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“You’ve made me a monster.”
“I have made you what you always were, Sankta Sol. I could not bear you leaving me.”
“A tool, then–“
She moved to step away, snarling, and his hand met her throat above the collar, squeezed and lifted her in an instant onto the table in front of him. A futile kick from her legs tangled in that golden gown, eyes widened at the shock of the movement, at how easily she sat on the shined and sanded table.
“Sansa, then.” She blinked at his gentle smile as he said her name.
He wanted to lie, say that he loved her in order to bind them closer. I’ll die without you, he could say with his hand around her throat. There are no saints between lovers, only bodies, murmured over the sound of her whistling breath, though this itself was not untrue– he had made saints from nothing, fucked them in his bed one night and watched them perish in manufactured miracles the day after. Sankt Martell, whose own spear had memorably planted itself between his eyes in a condemnation of foolhardy soldiers. Jaime could feel the hard roll of Sansa’s swallowing throat and hot damp skin under his hand. Once, in another life, he had studied the anatomy of the delicate structure of the throat. Esophagus. Trachea. Larynx. All covered by the breadth of his now-relaxed palm. Sansa Starkova looked down from her upturned face at him not unlike a fox– sleek and red and secretly clever.
(Something he had not learned in all his long years, being a twin and therefore never truly alone even in eternity, was the orphan’s art of being invisible, unknown, unacknowledged. What use was it to care about one little foundling girl brought into the mechanism of a large camp? So Sansa had spent her time learning to observe– is that not also the great skill of the mapmaker and embroiderer?– to recognize a person’s weakness in the way they attacked. See a soldier swing their fist enough times, make enough stitches or maps, have a man lure a woman into his arms and confidence, and the pattern becomes clear. The Darkling had watched so often he was unable to recognize when that same gaze was turned onto him.)
He stepped forward between legs which had spread, he thought, to welcome him in silent invitation (a steel trap hidden under fresh snow; a missing stair). The only sound in the tent was their heavy breath; outside, the wind coming off the Fold made the walls brush against the sand. It was a beautiful tent, outfitted just for her. He’d requested items which would make her glow. White and blue and gold, lace and silks, rugs which each cost more than five farmer’s annual yields piled and layered so her soft leather boots would not touch bare ground. The gown she wore, gold like sunset and embroidered in black, had been made in a rush by the Fabrikators under his direction; her red hair was pinned up with pearls and the dust of precious metals swept over her lids and cheeks. She looked like a living icon, to be adored and feared.
“You’ve made me your weapon, Jaime. You’ve used Katya against me like her life is nothing.” Her nostrils flared, and he let his hand with the piece of antler slide flat down the front of her throat, over the matching amplifier embedded in her skin, sweeping it up below the line of it to her shoulder. She covered it with her own, squeezed. Katya, that little tracker currently held in another tent, across the camp. The blessed saint’s sister. “I would have liked to have been your equal. I would have liked something you’ve told me to be true. That was all you needed to have done, and I would have listened. Instead...”
He had no equal outside of his own sister. He had told Sansa this, when he had explained the story of the Fold, even if she had not known he was telling his own story at the time. The Black Heretics, the Grisha twins who had created something far greater, far more destructive, than themselves. A family who mysteriously had, in each generation, two children. Always twins, always one boy and one girl, blonde and beautiful and the other’s mirror. Darklings. It was an ironic title.
I can change you, save you, make you better. A lie, said to him over the years, but not by this woman.
Sansa Eddardavna Starkova– he had always known the truth of her parentage, how she had not been an orphan her whole life, fool girl trying to hide her identity as Alayne Kamenoya with her sister Katya, truly Arya– could topple him. Not a lie.
He could feel it, the potential to be shattered by her. A shame she would never get the chance. He could not allow it. Cersei would never allow it, even so far across the Fold. They would eclipse Sansa if she tried. He had come into this tent to–
Jaime could not remember. To seduce her into complacency? To see the antlers erupting like briars from her skin? To touch her again before their grand display? His hand had wrapped around her throat in an uncharacteristic lapse of control and he wanted to–
Quietly, calmly, he said instead, “I’ve never lied to you. Such as now: only your life matters to me at this moment.” Your life, in that your body and power serve me , went unsaid.
Sansa tilted her head at his reply, eyes soft, condemning even in their kindness of what they’d shared before. Haven’t you lied, in your way? Aren’t you lying now? That infuriated him, the implication. She wanted too much from him, he assumed, too many things he could not give entirely. Was it not enough for her to be useful, to be a saint out of prophecy, to wield an amplifier considered legendary? All of himself had been given to what he desired, and what he desired was power. He did not want to be human like she did. One day, she would understand because she would have to cut the humanity out of herself like a sharp knife skinned a rabbit. When one lived in eternity, it was inevitable.
Her eyes were blue like a still clear lake, and the Darkling, in his infinite arrogance, forgot the threat of drowning in calm waters.
What could he give her? Power. A kiss. It was brief and bruising; she did not look stunned afterwards like she had the night of the winter fête. He wanted to shove his fingers into her cunt, feel her wetness and coax more as a promise. Afterwards, when she saw the scope of what they could accomplish together, in the heat of success, he would make her expression dazed once again. He would take her to his tent and he would claim Sankta Sol on his bed like he had so many others in his lifetime. He would make her scream. He would make her body boil over with sunlight and set the linens aflame as precursor to their ultimate triumph.
-
Hours later, in the blackness of the Fold, Sansa Starkova, orphan and saint, would prove she had paid attention to his little lessons very well when she used the cut for the first time, aimed at his right hand. The limb dropped, now useless, to the ground with a piece of antler inside it. The heat of her cut, made out of pure light, cauterized the wound immediately, and Jaime did not feel the loss. Oh, he was furious, but he also grinned cruelly as he was dragged off by his own monsters into the consuming darkness he and Cersei had created five hundred years ago.
I’ll return to you, little weapon. This I promise. We are not done with this, not until the ending of this world.