EDIT: I've been editing once again the whole Rhaegar chapter, cause I wasn't pleased with its composition, therefor there are new things here in the first part now! :) as they will be in the second part. Ty for reading!

Rhaegar

"My king?"

Rhaegar ceased twiddling the stone and slipped it into the pouch fastened to the belt at his surcoat's waist. His hand burned faintly again, as though tiny sparks were tickling tiresomely the inside of his palm. He turned his head to see Arthur Dayne's face, pale in the light of the torch, which flickering shadow was moving along with them deeper into the cave, darting and writhing upon its wall like a thing alive. His comrade and friend was looking at him warily, unsurely, almost fearfully.

Fear was so unlike the Sword of the Morning that in another time it might have left Rhaegar marveling. Now he did scarcely care. His thoughts were misty, drifting far, far away.

"Forgive my boldness, my king," Arthur went on, "but do you truly think this wise? You have kingdom to rule, its troubles to mend... Is it wise to leave the Iron Throne now, while your messengers to Stark are doubtless already on their way back to King's Landing? Should you not remain there, to hear out their tidings anon, rather than wander these ruins and caverns?"

Rhaegar smiled faintly, barely heeding his words. Bats flitted above them, their wings stirring the air like banners. He tilted his head back, his eyes following their flight. Targaryen banners, Stark banners, Arryn's, and Baratheon's, and Martell's, and yet others, and others - they all fluttered whilst the rebellion, only to sink in blood thereafter, devoured by it like carrion by worms. So many graves, so many barrows, yet hers was nowhere to be found. Where is her grave?

"We have known each other far too long for you to incessantly pardon me and name me king," he said smoothly.

"Therefore?" the knight insisted. Rhaegar felt almost bored.

Who is Brandon Stark?, he mused lingeringly, as if trying to unearth the answer from the fathomless mine of his memory. Ah! He is her brother, and I have ever somehow believed in the strong North. If he so desires its independence, why should I not grant it to him as a gift?

Where is her grave? For all that lived once and died must surely have a grave somewhere.

"The Hand remains in King's Landing," he replied to Arthur at last, his tone nigh carefree, as though that single sentence resolve all matters.

"I'd not wager a groat for the loyalty of Tywin Lannister," his comrade spat with contempt. "He agreed to send his own son to the Wall without so much as a flicker of hesitation. If a man can so easily sacrifice his own blood, is there any soul left whom he would not betray when needed?"

"Yet, it is his daughter they now name queen." Rhaegar had never, not once, forced himself to call Cersei his wife, not even in the silence of his own thoughts, let alone aloud. There was something foul in that, well-nigh lothsome, like the stench of corpse left to decay. All my deeds were wicked, he repeated again to himself, his fingers clawing idly at the palm of his hand, hidden beneath the folds of his silk mantle, itching and burning.

"The king's interest is in Lannisters' interest, and the Lannisters' interest is what concerns my Hand foremost," he told Arthur. "And ask me not to pity Tywin's son. Even after years, I shall not."

"I do not," Arthur replied, albeit reluctantly. He had once borne a fondness for the boy Jaime Lannister had erstwhile been - Rhaegar knew this well - and that sentiment yet lingered in him, mayhaps. Memory is a cruel and wearying thing, Rhaegar had long believed. "I say only that never should one trust a man who has betrayed his own son. I-"

"You would never betray me, nor act against me, even now, when you deem me mad." Rhaegar glanced at his companion and smiled softly. Suddenly, for a reason unknown to himself, he felt as light as a feather, as though soaring high above the seas on the back of one of the Targaryens' olde dragons, and his heart seemed just as unburdened. "Therefore you now wander Summerhall's ruins and antres along with me, though surely you have little taste for it."

The cave's passage was drawing to an end, and from an opening shaped like a doorway with but a single, phantom wing, pale light began to come through, whiter and more veiled than the light of the torch Arthur carried aloft. There are stairs there, the very same I saw in the dream, Rhaegar was almost certain, and then, for the third time, yet less grimly now and with a flicker of something newly stirring within him, he asked himself: Where is her grave? What if he should ask me this?

"Brandon Stark sacrificed his own brother as well," he then said thoughtfully, ere they reached the top of the stairs.

Arthur Dayne raised his brows. "Brandon Stark sacrificed no one, nor anything. You gave him the North freely and for nought, before he even thought to ask for it."

Was it truly so?, Rhaegar tried to remember. Perchance. Her grave, the one that is nowhere, bound us together. Or perchance not: it bound me to the Starks. Brandon Stark it only made more angry, he recalled as the whole scene returned to him now, so vivid as though he were once more in the tower of joy, that had become the tower of sorrow that day...

