Chapter Text
Winter came and went, the Long Night came and disappeared into the dawn.
Light was reborn from the darkness.
The sun rose over snow-dipped mountaintops, above the ashes of the battlefields still burning. And however great the sacrifices may have been, victory was wrestled from the dead so the rest may live.
It was supposed to be a new beginning – a dream of spring.
Though perhaps that was more wishful fantasy, hopeful thinking for the hopeless, because the sun rose today, too, like it does any other day, but one cannot see it behind the wall of ashes, of death lingering in the air. One can only watch the fragments of life, of people, flying through the dusty air as corpses burn to fragments and twirl down destroyed alleyways, only to be shaken up anew for another round of the most wicked dance.
The dead are dancing to mute screams of those to come next, and the only victory seems to be that the life wrestles against life, leaving only death in the wake of whoever turns out victor of this most cruel game of thrones.
The sound of cracking stone and breaking bone rings into the last corners of every narrow passageway, howls and shrieks in the smallest of crevices in the walls on the verge of collapsing under the weight of power, and the hunger for it.
Fire licks at stone that held together a city for hundreds of years, angrily gnaws at it so nothing shall remain.
And amid the destruction, people keep running, shouting, trying to live, no matter the threat, no matter the consequence, no matter the Stranger’s cold breath running down the spines of young and old alike.
Because if they stop running, if they stop living, there is just death’s dance waiting for them, a ballroom trapped between a sky without a night and without a day above and a city turning to ash below.
An end without ending.
A future without future.
A cruel kind of eternity.
Tobin never imagined it would come to this when he put on the armor in the morning and joined the Lannister forces in the capital, as he had been ordered to do the day before.
He joined the armies back when Tommen Baratheon still had the Iron Throne, however short a time that may have proved to be. He had no illusions, like many others, about Queen Cersei being as vicious as rumors painted her, or perhaps even crueler than that. A woman who was forced to walk the streets naked as a whole nation watched and was mocked by all those she kicked down before has no love for the likes of them. Everyone knew that, and yet they went closer to the Red Keep, counting on stone, counting on wood, on nature itself to hold better than this hateful woman’s clutches ever could.
But now there is another, younger, a strange beauty from beyond the Narrow Sea.
And with her she brought an army meant to take the city by force.
And with her she brought a dragon.
A dragon! Tobin never thought he’d see such creature. Even though he knew they once roamed the Seven Kingdoms, they were monsters of myth, of stories passed over to children to give them a fright. He never even saw the skulls in the Red Keep, only ever heard the tales looming around another dance that changed the whole nation. But then he saw this monster fly over the city and Tobin understood that no single story ever did it justice, could ever express the terror of its fire, its sheer power, and its will to carry out what its master wants. And what she wants is this city, is the crown, the Iron Throne.
Though all Tobin sees is fire licking at the outer walls of the city, on the verge of pushing further to the inside. She started burning the skin of that body away, and now she means to turn to the flesh, until she reaches the heart and burns it out.
And that even though she claimed that she wanted to free us.
Tobin heard the conversations as he stood vigil by the city gates the day the conqueror’s advisor and friend from across the Narrow Sea was executed by Queen Cersei. He shut his eyes, he will admit. Tobin didn’t find it just what his Queen did to that woman. And now he feels like closing his eyes, too, because none of this is just either.
The Dragon Queen doesn’t bring them justice, she only ever brings war and destruction. And is that just? Is that honorable? Is that good? Is that how you make people free? Tobin doesn’t know, though he dares to doubt.
For all it seems, there are no just kings, no just queens, only destruction, death, and screams waiting for the likes of him, those never asked, those never heard.
Maybe he should have listened to his old man back in the day, to leave the city while he still could, but Tobin wanted to be a soldier. Since he was a scrawny lad he dreamed about wearing golden armor and riding a horse with a sword strapped to his waist. Tobin thought that meant something. That it would make him more than some rat born amidst bowls o’brown and the piss running down the cesspits of fancy and smallfolk alike. He wanted to be more than his father, more than himself, just a little bit, but even that bit seemed to be too much to ask, looking at the streets now where people flee and find no place to hide, no place to live.
