She dreamed she was hunting in a dark wood with Summer and Shaggy Dog. It was a good dream. Together they overcame a monstrous stag with antlers of black bone and lion eyes; and as her teeth sunk into its throat she felt a wild rush in her body that made her bite down harder; and the stag's blood filled her mouth like strength and life, and spilled onto her fur in strips of black and crimson, and it was delicious, so delicious.
This is what revenge is supposed to feel like, she thought, the taste of an enemy's blood on your tongue and the euphoric knowledge that you're the one draining it out of them. Not a lot of crying and whimpering and doubting and feeling that you've accomplished nothing; no knowledge that the kill hasn't taken your grief away, but has only left you alone with it.
And her mind seemed to become more and more human as the blood frenzy abated, and she realised that she couldn't be hunting with Summer and Shaggy Dog because they were shades; shades taken by the sea when it had come rolling across open country to Winterfell like a great wave. And yet there they were before her, stripping the carcass raw; their muzzles dark with blood, as hers was; and she loped sadly away from them because she did not care for dreams within dreams and hopes within hopes. Dreaming was for children, and so was hope.
Her nose smelled a whiff of blackened wood and fire on the air; so faint that she might never have noticed it had she not been trying to wake up; had her humanity not insisted on invading her wolfishness so spitefully. She went further and further into the wood; the soil and the leaves cool beneath her paws; the wind rustling in her fur and in the trees, and soon she came upon two shapes; two sleeping human beings on either side of a fire so small that it gave off no warmth at all; only smoke. And she wanted to wake up, because they were her pack too: Jaime and herself; him and her human self, not her wolf self, and why can't I wake up? she thought, I want to wake up; why can't I?
Jaime was muttering to himself in his sleep, his words no more than the ghost of a breath on his lips, and yet she could hear them as she watched the crease between his eyes grow deeper and deeper, and his jaw clench harder and harder.
'Your Grace, please,' he murmured, 'you can do nothing now but surrender, please, surrender.'
She pushed her muzzle against his nose, trying to wake him up, but the fingers of his hand were clenched right into the soil beneath him; his knuckles the colour of bone; his fingertips swallowed by the earth just as his mind was swallowed up by sleep and refused to release him from its grasp.
'My father will…you have no choice…we have no choice…you must…yes, I am telling you that you must…'
His voice became louder and angrier, and his face was a horror of whiteness and revulsion, and she was trying to move his head by bumping her nose against it, but he wasn't waking up, and she opened her mouth and screamed in the desire to be human and awake and alive and with him; and in a flash she was awake and throwing herself across the space between them and shaking him violently by both shoulders as he shouted out that awful cry:
'Surrender.'
When she shook him, he did not stir quietly into the waking world, but tore into it like a blade; bolting upright so abruptly that he almost knocked her over; his hand seizing the front of her shirt and yanking her up as she lost her balance.
His eyes were damp, and beautiful, and close. Her hands were convulsing on his shoulders with the tremours in his body and he breathed rawly like a drowned man; nightmare still dissolving from his face like a veil that only he could see. Arya felt her fingertips ghost from his shoulders to his face, her thumbs tracing lines on his parted lips, and
What am I doing? Arya thought as her fingers grew damp from his breath and shivering from his eyes, why aren't I stopping? Stop. Don't. Don't.
She kissed him, and his mouth as it answered hers felt drunk, and soft and childlike; the fingers of his left hand tearing swathes of fire along her jaw and down her neck. His lips felt like a caress or a murmur or an echo of a forgotten song, and on them she could taste the ghost of tears.
'It was just a dream,' she murmured as his head nestled weakly into her shoulder; his entire body quivering like an ice storm against her own, 'it was just a dream.'
He said nothing for a while; the feeling of his breath on her shoulder, and the sound of it, making the hairs on her neck stand on end, but his heartbeat did not abate; his chest pulverising hers with every last crash of his heart.
'Arya.'
'Yes.'
'I have to tell you something.'
