He must have fallen suddenly asleep – he would not acknowledge the possibility of having passed out from exhaustion – and when he opened his eyes the dragon sconces were still sending monstrous shadows chasing across the walls, and the person who had apparently ignited them was sitting on the other side of the chamber from him; attempting to stitch up her own arm.

Her doublet and sword belt were piled untidily on the floor beside her; her shirt, bloodied, lay torn to shreds in her lap; leaving her torso in the clutches of a laced-up undergarment that resembled a corset, but which the character of its owner prevented him from branding as such. The leather shoulder belt that he had observed earlier was laid carefully out on the floor in front of her, and a ball of black silk thread, punctured with needles of various sizes, nestled neatly on top of one of the belt's middle compartments. Her face was utterly calm; her shoulders were bare and pale as marble (in steep contrast to the blood that was pouring down her right arm); and as Jaime watched her working steadily with needle and thread, he observed that the place where the boar had bitten her looked like such a gruesome mess that he could not conceive of how she was managing to work.

'Ever heard of swabbing?'Jaime jeered.

Arya looked up at him.

'You're awake,' she replied.

'You're making a mess,' Jaime said; getting to his feet and walking over to her; trying to ignore the pain pulsing in his back.

'If I swab, it bleeds; if I don't swab, it bleeds,' Arya grumbled; glaring at him as he sat cross-legged in front of her and casually pulled a strip of shirt from her lap, 'I'm saving time.'

Jaime rolled his eyes.

'What did the Faceless Men tell you to do in cases like these?' he asked.

'They told me to swab,' Arya snapped.

Jaime grunted in laughter and began to mop up the bloodstream that was coursing from the wound and down her arm in rivers. The strip of shirt turned red; leaving the ghost of war branded into her skin each time it came away, and when his fingers reached the wound and began to gently work at the stitches that had already been completed, he observed with surprise that they were perfectly straight, and executed with a militaristic neatness that he found profoundly disturbing under the circumstances. Still more disturbing were the scars that had suddenly become visible on her shoulders and arms, and that torchlight and shadow had concealed when he had first opened his eyes. There was one particularly unpleasant disfigurement on her left upper arm that could only have been caused by an arrow or a crossbow bolt fired at close range. There was an equally-gruesome explosion of formerly-torn skin in the groove above her left collarbone, a mesh of smaller cuts and slashes scattered about her shoulders, and a thin line that ran almost across the entire circumference of her right wrist; as though some fool had tried to chop her hand off.

Jaime shuddered, tossed the piece of cloth away from him and tore off another, and for a while they worked together in silence; Arya indifferently puncturing her own skin; Jaime cleaning up after her. He thought of the world above them; and how she had made it burn, and for a moment he could not think at all; blaming her; not blaming her; blaming his brother; not blaming him.

'I can't stop thinking about Tyrion,' Arya murmured suddenly.

'I know,' Jaime mumbled; a part of him wanting to tell her that she'd forfeited the right to worry about Tyrion the moment she had set the dragons loose.

But Arya's face was pale with a remorse too genuine to justify such an outburst.

'Were you friends?' Jaime asked.

Arya paused at his use of the past tense, and stuck the needle into her skin one last time before replying.

'In Braavos,' she told him, 'we were together for eighteen hours a day – sometimes more – for a year. He spoke; I interpreted. He drank; I listened. That creates a kind of understanding; strange as that might sound.'

Oh gods.

'He didn't try to fuck you, did he?' Jaime chuckled; secretly dreading the answer.

'No,' Arya replied; her face breaking into an affectionate smile as she separated needle and thread with her dagger,'he wanted to a few times, but no.'

Jaime felt half-disconcerted that she could know his brother so well after so short an acquaintance; and half-relieved for reasons that he preferred not to contemplate.

'If he didn't try anything, then how can you be so sure that he did want to?' Jaime scoffed, taking one end of the thread while she took the other.

'A woman always knows,' Arya shrugged.

'I promise you, she doesn't,' Jaime mocked as they knotted the threads together; flinching as an unexpected and blood-curling scream ripped forth from Arya's throat.

He'd pulled too hard.

'Gods, Jaime!' she yelped weakly; clapping her left hand instinctively down on the wound and leaning forward as though about to faint, 'are you trying to fucking kill me?'

'Stop whining; at least they're not coming undone anytime soon,' Jaime remarked nonchalantly; though he wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder in apology the moment the words were out of his mouth.

