That night, Jaime dreamed of Cersei.

He felt his anger consume him every day for a month as they journeyed north; so close to her, yet unable to touch her. He saw her bristling at the high table of Winterfell as Robert paraded himself in front of her, his hands down the bodices of two different serving wenches, and she had looked coldly across the room at Jaime, regal and beautiful as the dawn, the hatred in her eyes begging him. He felt himself tear away the clothes that kept her whiteness imprisoned; felt himself fuck her against the cold stone wall, gripping her, hurting her, her lips drawing blood from his, and you're home, he had thought, you're home. But then she was crying out; in alarm, not in ecstasy, and he saw a pale, uncomprehending, wide-eyed face at the window, and he ran, seizing the front of the Stark boy's jerkin and yanking him away from his own escape.

'Quite the little climber, aren't you?' he said, and relished the look of terror on the boy's face, growing harder as he realised how high up they were, how easy it would be to silence him and how badly he wanted to prove to Cersei that he would do anything for her.

And then he was staring into his own face.

And nothing but the tips of his feet were balanced on the window sill, and his legs were twitching and spasming, wanting to move, to grip the stone better, but knowing he would fall if he tried. And he almost wept at the hope that he felt at the feeling of his reflection's hand at the center of his chest; holding him anchored to the world when it was obvious that the time he had left in it was short and dark.

'How old are you, boy?' his reflection asked.

'Ten,' Jaime answered.

He looked into his own eyes, and he was horrified by what he saw in them. Not cruelty, not coldness, but laughter. Laughter.

'The things I do for love,' his reflection said, and shoved him.

The tears were torn out of his eyes by the force of the wind, and his mind felt slower than his body as he fell. But then he felt the air lurch and quicken and die; felt the ground crack against his back; and then, darkness, a darkness so complete that it was chaos, primal, without life, before life.

His breath burned red hot in his lungs as his eyes opened. His heart was roaring like a lunatic inside him, his body was slick with sweat, and the heat of his bed was unbearable as he tore off the covers, crossed the room, and opened the window; where he stood, head bowed, over the basin at its edge, his jaw pulsing violently, like he was about to vomit.

The sweat cooled on his brow, and the night air filled him up with mist, but the nausea did not leave him as he once again saw his own eyes laughing at him; felt his body, so small, so…human, fall backwards into the empty air.

Have you gone soft, you bloody fool? The little shit was spying on us. He would have run straight to his father, who would have run straight to Robert, who would have decorated his personal standard with both our heads. I do not feel guilty. I do not feel guilty.

But his own eyes would smile at him each time he closed them, and the Stark girl would look up at him, pale and in pain, and he did not sleep again for the rest of the night, cursing himself for a lily-livered weakling and a fool. He was in a foul enough mood by sunrise to want to hit something, and he wandered aimlessly about the castle in search of a sword, the halls empty even of servants, until he happened upon some luckless squire returning from the privy, seized his ear and commanded him to show him to the practice yard.

The squire was a stutterer, and Jaime would almost certainly have found some way to mock him had he been in a better mood. Today, the boy simply contributed to his rancour.

'This is the y – y – yard, my lord,' the squire mumbled, 'and t – t – the armoury is just t – t – there – '

'Speak up, boy!'

'My l-l-lord - '

'Never mind!' Jaime shouted, crossing the yard to the armoury and hoping against hope that the young fool would still be there when he came out so that he could beat the stutter out of him.

The armoury at Harrenhal was a huge, vaulted room in a rather better condition than the rest of the castle. Weapons were set out on wire meshes that ran from floor to ceiling, and hung on all four walls; and at first glance, one might have been inside a library, with swords, spears, morning stars and pikes crammed into the shelves instead of books. Jaime approved heartily, and set off to discover the source of the sound of steel striking stone that was emanating from the depths of the room.