He beheld her again, as she lay there in nigh-complete darkness, illuminated merely by the faint glow of a single candle in a humble oil lamp, in an empty chamber upon a makeshift bier raised by the three knights of the Kingsguard. She was paler that the whitest linen, with a bunch of withered roses that Arthur had entwined within her hands.

It was high time for them to be withered and blackened: she had lain there for five days now, five long days Rhaegar had been late. Yes, the flowers had right to be withered - Rhaegar had clung to that thought then, lest not think how he himself had no right to be late. Lyanna had been dying in pain, Arthur had told him, and he had not even given her the comfort of his presence at her death.

He knew not how long he had sat there, blank and bleak, unmoving, his soul as dead as Lyanna and their son, whenas a noise reached him from the stairs: the clash of steel in some odd scuffle and the hurried, nervous clatter of many footsteps ascending the tower.

Rhaegar did not even turn as the door groaned open behind him, its hinges creaking like a dying thing, and they entered. It was only the voice of Gerold Hightower that pulled him from the waking dream holding him fast. "My lord! Forgive me, I beg you, for daring to disturb your mourning. You commanded us to leave you alone to your grief, yet... he came and willed fight us, alone, with not a single man at his back, to later come here for you. We took him alive, for he was your lord father's prisoner and now he is yours. It falls to you to decide his fate."

"My prisoner?" Rhaegar reluctantly tore his eyes from Lyanna's fingers - still clutching, so fiercely, those accursed blue roses - and turned at last. His brows furrowed at the sight. 'Mongst his men, those he had ridden here from King's Landing along with and the knights, stood Brandon Stark, thrashing in the grasp of Arthur and Oswell Whent, snarling like a true wolf caught. His icy grey eyes blazed with fury.

"Lord Stark!" Rhaegar's voice carried his surprise. He had forgotten him entirely, after his arrival at Aegon's Hill to find only the scorched ruin left by fire... Perhaps he had assumed Brandon perished in those pitiless flames, as so many others had. But no: here he was, alive, defiant, having somehow escaped the cells and fled King's Landing on his own.

"Release him and leave us!" Rhaegar commanded, not knowing where his voice found such strength. His eyes met Arthur's, which widened in astonishment and hesitation. "Rhaegar-"

"I have said: set him free and leave!" he repeated even more kingly.

Whenas they obeyed, Brandon Stark rushed towards his sister, yet halted just before, as though afeard to touch her. He froze, unmoving, whole but his eyes, that remained lively, darting over Lyanna's body in a mixture of disbelief and terror.

"How have you known that here...?" Rhaegar asked at last as they stood what seemed an aeon.

Brandon said nought to that. Whenas his gaze snapped back to Rhaegar, his eyes were so wild and seething with rage that Rhaegar thought he would tear him apart with nothing but bare hands. Yet what of it? He realised he would scarcely resist.

"You!" Brandon barked, his voice a raging whisper. "In damn, stinking dungeons of your mad father, treated worse than dog, I dreamed, day and night, of this one moment, imagined it - killing you, over and over, in a dozen of duels. And now... now the moment has come!"

"I shall not fight you," Rhaegar said flatly, in calmness hollow and grim. "You can kill me, here and now, if you wish - I will not withstand, and will rathe welcome death at your hands. But I ought warn you: to slay me this way you will dishonor yourself and your House far more than if you never avenged Lyanna at all. The war is over, lord Stark, and I am to be king by the will of law and gods."

"Not my king!" Brandon spat, venom in every word. Rhaegar merely nodded, as if in unspoken agreement.

"Perchance this will sway you more, then: killing me will not punish me as you so desire, for there is nothing I now crave more than death," he said. "To slay me would not be justice, it would be mercy. If I were to punish myself, I would let myself live. You will find no greater torment for me than that, be sure!"

For a long while, Brandon Stark simply stared at him, his breathing heavy, fists trembling. Thereafter, at last, he fell to his knees and pressed his brow to his sister's cold, lifeless hands, and wept. The bunch of roses finally slid from her grip, the brittle petals tumbling from the bier to the stone floor below with a faint, rasping sound.

"How have you know she was here?" Rhaegar asked quietly again, yet he was never given an answer to this.

"I have always believed the North should be strong," he now said aloud, repeating his earlier thought, yet his voice carried such indifference that he startled even himself. How little all this stirs me. I may think only of these stairs leading down, only of them! "And it shan't be without Starks in Winterfell."