But he couldn't do it. If he did, she'd feel his hand shaking and his heart beating; and besides, he was not in the habit of apologising to people.

So he watched her straighten up and shrug on her doublet, and for the first time that evening, it occurred to him that seeing her half-clad in such a manner was both improper and very likely dangerous, and he soon found himself sitting against a wall and gazing up at the dragon sconces as though nothing could be more fascinating. He listened to the sound of the clasps of her doublet as she fastened them– they clicked like crickets in the dark – and the tiny, tuneless song they sang was like an old friend to his ears. He had worn the same uniform for thirty years…after all.

Arya did not stand up to put on her sword belt; buckling it about her waist in a thoroughly sloppy and careless manner that he would have reprimanded her for had he still had the right to. To her shoulder belt, she gave infinitely more care; replacing the needle and thread in the bottom compartment and lifting the belt carefully over her head as though it were made of glass.

'Where did you get the belt?' Jaime asked.

'How did you know about this place?' Arya asked, at the same time.

Jaime almost groaned aloud.

'You first.'

'Why?'

'Just remembering my courtesies, Lady Stark.'

Arya rolled her eyes at him.

'This place, Ser Jaime,' she repeated, 'how did you know about it?'

'We discovered it on the morning my father was found dead,' he said; trying to sound indifferent, 'I led a detachment of guards down here to look for Tyrion.'

Arya's face fell slightly, as though she were remembering something terrible, and Jaime felt compelled to ask her:

'How…how much did Tyrion tell you?'

'Everything,' Arya softly replied; her voice and face entirely void of judgement, and Jaime found that he minded, a great deal, that she knew anything about it at all.

He would never forget the look in Tyrion's eyes when the truth had come pulsing out of Jaime's mouth: in the black cells, in the dark, in the heat, too many years later; too late…and then the words that Tyrion had spoken in response; the hate that had appeared in him, and then Father, lying dead with a fucking crossbow bolt to the balls.

I should have told him the truth about the girl from the beginning. I should have been a brother to him; a real one. Father shouldn't have mattered, he shouldn't have – and this girl, the one beside me now, should not know about it. I don't want her to know about it.

'Your turn,' Jaime rapidly proclaimed; Father's ghost disappearing with his words, 'tell me the sweeping story of the brown leather belt.'

'It's Jaqen's,' Arya said slowly; the name jagged and painful on her lips, 'when the fighting started, I went upstairs to destroy my case of poisons. It was in my trunk. This was next to it. And I couldn't…'

She bit her lip, and looked away.

"… leave it behind," Jaime murmured.

Arya nodded, and smiled at him with all the unassuming familiarity of the bereaved acknowledging the bereaved, and began to fiddle with a loose piece of embroidery on one of the belt's compartments.

'Faceless Men don't typically walk around armed to the teeth,' she told him, 'so he almost never wore it, but…he kept things in it. Interesting things to use for killing. Darts coated in wolfsbane; roses marinated in Manticore venom –'

'Did he have something against cutting people?' Jaime asked, appalled; anger beginning to blister his insides, and everything that he was rebelling and sickening at the thought of using poison, a coward's weapon, to kill a man.

'He was extremely fond of cutting people,' Arya responded; her tone unchanged, 'he just found the way a blood smell lingers on hands and clothing rather tedious. These were his favourite.'

She opened the top compartment of the belt, removed something from it, and passed it to him. It was a tiny, blood-coated triangle made of what seemed to be Valyrian steel; lighter than a whisper, and the size of a signet ring. He turned it over in his fingers.

It looked like it belonged on a cyvasse board.

Jaime's lip curled in disdain. He thought back to the first complement of guards that Arya had killed…the way that she had come into view behind them, her hand flung out in front of her, as they had fallen to the floor like flies; the way that she had bent over each corpse, dagger in hand, and had dug some invisible object from the spine of each man. His own mind could offer him no explanation for it. But this – this was no explanation at all. This was a fucking joke; a joke and a lie; and he began to chuckle, in anger and mirthless ridicule, that she could think him fool enough to believe her; that she could lie to him and still look at him as though he were some kind of fucking relief; that he had left his own brother behind for a person who trusted him less than she would a sellsword of non-existent intelligence that she had paid up front.

'Are you fucking with me, Lady Stark?' Jaime demanded venomously.

Arya cocked an eyebrow at him.

'What's wrong with you?' she scoffed.

