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“Delivered from the blast
The last of a line of lasts
The pale princess of a palace cracked
And now the kingdom comes
Crashing down undone”
--Smashing Pumpkins, “The Beginning Is the End is the Beginnining”
The Last of a Line of Lasts
A winter storm rages. Flashes of lightening streak the sky as heavy snow falls thick. The thunder rattles the newly restored walls of Winterfell, and Jaime thinks not for the first time that the walls are not quite thick enough. Not quite thick enough to keep the cold at bay, nor to protect them from all that threatens the Queen of the North, and not nearly thick enough to give her the rest she must need now. Jaime would stand outside the gates and scream up at the sky to make it stop, but he has raged uselessly enough for tonight.
He goes to her bedside instead. The slick, dark furs tucked under her arms make the pale of her skin look almost ghostly.
Not dead, he reminds himself. Not dead.
Her eyes are closed, mocking his silent self-assurances in a convincing imitation of eternal sleep, but they flutter open, when he sits on the bed and brushes strands of clinging, damp hair off her brow. The maester instructed him in hushed stutters not to wake her, but he needs to see that Sansa is truly still with him. He can’t bear to be alone.
At least the maester was not so mad as to attempt to keep him out, for his patience with the maester is at low ebb. If Sansa should die, so will the fat maester, and even then he suspects there will be little satisfaction in spilling the man’s worthless guts.
“How do you feel?” He knows it to be an idiotic question, for he can see by the dull blue of her eyes that she isn’t well, but he needs someone to tell him everything will be all right. Sansa is as like to do it as any, for she is braver than the cowards that have fled this room, which still smells of blood. She is braver than he is certainly.
“How could you?” she asks flatly.
His hand presses to her forehead, testing to see if she burns with fever, whether infection is setting in.
There was so much blood and yelling—mostly his. His throat is raw from it. But every time he blinked, he would see his mother. How pale she looked against the linens of the bed before they carried her away.
Sansa’s weak attempt to shake off his hand, makes him frown. It is not like her to push him away, and he is not the only one to be confused by her feeble movements. One of her waiflike serving girls jumps up from the stool she’s been sitting on in the corner, perched like a vulture. She hesitates, wringing her hands as if she—in her underfed glory—might be able to intervene should her lady’s husband become a nuisance.
He whips his head around to command that she leave, and the girl scrambles to do just that. They may not like him—none of these Northerners do, save Sansa—but at least they do his bidding. Otherwise he would not have a wife at all.
“They told me,” she says, just as toneless as before, once they are alone, her half-lidded eyes never leaving his.
He thought she knew, he had assumed, wrongly perhaps, that she was aware of the loss of the babe, that no one need inform her. He failed her then, when he left to blaspheme and roar, if he left her unaware of their loss, left her to hear it from another’s lips.
He tries to make his thick tongue say something to comfort her, but Jaime has always been better at fighting and fucking than playing the sensitive hero. The way she looks at him, he suspects there is nothing he could say anyway that would make a bit of difference.
“You’re a terrible father,” she rasps, and he pulls back his hand, stung.
“I’ve never been a father.” Joffrey, Tommen, Myrcella—they were all Robert’s children, even if they were his seed.
“That is your doing.”
He squeezes his eyes shut. The only times they have argued have been about Cersei. And Joffrey. And Robb. And Bran. This isn’t the time to tell her how he would have claimed his children for his own if Cersei would have allowed it. Cersei called him a fool and said it would have meant their deaths. They all died anyway, so it would have made little difference.
“You could have been holding our little girl right now. You chose to let her die.”
A girl. Jaime didn’t ask whether it was a girl or a boy. It didn’t seem to matter, but now he sees her, a little girl—red ringlet curls, pale skin, freckles, impossibly big green eyes—that will never be.
He opens his eyes to stare back at her. “I did, because otherwise you’d be dead.”
“I can save the babe or I can save the Queen,” the maester said at last, his fat face red, as if he had been the one fighting and straining in the twisted bloodied linens and not Sansa.
Sansa was insensible, limp, her breathing shallow. It didn’t appear as if there was much hope for either of them. Looking down at her, it felt like the Stranger’s bony hand was around his own throat, squeezing.
