07x05, 'Eastwatch'

Jorah is exhausted. Since leaving the Citadel, it's been a constant push forward to get back to Daenerys' side. And now he's leaving again, on a doomed expedition.

This morning he'd held her hands in his, marvelling that he could touch her once more, that she'd allowed him to after everything that has passed between them.

But then there was Jon Snow, as noble as Ned Stark, dark and handsome, and the way that Daenerys' eyes had wandered away from him to the brooding king in the north, her interest piqued. She'd come back to him when he'd brushed his lips over her hands, so close that if he'd lifted his head up just so their noses might have brushed, their mouths met; but she has never looked at him that way.

He'd looked back at her on Dragonstone Beach, to lock that last image of her into his mind, the look in her eyes, silhouetted against the dark brimstone, like a pale goddess—and it doesn't matter whether she had been looking at him, or beyond him, to Jon Snow, because he is a dying man all over again and he will take what little comfort he can to the freezing grave.

Jorah isn't foolish. He has little belief that he will be coming back from this trip beyond the Wall. It's a plan of utter madness. Finding the army of the dead will be task enough. Capturing just one soldier will be nearly impossible. Somehow getting it all the way back to the Wall and all the way down south? A fool's errand.

He will do his duty for his queen, as he's sworn he will for the rest of his days. Those days are likely numbered…so he will comfort himself with the false hope that perhaps she had been looking at him with that wistful look in her eyes, a poignant kind of what if, what if their circumstances had been different, what if they had been given time, what if…

They are painful, harmless comforts.

For the tomorrows that come may well be his last.