'Do you take me for a fool?' Jaime growled.

'I'm starting to!' Arya snapped; not even having the good grace to look ashamed of herself.

That only served to make him livider.

'You couldn't kill a fly with this!'

'A handful of those can take down twenty men, if you know the way!'

'Gods, you're a terrible liar.'

'I'm a brilliant liar!'

'Do you really expect me to believe this?'

'Right now, I don't care what you believe!'

'If you can't tell me something, or if you simply don't want to, say so, don't –'

'Fuck off, Jaime!'

'This isn't possible!'

'Yes it is!'

'This is a puny piece of scrap metal that couldn't – fuck!'

The triangle had sunk into his thumb and cut him almost to the bone. Arya unceremoniously yanked it out.

'You were saying?' she demanded irately as a surprisingly large amount of blood began to pour out of his thumb.

Jaime did his best to look as though he hadn't just made a spectacular arse of himself.

'Not bad for a collection of eastern trinkets,' he shrugged.

'A collection of eastern trinkets?' Arya repeated shrilly; hurt beginning to creep through the cracks of her indignation.

'Forgive me,' Jaime said sweepingly; telling himself that the sudden moisture in her eyes was down to anger and nothing else, 'would you prefer the term 'magical eastern trinkets?'

'Only tricksters and deceivers work with 'magical trinkets,' you…stupid!' Arya yelled, 'the rest of us use our brains.'

'The rest of us?' Jaime scornfully laughed, 'is that what you spent so much time learning in Braavos? How to turn men into rats and rats into dancing drinking horns?'

Arya flew at him, and the entire chamber was plunged into darkness with a howling groan that resembled that of a dead man breathing his last, and she was pinning his knees to the ground with her heels and his arms against the wall above him with one hand; her other hand drawing her dagger with an audible shick of Valyrian steel and thrusting it roughly against his throat; and as he felt her breath ice cold on his face and her dagger ice cold on his throat, and heard the patient, cold-blooded, horrifying-steady sound of her breathing, he was gripped by the most complete, unequivocal and all-encompassingly paralytic terror that he had ever experienced. His limbs were turning to mortar; making him feel as though he were being crushed beneath a weight of stone and rock that he could not shift. He tried to move his legs; his hand; his fingers. He couldn't. He couldn't struggle. He couldn't fight. He was interred in marble like a corpse. Her strength was impossible; gigantic; unnatural; she could not be that strong; and her voice as she spoke was utterly without mercy.

'How would you like to die, Lannister?' he heard Arya spit; the tip of the dagger dancing repulsively on his throat.

And the dagger was beginning to slice at him; tearing a long line in his flesh from collar bone to navel, and as fire erupted across the wound he saw a light dancing in the darkness; the tip of a sword, red hot, white hot. Chains were holding him down; hands were holding him down; and he was screaming in agony as the sword drew patterns on his chest; the smell of burning flesh almost making him gag, and a voice was speaking above the screaming, 'Swear allegiance, and this all goes away,' 'Fuck yourself,' he spat in reply, and they brought the burning sword down on him again, on his back this time, and pressed it into his shoulder blade and held it there while his skin melted and blood erupted out of his mouth as he prayed for death, and death never came. And torches were lit, blinding him and taking the darkness with it, and he was shuddering so violently that he couldn't see, and Arya was there; in front of him, against him, terrified; clasping his face and shouting.

'Jaime. JAIME! You're not there. You're not there!'

For a moment, he could not understand what she was saying. He blinked at her and mumbled something, and she embraced him and held him so hard it hurt as she jabbered a constant string of short, identical words into his shoulder, 'I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry,' and he could feel his own arms around her waist and torture still screaming in his head and shuddering in his body, and she was holding him tighter and whispering, 'You're not there. You're not. You'll never be there. If anyone tries to do that to you again, I'll kill them; I'll cut off their faces.'

'How?' Jaime muttered; trying to stop his voice from shaking as he remembered the blackness and the weight.

'Jaqen taught me to do it,' Arya whispered; knowing immediately that he wasn't talking about cutting off people's faces, 'just how to make fire, nothing else; nothing else, I promise; I didn't know you would –'

Her hair smelled like smoke. He could feel her heart beating against his chest. She continued to murmur 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' and as she held him he felt the world coming back; stone and light rising around him; her limbs sheltering him there; keeping him anchored to the rock. His left hand had come to rest in the small of her back, and he kept it there; feeling it rising and falling with her breath; and he was breathing with her, in and out, his body moving slowly with hers, and I've become weak, he thought, weak and ridiculous. Undone by dreams and darkness; like some green boy who's never fought a war in his life.

