Chapter Text
He thinks, somewhere past the pain, the blindness, the suffocation, that he can hear voices.
He is surely dead. He must be. The voices are those of the gods, debating which hell he gets to suffer in for all eternity. (He wants to laugh at the notion. The fucking gods, actually existing. But then, he thinks: wight walkers, dragons, fire magic? Why not.)
There’s blood in his ears. He isn’t sure how he knows this, but he does.
The muffled voices grow close. The sound of stone being moved shortly follows.
Jaime cracks his burning eyes open—well, eye, as it were, seeing as how his left one is also full of blood—and dares to peer into the blurred shadow of the fallen keep.
One of the voices comes to fall close to his ear. He swears he knows it, despite the disorientation,
“You’re lucky, kingslayer. Be still.”
Searing heat shoots into his side a moment later, and Jaime coughs instead of screams. His one working eye widens, the wreckage around him blurring, spinning, growing too dark and too bright at the same time.
Arya Stark is digging a needle and thread into one of his wounds.
She’s ghostly white, smeared in blood and ash.
Her hands shake as she works. He tries to groan in pain, but only gags drily, chest crackling with the effort. He wonders how many of his bones aren’t broken. Jaime swallows hot, dusty air, cranes his head to the side to see a Stark soldier pulling a body out of the rubble next to him—
Cersei.
No, he wants to shout, leave her buried, where I cannot see.
This is his punishment, then, he thinks. For all of the atrocities. For the murders, the secrets, the plots and the betrayals. He lives to watch her ashen, broken body dragged away, her eyes half-open but seeing nothing.
He wants to vomit.
He can’t.
The urge to sit up hits him, to sit up and grab Arya and shake her, demand that she kill him, put an end to it.
After all, isn’t he on her list?
Take the needle and drive it into my skull, he wants to say.
His voice cracks weakly as he whispers a simple “why?” instead.
She shrugs, her fingers fumbling for a moment with the needle. She glances behind her and Jaime sees Jon Snow—he’s sure it’s him through the dust and ash—moving slowly and carefully through the ruins, a limp in his step but his telltale gait giving him away.
Jon looks his way, briefly, and speaks to the soldier carrying Cersei.
Jaime swallows as they leave his line of sight, and his sister is gone.
“Brienne would probably want me to save you. Not sure if you’ll live, though. Not sure if you deserve to.”
The name from her lips wracks him, and Jaime feels the ghosts of Brienne’s hands on his face, and the blue blue blue of her eyes staring into his, begging.
I don’t. I don’t deserve it. Finish me. Finish me, please.
Arya stills when he chokes on a sob.
She moves to another wound and drives the needle in without a word.