Jaime

Jaime shifts his boots in the Winterfell mud, feels one unstick and one sink in deeper. He does not turn his head, he keeps his eyes firmly on the distance; but he sways a little to the left, just to brush against Brienne's armour.

"Do you pray to a god?" he asks.

He can feel more than see her indignation. "What?" she enunciates, with all the familiar vitriol. It's not such a terrible thing to hear, at the last. He keeps his eyes fixed on the horizon. No man would pitch a battle on this dark a night; the braziers keeping it barely light enough to see each other seemed unable to light the battlefield more than ten meters ahead of them.

"I don't know what they worship on Tarth," Jaime says. "I would guess the Seven, but I've never once heard you pray to them."

Brienne doesn't reply for so long that he almost gives up on hearing it, but as the wind whistles across the braziers, picks up sparks and litters them across those standing on the front line, she finally speaks.

"I don't pray, much," she says, "but I like the old gods."

"You like them?"

"They're simple. A god for trees, a god for lakes." She shrugs one shoulder; he can hear her pauldron shifting against itself. "I prefer it."

A moment passes, sparks flying, and then she adds:

"And I hated praying to the Maiden."

There are jokes to be made there, of the infamous Maid of Tarth, and all of them make him bite his tongue, lightly, just to make sure there's no way he can say them. The man who would have said those jokes was only a few years behind him, not far enough behind to make him not think of the jokes to start with. He brushes up against her again, hoping that she doesn't realise it's an apology.

If she does, she doesn't comment on it.

"What about yourself, Ser Jaime?" she asks.

Jaime hums absently, chewing at his tongue a little while considering the answer. He's starting to feel the crushing weight of the darkness ahead of them. His legs are starting to shake in the way they used to back when he was green, back when he'd never faced a man in battle before.

He supposes he's never faced a dead man before.

"Gods don't tend to answer the prayers I send," he says, and leaves it at that. "But halfway through a battle I always pray to the Warrior. Or swear at him that I'll find him after the battle and tear him limb from limb, but I find that it's all the same."

He can hear her huff out laughter, and the sound is— heartening. At least he's going to die funny.

"May the Warrior give strength to your sword arm, then."

Jaime grimaces, can feel the half-sensation of closing a right hand around a sword where there's only empty space and gold freezing itself to his wrist.

"And the Warrior knows I need it."

They're silent, then, for a long moment, and Jaime entertains the notion that the wildling had been wrong, and that nothing at all would attack tonight. They could curse him, laugh, go to bed tonight.

Go to bed with each other.

The thought rises higher and higher as he tries to tamp it back down to wherever it came from, but the image is already forming, like a fight with an opponent he's only seen. He shifts his sword in his hand a little more, tries to flex his right hand as well just to distract him from the thoughts. The phantom pain it causes isn't quite worth it, but it does get him to focus up.

Somewhere in the distance, there is a sound.

He supposes the sound must have been happening for a while, and for so long the nervous chatter of thousands of men fearing death had drowned it out. But there it was. This soft scraping sound. It seems to be coming from everywhere at once, and as it starts to get louder, the whispers of the men around him diminish to harsh breathing, clouds of steam in the air.

It's coming from ahead.

He can hear a Dothraki call, and then one of the Unsullied yells in Valyrian, and then the sound of ten thousand horses fills the air, joined by the screams of the horselords, and then-

The heat and light of ten thousand swords aflame. Impossible and there.

He has to squint away from it, and he blinks over at Pod, shielding his face, and then to Brienne, who is looking to them both. They exchange a momentary glance, that seems to mean more than just looking at each other, gods know what, whatever gods know how to light fires on steel, and then they turn away.

The Dothraki charge, beacons lighting the way ahead, and suddenly Jaime can see for hundreds of yards, the backs of the screamers as they flow like a wave into the sea. Flaming missiles spiral overhead, painting the treeline orange, and the Dothraki come in to the same place the trebuchets are firing to-

And the wave breaks.

Ten thousand swords dim into darkness. Jaime follows the progress of the last few swords that spin from left to right and sputter into nothing, moving at first with the speed of the horse and then with the zig-zagging of a man, and then wrenched here and there and gone.

It's crushingly dark again.

Behind him, Jaime can hear the men begin to shudder, talk, ask each other did you see that, and Jaime wants to do the same but there's no damn point when everyone saw that, and everyone knows what it means.

One or two horses ride back, pushed sideways by the crowd standing ahead of them. They are without a rider, and on some, their saddles are torn and dragging beneath them. A horse, fifty or so yards to the right, some dappled steed, tangles its legs in the shredded leather and goes down hard, screaming.