About halfway into the armoury he found the Stark girl, who evidently thought that hitting a greatsword against the wall was a more effective way of polishing it than making use of the stones scattered on the floor around her. Jaime smirked. She really was dreadfully skinny – he'd seen better-fed tavern girls – and he wondered that she didn't topple over immediately just by holding the sword up. And yet she was only using one hand. Impressive. Though he supposed she might have been too angry for the weight to matter much. The enthusiasm with which she was attacking the wall certainly suggested that.

'Not so hard,' Jaime said, amused, 'you'll ruin the steel.'

The girl whirled around and glared at him.

'What are you doing here?' she shouted, 'go away!'

'You sound just like your mother,' Jaime observed mockingly.

'Don't you talk about my mother!' the girl snapped.

Jaime folded his arms and leaned against a mesh of swords.

'Why shouldn't I? We got to know each other rather well while I was her guest. Her bed was lonely, and I was happy to be of service.'

The girl coloured,

'You're lying.'

'On the contrary. She's become a real she-wolf in her old age. There's not much fish left in her.'

'My mother has always been a wolf, not a stupid fish! And if she was ever desperate enough to fuck an insect like you, your tiny cock would probably fall off in shock.'

Jaime grinned.

'It's not so tiny.'

'Is that what your sister tells you every time you fuck her?'

Jaime's grin disappeared.

'Don't talk about my sister in that tone, Stark.'

'Did you keep fucking her after you pushed Bran out of the window like he was some sack of wool at a fleece fair?' the girl pressed on, 'did doing it make you hard? Or was she the one who wanted more?'

'Are you –'

"Oh, Jaime, please fuck me harder, Jaime, there's nothing more arousing than murder, Jaime," the girl imitated shrilly, before her face fell into an expression of exquisite, fiery-eyed contempt.

'You're…disgusting,' she spat.

Nausea blinded him and made him want to retch, blood rushing rapidly to his head, then draining out of it. He remembered his own face, and 'how old are you, boy?' and 'the things I do for love' and the casual, ghastly amusement that he had seen in his own eyes. And he remembered his stomach wrenching and turning in on itself as he fell to earth, down into its jaws, to death, and he remembered what had followed; the darkness, the non-living and the non-dying, the horror of being both of them at once.

Jaime realised that the girl was staring somewhat triumphantly at him, and he grinned widely and hurriedly at her, his lip curling into his favourite sneer.

'Was that little speech supposed to unman me?' he purred.

The girl smiled scornfully at him.

'Yes.'

She walked away from him with the sword still clutched in her hand, her tone suggesting that he had done a miserable job of concealing his discomfort, and he could not recall being angrier with himself in the entire course of his life.

In his own way, he was his own master of whisperers, his own Faceless Man. He was his father's son. Father hid behind marble and silence and fear, Jaime behind smiles and violence and noise. Father was better at it than strategy; Jaime better at it than swordplay. He wore it like armour, like a second skin, often for years on end, and nothing in this world could pierce it; not after the things it had protected him from. And then some half-starved, foul-mouthed little brat with judging eyes just like her father's had come along and stripped the skin right off his bones with nothing more than a few short words; and worst of all, she knew it.

Say something, he growled at himself, for fuck's sake, say something.

'Leaving so soon?' he called after her retreating back.

No reply.

'If I disgust you so much, you could just ask me to leave,' he suggested.

'I'm leaving because your father said he'd hang me if I tried to kill you again,' she shouted over her shoulder.

Delighted to be so generously awarded a pretext for bursting out laughing, Jaime gleefully launched into gales of laughter, pushing them eagerly out of his throat and up towards the ceiling. The idea of this child doing him any harm was so ridiculous that –

Oh.

Time had lost momentum, before gaining it again like an arrow loosed from a longbow; something cold, grey and metallic had grazed his ear; blood was flowing slowly down his neck; and he was yanking a sword off the rack as the girl stormed back towards him, murder in her eyes.

She'd thrown a knife at him, and it had missed him by inches.

Whistling provocatively, Jaime felt the weight of his sword in his hands, his fingers almost sighing in contentment as they slid into place along the hilt; and the deep, beautiful knell that travelled through them as he deflected the Stark girl's first blow was glorious, a symphony, perfection. Then the girl slid backwards into a stance that made her seem thinner and more elusive than the air itself, and as his eyes met hers and saw an intelligent, analytical opponent staring out at him, Jaime realised that the girl knew how to fight. And she had not been trained by a Westerosi.

