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“I would die for you,” he swears.
Her smile is a small, sad thing.
“Dying is easy. It’s living that’s hard.” Her hand reaches out toward him, her fingers resting gently on his cheek. “Would you live for me, Jaime? Would you pass through life at my side?”
“Yes,” he whispers. Then again, more fiercely, “ Yes .”
He sees doubt swimming in the endless blue of her eyes. Her smile widens a fraction, though it is more melancholy than mirth. “I wish I could believe you.” She drops her hand, fingertips grazing his skin as they move away.
Kingslayer, he hears. Oathbreaker. She is either too courteous or too kind to say them, but he hears the words just the same. They sear through him like a knife just as they always have. Just as they always will. The same old hurt. And yet, from her, it means so much more.
Rage cuts through the bitterness and he seizes her shoulders in his hands, his useless, golden right banging clumsily into one and his good hand, his real hand, clamping down upon the other like a vise. He watches the knuckles whiten against her skin and the fear flicker in her eyes (just a moment, just a heartbeat, before her walls come up once more and she is again the impassive Ice Queen, calm and collected and remote) and he is powerless to stop himself.
“You think I would leave you now?” he demands, his voice little more than an angry growl, face mere inches from her own. “You think I would abandon you? Now, after everything?”
She smiles again. “I know you would.”
“For what?” he growls. “What do I have left? Who in this world do I care for more than you?”
“Your sister.”
Cersei. He jolts back as if struck, his grip on her shoulder loosening absently as his gaze drifts to a point just over her shoulder, inches and miles and years away from where she stands before him.
“She could call you away at any moment,” she continues, smoothly. Calm, so calm. What right does she have to be so calm? “She could send a raven and beg you to serve as her champion and you would. You would go and leave me behind without a second thought.”
Once, he thinks. Once I would have. I would have ridden south and fought and failed and she and I would have left this world just as we entered it: together. It would have been a fitting end. Glorious. Noble, even, in it’s own way. Once he would have relished the thought.
But not now. Not after everything. Lancel and Kettleblack and Moonboy. The old litany echoes in his mind. It shouldn't hurt anymore but it does.
Somehow it always does.
She never loved him. He knows that now. She only ever loved the idea of him; the image in the glass that reflected herself back at her. They were never two halves of a whole. How foolish to believe otherwise.
How foolish to waste his life believing otherwise.
His grip on her shoulder loosens, the fingers of his good hand sliding down the smooth silk of her gown, the cool marble of her skin underneath. His gaze meets hers again and he finds no more judgement in her eyes, only the cool detachment he has grown used to from her, but the thought gives him little comfort, for he can see that she still does not believe.
"I will make you believe," he vows. "If it takes my whole life, if it costs me all that I am, I will make you see. I will never abandon you. Never. I swear it." He thinks he sees some emotion he cannot name flicker into her eyes as he bows, but it's gone as soon as it appears. "My Queen."
He does not look back as he takes his leave of her, the chamber door swinging shut behind him with a finality he does not wish to think on. He thinks instead on the vow he made her, his last vow and the only one he will not break.
He will die before he does.
The raven comes a fortnight later. He takes one look at the golden seal and knows exactly what he will find within. Yet his fingers still unfurl the parchment, his golden hand holding it in place on the desk as his eyes drink in the words. Her words. Help me, she writes. Save me. I need you now as ever I have needed you before. I love you I love you I love you. Come at once.
He feeds the parchment to the flames and watches as her words burn away.
And he feels nothing.