Chapter Text
Jaime can’t decide if he’s drowned already.
The flicker of light and dark across his vision is strobing and soaked in water. He can’t remember what fresh air tastes like and he’s swallowed too many mouthfuls of swirling, frothy waters to survive this, he’s certain.
He’s surfaced and gone back under a thousand times. He’s far downstream from the Tumblestone, riding the wilds of the Red Fork. He can’t see the sandstone walls of the Tully castle any longer. Not for some time.
He tastes metal on his tongue, and his addled mind wonders if that can be blamed on traces of gold dust from his father’s mines in the Westerlands, for wouldn’t it be washed into the Tumblestone as it all flows east?
But then, he realizes the metallic taste is probably from the blood in his mouth.
If he doesn’t drown first, the wound on his neck will certainly kill him. At the gates of Riverrun, Edmure Tully slashed his throat well and true and the cut is deep, bleeding out into dark, murky waters.
Where did Edmure get that dagger?
They’d had him in a prison cell in the Twins for nigh on a year. In the camp at Riverrun, he’d been tied to a pole in the mud. Jaime saw him, spoke with him, and had been so certain the Freys had broken him, in spirit and in body.
Fool, fool, you golden fool…Tyrion’s snarky chuckles fill his head. Broken doesn’t mean dead.
Too late Jaime realizes that trusting Edmure to betray his uncle was too much to ask. Edmure finally showed his true worth, didn’t he?
But how did he get the knife?
Jaime thought there was no danger in it. After all, it wasn’t the Blackfish who met Edmure on the bridge. It was Roslin Frey and with a newborn babe in her arms. Jaime saw her forlorn tears from the opposite bank, the softness she showered on the husband she hardly knew. The way she retreated back to the Blackfish's comforting embrace afterwards. Surely she wouldn’t have…
But she must have snuck the dagger to him discreetly, now a Tully in her own right. And these damn trout are so damn stubborn about lost causes.
When Lord Edmure struck, Jaime hadn’t been prepared for it. If the gods let him live, he’ll admit freely. He was bested by a man whose wrists were marked and scarred by chains. He should have known better. In Robb Stark’s cage, didn’t he take out his own cousin nearly the same way?
He didn’t have time to cry out. He reeled back at the bite of steel, his hands going to his throat, his feet catching the edge of the boards. He lost his footing and tumbled down from the drawbridge, landing with a splash in the water below.
The fall itself might have killed him. Should have killed him.
He expects the Blackfish thinks he’s dead and already bloating in the reeds, perhaps weighed down by his golden hand. But Jaime left the hand behind in the moat at Riverrun, quickly removing it and failing to surface, swimming as far as he could under the water to avoid any arrows from the holdfast.
He swam too far, emerging in rapids that carried him swiftly downstream and soon had him tumbling over jagged rocks and short waterfalls intent on killing him, vicious in their zeal to do it. He feels no love from the waters here and that seems fitting.
For Brynden Tully is the master of this river. There will be no question of that now. Especially if Jaime Lannister fails to live through his wild ride down the Tully-sworn river.
But perhaps I’m dead already? He thinks, wondering whether the dead are capable of thinking. Or of feeling throbbing, aching pain.
He’s dizzy, from the rushing river and blood loss both, and if he doesn’t find shore or something to hold onto soon, he knows he’s finished.
A drowned man, food for the fishes.
The rapids chortle along, diamond sprays like pixies with teeth, bouncing him fast and slamming him hard against every rock and felled tree he comes upon.
Thump! A knock against his wrist, another against his ribs, all the while choking and sputtering on river water.
Thump!
After too many near misses, his head hits black granite and all goes dark.