45

45.

Beneath the ruins

The Neck.

Her hand was shaking and she tried to hide her discomfiture. So many feelings were swirling around in her mind that she suddenly couldn't distinguish between them: grief, loneliness, fear. Worry was still a shadow in the background that she could sense haunting her. Should she have stayed? What if none of it made sense and Jon died anyway? Dany admitted that there was nothing in this world that could break her as much.

She loved him more than she pained for herself.

I'm not myself anymore. 

It must have been fate that it was her loyal bear who dared to make that statement as soon as he saw her back in the camp. She was disheveled and with a long cut on her arm bandaged, the justification for it only bound to compound the concerns he had raised previously.

And his perception was anything but wrong. 

"It is time, my friend, my most loyal and most important subject, my chosen family, for me to tell you a story about a lonely girl who became a lonely woman, who, given the chance to be less lonely, sought to right past wrongs," Dany then proceeded.

Jorah listened to it intently and heartily. His expression soft with understanding at first before shifting to a grave countenance. Her recital was careful but reserved in details that were to be preserved to her own intimacy. Jorah stood at the end of the recount, exhausted and thoughtful, his eyes fixed on the fur-carpeted floor, his mind racing with conclusions that Dany understood could result in the most damning denial or utter confusion at best.

"Coming from anyone else, I'd deem it madness," he said, and stretched the eerie silence. He sighed. "I suppose it has shed light on the inexplicable behavior of yours of late. The decision to alienate a great friend of yours, breaking her heart with no apparent consequence on your part. Oh, Khaleesi. You certainly have a gentle heart huddled in fear of all the prices you paid for your goodwill."

She never acknowledged that, lest she had conceded Cersei Lannister reason on her detestable predictions. 

They will love you for a while, but they will love more hating you.

After her resurrection, after the state of abandonment and madness followed by long years of inertia and reflection, the conclusion had finally been as simple as it was damning: she could not subsume the principles that guided her actions to the yearnings of her heart. 

***

Sansa reunited with Bran first, who had arrived at the break of dawn at the survivors' camp carried by a group of Jon's soldiers. She still knew nothing of Arya or Jon, nor of Brienne, or the Hound, and the odds were greatly discouraging.

Her spirit was too broken to offer comfort to those who saw her as a possible source of it to ease their bereavement. Before the war against the Night King, and in the face of threats that were at least of human origin, she had considered herself capable of leading, now she found herself shrinking from it.

"Is there any way you can see if they're okay?" she asked her younger brother — her only surviving brother — as she helped him settle in and warmed his limp legs. There was something motherly in the way she tended to him.

Bran for the first time in a long time looked uneasy.

"Would it be enough if I told you that they are too tough to let anything happen to them?" 

That's what Sansa thought most of the time, so it was only a partial consolation. She bit the inside of her cheeks to hold back the unbearable urge to cry.

Bran's brow furrowed as he looked behind her. Sansa turned around and saw more survivors arriving, including Ser Davos and Arya's friend, Gendry.

She felt her heart leap within her.

Sansa scrambled to her feet and ran to meet him.

"Where's her? Where's my sister?" Sansa rushed in without hesitation or regard for the person of Gendry himself. He understood though, since they barely knew each other. 

"She's well, that's all I know," Gendry said, and it made Sansa almost laughed unamused, because it sounded exactly like what Bran said. But Gendry quickly reassured her, "She's a bit behind. Ser Beric and her are bringing The Hound with them. It's him who is badly injured."

"So you..." The Hound, Sansa thought feeling it for him, "So you saw her? She is well?"

"Yes, m'lady."

Gendry glanced at her one last time and moved on, helping the other soldiers escort the survivors. 

***

Arya's head fell slightly onward before being startled by the sound of the Houd's panting breath. She stopped her horse and hopped off to make sure her friend was all right. She had strapped a makeshift sledge to her horse to carry him after found him near the smoky ruins of Winterfell. Ahead of her, on another horse was Beric Dondarrion, who also stopped and turned around.

Arya swallowed hard, bringing down her wineskin to gently place the beak on the Hound's lips. The older man took a sip and coughed hoarsely. 

"Just...let me...die," he said.

He had said the same thing when she found him half-buried in rubble, snow and ashes. And he reiterated it to her when she tied his crushed body to the sledge. 