His old man died as he lived, laboring without ever getting more than just enough to feed his family and keep a home. Tobin’s father cleaned the streets with his shovel day in, day out, shoveled the dirt and shit so others could walk. One day he just collapsed, fell to the ground and was dead. Tobin wanted more than that for his life, for his death. He didn’t want to die like his father did, shoveling the dirt of others only to die in it. He wanted to become a respected soldier, fancied himself becoming a knight one day, and perchance getting a stretch of land outside the city for his mother to spend the last of her days after she already had to live the tough life of a widow ever since his father came to pass.
His old man used to laugh at Tobin’s ideas, berated him to take on a proper job, learn a trade, something useful, something to build with, and then get the Seven Hells out of the city once he’d have enough money. Back in those days, Tobin was angry with his father for not believing in his dreams, in him. And the rebellious son he was, he pursued that life of his dreams anyway, perhaps with even greater fervor, believing it to have the better prospect of the future, believing himself more right.
However, looking at things now, Tobin feels more like he is about to face his father’s fate than anything else. Today, he’s cleaned the streets by dragging dead bodies away so others still alive may keep waking, may keep living just a while longer. And if Tobin doesn’t watch it, he will end up like his father, face in the dirt, breathing no more, fading from view, from memory, having achieved nothing anyone would ever wish to tell a story about.
He won’t get that stretch of land for his mother, won’t leave the city. That future he dreamed of, it is no more. It was swallowed whole by the ash and the fire raining down above their heads.
They all walked into the trap because there was no escape. And now it’s either dying locked in the Red Keep or at the hands of the woman seeking to take the city because she finds she deserves that bloody chair more than the Queen currently having it.
The Queens, for whatever their intentions, both swallow the futures of the people for breakfast and dinner today, or perhaps it’s supper already, Tobin doesn’t know. The day is too dark, the sky too far away, and he is afraid it’s about to get darker still.
And his father will get to tell him in the afterlife that he was right all along, that his lad was a fool who played knight but never could become it because knights don’t matter in this world. Because it’s only the fancy folks living in their castles that make the rules, who decide on who gets to live in there and who has to die defending it.
I really should have become a carpenter instead of trying to become a knight…
“Soldier!”
Tobin whips his head around when he feels someone grabbing his sleeve forcefully. His hand travels to his dagger, ready to defend himself if need be, but then Tobin sees a face he finds somewhat familiar. It takes the young man a moment, then two, to put the familiarity next to a name, until he does.
“Ser Jaime!” he gasps. Tobin only ever saw him a few times. When they marched against the High Sparrow, he saw him ride up the steps of the Sept of Baelor all boldly, with a kind of determination Tobin hardly ever saw on Queens and Kings and only ever found in the eyes of soldiers and knights, those sworn to protect, those ready to defend, bold enough to draw a sword and use it.
Though the man looks different from that image, much different from the Jaime Lannister who rode up the stairs on a white horse, the man who once reminded Tobin of a golden dagger about to cut through the sparrow’s nest. There is fear in the older man’s eyes now, or perhaps he is just the mirror of Tobin’s own condition, he doesn’t really know. The only thing he knows is this:
These are not the days for the bold anymore, it seems.
“Ser Jaime, I am…,” the young soldier stammers, but he finds himself pulled into a side alley where fewer people try to push past them in direction of the Red Keep, however futile that may be. Tobin studies the older man with wide eyes, trying to figure out just what Ser Jaime Lannister would want with a meaningless lad from Flea Bottom whose father told him to leave and did not, and is now meant to leave the same way his old man did, face in the dirt, meaning nothing.
“Listen to me now, we don’t have the time, soldier,” Jaime snaps, looking around frantically, chest rising and falling as though a thousand stones rested upon it right at that moment. “I need you to do something for me.”
“What?” Tobin asks, frowning.
“You need to go up that tower here and ring the bells for me,” Jaime tells him, pointing at the tower just around the corner. Tobin’s frown only ever deepens at that request. “The bells…?”
What would they change?