Some merciful wildling steps forward— bearded, hair glinting red-blonde in the brazier light, Tormund; and hits at its straining neck with his axe, and the screaming stops. Jaime nods over at him but he doesn't think Tormund catches it. Tormund, that crazy fucker, looks scared.

He can hear the sound again. The scraping sound.

It's much louder, and much closer, and loud enough for him to hear what it sounds like. It's flesh shifting across flesh. The click of bone. The clatter of thousands of legs running.

Jaime can feel the fear go across the battlefield, and Brienne sinks down into a fighting stance, and she screams- "Stand your ground!"- so loud that he almost can't tell what she's saying. Beside him, Pod bristles and levels his dragonglass blade, and he exchanges a look with the boy; almost a man, now, staring back at him with fear and determination, and about to fight his first damn battle against an enemy that—

Through the haze of darkness, movement.

A thick moving wall of flesh, mouths open, eyes blue.

There are so many of them that they seem to just roll over the braziers.

There is a split second between the dead attacking and waiting for it where Jaime is stood in the darkness, sword arm swinging but not hitting, and he can see, just about, the full extent of what he's about to hit.

Or more accurately, what's about to hit him.

It swarms with hate.

The wave of dead men impacts with his chest, his face, his legs, and he's pushed back as much as he's pulled in, thousands of arms yanking at him as he's lifted off his feet by the sheer force of their momentum. He's pulled into the throng and he doesn't have time to yell, just to push his arms out, metal hand slamming against bone and flesh as he jams his sword into the host of dead. They tip him up by his legs and he's now suspended facing down, and they drop upon him, trap his sword arm beneath him, push his face into the mud, and tear. He feels a hand slough off its flesh as it pulls at his hair, another trying to tear through the skin of the back of his neck, and he scrambles, elbows in and up, pushes them back for just long enough to get his left arm up and swing back, breathe air rather than mud, and now he's standing, barely. They don't stop at any point, just keep moving no matter how much he cuts off or how often he pushes back, and the second he makes space on one side he can feel hands pulling him down on the other. He can't see the battle. He can barely see anything. He can feel the cold air getting colder the longer the wights stay near him. No matter if he fights like he did when he had two hands and the strength of a younger man, he's dying, soon, perhaps in minutes.

He's covered in mud, or flesh. It's cold, and it's freezing against his skin. He can feel his legs shaking, and he might have pissed himself.

None of this seems to matter to the dead, even as he flails his left arm in a swing that cuts off a head and two arms. They aren't fazed if they lose a hand. It'll just keep trying to kill him.

He feels teeth sear against his skull and he slams his metal hand back into it, again and again, but the teeth keep chewing with a broken jaw and its arms have latched onto him, and he screams out in horror, fuck, fuck, fuck, and they start pulling him to the ground—

A cry that could have come from the gods. A sword that cleaves the dead man in front of him in two. The wight on his back, his head, is plucked off and flung back like it's made of paper, and he's pulled up and dragged into a sprint.

He barely has time to see as he finds himself joining a crush of men running for their lives, pushing through each other, leaving the slowest to die as they run for the dim lights of Winterfell, but he can feel her presence, hear her comforting grunts of exertion, knows that her eyes will be round and blue and wild with frenzy as she pushes through the men she should be leading forward.

He owes her his life, again, and he knows that he's going to die if he has to save her from the same. He thinks he'll have to do it.

The retreat is wordless, because there's no need to explain why they need to fall back. Jaime pushes and pushes and runs when he finally has the space to, runs through the throng of men being dragged to the ground by the wights that can run almost as fast as they can, perhaps just as fast.

Something tugs at his boot.

He trips a little in the mud and turns back, expects to see the flat blue eyes of a wight. Instead, he looks directly at the wide brown eyes of Pod, trampled into the ground by the retreat, staring up at him with a clear plea, arms still outstretched. Jaime stutters to a halt.

And then the dead swarm and descend on Pod, tear into his face, look up at Jaime with a screaming hunk of flesh in their ragged mouths, and coward, coward, he keeps running.

Stopping for however long has cost him the advantage, the dead sprint like their own speed carries their legs. He has to barrel through the churned mud and stamp over the people who have tripped and fallen below him, and he almost stumbles here and there as he is bashed to and fro. Up ahead, as the fires of Winterfell get closer, he can see a tall shock of blonde hair, matted with viscera, and he runs for that hair, crushes across the bridge and almost gets pushed into the dragonglass spikes on one side but sheer bloody determination makes him push back in. He wonders if someone ended up falling on the other side of the bridge, but there's no way to find out. The scream would be lost in the rest of the screaming now.

As he drags himself through the crowd to Brienne, pushes to the castle, he can see now that everyone has broken formation. Unsullied, knights of the Vale, northmen, wildlings. Someone's still manning the trebuchets, but they're effectively firing pebbles into a sea.