You did it once, you can do it again, you stupid girl, she imagined him saying. Or maybe she was telling herself so. Arya was seized by a very great anguish, incomprehensible to herself. Her time under the tutelage of the faceless men had thought Arya that she could leave behind everything that made her volatile and prone to imbalance.

What was death if not a spectre continually nipping at one's heels?

Sandor was not even her kin. Any more than Gendry, Beric or anyone else who wasn't her siblings. Yet the grief that flooded her was absolute.

A morose Beric knelt beside her, looking at the dying man to avoid seeing Arya's grief-stricken face. The knight knew how to respect a moment of weakness. His hand rested on the handle of the knife at his side, as The Hound's eyes sought those of him and an understanding crossed between them.

***

A blast of the horn warned of the sighting of a disoriented group of people from Winterfell and Ser Jorah was quick to order the soldiers to assist them. Within hours, twenty, thirty, at most fifty people were arriving. Many of them seriously injured. Especially men and women who survived the battle. Jorah was surprised that so many of them were carrying fire wounds. 

Daenerys immediately emerged from her tent to greet them in kind, but her attention was on the sight of someone else. Daenerys was eventually reunited with Sansa and Brandon, her expression wrought with obvious intrigue.

"I know nothing of them," Sansa Stark stepped forward to warn before Daenerys could even ask her. She was in a despondent state. "The last time I saw Jon was as he burned Winterfell to the ground."

Her voice was harsh but not accusatory. Her bloodshot eyes drooped in weariness and grief.

"The dead were too many for the Northern army alone," Bran added, his tone stern and expression blank. "You were needed to win that battle."

Daenerys didn't know whether he was referring to the past or now, and whether the statement was an acknowledgement or a reproach.

Their exchange was abruptly cut off by the unmistakable song of dragons. Everyone looked up at the sky as terror began to spread through the camp. Rhaegal's jade form emerged from the thick mist with a warning shriek, gliding smoothly over the peat bog until it flew over them and passed them on its way to a rise.

Dany, Sansa, Bran and others watched as Jon slid off his back and fell sharply to earth.

***

Jon woke up with a foggy mind. Dany was sitting in the bed looking at him with an expression of mingled worry and weariness. The image soon became familiar from a distant memory, now long lost. He attempted to speak but instead of his voice, a raspy sound burst from his throat.

Dany hurried to bring him water.

"Here," she invited him, holding the cup for him as if he were a child. 

Jon sat up hastily, letting the furs uncover his naked torso, and drank in desperation. No one had warned him that exposing himself to dragonfire for so long would have this effect, and for a moment he was almost curious enough to ask her if she felt the same way at King's Landing.

It would have been a terrible distasteful. 

Fortunately, Jon didn't have to start the conversation. Daenerys subjected him to a series of questions in regards to his health until he had to reassure her that it was all well now. Her concern for him, coupled with the obvious deflection of her eyes every time they stray to his half-covered form, made the situation easier and lighter for him. Even almost amusing. 

"You gave us quite a scare there. Luckily Rhaegal knows how to take care of you a lot better than you know how to take care of yourself, Jon," she said, standing near a basin of hot water, which she brought over and placed next to the pallet where he was lying. Her tent, Jon guessed, as he did not believe he was at the healers tent or that a separate tent would've been set up for the only purpose to attend him.

"My climbing the Wall was more graceful, I promise," Jon quipped.

Her face changed to a soft, melancholy smile.

"With your lover Ygritte, the wildling girl. I remember," she said.

Jon scoffed.

"You remember? I don't remember ever telling you about her. Not in this lifetime."

Dany paused thoughtfully, wringing out a warm cloth and holding it to Jon's forehead. Absent-minded she slid it down his neck, making Jon shiver with a sensation other than cold. 

Jon held her wrist, careful not to touch her wound — the one he inflicted.

"All it took was a little slip of tongue to finally finish waking me up," he revealed. 

Dany understood then. She had asked him on their wedding night about his wildling lover. That had unleashed the rest. 

Daenerys sighed and pushed aside the objects in her lap. 

"I didn't mean to let things go that far. I wasn't supposed to allow it. I let my good judgment become clouded again."

"You mean...us."

"I mean everything. Tell me, would you had had the same opportunity wouldn't you have wanted the same thing? Just do things right this time?" 

Jon had thought about it, had he been in her place and been the one to turn back the time. Even when he was still alive in his other life, he tortured himself with thoughts of what he might have done differently. 

Dany looked away and smiled mirthlessly. 