“Yes, they are the signal of the city’s surrender. This war is lost, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to die for it. Ring those bells as fast as you can and we may save at least a few more lives. Do you understand?” Jaime urges him, squeezing Tobin’s arm all the tighter.
“Yes.” Tobin nods his head frantically, suddenly finding purpose and a faint glimmer of hope that he doesn’t mean nothing after all.
“After that, I need you to grab as many of your men as you possibly can and go to these squares before the dragon gets there first…,” Jaime continues. He lets go of Tobin’s arm to take a folded-up piece of parchment out of his vest.
Tobin watches silently as the older man unfolds it awkwardly with just a single hand before pressing it against the stone with the golden one. The young soldier can recognize the outlines of the city on the parchment at once, but he is irritated by the marks on it, red X’s all over the city, because they don’t appear on any other map he ever saw of King’s Landing.
“You have to get people away from those places immediately,” Jaime continues, pointing at the X’s for emphasis.
“But why?”
Jaime’s nostrils flare as he speaks, “There is still wildfire from the Mad King underneath those squares, in crypts beneath the city. Even more people will die if you don’t get there first to get them out of there and away from those places, away from that fire coming from below.”
“But if we ring the bells…,” Tobin stammers, somewhat at a loss.
If they signal their surrender, it should stop, right? Then the fire would die out over time and perhaps there would be a tomorrow underneath the ash. Isn’t that the point of surrender? Isn’t that the tune those bells are meant to ring, then?
“She arrived here with a dragon. I know that their fire reaches far. We can’t take any chances even if Daenerys Targaryen accepts the surrender. And we cannot count on it either, I am afraid, not after what the Queen did to her friend…,” Jaime explains as he hands the map to Tobin. “Now I know I am asking the impossible of you, but we may save innocent lives if we act quickly, so will you follow my orders, soldier?”
“Yes, Ser.”
“Very good. I thank you,” Jaime says, squeezing his arm again, but this time in comfort, Tobin can tell. And for a moment there, though only to himself, he feels reminded of the last time he saw his father alive, before he went to work to shovel dirt like any other day. His old man squeezed his shoulder after breakfast and gave him a gentle smile before he left. That was the last Tobin ever saw of him, and something tells the young soldier that it may be the last he will see of Ser Jaime, too.
“To where are you headed?” the young soldier asks.
“The Red Keep.”
Tobin frowns at that. “Why?”
“A change of plan… or having a plan where I didn’t have one before… but it doesn’t matter,” Jaime ponders, looking around. “We need Daenerys Targaryen to know that we surrender, not just because of the bells, as those even you and I can ring in a Queen’s stead. The one who has to surrender to her is Queen Cersei, so to the Queen I go… hoping to sway her.”
“Will you need men with you?” Tobin questions, swallowing thickly. “I could have some gathered if you give me a bit of time…”
“No, I am going on my own. You go now and ring the bells. And once that is done…,” Jaime begins, and Tobin completes, nodding his head, “Get as many men as I can, go to the X’s on the map and bring as many people as possible away from them to get them to safety.”
“Yes, very well,” Jaime agrees, flashing a smile overshadowed by anxiousness and fear, a sense of foreboding. “I hope to see you again… what is your name, soldier?”
“Tobin.”
“Tobin, you are doing the city a great honor… Good luck.”
“Good luck to you, too,” Tobin mutters as Ser Jaime disappears back into the busy street, soon consumed by a thousand heads and shuffling feet as they push for a way into the Red Keep, to a safety that will never come from that direction.
“The bells!” Tobin shouts, before bolting for the tower.
He has a mission now.
And maybe, just maybe, he can prove his father wrong after all.
Maybe today is the day for the bold.
Tyrion never felt his feet weigh that heavy, not even as he dragged himself to the ship that took him to Essos after he murdered his father and Shae. Back then, he thought he would collapse under the weight of that guilt, that this was the greatest weight he ever had to carry, but he was wrong.
It is this weight that is threatening to suffocate him, break every bone in his body and leave him bleeding out slowly.
Tyrion runs his fingers over his eyes, feeling fresh tears welling up, but he cried enough, shed enough tears to ease his suffering. He now has to focus, he has to come up with a plan, however futile it may prove to be in the end. He has to try at least.
