Jaime had never heard anything like the scream that had ripped from Arya's throat at the news of Sansa's death: the loneliness inside it; the agony, the realisation that she was completely, completely alone. He knew all three emotions too well to flatter himself that there was anything he could do to make it better. And yet the crossing over to Dragonstone had been worse, much worse: a death rattle of screaming silence and helplessness as Arya had sat slumped against him like a mute, exhausted sack of nothingness; her spine bent; her body limp; her voice silent; and he had wanted to wrap himself tightly around her and carry her body inside his, so that he could bear this for her, or at least with her. He had held her hand instead, and she had clutched at his, hard: hurting him, but not enough to make him let her go. Then they had reached the castle, and she'd been taken away to see the queen, and when her hand had been uncaringly ripped out of his; leaving what had felt like a gaping void between his fingers, she hadn't protested, or even looked at him; so he had taken himself angrily off to the maester to get his hand treated and bandaged, and had been hard pressed to prevent himself from punching the old fool when it was venerably concluded that his hand would heal in a matter of months, but only if he used it as little as possible.

That doesn't make much fucking sense, Jaime had thought, every man within a hundred miles is going to be sailing off to war one of these days, and he tells me not to use the only hand that I have left? What does he imagine I'll do in battle? Head-butt every enemy that gets in my way?

He had fumed about that all the way down to the bathhouse, and for every moment that he had sat staring at his toes in the hot water; half-expecting to see Brienne scowling opposite him; her bright blue eyes seeking out both the brush and soap and debating whether or not she'd do much damage if she lobbed them both at his head. The wench did not put in an appearance, however, and it was only when Jaime rose from the water – and started at the discovery that some invisible squire had taken his clothes away and left him with new ones – that he heard the voices in the next room, some that he recognised, some that he didn't, discussing the queen's strategy for the taking of King's Landing. Jaime had half a mind to go in there and bang their heads together for discussing tactics in the fucking bathhouse of all places, especially with so many little birds about, before 'Lady Arya's to sneak in and restrain him,' one of them said. And the world was spinning around him and fear suffocating his heart in his chest at the thought of her right arm that had been disfigured and ruined; of her face that was so different now from the Faceless, expressionless mask she had worn in his early days of knowing her, and he was pulling on a shirt and breeches without bothering to dry off, and seizing the first servant he saw by the throat and demanding to know which stinking pile of stone that evidently-blind dragon bitch of a queen had put her in for the night.

The stinking pile of stone turned out to be some enormous draughty chamber at the top of a tower with some twenty two million fucking stairs, and when he eventually reached the fucking door and knocked on it, feeling as though his bloody lungs were about to cave in, the response was predictably discouraging.

'Go away!' Arya shouted.

Jaime ignored her, and opened the door anyway.

She was leaning against the open window; her posture suggesting that she'd been retching out of it, and when she slammed it shut, turned and glared at him, Jaime's breath caught in his throat.

She looked beautiful. She'd thrown her Kingsguard whites (now so dirty that they might more properly be called her Kingsguard blacks) into a crumpled pile on the floor, and put on an ancient-looking bed robe that hugged her form like a lover. Her hair, freshly-washed, tumbled gloriously down her back like a starless sky; her face was beautifully flushed, and alive, and resolved, and he wanted to tell her that she couldn't go after Aegon; that he'd kidnap her and lock her up if that was what it took to stop her, but all that he could think about was his sudden, aching, uncomfortable awareness that he could see every small, fragile line of her body in the folds of her robe, and that he wanted to kiss every single one of them; from the curve of her breasts right down to her ankles.

Seven hells, get a fucking hold on yourself, he thought, growing embarrassingly hard and praying to all the gods at once that she wouldn't notice.

'Does 'go away' mean something different in the West?' Arya was demanding.

'Well you sound better,' Jaime shot back, closing the door behind him.

'I'm fine,' Arya drawled, 'I'm just not used to being so bloody emotional all the time; it really is the most draining – '

'Please don't go after Aegon,' Jaime blurted in a rush.

Arya's face softened for a moment; her eyes transforming from Valyrian steel to autumn rain, and she glanced hesitantly through her eyelashes at the open neck of his shirt and at the damp, dishevelled state of him, before flushing in embarrassment, and promptly beginning to argue.

'If you're here to talk bullshit to me, then please fuck off while you still can,' Arya snapped, glaring at him and blushing still further when her nipples hardened, tight and excruciatingly visible, against the fabric of her robe.

'You're the only one here who's fucked, Lady Stark,' Jaime retorted, making a further genteel effort to control his arousal, 'you've lost your Facelessness and you can barely use your right arm; will you please explain to me how you intend to do anything to Aegon without getting yourself killed?'