“She might never carry another,” the maester said, as if to sway Jaime’s decision.
Sansa, the last of a dying line—only her child could inherit this cracked, scarred, battle weary castle and Northern crown.
“My wife. You save my wife or gods help you, I will slit you from neck to groin.”
He didn’t need to consider his choice. Losing her is not in his battle plan. He has seen twice as many name days as she, and it is a strange sort of comfort to think of preceding her in death, so that he need never be alone. He has been left by his family before. It was not his intention to let it happen again. He is not a man who is meant to be alone.
“It was nothing to you then, to let her die, since you have a history of killing Starks,” she says, as her head rolls to gaze blankly up at the canopy above the bed draped in grey silk for the House Stark.
“Even my most focused efforts at killing members of your family have been abject failures, and the babe was a Lannister.”
He is the last of his kind as well. The death of their child sealed both their fates on that count.
Her nostrils flare and she fists the furs. There is never any mention of his house, nor does he feel inclined to remind her of his birth on most days, but every member of her ragged court would agree with his assertion of the child’s parentage, undesirable though they would find it. If they could have chosen another man, any man, for their queen, they would have, but Sansa would hear no advice on the subject. He loved her for that. Despite all her careful composure and plotted calculations, she would not compromise when it came to her heart. He recognized in her a kindred streak of recklessness, of foolish romanticism that could not be snuffed out by the cruelty she experienced.
There is a sweetness about her, a softness, which makes her love so tenderly, that he can do nothing but love her in return. He isn’t worthy of her heart’s foolish devotion, he will never be worthy. His being sharp with her is only further proof of that, but her desire to have died, leaving him alone in this miserable world, makes his chest tighten.
“You shouldn’t have chosen me. It wasn’t fair to the babe.”
He barks a mirthless laugh that still draws no reaction from her. She must look at him. Must hear him.
He leans down to cage her in with his arms, careful not to actually touch her, for she looks as brittle as cracked porcelain. “Fair? I don’t care about fair. I care about protecting you. I will always choose you.”
He knows how much she wanted this, how she dreamed of a family, since hers was lost to her, and though he drunk himself into a stupor the day she told him he would be a father, he wanted it too. Just not as much as he needs her. It is true, what he’s said: he’s never been a father. But he’s a husband now, and he isn’t ready to trade that for anything.
He is close enough to kiss her, but she won’t meet his eye, staring glassy eyed at a lock of his hair, which hangs in her face. If she would only look at him.
He draws the crook of his finger over her cheek. “I had to see for myself that you were still with me. But, you’re weary.”
And not thinking clearly, for as skilled in stratagem as she is, he would expect Sansa to see the flaws in her little fantasy of trading her life for the babe’s. What does she imagine would happen the moment she last drew breath? These Northerners barely tolerate him. There is no way he would have been allowed to raise the child. He was a terrible father, but he would not allow strangers to take his child. So, was he to fight his way out of this castle, left handed, with a newborn babe in arms and strike out into the snow?
Still she looks without seeing. I’m here, he wants to shout, but he kisses her instead. Not on the lips. She does not seem like she would allow such a thing in this moment. A kiss to her temple, where wisps of her hair, salty with sweat stick to his lips, is all he wagers. It is where he kissed her first in the halls of the Gates of the Moon, when she shook like a leaf and had blood up to her narrow wrists.
She leans into him, just as she did that day, like a kitten rubbing against his leg, desperate for affection. Tommen’s kittens. Another twist in the chest, reminding him of what it is to be alone, of what it is to lose everything.
Everything but Sansa. She is here. Not dead.
He kisses her cheek, and his golden hand is too hard against her temple, too desperate to increase the need he sensed in her for him, when she leaned into his touch. He kisses fat tears that fall, rolling, spilling over his lips. More salt for the wounds.
“I’ve forgiven you a great deal, Jaime, but I’ll never forgive you this.”
Once the ground has been sown with salt, nothing can ever grow again. They are the last of a line of lasts.
“I can live with that.”
He’ll have to.
THE END