Like he did…
Tyrion cannot fail yet again because he failed far too many people already, disappointed too many hopes, let them be destroyed, burned and turned to ash.
His attention is drawn to a soldier cautiously walking through the rubble, looking around nervously. A Lannister soldier, Tyrion adds to himself, finding it all the more curious that Grey Worm and the Unsullied didn’t yet find and execute him. After all, that is the new rule now, for what it seems. The dwarf gets to his feet at once and makes his way over to the young man stumbling over the remains of a city still burning.
“Have you lost your wit, my friend?” he asks in a lowered voice, hoping not to call attention to them both. “The Unsullied would not want you anywhere near that building. Get back someplace safer. Only death awaits you here.”
The young soldier just looks at him with an expression Tyrion fails to read under all that dust and blood and grime.
“What are you searching for, soldier? Don’t you see that all lays in ruins?” Tyrion sighs, biting back tears all over.
And it is all because of me, because I believed, because I was a fool.
“He didn’t make it then, did he?” the young man then asks sadly, forcing Tyrion to frown.
“Who? I’m afraid too many didn’t make it through this day, so you will have to be more precise, my friend,” the dwarf says, his grimace stoic yet filled with pain on the verge of breaking him apart, shattering him like the rubble all around him, like the rubble he climbed to find his life in ruins all over.
Because he couldn’t keep them safe, and even now, he can’t do nothing much to protect that which remained.
What a Lord Hand I am!
“Ser Jaime,” the young soldier answers, which takes Tyrion by surprise. “You’ve seen him?”
“He was the one who’s given me the order to ring the bells and try to get the people away from the wildfire under the city… of which I didn’t know until then… If not for him, many more of us would’ve been dead than are now anyway…,” the soldier answers, his voice cracking towards the end. “So is he…?”
Tyrion coughs, forcing dust and ashes down his throat, so he may never forget its taste, the taste of his wrongdoing. “He let you ring the bells… of course he did.”
And that plan failed, too. He sent his own brother to do what Tyrion knew he could not do himself, and it changed nothing, absolutely nothing. The only one who made a difference for good was his big brother in the end, the way it’s always been.
He rode into that city to defend, not to take, and that, at its core, is what Jaime Lannister always was about.
Even though most never heard that part of the story, but I did, I knew.
“And he gave me this map, showed us where to go to get the people away from the wildfire,” the soldier tells him, looking down. “Not that this saved them from the fire from above, but the fire from below… it didn’t get as many as it could’ve.”
The dwarf shakes his head with a sad smile. Of course he did. Of course he’d try not to see his finest act be destroyed by a Targaryen all over. Of course he did. And he said he didn’t care… what a foolish lie to tell.
However, that memory soon washes away in the face of what he saw, and it reminds him that he cannot give up just yet, despite the weight on his shoulders, his chest, his entire being. Tyrion walks up to him slowly, carefully measuring his steps, as though the walls around him may bury them underneath at once. He only stops once he is right next to him. The young man bends down out of reflex, for which Tyrion is glad for once, because it is only reserved for his ears and his ears only.
Hope is such a fragile thing and he cannot allow it to break any further.
Too many wheels were broken already.
She can’t have that one, too.
He can’t let her make it stop spinning.
Not ever.
“… Can you keep a secret, soldier?” the dwarf mutters, his voice almost not audible.
The young man looks at him for a long moment, but then nods his head. “Yes.”
“Mind keeping one for me?” Tyrion asks slowly.
“No, I don’t mind, my lord,” the soldier answers. “What do you want me to keep a secret? What do you want me to do with it?”
“You will see for yourself in the crypts underneath the Red Keep whether you can find what you are looking for,” Tyrion continues silently, slowly. “And that which you find… keep a secret. Can you promise me that?”
The soldiers swallows, and Tyrion can tell that he understands, and he is glad for it, because that means that perhaps not all is lost just yet, that there are a few wheels still turning in the right direction.
“Aye,” the young man says faintly.
