Author's Note:

Welcome to one of the saddest, most melancholic chapters that I've written for this fic. Apologies in advance for what I'm about to do. But Meera Reed is just the perfect character to handle tragedy (which is possibly why I love her so much*).

*Note to self: I've gotta give that girl her own story. Someday…

Special thanks to my lovely amazing beta-reader, SmashingTeacups, for helping me choose a name for Brienne and Jaime's little boy. I love it! Mwah!

Next chapter will be lighter and I promise this one ends on a semi-hopeful note! Brienne will absolutely see her son again. For all the angst I throw at you guys, I don't do tragic endings. Promise. Xo

Meera

Greywater Watch was in mourning.

Its master, Howland Reed, had passed sometime in the night. When Meera entered his bedroom early the next morning, breakfast tray in hand, she knew it immediately, though anyone else might have mistaken the old man's serene, eyes-closed visage for peaceful slumber.

But she knew. She knew as soon as she walked into the bedroom, faint morning light falling across her father's grey face. She had too much practice knowing how the air feels, how the silence deafens, and how everything changes in one heady moment, after the spirits of loved ones unmoor themselves, depart swiftly and fly off to only-the-gods know where.

Meera blinked back the first, hot tears, stinging at her eyes insistently. She knew this was coming—those foolish tears should've known it too. She set the tray down on the night stand beside his bed. She'd made him a simple breakfast of toast and honey, with a steaming cup of blackwood tea. He preferred simple and these days she couldn't get him to eat much of anything else.

She slumped onto the side of the mattress, her hands reaching for her father's cold wrist. She pressed her thumb against the silent vein, where she confirmed that his pulse had faded away to nothingness.

Just like that.

Her father joined Jojen and her mother, leaving her behind. Leaving her alone. Meera kept his cold wrist captive in her hands for a long time, until the scullery maid came in to clean the ashes and stoke the fire.

"My lady, are you all right?" the maid began, though one look at Meera's face and the woman knew that their good master was gone. The maid set down her bucket of ashes and crossed the bedroom floor quickly, taking Lord Reed's cold hand from Meera's grasp and setting it down gently on the quilts. This sparked tears in Meera's eyes that she couldn't hold back.

This time her father wasn't there to hug her and make the pain subside. With a gleam of tears in her own eyes, the sympathetic scullery maid reached out her arms. She was covered in soot and ash but Meera didn't care. She accepted the woman's embrace without protest, holding on tight, needing to feel the warmth of another living person, to make sure that she wasn't a ghost too.

Like Jojen. Like mother and father. Like Hodor, Osha, Rickon, Shaggy-Dog and Summer. Like Bran too…spirit caged away by a Three-Eyed Raven.

Meera didn't bother brushing her tears away, letting them dry and then fall again in little trails down her cheeks, when she finally went downstairs and found Daniel, the steward, and told him to make all the necessary arrangements.

"Of course, Meera," he answered with feeling, subdued and hit with the same despair that would settle on the whole house over the next few hours. In grief, he misspoke, using her given name instead of "Lady Reed", which she was now, undisputedly, as the very last of the highborns of Greywater Watch.

But she was glad he called her Meera. The bleak loneliness that she'd been anticipating for weeks, as her father faded farther and farther from the land of the living, nearly lifted at that one, strange misstep. Daniel knew his mistake immediately. He could have corrected himself but was watching her face and gauging her reaction.

She shook her head slightly at his unasked question, giving him a little smile. "Thank you, Daniel," she said.

And then Meera went upstairs and dug through her garments for something black. Meera didn't own any dresses, as she was most comfortable in trousers and hunting clothes and she'd been wearing them since she was a young girl. Her father and mother had encouraged her choice of wardrobe, knowing their daughter was no summer rose to be plucked, cut or put in a vase for display.

But she wore a dress once before, right after her mother passed away. The dress was her mother's, folded away at the bottom of a cedar trunk filled with her mother's things. It was black, simply cut and unadorned, with clean lines and minimal black lace. The fabric had smelled like the lavender scents that always lingered in her mother's brown hair.

You look like Mother. She's pleased, Meera, Jojen had said that first time, in his greensight way that said he knew what he was talking about. As they solemnly gathered to bury Jyana Reed, Howland caught sight of his daughter and smiled at her warmly, approving the choice.

She found the same frock and pulled it on, gathering her curly, brown hair out from beneath the lace collar. She did up the buttons and smoothed the wrinkles in the skirt. She caught sight of herself in the looking glass and, for just a moment, saw her mother looking back at her. The lavender scents had faded away long ago but the memory remained strong and Meera gave a small sigh of something like relief.