'I have to restrain a friendless, army-less king in a ruined castle in a ruined city,' Arya snorted, pointedly crossing her arms, 'it's not exactly as complex a job as killing the Sealord of Braavos.'

'So how are you going to go about accomplishing this 'simple job'?' Jaime mockingly asked; his temper flaring dangerously, 'fly over the walls, hop in through Aegon's window and hope he doesn't drench you in wildfire too?'

'Get out!' Arya yelled.

'The man has lost his mind!' Jaime shouted.

'So what?'Arya shouted back.

'If he sees you,' Jaime said, trying hard to remain calm, remember how young she is, 'he will kill you, and that's only if he doesn't rape and torture you first.'

'He won't see me, because he'll be asleep!' Arya countered, 'that's why the attack's happening at night, stupid. When people are asleep.'

'Asleep?' Jaime furiously repeated, 'Aegon is a fucking lunatic; he doesn't sleep!'

'How do you know?' Arya flippantly demanded.

'I have experience with the sleep patterns of lunatics!' Jaime roared.

'I forgot,' Arya drawled.

'Good for you!' Jaime snapped, 'but I do happen to know what I'm talking about, so let me tell you something about what's going on inside the mind of Aegon mad-as-fuck Targaryen –'

'Blackfyre,' Arya corrected, as nonchalantly as though they were discussing the weather; and it might have been her tone, or the fact that she didn't seem to give a fuck whether she lived or died, but whatever it was, it made him so fucking angry that he could hardly see what he was doing as he stormed towards her, seized hold of her wrists and shoved her roughly into the opposite wall; his burnt hand cupping her chin, hard, and forcing her to look at him.

He expected her to fight. She didn't; calmly resting the back of her head against the wall and glaring fearlessly up at him with those infernal fucking grey eyes as though she were the one imprisoning him; the space between their bodies an inferno; the breath pulsing from her lungs as hard and hot as wildfire; which of course only served to make him more furious at her pig-headed bloody stubbornness.

'Right now,' Jaime stormed; his nose inches from Arya's, 'I can assure you that Aegon Targaryen or Aegon Blackfyre, or whatever the fuck his name is, is convinced that every person in his service is trying to kill him: his guards, his advisors, his friends, the boy emptying his chamber pot; the girl sucking his cock; all of them. The idea is settling down in his head, taking root, getting bigger and bigger, and more and more dangerous, and before long he'll be outlawing knives and scissors and burning anyone caught with one in their dinner sets or sewing boxes. To him, the rest of the world is fucking crazy: he is the victim; he's the one being persecuted; the world needs to pay for what is happening to him. That's why he killed Sansa. And when he sees you, and he will see you, all of that will come tearing out of him at once; he'll see it as confirmation of all his suspicions, he'll be reminded of the thousand-and-one times that you've rejected his royal advances, and when those two things come together in his head, the seven gods together will not be able to do a thing to save you.'

'And what would you do, if you were me?' Arya raged; her voice breaking, 'if your entire family had been fucking massacred, and some cunt like Aegon had taken a jar of wildfire and poured it over Tyrion's head, burned the last person of your blood alive like some piece of meat? If it had happened to you, would you let some stranger do your killing for you?'

'Of course I bloody wouldn't!' Jaime bellowed.

'So why are we fighting?' Arya demanded.

In his mind, he was still yelling; telling her that she was wrong; that she was too injured and too alive to do this; telling her that she'd almost certainly be killed; telling himself that he had come here to convince her that she was wrong, not to end up agreeing with her. Instead, he was pulling her against him, she was seizing the back of his head, and their lips were colliding; Arya's mouth sinking deeply into his as he crushed his lips to hers, desperate, delirious, right; his hands moving slowly down her body, flesh and blood and gold as she opened her mouth for his tongue, and groaned beneath the taste and touch of him; and suddenly they were doing what they should have done; what they had both wanted to do; what he knew they had both thought of doing from the second that he had ripped back the balcony curtain in the great hall of the Red Keep, and she had lowered her flagon of wine, and looked at him.

Arya's hands pulled hot and feverish at his laces as he laid one of her shoulders bare and softly devoured it with his mouth, and she was gasping, and burying her lips in his hair, and walking him back, and further back, and pushing him down into bed. Her tongue and her smile filled his mouth, and left the taste of them sweet and lingering on his lips as she divested him of his shirt and breeches with a speed that rather alarmed him, until he remembered that she wasn't a maiden; not in love and not in life, and that that was one of the countless reasons why he loved her: because she knew without pretending to know; because she knew when others could only ask, or wonder.