"For the most part, we can agree that it was a big mistake...us," she continued in a soft voice.

Jon's eyebrows crinkled together, wanting to resist the idea. However, seeing in her gaze the same torture that had once haunted him, he had no choice but to remain silent. For all he knew, he had no regrets that their fates had crossed and no regrets that they had fallen in love. The circumstances surrounding that affair were the problem for Jon. And their reaction to them. If they had not allowed things to get out of their control, they might have stood a chance. 

"I don't know what I would have done in your place," is all Jon could conclude, "but I will never regret us."

Dany was silent, her throat closed with a heavy lump. She was torn between two tumultuous sensations, on the one hand she wanted with all her heart to believe in it again, to have hope again...but her years weighed on her mettle. She knew it was vain to hope against hope. 

"Bran and Sansa told me Winterfell fell," Daenerys changed the subject, treading carefully. 

"Winterfell is no more," Jon assured. "I tried, Dany. I tried to save it..."

"Jon," Dany interrupted him seriously, looking him in the eye, "You did what was right. Winterfell will be rebuilt and all this will be left in the past."

Regardless of his feelings with the truth of things, Jon felt utterly guilty about the event that unfolded. To a great cost, at least in that other life they were able to destroy the Night King before he could potentially advance further south. And it was because Daenerys and her people received the brunt of the most damage. 

"You need to rest," Daenerys said softly, reaching out to hold his hand and give it a squeeze. She attempted to withdraw it but Jon retained it there. She looked down and up and he saw a glimpse of something, not quite love, but there it was still a feeling hanging there, restraining itself. 

***

When Dany closed the flaps of her tent behind her, she found Jorah sitting on a tree stump watching for her like a sentinel. His gaze betrayed no judgement but a gravity inherent in the knowledge he now possessed. 

"I regret to have to bring you bad news, Khaleesi," he advanced in a sorrowful voice.

Jorah then briefed that Lord Reed had most certainly perished at the Battle of Winterfell and that his daughter, and heir, was being comforted at that very moment as was she being acquainted with her new position. Jorah asked if she would agree.

"Young Meera Reed? Why should I object?" Daenerys asked still shocked and moved by this news. In the other life Lord Reed had not even had to sacrifice himself, and he had been at Winterfell because she had asked him to. A wave of guilt washed over her.

"You are the Queen. And you decide in these matters. You might consider someone more fit to lead now that Lord Howland is gone."

Daenerys blinked. 

"We are not talking about the Reed's position," she softly said as it dawned upon her. "You want to lead this battle."

***

King's Landing

The Queen of Thorns sat at the monarch's chair with her back to the desk and her eyes fixed on the overcast sky. Her regency these past months had gone relatively smoothly and sitting on the Iron Throne certainly pampered her vanity which by all accounts was the only comfort life could offer her after all she had lost and would never regain, in pursuit of that very goal. 

It was her unchanging routine to spend the late hours of the evenings in her own very company, with a chalice of wine in hand, ruminating on the family she had lost. Vaguely, she wondered at times, if this was how the dowager queen Alicent Hightower had felt, locked away forever in this very castle after witnessing how the entire generation she spawned from her very womb had vanished just like that.

On the desk lay open and read the letter written in her nephew's hasty handwriting recounting the events back in the North, and declaring his outrage at losing the Queen's hand to the King in the North. A matter she would probably have to tackle only for the sake of her birth House's pride, and not because she particularly held a deep affection for her lackwit of a nephew. His only chore had been to charm his way to the Queen and he had failed. He certainly lacked the personality for it. Not like her late granddaughter, poor Margaery, who would surely have won the Queen over in less time than her unremarkable cousin could have ever, just by keeping her company. 

Upon deciding to retire for the night Lady Olenna looked up at the evening sky one more time. Barely a trace of light remained as a blanket of mist fell over the city. She squinted as a thin layer of frost covered the balcony stones and window grills. She had certainly lived a long time; never, but now, had she seen snow come so far south.

After she was left alone by her maids, Lady Olenna sat on the edge of the bed suddenly overcome by a strange feeling of dizziness. As she lay back on the soft pillows that elevated her torso, her vision became less clear and her eyelids terribly heavy. All she could make out before she lost consciousness was a blurred shape approaching her face, a distant, familiar voice thanking her for her cooperation. She thought it was a vision of the past, but with what little time she had left, she remembered the face and cynical smile of Petyr Baelish.