“Then go forth and be quick about it. It’s only a matter of time until she gets here, and you don’t want to be caught. Make sure you stay out of view. You must act quickly now and follow down this path until the very end, walk down to a small opening in the stone. You will see a small boat there. This is where you enter. You will find a small passageway leading up. You just keep walking past the dragon skulls, past everything you see. You only walk ahead… until you reach a wall of rubble. There is a hole there, leading into another room. You may have to get some more rocks out of the way to fit someone your size. Get in there…” Tyrion tells him, gesticulating to show him the directions. “And… you know the rest.”
“What of you, though?” the soldier asks, studying him with a mixture of curiosity and concern, the latter of which is an emotion Tyrion knows he is entirely undeserving of. Yet, at this point, he will take comfort in it. Because this may be the last time he will hear someone speak to him kindly, will look at him mildly.
Because where his brother once succeeded against the Mad King, Tyrion failed against the Queen who lost her way and he let her continue to walk into the darkness.
Jaime saved half a million people all those years ago, and at least a couple hundred more this very day, but Tyrion? At his core, he failed to protect anyone, even more so the people he loved no matter how little they loved him in turn.
Who is the stupidest Lannister now?
“I am awaiting our new Queen,” Tyrion answers.
“Queen of the Ashes, is all she is.”
“Queen of the Ashes indeed…,” Tyrion agrees, inhaling another time to remind himself that, yes, this is the truth. “Go now, don’t look back. And keep the secret.”
“I will… Good luck to you.”
“All luck to you, soldier. You hold my one hope in your hands now, I’m afraid.”
The young man disappears behind the next huge stone boulder. Tyrion walks back to the center of what used to be a room once but is now open space, only ever filled with the remains of a house, a castle, meant to offer protection. He sucks in a deep breath. He remembers that smell, the same he inhaled back on the battlefield at Highgarden.
The smell of death.
The smell of lives that went up in flames, turned to ashes and flew away.
And that even though the bells rang loud and clear.
Because sometimes good intentions turn bad and bad intentions turn out not so bad. Other times, wheels that one believed needed breaking only ever turned to charred wood instead of providing a way forward. And there is no force in the wind anymore to make it turn around to a new beat, a new melody. This wheel can only ever screech to the same old tunes of tyranny and death, of its own brokenness.
“What have we done?” he mutters to himself. “What have I done?”
And how does it all end?
Though Tyrion knows this one thing:
It has to end.
Masha saw leaders come and go. More often than not, she was glad when they went, but in her old days, she came to realize that it was a false sense of hope that the next one would not be worse, because also, more often than not, they were far worse.
Her hands may be bony and brittle from old age by now, but they had to work fast today, on men’s stomachs with the guts sticking out, children with burned cheeks, they had to feel babies kicking in the womb, and sometimes confirm that they did no more. Her hands were restless today. And yet, all feels the same, if only worse.
Because that just seems to be the way of the world works, it only gets worse, at least for the likes of them, those no one cares about as cities burn and collapse and bury underneath them their children. Because the grandeur futures kings and queens and lords and ladies dream about, the ones they have others fight wars over to see them achieved? They are not for them to live, they are for them to die for.
Masha has seen it all, her hands have felt it all.
It’s an old song, and it’s bloody well tragic that they still have to play it on broken harps and flutes, forever out of tune, echoing into the past and future all the same. And if she still had tears to spare, Masha would shed them for the lost souls who were never granted so much as a small future, a little mercy, because queens and kings and lords and ladies just don’t seem to care.
She’s seen it all, and yet, nothing prepared her for this. Masha knows she shouldn’t have been surprised, because she knows it only ever gets worse.
Yet, this is… the worst, so far anyway. Because who knows what terror is yet to knock on our doors?
A bang on her front door pulls Masha out of her thoughts, back to her little house, one of the few that remained standing after a bloody dragon flew right across it and burned squares, alleys, and people all alike. She wipes her hands in her bloodied apron with a frown.
I didn’t think they’d come that fast.
“Open up!”
Masha recognizes the voice at once, though she is surprised by the urgency. The city grew so quiet after the attack. People were too busy hiding from the Unsullied to grieve the dead and cry for them, too afraid that their tears may seal their fate.
