"Promise me you'll be careful."

"I always am."

"That's not true. David once told me you charge forward as soon as you glimpse the enemy over the horizon."

"Guess I'll have a little chat with David, then."

Kurt slapped Blaine playfully over his shoulder. It was time for him to go meet the Yunkai'i on the battlefield, but strangely so, the mood was light. Maybe they were both trying to mask how worried they truly were. Kurt was, anyway.

He had hoped they would have more time to rediscover each other, to bask in the simplicity of being together again, ignoring, at least for a little while, all the problems and unresolved issues surrounding them. But the Gods, as always, had other plans for them.

"Promise me you'll beat a retreat if you realize they are too many."

"Look at you, talking military now."

"Blaine, I'm serious."

Blaine chuckled and looked away, out onto the city. Meereen was buzzing with energy as the khalasar uncoiled from around the Great Pyramid like some big snake waking up from a long, restful sleep, ready to snap at the prey. They had argued on which was the wisest choice to make: to stay where they were and defend themselves from a siege, or to attack the Yunkish and Astapori army in the open field. The siege looked safer in theory; thick brick walls would protect them, tiring out the enemy. But Kurt had taken Meereen from the outside, after all. It wasn't impossible. And if somehow they got cut off the river's mouth during the siege, they would run out of supplies eventually and have no way of getting new ones.

"It's not very Dothraki-like" Blaine answered thoughtfully.

"I know it's not" Kurt conceded. "But this isn't a sacking, my sun-and-stars, and this is not the Great Grass Sea. This is-"

"-Slaver's Bay. I know" Blaine completed his sentence for him, and Kurt didn't miss how he scrunched up his face as he said the name. His husband had never liked the place, but now he was running out of patience. Kurt promised to himself that he would set to work after the battle to make sure everything was settled in Meereen, so they could finally leave.

In a way, maybe the attack was a blessing. They could be done with it and move on with their lives. Otherwise, Kurt would have spent his days waiting for the Yunkai'i to make a move, afraid to leave only to discover afterwards that the city had fallen, his children cursing him for abandoning them as they died.

"You promise, then?" he insisted. Blaine sighed in surrender and leaned over the terrace's banister with his elbows.

"Yeah" he conceded at last, a slight frown painted on his face. He seemed lost in some distant thought as he stared at the bright blue sky overhead. After a moment, Kurt understood.

He's looking for Drogon.

"He hasn't been around in a while" Kurt told him then, almost matter-of-factly, earning a look of surprise from his sun-and-stars. Blaine stared at him with a mix of sadness and worry in his eyes, so strong it made Kurt squirm under his skin. He had missed it, in a way – that power to make him deeply uneasy that only Blaine seemed to have.

"What happens if he shows up?" the khal asked him suddenly. "What happens if the sound and smell of people dying brings him onto us? Will he know the difference between us and them?"

The stream of questions filled Kurt with dread.

"I don't think he will" he admitted quietly, lowering his gaze to the ground. The next words that came out of his mouth stung, their meaning harsh and bitter and painful, but he had to tell them. "If you see him coming, run away."

There was a pause.

"And if- if we win the battle," Blaine ventured eventually, "and you fix all those things you said you need to fix... will we... leave? What are we going to do with them?"

"I don't know yet" was Kurt's answer – the same answer he gave every time Blaine tried to broach the subject (which happened more than Kurt would have liked). "But yes, I told you I want to leave, too. I promise you we will. Soon."

What to do with the dragons was something Kurt asked himself constantly, but the most rational, logical answer hurt too much for him to bear, so he always ignored it and kept looking, even though he knew, deep down, that he had already found it. He could either stay and try to figure out a way to understand what went on in their minds – but he couldn't, there was no point, they didn't listen to him anymore –, or leave the city without them.

Drogon was impossible to catch, and Rhaegal and Viserion impossible to carry anywhere. He could have a new wheeled cage built, something big and heavy and made out of thick close-set iron bars, but they would always spit fire, burning alive whoever came near them. The Unsullied guarding the dungeon told him they were growing wilder, roaring, always roaring, trashing at their chains and biting at each other and blackening the walls with their flames. And hungrier, always hungrier than the day before.