As Jaime spoke she travelled with him to the throne room on the day King's Landing fell. The smell of smoke and blood and rape was rank in her nostrils, and the monstrous skulls of the Targaryen dragons leered down at her with an indifference that was almost obscene. Blood was pouring down the Mad King's arms from the number of times he had cut himself on the throne that day, and he looked like a demon from one of Old Nan's stories. He had shaggy, bone-dry white hair that might have belonged to a man of seventy, uncut nails that hung grotesquely from his fingers like ringlets, and a face that was all the more horrible for bearing the signs of what must once have been great beauty and nobility of form. A pyromancer stood at his side like a sentinel, but the Mad King was not looking at him.
'Bring me your father's head,' he was screaming into the empty hall, 'bring me your father's head and I might not have yours in payment for what he has done!'
Disgust pierced her, and for the first time she looked to her side at Jaime. She could see horror coursing through his body like poison, but his face was oddly calm and detached, as though he were observing the scene through a slit in the wall; or with a legion of troops at his back; and with a shock she noticed how young he was: eighteen or nineteen at most. His hair was so blond that it looked like innocence and light, and his face was the face of a boy, effortlessly carrying the unmarred splendour of youth.
He is far more beautiful now than he was then, Arya thought, Life has made him beautiful.
'Let Robert be king over charred bones and cooked meat!' the Mad King was screaming at his pyromancer, 'let him be the king of ashes! Burn them all! Burn them in their homes! Burn them in their beds!'
The threat of all that wildfire beneath her feet seemed to roar up at them from the depths of the earth like a monster from the deepest of the seven hells, and as she watched Jaime walk slowly and purposefully towards the Iron Throne; the threat of wildfire seemed to join with the command for Tywin's head in choking up her heart and filling it with more contagion than she could take.
Stop him, she thought, please stop him.
She felt coldness and calm as they overcame Jaime's body. She felt him becoming an adult and no longer being a boy; and the knowledge that he was here alone at the edge of an apocalypse didn't frighten her, just as it didn't frighten him, because he was doing the only thing that could be done.
As the Mad King's blood spread across the floor and pooled gruesomely with that of the pyromancer, dragon blood no less red than common blood, she saw Jaime seat himself on the Iron Throne, and almost smiled as he slumped back in it, exhausted but clearly enjoying the view.
Then she heard the creak of ancient wood and the groaning of her heart in her chest as the throne room doors opened to admit her father, alive and breathing and with a head. He was tall and strong and alert, and Arya saw, with a sob, that the grey eyes she'd inherited from him bore a seriousness and a grief that were too old for such a young face. She saw herself in them, and wept.
Father's armour was stained with blood, with too much of it, and his expression was granite and iron, and she cried harder because she knew that look, and had allowed herself to forget what it had looked like. Father was walking slowly towards Jaime and the corpses of the Mad King and the pyromancer; his mere presence commanding that entire hall in a way that would make Lord Tywin envious; and she could feel hatred radiating off both of them; hatred for Lannister arrogance that could mean more blood and more war; hatred for Stark judgment and unrelenting honour before words were spoken. The existence of such hatred between two people that she loved was like death to her, like death inside, and she waited for Jaime to speak; to tell Father that he had saved half a million people from burning alive; that he had done the only thing that could be done. But he did nothing of the sort, hopping off the throne with an impudence that angered her and blathering some nonsense about its being a very uncomfortable chair. Why wasn't he telling him?
Arya felt the weight of all the lives that Jaime had saved and the knowledge of the dishonour and the insults he had endured squat grotesquely over her chest like a hobgoblin. And she remembered seeing this day in him on the day that they had met; she remembered how she had felt the legacy of the gaping horror of what she had just witnessed as acutely as though it were happening in her, not him. And she had asked Lord Tywin if something horrible had happened to Jaime during the reign of the Mad King, and Tywin had not even looked up as he responded: 'nothing more horrible than usual.'