Above, as he is swept by the crowd towards the gates of Winterfell, he can see a waving torch, and then a wheeling screech, and the world is aflame behind him, a deep orange, and he makes the desperate mistake of looking back.

The trench is alight and so is the sky, a dragon spearing through the clouds setting the dead aflame. They're everywhere. A hundred thousand wights as far as the horizon spreads, and they could never have held them back, never, and as Jaime is pulled by the crowd into the castle he realises he's merely delaying his fate.

They're entering the stage for a massacre.

The world spins and he stumbles halfway across the courtyard to Brienne and bile hits his throat and he's throwing up on the ground a few steps before he makes it to her, pushing his head against the frozen rock to feel anything other than the certainty that they're all going to die. In the distance, he can hear the screams of men, and the creak of closing gates.

He risks a glance up to Brienne. He expected eyes frenzied from the fight, staring into the middle distance, looking for the next target. He was wrong. Instead he met her gaze, and he can see that, somewhere in the mess, she's sustained a massive cut down her face, eyebrow to chin, slicing all the way through the cheek. She looks scared. Blood is pouring from her face with appalling speed, and he takes that final few steps towards her, looks up at her. She looks down at him, shivering, taking in his face like it's the last thing she'll ever see. It's a terrifying thing.

They don't need to say anything. He's not even sure she can, her cheek is so slashed. He looks over to the gates and checks that they're closed, the dead and half the army behind it, bashing at the wood, begging to be let in, and he sheathes his sword just so he has a hand free to caress her hair, matted with all the worst of a corpse, and he breathes in deep and stares and she reaches out a hand and scrubs it across the back of his head, too forceful to be pleasant but in its own way comforting, warm at least.

"Open the gates!" he hears in the distance, hundreds of voices, shrill and high, and all around them, the drumbeat of a hundred thousand corpses running.

He realises that pretty little vision of bedding each other is never happening. And so's an image, scraping itself across his imagination unbidden, of him and Brienne, wearing each other's cloaks, smiling and warm in the summer sun. Perhaps a white piece of cloth joining their hands. She does like the old gods, after all.

None of that can come true, so he just does the only thing he has left to give her, in the time he has left. Hope that it tells the rest of what he's never said.

He kisses her.

Brief and chaste, nothing at all, really, but he just vomited out half his stomach and her face is coated in blood and horse shit, so he doesn't think either of them would prefer it otherwise. He closes his eyes as he does it just to make it feel romantic.

He leans back and opens his eyes. Brienne's face crumples, just a little, and he can see all that blood pouring from the effort of moving her face and he wants to curl up and die, right here, just so he never has to think about her looking so defeated again. He settles for just collapsing his head into her chest, her head resting on his shoulder, for the few moments they have left like this.

He can hear dragons. The screaming outside the walls is subsiding horribly fast.

She mumbles something, and he has to back her up and stare at her face to face.

"What?" he gasps.

Her face contorts with the effort and pain of speech.

"…Figh' 'il we're dea'.." she makes out. He feels like he ought to cry, but instead he just feels sick again. He won't tell her about Pod. Not now. If they survive, she can hate him for it.

"Fight 'til we're dead," he repeats, nods, tries to make it feel convincing. He grips her arm hard. He smiles at her just because she can't, and because she ought to see something that isn't the army of the dead. He can only hope he's been comforting.

The silence draws their attention first.

And then everyone backing away from the doors, running down from the walls, calling to take cover, take cover, fucking run!

Brienne grabs his arm and he grabs hers and they run for the castle with the rest as behind them—

The sound of something terrible descends—

And they look back as a dragon with black-blue flesh erupts from the sky, white-blue flame boiling in its throat, and destroys the walls of the Winterfell gates.

The Three-Eyed Raven

He watches from the eyes of crows that are immolated in the blue-white flames.

It had only been a matter of time, but, in truth, he had expected the Night King to wait for the walls of Winterfell to be breached.

It seems whatever drives its decisions lacks patience, which is interesting. Or perhaps it means something else for strategy. He will have to compare it later.

For now, he has to speed things along.

He returns to the cold air and shifting branch sounds of the godswood and regards the men defending him. They look scared. He supposes he heard the dragon.

"Theon," he says. Theon turns, fearful but, as expected, after all he has been through, the guilt he has, he is ready to do whatever Bran asks.

"You're a good man," Bran says. Theon exhales, eyes shining with tears. Nods.

Bran tilts his head up at the branches of the weirwood. A single leaf breaks from the branch in the cold, flutters to the ground; he watches its progress slowly. When it hits the frozen snow, it dissolves to dust.

It's time.

"And I need you to do something for me."