Chapter notes

Valar morghulis, all. A sudden splurge of creativity has produced an extra chapter before Sunday. I hope you enjoy it!

Jaime, smiling, looked up with more curiosity than alarm as his bedchamber door crashed open to reveal his squire, terrified (and still carrying a tottering pile of his master's armour); and Arya, furious.

'I'm sorry, my lord,' the squire blubbered, 'she just – '

'That's alright, boy,' Jaime interrupted, 'get out.'

The squire slammed the door behind him, and Jaime grinned delightedly as Arya strode into the room, walked straight up to him and shoved him in a way that would have been provocative had it not been so funny.

'Well, look who's come back to life!' Jaime mocked.

'You,' Arya spat; the fingers of her right hand fastening around his neck when her second shove send him careering backwards into a wall, 'you selfish, arrogant, repulsive arse.'

Jaime considered decking the little shit then and there for her insolence, but found that he rather enjoyed letting her think that she had a real chance of strangling him if she tightened her grip any further. Her confidence was delightful merely by virtue of her stupidity, and seeing her as she was when completely unburdened by poisonous foreign nonsense was far more absorbing than he had ever thought it could be.

She was glaring at him with a piercing, near-paralytic hatred; her breath resembling some cold and inadequate attempt to control the wrath that pulsed visibly and powerfully through her body like heat burning at the heart of a blade; but there was a visible kind of space around her; the missing thing; the same emptiness that had weakened her the first time they had spoken, but that strengthened her now; turning her eyes to iron and making her beautiful and flame-like and absolutely fucking glorious to watch; and to Jaime's profound shame, he found his cock stiffening in his breeches and his breath beginning to burn in his lungs.

Gods be good, he thought, this is no time to be thinking about your cock!

'Can I help you, Lady Stark?' he pleasantly enquired.

'What in seven fucking hells was that?' Arya demanded, seething.

Jaime thought back to the tourney, and grinned.

'That was me telling the entire world to fuck off. Your fainting was an added bonus, of course. Was your boiled leather a size too small for you? Or were you overcome by my great good looks and sparkling personality?'

'I was pretending to faint, you camel's cunt!' Arya shouted.

'Camel's…what?' Jaime laughed.

'Do you have any idea what would have happened if I had accepted or rejected that stupid crown?'

'Nothing pleasant, I should think –'

'You bastard!'

'- but at least I wouldn't have had to marry your sister.'

'And avoiding a marriage to someone you dislike is worth another decade of war, is it?'

'Don't you dare start bleating about selfishness again.'

'Is there another word for it?'

'Yes, there's another fucking word for it! Decency. Loyalty.'

As the last word escaped his lips, Arya's grip on his throat slackened slightly, though her rage did nothing of the kind, and Jaime suddenly felt his own anger hammering fiercely and violently in his throat as he thought of ash, and screams, and dragonfire.

'How do I go home when this farce is over?' he growled; the new-born ghosts of his wrath thrashing raucously against Arya's fingers, 'how do I return to my people, walking by the side of the woman who destroyed them; who ruined them; who turned their realm into an underworld, and say: 'this is my lady wife'? How do I do that? How can you compel me to do that? How can Aegon? How do I endure the company of the woman who did that to my homeland? How do I ask the Westerlands to endure her? How do I marry her? How do I fuck her?'

'You fuck her,' Arya snarled, her grip tightening again, 'because thousands of people will die if you don't!'

'I'm afraid that's out of the question,' Jaime spat, 'I've always had a problem with red heads.'

'She has to marry the sire of the boy who chopped her father's head off,' the girl accusingly responded, 'I'd say her problems are worse than yours.'

Jaime could scarcely believe the injustice of what he was hearing.

'Did I chop your father's head off?' he demanded.

'No, but –'

'I was your brother's prisoner when it happened!'

'Really? Were you also his prisoner when the Lannister armies torched the Riverlands?'

'That was completely different, you savage little – '

'How was it different? Was raping an entire realm acceptable because you were under orders? Or is this sudden concern for the common man something that's come upon you late in life?'

'Late in life?'

'Did turning my mother's homeland 'into an underworld' concern you when you were battering your armies against the walls of Riverrun? Did it cross your mind when Winterfell was burned to ashes, and my younger brothers with it?'

'I had nothing to do with –'

'And what about the Red Wedding? Were you seized by a similar attack of sensitivity when your father decided to butcher anyone and everyone that I might have –'

'The Red Wedding was Walder Frey's work, not my father's!'

'Is that what you tell yourself at night?'

'Not this again –'

'Not this again?'

'Arya –'

She hit him. Properly, too. Harder than any woman had ever hit him. Splinters of pain roared sorely across his cheek before settling into dull, aching, glowing coals that invaded his skin and began to colour it red.

'Don't call me that,' Arya snarled, 'don't you fucking call me that.'

'I'm sorry,' Jaime snarled in return, livid at her willingness to condemn him when it suited her, 'I forgot that the dead have no names.'

'Fuck yourself, Lannister.'

Jaime smiled bitterly at that.