She was never in one place for more than a split second; her body like millions of tiny cracks in the fabric of the air that he could only reach with his eyes half-closed. She handled her weapon as though it were no lighter than a needle, propelling it between her left and right hands and dealing such equally heavy blows with each that it was impossible to tell which was her sword hand. She crouched and she leapt; she reversed the blade effortlessly in her hand to swing the hilt at his face, and she would fool him again and again; her entire body singing out that she would attack from one direction, her blow landing squarely and effortlessly on the opposite side, stinging him savagely as she backed away again, safe from the hulking, hammering power of Jaime's arm. Her style had the lightness and the devastating weight of Braavosi water dancing; the heavy, iron instinct of Westeros that made men take hold of a blade with both hands and use it to crack skulls…and something else, something undefinable that he had never seen or felt before. She was extraordinary. She was…beautiful.

Jaime would sooner die than admit that he felt out of his depth, but his attempt to bring an entire rack of swords down on her was all the confirmation of the fact that the Stark girl needed. She danced elegantly out of the way as the impact sent clouds of dust surging into the air, then leapt onto the rack itself and came at him again, trying to trip him up. Her face was raw with enjoyment; his own with anger, and his blows grew harder and harder as he succeeded in turning her around and tried to draw her towards the back of the room, where he had earlier perceived a very useful-looking set of nets hanging on the wall.

That impudent smile on her face was incensing him, but the angrier he became, the more mistakes he made. The Stark girl darted into each of them like a magnet drawn to metal, her instinct razor-sharp, flawless, supernatural, but to Jaime she seemed to be focusing on him, and only him; not paying much attention to the direction in which his mistakes were taking her. He took advantage of that by taking care to seem wilder and angrier than he felt; and as they reached the back wall, he glanced just once over her shoulder, contemplating how he could bring the nets down on her.

With an audacity that he would have praised under any other circumstances, the girl suddenly took hold of both his shoulders, spun him around, and slammed him into the very wall he had been trying to drive her into, sending him crashing to the floor with a pile of the bloody nets on top of him, their weight so tremendous, so painful and so humiliating that his eyes screwed up till he saw nothing but blackness, and his fingers clenched into fists.

When he opened his eyes, the Stark girl was standing over him, looking thoroughly pleased with herself. Her lips were pursed in satisfaction, and her eyes smoldered with the thrill of the chase, brilliant against the fairness of her skin and the blood pulsing in her cheeks.

'Oh, good,' she observed casually, 'you're alive.'

And she left the room whistling, leaving him tangled up in his own trap.

Chapter Notes

I respectfully inform readers who keep sending me reviews to the tune of 'Arya can't beat Jaime because she only has a few month's training; Jaime is the greatest knight in Westeros and knows how to protect himself; Jaime relies on speed, not strength' that I already know all this and have not unknowingly inserted these contradictions.

Point 1: Arya beating Jaime after a few months of training. I clearly state that Jaime recognises Braavos, Westeros and something else that he can't define in her style, which is a subtle hint that there is something else going on apart from her few months with Syrio. This point is raised again in Chapter 7 at the mention of Arya's 'friend,' and I am certainly not going to reveal what is going on earlier than I had intended simply because this hint has not been recognised by certain readers.

Point 2: Strength versus speed. In this particular scene, I speak of Jaime's strength more than his speed for a reason. I am aiming for an intense physical/spiritual connection between Arya and Jaime that is much better expressed through the imagery of strength than speed. A blow that resonates right down to the bone is an intensely physical experience that connects two people through the steel that they carry: it can be extremely powerful and overwhelming, which is the sort of relationship I am aiming for in this ship. Furthermore, Jaime is certainly the fastest knight in Westeros, but a child who is a quarter of his weight is a lot lighter than him and would only be able to defeat him through superior speed, something that is made possible for Arya through her light weight.