Arya sat perfectly still in his lap, her breathing hitching and her eyes burning as she patiently endured every clumsy, blundering, inept move that his single, useless hand made to undo the knot that bound her robe together, and as her nakedness began to emerge; Jaime's hand peeling her robe away from her left shoulder, and from her damaged, bound-up right; the world began to change into a place that was shaped like her; like her sad, human face and her wide, expressive mouth, like her fragile, birdlike shoulders, like her small breasts with their hard, pink nipples, like her firm, masculine stomach, like the feast of brown curls at the juncture of her thighs; and with newness and beauty came the memory, the shame and the anger that he was too much of a bloody cripple to even undress her properly, and that his own body was a thing so scarred and so broken that no one in their right minds would want to touch it, or even see it. The bloody Targaryens had seen to that.

Arya was doing a good job of not noticing anything; looking silently down into his eyes and not at the horrendous bloody scars that decorated his torso; her small hands tracing the scars on his face like patterns in the sand as he clumsily struggled with her clothing; her voice sighing softly each time he touched her with so much as a fingertip; and when the bloody robe finally fell away from her, and left him with only his skin and hers, she didn't move, or kiss him, or touch him. And he found that he didn't blame her.

She continued to stare intently at him, at his eyes and nothing else; frozen above him with her summer snow skin that looked unblemished despite her own scars; and he started to babble something clever about how they should stop, shake hands and pretend that this had never happened; how he couldn't reproach her for being repulsed on what was, after all, only the second time that she saw his scars; not when he himself avoided mirrors like the plague and could barely see himself in them without retching.

Then she bent over and softly pressed her lips to the jagged, sunken hole of burnt flesh above his left breast, and he was gasping and crying out under the weight of such a powerful surge of arousal that his bones seemed to melt to nothingness inside him and shatter his veins with his own heartbeat.

'You think I care less about your stupid scars?' Arya demanded, pressing her lips greedily to his and kissing him breathless until he moaned for release, and then her hands were moving slowly across his ruins, and her mouth was following them: all of her lips, all of her tongue, all of her teeth, kissing and drinking and tasting his chest, his sides, his stomach and every single fucking scar that disfigured them as though they were made of wine, not broken skin. His fingertips glided softly up her spine and into her hair; and she was kissing, and sighing, and touching, and gasping against him until her name was appearing in the centre of every breath that escaped him; until every breath that escaped him became fast, short, non-bloody-fucking-existent; until he was squirming beneath her like some maiden on her wedding night, biting hard on his bottom lip and sincerely trying to prevent himself from coming all over the sheets as Arya kissed his mouth again; gently, this time, and followed the scars on his face from his forehead down to his beard; her lips like fiery whispers on his skin and sweetly suffocating him with their touch.

Jaime looked up into Arya's grey gaze, and gently framed her face with his hands, one golden, one flesh and blood. She smiled at him. His burning fingers traced her hairline, and her cheekbones, and her jaw; then his lips did the same; and he wanted to bury his lips in every last inch of her skin, and sleep there, in the scent of her. He wanted to tell her that. He tried to; whispering 'you are…', then nothing, because there wasn't a word for what she was, and Arya was kissing him softly and letting out a yelp of surprise as Jaime seized her hips, yanked her against him, flipped her over and showed her.

Her tongue was hot in his mouth as he rolled his slowly and beautifully against hers, and felt it growing warmer with the taste of the groans that rose in the back of her throat while his hands, touching her skin, tangled deeply and impossibly with her hands, touching his. And he couldn't see or feel anything but her; she was the whole world; and her smell, and her smile, and the heat of her skin, and the wetness of her cunt, and the sounds she was making as his mouth travelled languidly down her neck and throat and kissed the tip of one nipple with his tongue; her fingers combing through his hair, then bunching in his hair as she whispered his name and muttered to herself in a language that he didn't understand; probably Braavosi, and –

'What was that, Lady Stark?' Jaime grinned; thoroughly flattered by the idea of being so good that she could forget the Common Tongue.

'Bite…harder,' Arya snarled; glaring up into his eyes and clearly guessing his thoughts.

Jaime smiled against her flesh and had no mercy on her; circling each of her nipples slowly with his tongue and licking at them while she swore, blasphemed and spitefully pulled his hair; mischievously arching her back and moaning in satisfaction when his teeth sank momentarily into her breast, then growling loudly in frustration and hissing as Jaime wrapped his arms around her waist and glided his lips softly and persistently away from where she wanted them, up and up, until he reached her neck again, and kissed it, open-mouthed, as though he were kissing her lips.