The thought of leaving them like that forever, cramped inside a pit that would soon grow too small for them, condemned to never see the sun again when their primal, basic purpose on the earth was flying, was nauseating. So that led him to the next logical option, the one he dreaded most.

Killing them.

The Westerosi books Sebastian used to read to him were full of tales of dragonslayers, but most of them were just legends, dating back to the Age of Heroes, a past way too forgotten to be considered reliable. They spoke of impossibly brave knights who killed dragons with their spears or longswords, but the description was fuzzy, lacking detail, elegantly designed as to give only a generic idea of how such a dreary task could be carried out. Dragons did not live forever, though.

Balerion the Black Dread, the biggest of the three dragons with which Westeros had been conquered by the Hummelsmythes for the first time, died naturally and peacefully in his sleep after about two centuries of life. That only gave an inkling about how long they lived, however. The only dragons Kurt knew about who had found their death in violence were those employed in the Dance of the Dragons, one of the darkest episodes of his family's history. An internal war for the Iron Throne, between a prince and a princess. It had ended with both of them dying, and their dragons with them. Basically, it meant you could kill a dragon with a dragon. It wasn't very helpful, either.

The point, though, was that Kurt wouldn't be able to kill them even if he knew how. Let history remember him as the stupid boy who'd released three dragons upon the world without knowing how to tame them; it was better than being remembered as the one who'd put an end to the life of the most wondrous things men would ever see. Because they could be wild, and deadly, and ruthless, but ultimately they would always be that in Kurt's heart: wonder and magic and pure, raw, utter beauty. Let someone else be the hero, the savior, the dragonslayer. Kurt was the Father of Dragons.

And as much pain as that could cause him, he always would be.

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It was then, when Kurt forced himself to cling to hope even though there wasn't any, that everything fell apart.

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When something very bad happens, the first thing people think is Please, tell me it's not true, even though they know it is. They have it right there, in front of their eyes, some proof or result of what their particular brand of tragedy entails, and yet they pray, or wonder if they're dreaming, going as far as pinching themselves to be absolutely sure.

The second thing people think is Could I have prevented it from happening somehow?, which is quite a difficult question to answer, because humans have a striking, at times ridiculous tendency to blame themselves. They just can't help it; so they go around and around and around in their heads and think about all the things they could have done differently or not done at all, and all the things they could have said, should have said, and suddenly life becomes just a series of crossroads and decisions are just wrong turns that could have been right.

And Kurt Stormborn, Khalees of the Dothraki Sea, Father of Dragons, Unburnt, Breaker of Shackles, King of Meereen, King of Westeros, blood of Old Valyria, in the end was just a person, as much as everybody else.

As Tina's dead eyes stared back at him, cold and fixed and emotionless, the only thing Kurt could think was Please, tell me it's not true.

The second one, though, was slightly different, and it made its way into his mind before guilt and self-hatred could settle there as well eventually.

How will I tell Blaine?

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The battle was still ongoing when it happened. Kurt was in the court, surrounded by his usual entourage of slaves and guards, waiting apprehensively for some news. The whole khalasar and almost all the Unsullied had left Meereen, leaving behind only the ones necessary to keep the pyramid and the city walls protected. Tina was known to be inside her chambers, resting, with two guards at her door – Grey Worm was too precious to be kept away from battle, so he wasn't one of them.

Those same guards had found her, and brought her in front of Kurt over a litter. Her belly was bleeding, punctuated by three long arrows that seemed to have penetrated her from side to side, judging by how deep they were. Her hand had been clutching at them weakly, because it was resting over her belly too, soaked in her own blood. The bright red of it descended down her body to pool on the linen beneath her and then drip steadily to the marble floor, expanding at every passing second.

Kurt stared at her in silence for at least five minutes, trembling. In the background, he could hear his slaves and servants crying: Brittany and Santana and Rachel, uselessly shushed and comforted by someone, a male voice - Finn, it must be Finn, yes.