You still look like Mother. More so now than before. She would swear she heard Jojen whisper those words in her ear. And then her father, You're very like her, Meera.

She didn't quite trust the voices. She wasn't like Jojen or Bran. Despite all she had seen and played witness to, she couldn't believe that the world beyond was so near to this one. Unless…

Yes, darling, we're always with you. Jyana Reed's voice came from a far more distant memory but was all the more sweeter for its unexpected appearance. Meera almost believed her mother's voice, more than the others, if only because she wanted it to be real.

I wish you were here.

Meera took one last look at herself in the mirror, brushing at the tracks of tears on her cheeks and the stubborn wrinkles of that old dress, hiding the rest of her grief away, locked in her heart, before returning downstairs.

And this is how she bid goodbye to Lady Brienne of Tarth, who was returning north that very day. They had received a raven from Winterfell, the first one since the storms came to stay. The weather had turned slightly milder, threatening a mid-winter thaw, and Sansa Stark's raven had made it to Greywater Watch.

The scroll contained one line: "I bid Brienne return immediately, with whatever news she has from Greywater Watch."

Brienne's face betrayed more misery than Meera's, which on this particular morning was hard to manage. But Meera's grief was expected and natural, as a daughter outliving her father is a fact of life, hard as it may be. A mother being separated from her son when the child was not yet weaned…there was nothing natural about it.

The child—Brienne had named him Leo. With his golden hair, the choice was a fitting one. But with that golden hair and those sapphire eyes, there was no way for her to return with him to Winterfell. Not unless she wanted to declare her secret for all the world to hear.

Even only a few months old, he looked like both of them—Jaime and Brienne. A perfect match. Leo Lannister—he should have been, in a better, kinder world. Leo Snow—he would be, raised among the Reeds with a flimsy story about being left on the front doorstep in the middle of a snowstorm.

It was a half-hearted ruse and wouldn't last. Brienne must know it. Every time she looked at her son's face, she must see Jaime's. Meera had seen the Kingslayer only once, when she accompanied her father to King's Landing before the war, when she was only a child. If she could see the resemblance from that one meeting, there was no hiding Leo's origins.

Except perhaps here, at Greywater Watch.

"I'll return when I can," Brienne promised. Meera wasn't sure if the woman's words were for her or for the baby cradled in her arms. She barely took her eyes off Leo, bending and pressing another kiss to the baby's brow.

He was a quiet child and sweet-tempered, barely fussing from the beginning. After his birth, Brienne had taken Leo up to Howland's bedchamber and allowed the old man to hold the child. Meera's father had held the baby in the crook of his arm, like he once did with Jojen and Meera…like he once did with a squalling Jon Snow, standing on the dusty plains outside the Tower of Joy, before passing him up to Ned, for the long ride north.

"May your fate be kinder, my boy," Howland Reed whispered a benediction over the child before giving him back to his mother. Then he told Brienne that she could stay at Greywater Watch for as long as she liked and that Leo would always have a place in this hall.

But now Brienne was being called back to Sansa's side and she couldn't bring herself to refuse that call. Perhaps more than anyone else in the entire Seven Kingdoms, Brienne knew what the value of an oath meant.

She could not break hers. No matter the cost. No matter the pain.

So she passed the baby into Meera's arms, her tears two-fold after she noticed Meera's red-rimmed eyes, her change of dress and its black, black color. Brienne swallowed hard before managing, "I will never forget your father's kindness. Not ever."

"Thank you," Meera whispered softly, holding little Leo close to her chest. The baby's warmth, much like the scullery maid's that morning, was a balm on the hollow emptiness that threatened to freeze her cold, with grief more paralyzing than any amount of ice and snow.

Summoning that same brave spirit that had sustained her through a host of troubles and dark times, she promised, "Leo will be here waiting for you. We'll keep him safe. Return to us as soon as you can, Brienne."

Brienne's breath escaped as a strangled note and she couldn't speak. Not now, not for a long time after. She nodded, for Meera's sake, gratitude too shallow a word to convey her feelings. But her eyes were on her child. Her hand twitched, nearly reaching for him again.

With steely nerves, she resisted, out of duty, out of love…and out of time. As Brienne turned and walked out of the front hall of Greywater Watch, her shoulders bent and steps halting and unsteady, Meera's heart broke—for herself, for Brienne, for little Leo, for anyone, anywhere who had ever loved and lost anyone.

Grey was the color of her House. And for many years, grey would be the color of her soul.

But she was Meera Reed, gods-be-damned, and—she looked down at Leo, making a secret pact with the golden-haired baby that had been left in her care—she would never let grief eat them whole.