'Arya,' Jaime said, in as amused a voice as he could muster; glancing down and pretending to notice their position for the first time.

'Yes?' she asked.

'You're sitting in my lap.'

Arya froze for a moment, before looking downwards and also deigning (or feigning) to take initial notice of the fact that her intentions could easily be mistaken if taken out of context. She stood hurriedly up, stepped away from him, and strode across the chamber to the tunnel entrances that were carved into the rock.

'Do you know the way?' she asked.

'Part of it,' Jaime replied; clambering to his feet and joining her.

She was eyeing the confined space and intense darkness of the tunnels with a keen, worried and blatantly transparent eye, and Jaime could not help but resent her for it.

'Jaime,' Arya reluctantly ventured, 'should you really be –'

'I'LL BE FINE!' Jaime shouted; with more ferocity and far greater volume than he had intended.

Arya backed off immediately and showed him both her hands.

'Forget I said anything!' she exclaimed, before thrusting her hands into her belt, glowering at him, and mumbling under her breath:

'Gods, you're a shit.'

The tunnels only seemed to have gained in unpleasantness since the last time Jaime had been forced to crawl through them. The awkwardness of it was made infinitely worse by the pitiful radiance of a discarded, ancient, half burnt-out torch that Arya had found in the tunnel mouth, and by the excruciating soreness that plagued his entire body; as though he'd been ambushed in a back alley and beaten to within an inch of his life.

He hated growing older. He hated the weakness of it; the restraint; the surprised, mocking gazes every time he held a sword, silently asking him if it still belonged in his hand. He hated the faces he met; the faces that wondered, the faces that hoped, that he was a foolish old man whose fighting days were done; who had only months left before a younger, stronger, more brilliant opponent would meet him on the field of battle or the tourney ground and send him from this world with a whimper rather than a roar.

He thought of what had happened in the chamber with the ladder, and felt so ashamed he could hardly see. What a monumental fuck-up. To go to pieces like some fucking squire with his first head wound; no, worse than that, like a stupid child who had had a nightmare; and then, worst of all, to find himself in the company of somebody who indulged such nonsense instead of cracking him on the head and flogging him half to death with the ridicule that he deserved.

And then that business with Jaqen's triangular trinkets – where in seven fucking hells had that come from? He could not even remember when the argument had started, or why; only that he had been curious one minute and livid the next; livid, and paranoid.

Both reactions were somewhat atypical to a casual discussion with a young assassin about the lover who had taught her to kill, and Jaime rapidly pushed aside the possibility of his being jealous of a dead man before determining to concentrate on crawling, and nothing else, until they reached the dragon mosaic.

Upon entering the tunnel he had realised, much to his chagrin, that his golden hand would not support the weight of his body, so he had once again found himself crawling awkwardly forward on his elbows like some common foot soldier scouting out enemy lines. He did not like to admit the possibility of having lost even more weight since the last time he had been forced to scramble around these tunnels like a fucking earthworm, but he could think of no explanation for the raging discomfort in his arms and the bone-numbing pain in his elbows other than their being skin and bone and precious little else. His only comfort was that Arya seemed to be having a far worse time of it than him; the added burden of the torch making her snap and grumble to herself at intervals as she lighted the way ahead of them.

Comforting or not, the entire situation was starting to be a dreadful bore, and as Jaime watched the light of the torch flickering on the low ceiling of the tunnel, he thought about the moment that Arya had found the torch; picking it up and not giving it a second glance as it had burst into flames, before getting down on her hands and knees and disappearing into the black. Jaime, who had been expecting dramatic incantations and hand movements of the kind that would provide him with hours of ammunition in any future confrontations with her, had been rather disappointed, and he determined to ask her about it straight away; even if only as an antidote for boredom.

'Is conjuring up fire from thin air something all Faceless Men learn to do, Lady Stark?'

Arya, clearly still angry with him, snorted and did not reply.

'No, then,' Jaime ventured.

Still no reply.

'Either you can answer the question, or I can keep rephrasing it until –'

'High order guild members are allowed to use magic; no one else,' Arya impatiently snapped, 'I only know because Jaqen taught me.'

'Do your masters know that Jaqen taught you?'

'They'd have flayed me alive if they did.'

