"THE KING IN THE NORTH, JON SNOW? NED STARK'S BASTARD?"

"NO BASTARD. NO SON OF NED STARK. HE'S THE HEIR TO THE IRONE THRONE."

♕

"If I faint, pull me out. I don't intend to be the first Lannister to die in a bathtub," the debilitated, weak heir to Casterly Rock said with a certain sarcastic wit to his hoarse voice. He was coated in filth, head to toe and sinking into the steaming water of the bathhouse in Harrenhal. He was a prisoner of war.

One moment he was a Lord leading an army and the next, he was tied to a post, starving, aching, and covered in his own shit. His captor recently released him to another to exchange him for hostages that his House was holding.

He looked across at his transporter. What a brute of a woman, she was. She was tall, gaunt, ugly, and had the build of a man. Strong arms and a strong chest with a hard face. She was blonde of hair, just like him, only it was thin and stringy and it was cut above the ear just as a man would wear it.

The prisoner had been so cruel to her their entire journey south through the Neck. It was that way he had always been. People take one look at him and assume the worse since he was a young man. A boy really. He had learned to keep a demeaning tongue and a violent hand. Now that the hand was gone, the tongue was all he had left to weaponize.

It wasn't as if the manly woman didn't give him a reason. She was everything he wasn't. He was a knight and known for being one of the best fighters who ever lived. Yet here was this person. A woman! A woman who embodied the persona of what he was supposed to be. Her honor may outdo the late Ned Stark. She had proved her honor, loyalty, valor without asking for a knighthood or any other honor.

Things that he had never been able to accomplish in all his years. All because of that name. That brand. Kingslayer. This woman had not only shown that she possessed everything that he lacked, but she was perhaps even a better fighter than him. She still looked down at him with disgust. The ever-honorable and ever-loyal woman would never see the Kingslayer as anything more than scum. He knew it. He understood it and it was fair.

He had grown to respect her.

"Why should I care how you die?" the woman shot back fiercely, her cold, yet nervous blue eyes scanning the man before her, trying to understand whether or not he was teasing her. She was normally clad in heavy silver-plated armor head to toe, proud of what she was, but with him here, seeing her bare skin, she had sunk to her chin in the water, callused hands over her breasts and strong, lean legs crossed. She was doing her best to keep her abnormally tall and strong body hidden from his cat green, judging eyes.

"You swore a solemn vow, remember?" the dirty prisoner pricked distastefully, ignoring the fact they were vulnerable in the empty bathhouse. The steaming water seeking into every nook, cranny, and pore of his body. He wasn't used to it. The cold air he was accustomed to was a drastic contrast, and he felt his head getting fuzzy and throbbing. Normally the change wouldn't bother him, but as a prisoner, his health had not been very well maintained. And his hand-or what lacked thereof- gods it hurt. He was a knight. A Lord. A commander. And they had taken his sword-hand. He was that sword-hand.

"You're supposed to get me to King's Landing in one piece," he nodded to his severed hand which continued to throb with every labored breath he took. But leave it to him to be a dick. "Not going so well, is it? No wonder Renly died with you guarding him."

The brutish woman forgot all modesty and rose from the tub in a fit of wild anger nearly lashing out at him. She kept her composure in the end, which was another astonishing thing about her to him. After all the poking and prodding, she hasn't hit him or even talked back. If he were in her position, he would have killed the man who made so much fun.

But the prisoner had realized he had gone too far and was sorry that he had done so. "That was unworthy. Forgive me. You protected me better than most..."

"Don't you mock me," she growled keeping her honor, yet still standing, letting her naked body show. Ironic. Deep down, she was almost as insecure as the man she was guarding. "I'm apologizing," he said truly. "I'm sick of fighting. Let's call a truce."

He truly was sick of fighting with her. There was just something about the woman that he could relate to. The troubled past, the first impression assumptions. He understood her better than she assumed. She did assume. She assumed that he was the honor-less Kingslayer everyone assumed he was. And to be fair, he did assume she was a feelingless brute. And that was only after he saw she was a woman.

She sunk back into the tub, eying him suspiciously. "You need trust to have a truce."

