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The three-eyed Raven had said that Brandon Stark was gone.

Gone, that seemed a good enough way to put it at the time.

It was easier than pushing through from the labyrinth inside his mind.

The last thing he remembered seeing before he touched the weirwood tree had been Meera. The next thing he sees is her again, staring at him with contempt.

What did I do? What did I say? Bran thinks, deep within his own mind. He knew that if he searched, swam within the sea of memories, his own, and the memories of the Raven and the visions, that he could find it.

He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to know what he had said to make her look at him like that.

One moment he was a child again, climbing the walls of Winterfell. The next he was in the head of the Raven, soaring above the forest, and before he could try and figure it out, he was in the stands at the tourney at Harrenhall, and before the strike of the gong, he had returned to the age of heroes.

When his mind touches the Long Night, he doesn’t know what to do. With the Raven’s eyes, he doesn’t know if what he saw was real. If the memories overwhelmed him, seeing the night leaves him catatonic.

Sometimes when he’s lucky, he’ll be back north of the wall. Back before, before the Raven taught him the secrets buried in the ice and snow. Summer would still be be his side, sleeping cuddled roughly by Hodor, as though she were a toy. He’ll be when Meera pressed her face into his chest in a vain attempt to shield herself from the cold. He feels his own heart thrum uncontrollably, and he relishes the feeling, desperate for it to last, before he’s pulled away.

“Your Grace?” he hears. He opens his eyes, and Tyrion Lannister is offering him a handkerchief.

“Sorry Your Grace,” the man who he himself had once called the Imp says again. “You were crying.”

The visions take the most out of him. He only dimly is even aware of the passage of time, much less the difference between past and present, without adding future into the mix. Much like the Long Night, the visions of the future are so incredibly chaotic that Bran is uncertain as if anything in them could be real. And so, when they come, Brandon Stark retreats even further into the labyrinth.

The only time Bran Stark got any power over his own mind was in his dreams. Though they had once led him on his way to the Children, now Bran’s dreams were again his own.

In his dreams, he could walk again. He could dance and ride, and fly. Fly in a way that the Raven could never let him.

In his dreams, he can be beside his siblings again. Arya dreams of the sea, and the canals. Bran rows for her, wondering why they’ve turned back to Westeros already. He’s with Jon, again beyond the wall, in a beyond-the-wall that was new and open for life. When Sansa rides beside him in the cold of the North, he wonders if all these dreams are simply his.

Sometimes in his dreams, he reaches out and touches them. He wonders if they could feel it.

But then again, he has no control over his dreams. He was simply brought along for the ride, as welcome as the ride was. Or at least he thought.

One night, asleep in his chambers the new, much smaller and more modest than before, Red Keep, Bran dreams that he’s drowning.

The water isn’t like the pools in the Godswood back in Winterfell. It’s brackish and wild, and dragging him under. He fights and flails, but it brings him no closer to the surface.

Then he feels something underneath him shoving him roughly. The surface rushes to him, bright light through the green-gray water. His hands reach for it grasping for anything. Grasping seemingly forever, until his hand found the rope. He grabs on and pulls, pulls with all his strength, and finally, with enough strength to pull himself above the water.

With a splash from the water, Meera is beside him, pulling the rope from his hands and then pulling him the rest of the way from the water.

“You forgot your tether.”

With an unusual amount of control, Bran reaches out and touches her, as he had times before with his siblings. He brushes one of her dark curls, still wet from the water, behind her ear. His fingers linger as long as they can.

“But you brought it to me,” is what he says.

He fights waking, fights it harder than near anything he’s fought in recent memory.

When he does wake, the feeling of her skin lingers under his fingers.

When awake, he goes to the time on the road North to the wall. Jojen tells him of the time Meera pulled him out of the water when he tumbled off one of the crannogs before he could swim well. The grey water had gotten into his lungs then, and she had chided him for playing so close to the edge without being tied to the shore.