'I might have found all of this rhetoric very touching if I had had the slightest thing to do with any of the crimes that you blame me for,' he said, 'so far, I've heard you accuse me of no greater crime than being the son of Tywin Lannister. Can you really tell me that Sansa has committed no greater crime than being the daughter of Eddard Stark?'

The girl's face fell.

'I did not say that –'

'Can you really tell me that some fucking peace that Aegon dreamed up one day, probably while sitting on his chamber pot, can really be an option after everything that has happened?' Jaime demanded.

The girl ignored him, and returned, with a sanctimonious gravity that she could only have learned from her father, to her original point.

'You almost started a war today,' Arya persisted, enunciating every syllable as though she were speaking to a halfwit, 'if you don't marry Sansa, there will almost certainly be another war. Is that what you want?'

'If I do marry Sansa, there will definitely be another war,' Jaime shot back, matching her tone, 'is that what you want?'

When she did not reply immediately; the stubbornness and the blame on her young face not abating for an instant, Jaime found that the novelty of having her fingers fastened around his throat had worn off; as had any amusement that he could have derived from listening to her preaching. He shoved her backwards with enough abruptness to distract her, but with insufficient violence to alarm her, and with a flash of doubt and fear that a sudden siren call of inevitability immediately banished, he untucked his shirt and began to unbutton the collar.

'What – what the fuck are you doing?' Arya demanded shrilly.

He didn't answer, and with one practised motion, pulled the garment over his head and watched as his scarred torso met the girl's eyes; the legacy of his thirty days and nights as the guest of the Targaryens' torture detachment. Arya's grey eyes streamed with horror and disbelief, and travelled slowly over his bare skin like silent hands, and as she coloured, and swallowed audibly, Jaime realised, suddenly, that no one but himself, and the maester who had treated him at the beginning had seen this new half-nakedness of himself; this shell that made it seem as though the barbs and spikes of the iron throne had suddenly bent inwards, and that he, unknowingly sitting on it, had been enfolded and trapped in that ghastly embrace; the swords finding homes in his flesh and tearing carelessly out of him when they had tired of the taste of his blood.

For a moment, her seeing, and his own recklessness, paralysed him with fear. But he watched her face, even as she did not watch his, and when a sudden moisture the colour of rain began to cling to her eyelashes and to turn her cheeks to snow again, he knew that he had won.

He could not rejoice at the fact.

'Do you still think I want a war, Lady Stark?' he asked.

'Turn around,' Arya commanded softly.

Jaime turned.

He could hear fear in her footsteps, and hesitation in her body as she stopped directly behind him and paused; as though she only trusted her eyes to move. He could sense the spectre of that movement lingering vividly in the veiled space between him and her; and he gasped aloud as he felt the warmth of her breath on his skin and the sudden touch of her fingers on his shoulder blade, at the place where a red hot poker had been applied directly to the skin and had made the flesh sizzle like fat in a pan; making it seem that before that day, he had not had the slightest notion of what true pain was; not even when his hand had been taken. It had been the kind of pain that should not exist.

Jaime could hear Arya breathing in and out a symphony as her fingers moved slowly across his back; listening as his ruined skin told her mind its story, and hurting her as she witnessed its unfolding. The feeling of her skin touching his was unearthly. Even the graze of something so insignificant as a fingertip made his pulse rush and beat out, and flounder; and as he stood there, realising, he found that he didn't care a fourpenny fuck if she knew it.

Because he could also feel her blood; he could feel its song in every tiny pinprick of her skin as it met his; and the sensation was like a secret whispered between them in a language that had no sound; only touch.

He turned around. She took a hurried step back; like she was frightened of him. He bent over and picked his shirt up again; pulling it over his head and immediately struggling to find the sleeves as his mind was overtaken by the abrupt and restless desire to cover up the fragments of himself.

Arya helped him; slapping his hand aside when he tried to stop her and making no comment as she unravelled the sleeves and let him pass his arms through them. He stared at her as she wordlessly buttoned up his collar again; her eyes fixed solidly on her own fingers, and not on the lattice of scars still visible beneath them. He smirked.

It's only natural. I wouldn't want to look at me either.

When she finished, she stepped back again and thrust her hands deep into her pockets; as though hiding them from him, and from herself; fidgeting like an unruly child at lessons.

'The Targaryens did this to you,' she mumbled awkwardly; as though she would have preferred the statement to be a question.

That made him smile gently at her; though he didn't know why.

'They did do this to me,' Jaime replied, 'and quite frankly, I don't care. But your sister made sure that the Targaryens carved my lands up in the same way that they carved up my body. Aegon would never have deployed all three dragons if she had only kept her fucking thoughts to herself. I do not want that to happen again. I do not want a war. I just want to be left alone while I clean up the mess. And I cannot do that if I am saddled with a wife that I detest and the entire future of the kingdoms on my shoulders –'

Jaime bit his tongue and berated himself. He had told her far too much, and with far too much sincerity.

'Then there's the pure and simple fact that I would make Sansa a very bad husband,' he hurriedly added; sealing the weight of his words with his habitual disdain, 'because I don't want to marry her. I simply don't.'

Arya's face was wreathed in a sudden and inexplicable sadness as she looked at him; and her words, when they came, were quiet and desolate:

'Sometimes we cannot always get what we want.'