He stood up from the bench as if in a daze. His head pounded, and he had to steady himself for an instant, otherwise he would have fallen. The blood kept dripping, flowing toward the base of the stair that led to his bench only to stop and pool there, as if it wanted to reach out toward him and soak him, drown him, choke him. The smell was making him feel sick, and the sight was breaking his heart in thousands of tiny pieces that would flow away from him as well, like blood coming out of a deadly wound.

He thought about the baby, little Cooper, the Stallion That Mounts The World. Thick black curls on his head right from his birth, he would have had – not straight locks like Tina's, he just knew it –, almond-shaped piercing eyes and olive skin glowing in the sun. A smaller version of Blaine running around, clutching at his legs to point at something with his curious, eager fingers, yearning for battle and blood too soon for it to be healthy; and Kurt would have been there to hold him back, to counterbalance Blaine's eagerness to teach him how to swing arakhs and fight and kill. They would fight about it, he was sure of it, and then come to an agreement and educate their child with a mixture of delicateness and roughness, because that was who they were.

But that would never be, just like any other of Kurt's fantasies. He thought he'd learned his lesson, and yet reality kept rubbing it in his face to be sure he got it, and he did, he did, so why did that have to happen? Why couldn't he just be happy?

"What- why- h-how?" he croaked, his hollow voice echoing off the pillars and expertly decorated high walls that suddenly seemed to press down on him from all sides.

"These ones found her in the terrace" one of the Unsullied said, in a flat tone that somehow betrayed sadness and guilt. "She said she would be back. She said she just wanted to check if... if he was coming back. But then she didn't come back, so we went to check. These ones are very sorry. These ones have failed and deserve to be punished."

The two guards kneeled in a gesture of surrender and acceptance, laying their spears on the floor, but Kurt couldn't care less about them and what they did or didn't deserve.

She wanted to wait for Grey Worm to return, he realized, forcing back tears, but then he felt wetness on his cheeks and found out that he was already crying; had been for quite some time now.

As it turns out, brother, the blood of the dragon cries.

"Who- who did this?" he asked through gritted teeth, but he didn't know who he was talking to.

"Who do you think, khalees?" Finn whispered bitterly, staring down at the corpse as well. "The arrows could have come only from one of the pyramids surrounding this one. We are too high for them to have been shot from the ground."

Kurt's breath got stuck in his throat.

The Sons of the Harpy. It had to be them. They worked for one of the slaver families then, and the occasion had been too hard to resist – the woman carrying his son wandering around the terrace as the pyramid was almost empty and barely guarded because of the battle.

They did this to hurt me.

Just as he was opening his mouth to speak and have the body covered - Take it away, I can't look at it, I can't breathe - the doors of the court were slammed open and a blood-covered, sweating, raggedly breathing Blaine came rushing in, his expression contorted by anger and worry right from the start.

"They- they are too many, more than what we thought" he said as he strode toward the end of the hall, heaving short breaths between the words. "I had to-"

As soon as Blaine got close enough to realize that there was a corpse, and whose corpse it was, he froze. He looked down at it, his jaw working uselessly, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, nostrils flaring. He looked at it so hard that for a moment nothing seemed to exist but the way he stared.

Don't cry. If you cry, I'll lose it.

But nothing, nothing, not even Blaine sobbing and tearing his own hair, could have been worse than the look Blaine directed at him when he eventually tore his eyes away from Tina. He stared at Kurt with such hatred that Kurt shrank back from the force of it, taking a step back on instinct. For the first time in his life, he felt truly, utterly scared of his husband. In all the time they had spent together, Blaine had never looked at him that way. He had never looked at him as if he wanted to murder him.

"Blaine-"

Blaine seemed to snap out of it at the sound of his own name. He strode off toward the door that led to their chambers and slammed it shut behind him so hard that the thick walls of the court echoed with it.

It's just his own way of dealing with grief, Kurt told himself weakly, trying to shake the uncomfortable, terrible feeling that had settled in his stomach.