The next night, he wonders if he could try and seek her out again in his dreams. But the next night, he is with Arya.

She is on a ship, a small one, not like the one she left on. She steers it all herself, from the crow’s nest. She’s steering it towards the shore, towards a gathering storm.

“I told him I’d come back,” she says, with trepidation, “Eight moons ago I did. “

Dimly, Bran realizes he is not himself, but a porpoise. His smooth skin slipping easily through the water.

When he says, “Then you should,” he still has Brandon Stark’s voice.

“What if I can’t stop myself from leaving again?”

“Don’t make promises, and remember to bring gifts.”

He takes a deep dive under the sea, and when he rises, expels the water forcefully from his blowhole before waking.

The next night, he is climbing a staircase. Sansa is in front of him. The stairs rise and spiral, the way some of the stairs in Winterfell did. The steps are wood though, not stone, and he’s pretty sure all the staircases in Winterfell stopped at some point, instead of merely going higher and higher.

At some point, Sansa has become Lady. The pale gray pup, still as small as she had been when Bran saw her last. Not that she’d had any time to grow into her full size.

Bran gives her a scratch on the ear, and she says,

“You’re lonely and you shouldn’t be. Isn’t that what you told me?”

And then he wakes.

“You’re lonely and you shouldn’t be.”

It’s the next day,

“That sounds like what you wrote your sister last week. Shame she feels loneliness is part of her duty,” Tyrion comments from across the table.

Bran fixes on the words, he tries to so hard, but then he’s gone again.

The breadth of the Raven’s knowledge is so great that some days Bran barely even touches the years he was born in. He could spend a lifetime following the lives of the people in a Westeros that bears no resemblance at all to the one he knows.

He doesn’t want to. It may be a fight, but Bran wants his own life back.

In the night, there are storms. There are more boats, but they are not Arya’s. Some of them appear to be toys, carved from rock or driftwood, awash on the waves.

All of the Starks are here, though they are children again. Arya and Sansa are swimming amidst the waves, as if half fish themselves. Jon is beside him on the stone barge, munching on a loaf of bread.

“I’m going to go over,” Bran says, peeking overboard.

“That’s okay,” Jon insists casually.

He again peers over into the sea, afraid.

He feels a hand slip a rope around his waist and tie a knot to hold it. He doesn’t even have to look.

“If you’re going to sit so close to the edge, you’re going to need a tether,” Meera tells him, in the same tone she must have used years ago on Jojen.

A tether. He wraps his hands in the rope. And then he reaches out to Meera, desperate to touch her again.

But just like the nights when he wakes thinking their still north of the wall, he reaches and keeps reaching.

A tether.

His mind reaches, pulls on that rope as hard as he can, hoping the memory of her will help him pull himself out.

It almost works.

At breakfast, he asks Tyrion,

“What do you know about asking for forgiveness?”

“From a person? Or do you feel you have somehow displeased the Gods?”

“A person. A woman.”

He tries so hard to hold onto Tyrion’s explanation, and his suggestions, and tries not to think too much about his pitying gaze, before being pulled away and sinking again.

The words come out of his haphazardly, a few at a time, the ink smearing, his handwriting occasionally unrecognizable. He apologizes, with every bit of his being. He puts in words, for the first time, the way she used to make him feel, the way she still does. Every few minutes, his mind will try to retreat again, and he will grab his wrist and squeeze, pinching the skin violently in an attempt to stop it.

He can’t send it right away. He has to look.

The last memory, the one Bran lets himself go to before he retires. He has to make himself see.

Meera’s words hurt, especially now that he understands. She’d lost her brother, and all she wanted was to be with what remained of her family before the end came. He stares at the look in her eyes, when the words his own mouth produces are so cold.

He’s angry, so angry that he’d allowed himself to become that. To have let go so completely of the one person who had been with him through the thick and thin. To have cast her off. To have become the person who did that.