“Do we have to run away again?” she asks as she dries her hands.
“No, just open the damned door already, Mother!”
“I’m on my way! Seven Hells, a woman of my age should not have to hurry so.” Masha makes her way over to the door and opens, only to nearly fall over as her own lad pushes inside the house, dragging a man’s body covered in dust and blood alongside him.
“What by the Crone…,” Masha mutters as her son pushes the other man fully inside, though his powers are short before leaving him. “Tobin, I can’t bring back the dead.”
“He is not dead!” her son shouts, with a kind of desperation she last heard when she had to tell him that his father was no more. Back then, her boy did not believe, old her that it couldn’t be, and she hears that boy speaking just now, too.
Masha looks down to the man her son seems so desperate to know alive to detect the smallest rise and fall in the poor man’s chest, a last quiver, a last stand against death beating against this broken body.
It only ever leaves Tobin’s mother wondering why her lad would drag this half-dead man across what seems like half the city, all the way to here. This man is none of his friends, Masha can tell, even with all the dust and blood covering him.
He is too old for that.
“He needs help, Mother,” Tobin urges her, already moving back to pick the unmoving man back up, even though he nearly topples over from the exhaustion.
“Is that…,” Masha tilts her head as a flash of familiarity rushes through her. She wouldn’t know for she never saw the man in the flesh, but Masha heard the stories, rumors, descriptions, and he matches the image it thus created inside her head for many years.
“Quiet,” the young man hisses.
“Tobin!”
“Quiet, I said! And close the door. The Unsullied are still roaming the streets, looking for blood,” Tobin curses at her, and his mother follows suit, quickly barring the door as her son checks on the unconscious man once more.
“You brought the Kingslayer into the remains of my house?” Masha curses once the door is shut. “Are you mad?”
“I need you to treat him, so yes, I brought him here,” Tobin answers, nervously checking the windows another time to be sure that no one else is there. “And no, I am not mad. What’s mad is the world outside, Mother.”
“I just washed my hands of the blood of the lot whose wounds I treated,” Masha complains. “Far too many of them.”
“Then it’s time you get them dirty again. His life’s hanging by a single thread, Mother,” Tobin urges her.
“… What’s it to me?” she scoffs, setting her jaw.
All the lords and ladies for whose futures they have to die… Why should she waste valuable bandages and ointment and water for the likes of him? Why should they still try to save the people who’d never mean to keep them safe?
Why should she care about the man who was brother – and from the rumors more than that – to the Queen who’s used Masha’s friends as a shield against the other Queen?
Why should she care about the careless?
Why should she protect those who left them without protection?
Why fight for his future when I couldn’t save that of my dear friend Lara? Or her husband? Or their little boy who’s an orphan now? Why does his future matter but never ours?
“If not for him, not one of us would still be breathing, Mother, that is why,” her son answers with a resolution she rarely saw on her lad, even less so after his father’s demise. “Now help him, and don’t be so stubborn for once.”
“Tobin.”
“I’m not going to beg you. I am demanding it. I made a promise and I keep my promises. Father’s taught me that, too,” her son hisses, gritting his dust-covered teeth. Masha studies him for a moment, for a split second seeing her husband in the flesh before her.
“Fine, fine, put him on the table and get me all the lamps you can. This will be a long night,” Masha sighs at last, gesturing at the dinner table that today became more than that, not to serve food but holding on to life itself.
I am not doing it for him, I am doing it for my husband now, she tells herself. Because for the first time in a long time, I saw him and heard him in my son’s voice. And for that I suppose I can at least try to give you a future, Kingslayer. So you better don’t die or else my son will weep for you. And I don’t believe you deserve his tears.
As it appears, she now has to hold on to the life of the Kingslayer too, with her bony, brittle hands, because her dear Tobin may be a fool at times, but he is honest, good and true, all those things queens and kings and lords and ladies stopped to be because they fancied the game of thrones all too much.
And if what her Tobin says is true, then Masha may owe that man a future, for all those futures that passed through her bony hands today and walked away alive, not set aflame by green fire.
