The night was thick with the scent of blood and smoke, a scent that seemed to cling to the Red Keep itself. For a young Jaime, it was the scent of a world slipping into madness, a world where his every action seemed to echo in vain. He was young, barely more than a boy when he swore his vows to the Kingsguard, yet already he had seen too much, too much for someone of his years, too much for anyone to bear.

The Queen, though distant and shrouded in her own grief, had become a strange kind of refuge for him in those endless, suffocating halls. She was the mother of a prince, the wife of the Mad King, and yet to Jaime, she had come to represent something more, a fragile presence, a woman trapped within the confines of her royal title, but still holding onto something human beneath it all. He had lost his mother when young, and perhaps that was why he found in her something he could not name, something soft. She was not a woman of great beauty, but her sorrow was a thing of painful grace. Jaime saw it in the way she moved, the way she spoke to him with a tenderness that others might never have noticed. She was a queen, yes, but also something broken, something in need of protection.

And so, Jaime stood outside her door as he had so many times before, a silent sentinel, watching over her. His heart clenched as the sounds of Aerys' fury reached him, angry, venomous words that were followed by the all-too-familiar sound of her cries. It twisted something inside him, the helplessness of it, the knowledge that no matter how many times he stood at her door, he was powerless to stop it. Tonight, it was different. Tonight, Jaime had heard enough.