She knew that every word of the story Jaime told her was an act of love; and she had wanted to turn away from him for every minute of it to stop herself from loving his face and his body and him, as he was inside. But she was so, so angry with him; because telling no one of what he had done was so stupid and so stubborn, and so utterly typical of him.
'You've been a fool,' Arya murmured, still close to him.
He looked at her with an openness of expression that she could not bear.
'Why have I been a fool?' Jaime growled; every line in his face defiled by the memory of Aerys, and by blinding hatred of her father.
'Because my father would have believed you,' she stated with all the earnestness that she possessed.
'Do you really think?' he drawled with horrible bitterness, his lip curling like his sister's; his face clearly showing that he felt betrayed by her reaction.
'All you had to do to change that was open your big Lannister mouth and tell him!' Arya snapped, furious at the way he was talking about her father.
'I'd never thought of you as being stupid,' Jaime spat patronisingly.
'I've been stupid?' Arya retorted, 'you're the one who's put yourself through twenty years of having every man, woman and child in the kingdoms believing you have shit for honour, and all because some immature part of your deranged, fucked-up brain thinks that keeping quiet and dragging your own name through the mud somehow pays the world back for miraculously failing to guess that they owe you their miserable fucking lives. Why didn't you tell him, Jaime? Why didn't you tell him?'
He replied with such hatred that he could only speak through gritted teeth.
'Do you really think the honourable Ned Stark would condescend to listen to 'a man who would profane his blade with the blood of the king he had sworn to defend'?' Jaime sneered, 'his stiff Northern arse judged me guilty from the moment he laid eyes on me.'
'Aaaw,' Arya mocked mercilessly, "I'm a poor little rich man and nobody loves me.' You're an arse, Jaime. An absolute, unadulterated arse. All that time and all that whispering behind your back; all that talk and mockery about the 'Kingslayer,' all that hell...what exactly did you think you were achieving by keeping quiet? It's so stupid! Why in seven hells did you do it? How could you stand it?'
'I thank you for your high opinion of me, my lady,' he spat contemptuously, 'I had thought that you might understand, but you're clearly just as high and mighty as your bloody father.'
'Oh, I understand you!' she shouted, 'you're like a petulant child! You've willingly suffered twenty years of insults from every idiot in the world who believes himself to have a scrap of stupid honour, when all the while not one of them is fit to lick the shit off your boots! You could have told anyone, at any time, to make it end, but no! Being miserable is more fun! Vanity! Vanity, arrogance and bullshit!'
'Bullshit?!' Jaime repeated.
'Yes, bullshit! Bullshit and childish stupidity!' Arya insisted, 'so you're getting no sympathy from me, you bloody idiot. You've brought this all on yourself.'
Jaime was glaring her with a fury that she found both frightening and rousing.
'I don't want your bloody sympathy,' he growled, and she scarcely had time to notice the new brightness in his eyes or the way that the anger in his voice had changed before his fingers closed around the front of her breeches and yanked her against him. His mouth was hot and wild and relentless as it bit down on hers; his tongue forcing her lips open like iron and filling her up with the taste and touch of him; making her his, and him hers. She dug her fingers hard into the skin at the back of his neck and felt him shuddering and moaning into her; her mouth feeling like one wet and amateurish half of a dance that was a mess; but a beautiful one. She felt her pack standing around her, judging her and casting her away from them, and she sobbed as Jaime kissed her till her lips were raw and her tongue was aching in her mouth, and seven hells, but I do love his tongue, I love it, I love it.
'Jaime, stop,' she murmured against his lips, showing no sign of stopping herself; her pack still around her, watching her, 'stop this; stop it, please.'
She could feel his smile on her mouth, ironic and insolent and right, and as she stepped back from him, she hated him for that smile. She hated him for not stopping, and for not making her stop when she asked him to. She hated him wildly for that.
'Alright, Stark, I'll stop,' Jaime replied, smiling insolently, 'I'll stop when you do. Agreed?'
And the selfish, arrogant bastard folded his arms and waited for her to come to him.