“It appears the Long Night is now upon us, too, after we thought it’d stay in the North,” Tobin mutters, looking at the Kingslayer with anxiousness.
“Quick now! The lamps!”
“Yes, Mother.”
And so she sets to work once again, even as the sky grows impossibly darker outside and the city falls into the slumber of impending death. Masha has her son tear away the clothes of the man now lying on her table, so she can better see the extent of the wounds, of which there are sadly many, and deep ones, too.
“It’s a miracle the man’s still breathing,” Masha mutters, examining the injuries to his sides, gently probing them, though the man doesn’t even seem to have the power to stir. “Lucky bastard he is, it missed the organs for the most part, or else there would be no more blood in him after all this time. What’s happened to his head?”
“Big roof fell on him,” Tobin answers.
“What roof?”
“Red Keep?”
“Lucky bastard indeed! Looks like that whole damned castle rained down on him and yet the bastard’s still breathing,” she snorts. “We’ll need more boiled wine.”
“I’ll fetch it,” Tobin says, already rushing off.
Masha looks at the man before her, studies his bloody, dirty features. It is strange to her each time, how pain makes them all equal. Because a stabbed rich man will not look any different from a stabbed someone who’s never tasted anything but bowls o’brown for all his life. They all bleed the same blood. It’s always red, never blue. Their organs are where everyone else’s are. They are all the same underneath the skin.
They whimper, they twist, they turn, they breathe shallowly and suffer.
It may be the one thing people can share in no matter their status, no matter their name.
And doesn’t that tell you something about the poverty of this world if that is the only thing to unite us all?
Masha’s hands don’t tire as they work on a man not like them yet just like them, her hands clean, stitch, bandage tightly or burn out wounds to stop the bleeding. Hours pass in which she fights for a man she doesn’t know and likely never would have known, had her son not dragged him into her house, or what remained of it after the dragon swept across it.
She fights for a future not hers, because that is what her hands can do, and so they shall until the day they can no more. So that the world, for once, may not turn worse all over, but just a bit better, just one single bit.
“It’s done,” Tobin’s mother sighs at last, wiping sweat from her wrinkly brow. Masha steps away, looking at her work with a tired satisfaction. “For now at least, he will live. Let’s see how he fares by morning’s rise… if there even is a morning after such a night.”
Tobin pulls up a chair for her, so she may rest her old limbs at last. He brushes the back of his dirtied hand over her old cheek, offering a tired smile of gratitude, of the kind of affection that made her pull through all the darkness she saw throughout her life. Masha sits down heavily, leans her head back and studies her boy from below, smiling faintly at the thought that he seems to stand so much taller all of a sudden.
Both men lived, which is a miracle in itself, her little blessing, her bit of a future.
“So it’s true, what you said. Many live because of him, yes?” she asks, studying her son from below as he leaves his hands on her shoulders, looking at the man lying where they used to eat breakfast and dinner and supper, where they both saw Tobin’s father alive the last time before he left them forever, only to come back to them for just that small moment hours ago, when Masha saw him in her son’s eyes.
Tobin nods his head slowly. “He gave me the orders to ring the bells, to surrender.”
“That did not work well, did it?” Masha sighs. She heard the bells and dared to hope that it was all over, but then she heard wings flutter, heard them climb high into the air, and then she heard wings rain with fire. And after that was done, there were just screams, nothing but screams and the screech of a city collapsing under the weight of its powerlessness.
“No… but he tried. He tried to get Queen Cersei to surrender to the Dragon Queen personally. That’s why he went into the Red Keep, or so he told me.”
“And then the roof fell down on him,” Masha huffs. “So two things that didn’t work out greatly for him, aye?”
“But one thing did, and that is what saved so many lives today,” Tobin argues. He reaches into his pocket to take out a slip of parchment he hands to his mother. Masha takes it from him and unfolds the slightly burned and dirtied map, as it turns out. She studies the image of the city that is no more, though her eyes remain mostly fixed on the big X’s drawn on it with unsteady hand.
Her son points at the marks on the map, too, as he continues to explain, “If not for this here, many more would have been eaten by the green fire sleeping underneath the city ever since Aerys Targaryen put it there.”
