. He hadn't wanted Jaime to see that he could feel.

Jaime's mother had reached out for him, and he had taken her freezing hand with both his own.

'You have a good heart,' Mother said, her green eyes dim in a haze of pain; 'go where it takes you, and do it without fear. Watch over your sister. Watch over your lord father. Make him laugh from time to time. He needs it.'

Tears began to sting Jaime's eyes.

'Yes, Mother.'

'Watch over your brother or sister who will be born today. They will need you every day of their lives.'

His mouth opened – he was going to tell her that he promised – when his mother's eyes tore violently away from Jaime's towards where his father stood at the window.

It only lasted for a second. Less than that: a split second. And in her eyes, he saw two things. Abhorrence at what her husband felt towards the child that she knew would mean her death. And terror. Terror of what he might do when she died.

The expression had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and Jaime had kissed her, and promised to do all that she asked. He had been hustled from the room, the maester had taken out his knives, and three hours later, his mother was dead; her place taken by a screaming, deformed bundle of flesh that nobody cared for but him.

Jaime convinced himself, for years afterwards, that he hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary that day. But the memory would not leave him, and neither would the knowledge that his mother had foreseen the nightmare that Father would come to represent in his second son's life, and for one, split second, she had hated him for it.

In his daughter's eyes, Jaime saw everything that he had once seen in his mother's – in that one, split second of life, and as he looked at her for the first time – really looked at her – he saw her.

Her eyes were large and grey; like a stormy sea; like the wolfswood.

Like Arya.

Her tiny cheekbones and her tiny jawline were exquisitely delicate, but exuded a strange, unaccountable kind of strength, and her head was covered in a fine layer of golden fuzz that made candlelight dance within it.

Like me.

And her hand was still clutching his finger and refusing to let it go; and her eyes were smouldering stubbornly in a way that was utterly devoid of good sense or rational thinking.

Like us.

The ensuing shame burned so deeply that he nearly choked on it. Even though he didn't hate her. Even though he couldn't.

Love came next. And the hurt of it was so agonising that he felt the stump of his right hand sear and burn, and his missing hand emerge again in the hands of the child that was his; in her eyes that were Arya's eyes; in all of her that was Arya; in all of her that was him.

The child's fingers contracted suddenly and held his tighter. Her grey eyes still looked into his as though she would gladly have used a battle-axe on him had one been on hand; but they were wide as well, as though pleading with him, don't change your mind again, don't leave, don't leave again -

'Would you like to hold her?' Aunt Dorna said behind him; making him jump violently.

The nursemaids must have called her, fearful of what he might do.

'Jaime?' his aunt insisted; her eyes wide and exhausted from lack of sleep, and he heard himself babbling at her, No, I'll break her, I'll drop her, I'll crush her; get someone better; get someone who knows how –

'Don't be silly,' Aunt Dorna said, 'come. You do it like this…'

The child was heavier than he had expected. Before long, his arms began to ache. He was afraid to move at all, so he just stood where he was; looking down in half-wonder, half-terror at the enormous eyes that were gradually unmanning him as they looked into his; the tiny fingers, the tiny toes, the impossible smallness of the miniscule human being that he was apparently meant to raise and educate in the ways of the world.

How the fuck do you raise a child? Where do you start? What does she eat? Can she eat? Will she be this small forever? When does she talk? When does she start walking?

Oh gods. Walking. Banging into things. Picking things up. Trying to eat things. Where are we going to put all the knives? And the swords? Shit. What'll we do with the swords? Lock them up? Forbid her to use them? Give her one? Tell her they're only for decoration?

Aunt Dorna was sitting tensely on the edge of her seat, watching him, as though expecting the child to start screaming at any moment. But the little one remained perfectly quiet, her eyes gradually becoming hooded and sleepy, and eventually, after an eternity, she began to rub her little head against the leather of Jaime's doublet as though it were a pillow made of silk.

'That means she wants to sleep,' Aunt Dorna told him; now slouching, half-asleep, in her chair, 'you were just the same, when you were a babe in arms. I should take her; you can give her to me – '

'Aunt Dorna, she's beautiful,' Jaime heard himself blurt out; sounding for all the world like the sentimental fools at court that he detested.

On Aunt Dorna's face he saw a combination of relief, suspicion, affection and fear.

'I'll put her to bed,' she insisted.

'I'd like to stay with her for a little longer,' Jaime replied, 'you can go to bed if you'd like.'

'I'd rather not, Jaime.'

'Why?'

'I don't think you should be alone with her.'

'Don't you?'

Jaime's last words were pronounced with such vehemence that his Aunt looked at him, appalled, as though he'd slapped her.

His words had the desired effect, however, and she left without a word; banging the door behind her in a thoroughly unladylike fashion before storming away down the corridor; the sound of sobs beginning to echo against the stone vaulting.

Jaime ignored the pinprick of guilt rising within him and looked down at Joanna once again. She was yawning, her mouth forming a diminutive O as she once again rubbed her head against his doublet. Again, he touched her hand, and again, her fingers closed around his, and she made a strange, gurgling sound in the front of her throat that sounded oddly like contentment.

'Stark, she's beautiful,' he murmured, softly, and the realisation that his wife wasn't standing next to him was dreadful when it came.

Suddenly he felt a stirring in the next room; a silence filling up with a small thing that was also the world. He felt breath that was also his breath growing deeper, and lungs that were his as well filling up with it. He heard a rustling of dark hair against clean cushions; rustling in exactly the same way it did when Arya tossed her head, in nightmare or in love. And he heard a deep, low tone of sound, of a part of her voice that spoke only for him, saying softly, again and again, his name.

The thought flying from his mind would normally have made him drop whatever he was carrying and run, as quickly as he could, to where he wanted to be. Today, however, he only clutched Joanna closer to him; he felt her feel it and begin to cry; and when he walked back through the inter-leading door, and found Stark's eyes open, and staring at him, and her skin flushing red with life, and pain, and life, he found that he could only tell her what he had told her moments ago.

'Stark, she's beautiful.'

He saw his wife, his love, trying to smile at him, and her eyelids drooping as she failed to manage it.

'Bring her here, Lannister,' Arya commanded, and for the first time in his life, Jaime was happy to do as he was told.