It’s just luck, so he thinks, that the memory follows him into his dreamspace.

“All I wanted was for you to ask me to stay. I don’t know if I would have, but I wanted you to ask.”

The dream words cut deeply. The setting is the same as the memory, though she is sitting beside him. This is one of the few dreams where Bran finds he still cannot feel his legs, as if this were life. He tries not to notice that she’s naked, as is he. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d had a dream get sidetracked like so.

“If I asked you now?” His voice quietly seeks.

She ducks her head, paying no mind to the rope in her hands. He reaches and grabs it, wrapping it around his wrists loosely.

And then he leans forward to kiss her, with a certainty he would have never even dreamed of having in waking life. The noise she makes hurts him deep inside. She’s warm, and tastes of summer rain. Then she shudders.

“It isn’t fair, “ she whispers, barely a breath away from his lips “It isn’t fair that this is just me dreaming something that could never be.”

Overcome, he reaches out with one hand to embrace her, running the fingers of his hand through her thick hair. When he pulls back, he only does so far enough so that he can wrap both of their wrists with the length of rope and ties the ends together in two intertwining overhand knots.

Meera lifts her wrist and examines it.

“You know what the fishermen call this right?”

Those are the last words before he wakes, and Bran clings to them desperately. Her words are his tether.

Without even leaving bed, he reaches and rereads the words he’d written the night before. They are true, and honest, but feel so stilted. Before he can send it, he has to.

Bran’s not much of an artist, but the lines are easy enough, two overhand knots interlocking, and below it written.

I know what the fishermen call it, and I forgot my tether.

Gods above, if he hadn’t actually managed to reach out and touch her he was going to sound like double the madman he feels.

After he sends the letter off with the messenger, it takes all of Bran’s strength not to look. He’s resisted anyway, put off by his last memory of Meera, but now he feels that looking might make his attempts to stay grounded worse. He cannot let the Three-Eyed Raven stay in control.

He resists every single urge to peek into the future. The glimpses has made his rule easier, to be sure, but it’s also the easiest way to lose himself.

It seems people notice too. Tyrion asks him one day during petitions if he’s beginning to feel more like himself.

“I can’t say I knew you before, but-”

“I’m trying. Me before was just a child, but I’m trying.”

His attempts are aided by Arya’s reappearance in King’s Landing. Her formal welcome is brief,

“This place looks much better than when I left,” she says, “It seems you’re doing a good enough job.”

“The fire gave us a chance to start anew, and I’ve got plenty of help.”

Arya still moves nervously, as if she is unsure of her next moves. But she is happy, happy to see him, happy to be back with stories. When he has their dinner brought to his solar so they can eat in peace, she notices the ropes tied around his wrist. He’d put them there the night he sent the message to Greywater Watch, and touching it seems to help center him.

“You remembered something I showed you.” Her eyes are wide. She’d practiced her knots quite a bit before she’d set out for her voyage, and in his more lucid moments, she’d shows him several and taught him their names. He could have figured it out himself, but her teaching him felt important to her. She looks touched, and Bran is again grasped by guilt for what he had let himself become.

Breaking the reverie, she adds,

“I still think the name is overdramatic.”

“Sailors and fishermen spend so much time away from their loved ones, “ Bran tells her, hoping to nudge her heart, “It’s not surprising that they might be romantic in their naming. I’m surprised you don’t like the symbolism.”

Arya wrinkles her nose,

“What do you mean?”

Bran tugs at the loose tips under the bend.

“The two lines can still be moved independently of each other, even though they can’t be separated unless the knot is undone. “

Arya looks mollified by his words. Her eyes are shining. She jumps forward to hug him gleefully.

“I’m so glad you seem more like you again. Magic be damned, I missed my little brother.”

“I’m still a little lost,” he admits, “But I think I can find my anchor again. At least I hope.”

The messenger doesn’t return until a week after Arya’s departed, making her way to Storm’s End. And he doesn’t return alone.