That remark, and everything that Arya had ever told him about the way Faceless Men punished their own, made Jaime fall silent as they crawled deeper and deeper into the labyrinth beneath the Red Keep; his mind becoming a tangled web of uncertainty, half-admiration and half-anger, both at Arya, and at her mentor who was dead. How could Jaqen have understood the consequences, the harm that could come to her if he taught her what she was not meant to know, and then go ahead regardless? How could he do that?

He thought about it; thought about Arya; and chuckled to himself.

Something tells me it wasn't his idea.

'It's a pity that particular spell isn't powerful enough to burn Aegon alive,' Arya was saying, 'but you can't have everything.'

'Gods, you really do hate him,' Jaime observed.

'He's a fraud, and an arse, and he tried to kill my queen,' Arya steadfastly declared, 'of course I hate him.'

'Such misplaced loyalty,' Jaime smirked, 'Queen Daenerys must be bursting with pride…what do you mean, 'fraud'?'

'What do you mean 'misplaced loyalty'?' Arya snapped.

Jaime ignored her. He was remembering two fragile little bodies in red cloaks lying smashed and bleeding on the floor before the Iron Throne, and Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon screaming at each other while Father looked on and waited. The smallest had been a baby…and saying that his skull had been 'crushed' was a very gentle way of putting it.

'But the hair,' Jaime muttered, 'the eyes; the modesty and munificence of temperament, how –'

'He's a Blackfyre,' Arya interrupted.

Jaime's head was beginning to spin in a most unpleasant manner.

'Are you saying that the male line wasn't really exterminated?' he demanded.

'It was exterminated,' Arya drawled; sounding increasingly irritated with having to talk and crawl at the same time, 'Aegon's pedigree comes from his mother.'

'Who was his mother?' Jaime insisted, 'who was his father?'

'I can't tell you that,' Arya said.

"I can't tell you that," Jaime repeated, 'do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound?'

Arya stopped crawling, set the torch down on the floor and looked over her shoulder at him. The position looked uncomfortable.

'Are you ever going to shut up?' she asked crabbily.

'I simply feel a little fucked-over that there are now even more of these half-mad dragon spawn pyromaniacs to contend with!' Jaime retorted.

'Daenerys is not a half-mad dragon spawn pyromaniac!'

'She isn't? Is she also a fraud, then?'

'Jaime, do you honestly expect me to believe that you hated every Targaryen you ever met?'

'So a Blackfyre is pretending to be a Targaryen and pissing all over Daenerys' right to rule, and you hate him for it. That's all?'

'That's all.'

'You're lying! You told me as much!'

Arya cursed, picked the torch up, and began to crawl again. Jaime swore in his own turn, and was about to follow her when she flung the torch down, stopped and once again looked over her shoulder at him.

'Once, on night duty, Aegon put his hand on my cunt and tried to kiss me,' Arya said, 'he's been begging me to fuck him ever since. Satisfied?'

Jaime almost choked on his own astonishment.

'He did what?'

'You heard me.'

'What did you do?'

'I broke his nose.'

Jaime stared briefly at her; tried to hold himself in; failed miserably; and promptly burst into fits of hysterical laughter; the confined space and the echoing walls making it sound as though a group of particularly rowdy prison guards were getting drunk somewhere in the heart of the labyrinth. He could hear Arya trying not to laugh, and for some reason this only made him laugh harder.

'Do you have to do that so loudly?' she prudishly grumbled, 'the ceiling could collapse.'

Jaime ignored her.

'You broke his –'

He couldn't finish the sentence; it was simply too hilarious –

'Is that…is that why his nose looks crooked at the top?' Jaime asked; his eyes starting to water.

'Yes,' Arya admitted sheepishly, finally starting to laugh, 'I tried to break it back into position afterwards, but it wouldn't go –'

'You were trying to make it worse, you little shit!'

'Maybe.'

'He tells people it's a hunting injury!'

'My idea. I suggested the least-convincing explanation I could think of.'

'Why you –'

They sat cackling in the dark like lunatics until their insides hurt too much to laugh further. The walls around them were quiet, and the silence gave no hint of what was happening above them. Arya picked up the torch and groaned at the sight of the never-ending dark before them. And Jaime resolved that if, by some miracle, he ever saw Aegon again, he'd do worse to the fool than break his fucking nose.

Chapter notes

Arya's little triangular friends are a homage to David and Leigh Eddings' Dagashi.