“Wildfire… I thought that was all gone for good.”
“It seemingly was not.”
“And he knew of it.”
“Well, who would know if not the likes of him?” Tobin ponders.
Masha looks back at the map. “So he marked those places.”
“He marked them and sent us there to get the people away. I don’t know how many children I carried to different squares today, Mother, but I saw quite a few on the way as I dragged him to the house. They live, for now anyway. And that’s thanks to this map, thanks to him.”
“Well, he could have helped you do that if it was that important to him,” Masha snorts, not yet daring to believe, because she’s seen too much, heard too much, felt too much.
“I told you. He went to the Red Keep to get the Queen,” Tobin argues.
“Seems like the other Queen got there first.”
“Seems like it, aye.”
Masha shakes her head as she folds the map back up and hands it back to her son. She squeezes his hand a while longer and he grants it.
“I certainly wished he’d asked another soldier as you risked your life far too much for a mother to bear today, but… all those lives.”
And that is what she can’t deny, because she saw it, she saw those lives, put ointment on their wounds and bid them farewell, wished them good luck. If not for that map, however, it appears, there would have been far fewer she could have said those words to.
Tobin looks down. “We all would have liked to save more, but… he gave us at least a chance to save some, for which I am glad. I felt like standing on the wrong side for a long time… until today, when I realized that neither Queen’s side was good for us. His side, though? I think it was. It saved people, it saved us.”
“I never saw the man, you know? Only ever heard his name… looks different from what I expected. Almost like one of us,” the mother ponders. “I mean, granted, we all look the same, covered in dust and ashes, and even more so on the inside, but… not quite what I would have expected from someone as ominous as the Kingslayer.”
“We’re all just human underneath the fine garbs, armors, or rags, as Father used to say,” Tobin argues. “Covered in dirt, we all look the same.”
“And wasn’t he been right about that, hm? Just another human, covered in ashes.” She looks back at the Kingslayer, the man who no one believes would care, and yet, he drew a map, and yet, he made a try to save lives, if only just a few. On her table lies a lord who saved and protected little futures, gave small blessings.
The world is a strange place.
“I hope he lives,” Tobin says, swallowing thickly, biting back a tear.
“Why do you care for him so, dear?” his mother wants to know.
“I’d want to thank him. It felt good, to save at least a few lives, it felt right in all that wrong we had to undertake as of late. It felt like justice,” Tobin mutters, wiping a single tear from his dirtied face, leaving a dark smear across the side of his face.
Masha grabs his cheek to wipe the tear away with her thumb to bring forth some of the pale skin she knows so well underneath it. “My sweet boy. You were so much more than your father would have believed. He’d be so proud.”
“Would he?” Tobin croaks.
“Most certainly,” she assures him. “If he were not, I’d beat it out of him.”
Tobin smiles faintly before looking back at the man on the table, covered in thick bandages, making him look more like a corpse than a living thing.
“Perhaps not all Lannisters are as bad as they seem,” Masha ponders.
“Perhaps,” Tobin agrees pensively. “You know, I heard from soldiers who came from Riverrun some time back… one of them said the Kingslayer’s taken the castle without bloodshed. Only man who’s died was the Blackfish, and he chose to fight, I hear, so he’s had it coming no matter what the Kingslayer decided to do. But no smallfolk died after he arrived. Imagine that, Mother. Imagine if that were all true, in the light of this… darkness.”
“Fate’s the Stranger’s fellow. Think about it. How’s it that someone like him manages to make sure our kind does not die for the castles of the fancy folk when no one else ever did? Look at the one who burst through the city sitting on a dragon. She also wanted a fancy castle, and now it’s all in ruins for no one but the dead to inherit.”
“And he lived.”
“Because he let live, perhaps.”
At least she would like to believe.
“Perhaps.”
“Who could have guessed, really?” Masha chuckles tiredly. “The Kingslayer… Jaime Lannister.”
“No one. And I think that’s actually the point.”
Because for once, the bold wrestled the smallest of victories from death itself, but no one is meant to see it grow just yet, or else it would break.
And that future, however fragile, deserves a small blessing, too.