'You…are…killing…me,' Arya half-mewled, half-snarled; half-desperation, half-want as her neck arched beneath his mouth, 'you're killing me; you're killing me; you're killing me –'

'So yield,' Jaime growled; his teeth grazing the skin at the nape of her neck, and gracelessly releasing her as she seized roughly hold of his thighs and thrust against him, once, so hard and so unexpectedly that he almost came apart at the fucking seams from the effort of containing himself –

'You yield,' Arya hissed, her eyes like Valyrian steel; I'm not going to last much longer if she keeps doing that; and her shoulders were covered in scars, and her mouth was gasping into his and giving him breath shaped like his own name, and his body was covering hers as they sank slowly back down into the mattress, and down into the place that was her, where he could burn at the stake without dying; where dragonfire couldn't touch him, or her. Her eyes were turning his to grey just as his were turning hers to green; his cock was straining, slick and hard, at her entrance; she was grasping his buttocks with both her hands and pulling him harder against her; and they were crying out together as he thrust into her; their breathing a frenzy; their bodies trembling feverishly against each other; their voices sighing out each other's names as Arya wrapped her legs tight around his waist and slowly pulled him deeper into her, until their faces were inches apart, and they could watch each other burn.

They fucked slowly at first; tenderly, maddeningly; Arya's hips beating languidly up to each long, individual thrust he made inside her in a way that was fucking glorious, but too bloody unbearable to be worth it. He fucked faster, and harder, but her thrusts only grew slower, and deeper, and more and more stubborn, and more…bloody…gods…until Jaime was moaning in miserable frustration at every slow, passionate, unbearable roll of her hips, and Arya was smiling wickedly up at him with her grey eyes glowing– probably getting back at him for earlier, the little minx:

'Ready to apologise yet?' she asked, craning her neck and biting his bottom lip.

Fuck it.

'Yes.'

'Show me.'

Her eyes closed and her lips parted as he plunged into the heat between her legs and felt her urging her hips rapidly up to his to fuck him faster; she was biting on her tiny wolf teeth in an expression of frustration that was so utterly arousing that he was sure she had no idea she was doing it; I'm not saying a fucking word about it; and she was opening her eyes again and pulling his gaze inside her as she drove her hips harder into his and dug her nails into his thighs and begged him, 'Jaime, do it…harder, for fuck's sake!'

Jaime grinned breathlessly, and obliged.

'Like this, Lady Stark?'

'Seven fucking…hells, yes –'

'Like this?'

'Yes!'

She was coming apart in his arms and holding him and frantically kissing his lips each time her nails dug too deep, and her grey gaze was mesmerising him and enflaming him as the place that was her became the place that was both of them. Their bodies and minds boiled and seared and melted together until every pore in every place that they touched bled total fucking nigh-unbearable ecstasy, and the pain of it was exquisite as they gasped and moaned and loved as though they were the only two people for a hundred miles; and he didn't give a fuck if the entire castle could hear them: what they were doing was beautiful, her name was beautiful, and if he wanted to moan it twenty-five fucking times then he didn't care a shit what anyone else thought about it, or him, and the woman who had a name; who belonged to her name; the woman who had woken him up; the girl that he had wanted to kill and had chosen to save; If I had killed her, if I had done it, just the thought of it, I can't, I can't think; 'Jaime,' Arya was moaning; close; 'Jaime'; and he was sliding a hand between her thighs and touching her; and she was screaming for him and he for her as they slammed hard into release, together, and every inch of love, or desire, or good that he had ever felt was incarnating and roaring and spilling and fucking into the fragile, scarred, everything body and mind and heart that was her; and the heat was roaring higher instead of dying as their hips thrust harder together and made their voices better, redder, and turned everything around them to fields of searing, burning ice that hurt like all seven hells put together: beautifully, enough to turn his eyes to rain and Arya's to molten silver as she clung to him and sobbed; buried close and deep within him the way that he was buried in her.

He clutched harder at Arya's fingers, and she at his; their hands bunching together in the nape of his neck as the ice blew away from them in a slow, agonising fall; as air, earth, the world, slowly pulled their skins and minds out of each other, and made them two people again.

Jaime felt his head collapsing onto Arya's chest, and her hands pulling away from his and stroking weakly at his hair. Her breath enveloped her body as it rose and fell beneath his; he could feel it in his own lungs even now, and as he listened to the sound of her breathing, hitched, ragged, deep; no slowness; no restraint; he softly closed his eyes and fell down into her heartbeat.