Meera looks much the same as he remembers. Her hair, having grown a bit longer during their journey, has been trimmed back above her collar. Her cheeks are pinker, and she looks better fed. She carries her net on one hip, her knife on the other. He’s grateful she did not bring her spear.

She truly does not look like someone who had been summoned by royalty. But who did anymore? Bran himself has never ha a taste for dressing richly, and only wears his crown when the ceremony would demand it.

Her face is equal parts confusion, hope and a guarded facade.

Tyrion greets her when she arrives with a similar look on his face. Though he really should know better by now, it would be a lie to say he hadn’t become attached to his young king.

When Tyrion leads her into throne room, Bran asks him to leave them. It takes all his nerves not to retreat back into himself, to hide.

Meera takes a seat, and glances up at the Iron Throne. One of the first things Bran had done in the Red Keep was to set up a table and chairs instead, to hear petitions. Even if he had been able to handle the stairs, he finds the thing ugly and abhorrent, and a reminder of all the blood that had been spilled because of it.

“For all the fighting over it, it looks terribly uncomfortable,” is how she breaks the silence.

“However you think it, it’s worse, I think I might order it melted down,” he responds.

There’s another long pause. Meera shifts uncomfortably in her chair, knowing exactly why she came, but unsure still if she should hope.

“Why did you write me that letter?” she cuts through to the point.

Bran nearly chokes himself getting the words out.

“Because I played too close to the edge, and went overboard. I didn’t have my tether.”

Her face transforms, through the steps of disbelief, nervousness, recognition and powerfully uncertain joy.

“Can -can we please dispense with the metaphors?”

“I don’t want to hide anymore,” he says with more power in his voice than he really intends. “I want to be Bran Stark again, but I get so lost, if I’m not careful, my mind becomes a maze that I can’t find my way out of.”

He reaches out across the table to take her hand. He stumbles and nearly loses his breath when he notices she’s got a rope tied around her own wrist just like he does. From the way she jumps, she’s apparently noticed too.

“I’m so, so sorry for the way I treated you before. I could try and say it wasn’t me, but it’s my fault either way. I let this happen to me, I let myself be dragged off into the world of the Three-Eyed Raven, and but now I just want to be Bran again. Ever since the dreams started, grounding myself has been easier, and I think it’s because of you. You make me want to be a person again.”

In a single smooth movement, Meera stands and moves to the other side of the table, seating herself on the edge.

“How can I know that you’re not just going to disappear again?”

Bran looks up at her. He’s used to people, women too, standing over him. It hadn’t been so bad with Meera, she wasn’t especially tall, but now she really feels like she’s looking down at him.

“I can’t promise anything. But if I leave again, if you can’t pull me back? Feel free to do exactly what you did before. All I’m asking is that you try and keep me here, now.”

If he loses himself again, he doesn’t think there would be anything he could do. He would be gone, truly.

She slips down off the table and takes both of his hands in hers. He only has a half second to react before she kisses him. He tries to meet her halfway, and bumps her nose with his, making her giggle against his mouth. She doesn’t taste of anything but her.

She pulls back ever so slightly, and cocks an eyebrow at him.

“So did you know I was going to do that?”

He laughs then, a deep belly laugh. He hasn’t done that in a while.

“I hoped.”

She laughs too, a beautiful sound. And then kisses him again. One of his hands comes free and touches the side of her face.

When they come up for air, Meera giggles again.

“Well I suppose I have just one more question.”

Bran is confused. Elated, but confused. Elated, giddy, light-headed, all those good words. His blood is rushing in his veins, in a way it hasn’t since the North.

She tilts her head, to whisper conspiratorially in his ear.

“That last dream, did it start as yours or mine?”

Bran feels his cheeks go red. He used to hate blushing, but now it’s something else to make him feel human. He fingers the rope at her wrist gently.

“Does it matter?”

“Not really, it can be ours.”