"I trust you," he pressed. The woman stared at him with thought. Maybe fondness. But the prisoner does not see it that way. He sees her staring at him the way everyone has since he was sixteen. His sick body and sick mind made him vulnerable. The pain of his lack of appendage and soreness of his thighs from riding and sores on his feet from walking made him irritable and quick to moods. He couldn't stop the flow for words from his chapped, broken lips.

"There it is," he seethed, his voice cracking with fatigue. "There's the look. I've seen it for 17 years on face after face. You all despise me. Kingslayer. Oathbreaker. A man without honor," he said in a low growl, feeling himself lose control. He hated the woman that he truly related to looked at him the way she did and had the wrong idea of who he was. She had to know. "You've heard of wildfire?"

The woman looked at him apprehension of where this conversation was going. "Of course."

"The Mad King was obsessed with it," Lannister scoffed. "He loved to watch people burn, the way their skin blackened and blistered and melted off their bones. He burned lords he didn't like. He burned Hands who disobeyed him. He burned anyone who was against him," he revealed. The woman was immediately taken by what he was saying. The Mad King from the point of view from the Kingslayer himself.

"Before long, half the country was against him. Aerys saw traitors everywhere. So he had his pyromancer place caches of wildfire all over the city. Beneath the Sept of Baelor and the slums of Flea Bottom. Under houses, stables, taverns. Even beneath the Red Keep itself.

"Finally, the day of reckoning came. Robert Baratheon marched on the capital after his victory at the Trident," he said with a weak nod. "But my father arrived first with the whole Lannister army at his back, promising to defend the city against the rebels. I knew my father better than that. He's never been one to pick the losing side.

"I told the Mad King as much. I urged him to surrender peacefully. But the king didn't listen to me. He didn't listen to Varys who tried to warn him. But he did listen to Grand Maester Pycelle, that grey, sunken cunt. 'You can trust the Lannisters,' he said." The hatred of that day showed as the knight's face was twisted. The hatred of Pycelle and the king was heard in the harshness and cruelty of his voice. "'The Lannisters have always been true friends of the crown.' So we opened the gates and my father sacked the city."

The woman saw the pain in his eyes and was shocked more and more by every word that left his mouth.

"Once again, I came to the king, begging him to surrender. He told me to... bring him my father's head," tears welled in his eyes and his throat burned with the pain of the past. He almost couldn't speak. He had never told anyone of this. Not even the woman he thought he loved. He couldn't let this woman before him look at him the way she did. He wanted her to know that she was not alone. "Then he... turned to his pyromancer. 'Burn them all,' he said," the prisoner choked. "'Burn them in their homes. Burn them in their beds.'"

"Tell me, if your precious Renly commanded you to kill your own father and stand by while thousands of men, women, and children burned alive, would you have done it?" he asked, seething and weeping, scolding her. He was angry at her too. How can she complain about being judged when that is all she had done to him the entirety of their relationship? "Would you have kept your oath then?"

She stared at him in stunned silence, not knowing how to react. She had never been told such an intimate tale of the Rebellion. And she realized her fault. She was wrong to judge him by the words of others.

"First, I killed the pyromancer," he confessed, tears cleaning the dirt off his handsome cheeks. "And then when the King turned to flee, I drove my sword into his back. 'Burn them all,' he kept saying. 'Burn them all.'"

Lannister had trouble spilling the last two sentences, so he took a deep breaths pains shot through his severed hand. But he had seen the king. He had known his insanity. He was there. He was there every minute, every hour of the war. Not Rhaegar. Not Robert. Him. No one knew better than him.

"I don't think he expected to die," he cried, spilling his heart. "He-he meant to..." he had to gather himself again. Reliving that moment in his past was more painful than all of his extremities being gnawed off, "...burn with the rest of us and rise again, reborn as a dragon to turn his enemies to ash."

Ser Jaime Lannister, the young lion of Lannister looked up from his growing, filthy, gold spun hair to look the ugly Brienne of Tarth in the contrastingly beautiful blue eyes. She looked back at him, shocked, horrified, and empathetic.

Then Jaime completed the story that had traveled the mouths or the ears of every man, woman, and child of Westeros. It ended the same way, every time, no matter the lies or exaggerations:

"I slit his throat to make sure that didn't happen."

♕

ROBERT'S REBELLION