He walked down the stairs on shaky legs and hurried to follow him. When he closed the door behind him, he heard loud crushing noises echoing through the corridor toward him, coming from his chambers at the end of it. He found himself running, tears of grief and anger and raw panic streaming down his cheeks, until he practically slammed himself against the door of the bedchamber, from behind which the noises came louder.

He opened the door to find Blaine screaming, so loud and wild that it sounded like a wounded animal – and it looked like it, too. He was pacing from one place to the other, grabbing things to throw them against the opposite walls – tables, chairs, statues, chandeliers, paintings from the walls, vases from their marble pedestals. Everything around him was broken chunks of things, but Blaine didn't seem to be satisfied just yet. Without realizing that Kurt was there, he spun toward their bed at the bottom of the chamber and practically ran toward it, screaming, still screaming, sounding like something out of a nightmare, like a damned soul bellowing down from the Seven Hells.

He tore the beddings away and apart, shredding them in thick stripes that landed at his feet and tangled around one another. When he threw the mattress away and realized that the bed itself was too heavy for him to lift it, he turned around and searched the wall frantically, until his wild eyes found something he hadn't broken yet. A huge, full-length mirror – they had placed it there to look at themselves as they made love, after that time in Chandler's palace.

That thought, united with the sudden worry that Blaine could hurt himself breaking the enormous glass surface, set Kurt into motion.

"Blaine!" he yelled, rushing toward him. "Blaine, stop!"

Either Blaine ignored him, or he didn't hear him, because the mirror was off the wall and crashing against the opposite one in a instant, bursting into a million of sharp cutting pieces. Kurt had to cover his face with his arms, afraid that some of them would get in his eyes and blind him. The mirror crashing created a sound so loud and ringing and wrong that for a moment, just a moment, it drowned Blaine's screams. Then Kurt was able to hear them once again.

"Blaine," he sobbed, not knowing whether he should get closer to him, hug him, restrain him, or keep his distance to leave him the space he needed, "Blaine, you need to stop, you're going to hurt yourself!"

Blaine turned abruptly from where he was staring at the broken mirror, realizing only then that Kurt was there. The look was back full force, stabbing Kurt over and over like a knife through his severely wounded heart. The screams died down, and for a blessed, beautiful instant, Kurt thought the worst had passed.

"Get out!" Blaine howled at him then, hands thrown in the air. Kurt didn't know how much of the blood covering his skin was his, nor how much of his blood had come from the battle and how much from the current outburst. "Get the fuck out!"

Kurt resisted the urge to flinch back and kept his ground.

"I'm not going anywhere!" he screamed just as loudly. "Don't shut me up, don't do this, we won't get through this if not together, just-"

"Get through this?" Blaine echoed, and why did he have to look at him that way? "Tina is dead. Our son is dead. How could we ever get through this?!"

"I- I don't know, Blaine, I-" he choked on the words, helpless. "I- I need you now and you need me, we'll figure it out, we always do-"

He took a step forward to try and touch Blaine, but his husband shrank back from it as if he'd burned him.

"Don't touch me" Blaine said, not screaming this time – and that just made it worse. Kurt gave him a pleading, helpless look, his mouth opening around words that didn't come.

"You- Blaine-"

"This is your fault" Blaine stated in a harsh, unforgiving tone, and those four simple words rang in Kurt's ears just as loud as the sound of their full-length mirror crashing against the wall.

"What?" Kurt asked him weakly, head spinning, vision blurry from too many tears.

"This is your fault" Blaine said again, as if Kurt hadn't heard him the first time and needed to be reminded – and the cruelty of it was something Kurt knew he wouldn't forget. "I told you it was unnecessary to take this city, but you did it anyway. I came back here thinking we could leave now that things were settled between us, now that you had taught me you could be strong, but no, you always have to do more, to push harder, to try and fix things that can't be fixed and make the world better. Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think I didn't realize, the moment I looked at her, that they killed her just for the pleasure of hurting you?! We stayed here because you wanted to stop them, couldn't find it in yourself to leave these people to take care of their mess, and now Tina is dead and our son is dead and it's your fucking f-"

The echo of the slap registered before the actual collision of Kurt's hand against Blaine's cheek did. Kurt sucked in a gasp, recoiling his hand, as Blaine's face remained turned to the side, just like the slap had forced it to be. Blaine must have bitten on his tongue or the inside of his cheek in the impact, because he spit a mouthful of blood on the floor before looking back at Kurt with a renewed fire in his eyes – just as fierce as before, but not quite as wild. In fact, when he opened his mouth to speak, his next words were almost whispered, but sharp and full of resentment.

"If I were another Khal," he confessed, eyes narrowed and bruised jaw clenching, "you'd be missing a hand by now."

He's going to hit me back, Kurt couldn't help but think for a terrible moment, but right after thinking it he knew it wasn't going to happen – Blaine looked calm, almost deadly so.

"You don't mean that" he whispered hoarsely. "You can't mean that."

Blaine smirked evilly – he knew how to get painfully mean when they fought, and always apologized for it when they made up, but somehow Kurt didn't think that would be the case. Something had broken between them; whether it was because of their unborn son dying, or because of Blaine's reaction, it was too soon to discern. Everything was pain, just pain, and it was hard to trace it back to its source.

"Of course I mean it" Blaine revealed almost mockingly. "Countless khaleesis have lost their hands for having hit their respective khals."

Kurt didn't have the time nor the will to think about how cruel and wrong that was.

"About our son" he pointed out sharply. "I didn't mean for it to happen, I couldn't know they would dare to kill someone on my terrace, I- I'm hurting too, Blaine, I lost a son too, and you don't get to treat me like this, you just don't!"

Blaine seemed to consider that for a moment, but it was no use.

"If we had left, Tina would be alive, and it was you who insisted on staying" he said slowly, carefully, as if explaining it to Kurt. "There isn't much more to tell. We're done."

Kurt blinked several times at that.

"What?"

"I said we're done. I'm done. With you, with- with this, I just-" Blaine suddenly stopped speaking, looking around helplessly as if searching for the words, as if he could find them there scattered around their feet like everything he had destroyed, among what was left of both of their hearts. When he spoke again, the change in his tone was astounding – a pitiful, choked-off whimper. "I can't even look at you right now."

He walked around Kurt and made to leave, but just before reaching the door Kurt heard him say, "By the way, I beat a retreat like you said. The battle is lost."

Then he left.

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That night, Kurt didn't dream of Hazzea nor the dragons. He dreamt of a baby crying from a pool of his own blood.

As he woke up with a start, sheets tangled around his legs, he couldn't help but look at his hands to be sure they weren't red.

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They buried Tina where the Dothraki Sea began, a few miles north of Meereen. Dothraki usually didn't bother with giving their slaves a proper burial, but she had carried their child, and that meant something. So they buried her as if she'd been a warrior, with a horse next to her that would carry her through the nightlands where Dothraki believed the dead went – a spiritual version of the Great Grass Sea, its exact reflection in the sky, where the Stallion looked after the riders who were sent to him. They buried another horse, too, for the son they would never have.

Kurt didn't know if he believed that – didn't know what he believed in anymore – but he hoped it was true. He hoped Cooper's soul would find peace and meet Blaine's brother in the nightlands. He desperately wanted to tell that to Blaine, whisper it against his chest as they both cried themselves to sleep and held each other close. But Blaine didn't speak to him. Blaine didn't look at him. Blaine didn't sleep with him. Not anymore.

As Tina got lowered into the ground, the swaying grass echoed of a quietness that seemed to reach out for Kurt, trying to take him by the hand and wrap itself around him; but it wasn't real. He just had to turn around and look south to remember it, feel the smell of horse and death coming their way.

Watching from atop his horse, he forced his eyes up to look at Grey Worm. Kurt hadn't been there when the Unsullied had learnt about the news, but the soldier's hollow expression was something he would never forget. It was the saddest he had ever seen someone looking without crying.

Is that what losing a soulmate looks like?, he wondered.

When they went back to the pyramid, he stared at his reflection in his new mirror and realized he looked the same.