A/N: Hey, everyone, done with an exam this morning so wrote this since it was requested on tumblr. We'll get started on season 2 after this!

This is the latter part of chapter 4 from Amaya's perspective, when Gren took the bolt of lightning that temporarily stopped his heart.

Chapter 7: Interlude - Amaya, Winter's Turn

When Thunder fell, he shook the earth; a mountain of fallen white-blue, pierced through the heart with a spear of violet flame.

But Amaya only saw Thunder's last roar, as she had felt it in her breastbone where her ears did not hear – a lightning-lance of Thunder's own that crashed down amongst the edge of the forces of Katolis.

Then down came the king of dragons, in the blood and dust.

Amaya stood still.

She was sure–

She was sure, for a moment, that there among the soldiers where Thunder's last bolt of lightning fell, there had been the flash of strawberry hair.

It was impossible. She had ordered Gren to remain in the Fortress.

And yet–

She ran. Circled the fallen dragon's massive bulk to where a few crumpled figures lay, burnt beyond all recognition. And there, among the stench of smoke, ginger hair and the deep blue of a half-cape–

–and Amaya slid to her knees in the churned mud by Gren's side, the icy air of Winter's Turn somehow burning colder in her suddenly frozen lungs.

No.

She had ordered him not to come.

Her commander lay half on his side in the bloodstained grime of the battlefield. Smoke curled lazily from a charred rent in his armour that ran from right shoulder to left boot, exposing the teal under-armour shirt beneath. Gren's face was calm and still; long-lashed eyes closed, humour-edged mouth shut, as though he were asleep.

Amaya blinked, hand jarring halfway to Gren's uninjured shoulder.

He wasn't breathing.

He wasn't–

Amaya tore off her gloves and slid ice-fed fingers under Gren's collar. The skin there was still warm and hauntingly familiar to the touch; where her cheek would press whenever they hugged each other, as only the best and closest friends could.

But she felt no pulse.

She was moving before the horror could register.

She tore through Gren's smoking armour like parchment. No mere leather and metal could stand under her will, General of the Standing Battalion and sentinel of the Breach; she who was Katolis's last guard before the might of Xadia.

She had looked death in the eyes too many times to count. Death would not be victorious against her.

The material of Gren's shirt was horribly thin under her fingers as Amaya pressed the heel of one hand into his sternum and laced her other hand above; she leaned forward, her greaves grinding into congealing blood and mud, and forced her whole weight onto Gren's chest through her locked shoulders and elbows.

The give of a rib under her fingers nearly brought her to tears there and then, but she had no time to think of what abuse she was doing to her faithful commander's chest; the rhythm of the compressions took over in a maddening mantra of please-please-please–

Thirty compressions in, Amaya's sweat-slick fingers went to Gren's rapidly-cooling face and pinched his nose shut; her lips locked around his slack mouth and forced air from her own lungs into his, once, twice, looked for his falling chest then back to compressions, then nose, lips, air, hands, nose, lips, air, hands–

She became his heart and his breath.

Again, and again, until she tore off her own stifling mail and pressed on with the high collar of her under-armour shirt sticking to her neck.

The sky of Winter's Turn burned bright and merciless above; the ground bled fire and volcanic gases below. And under Amaya's fingers, her Gren – her most trusted commander, her closest friend – was slipping away.

Thunder had taken her sister from her – and now in his last act of bitter terror he had taken Gren, who knew her best in the world: her confidant and her voice.

She could not bear it.

Amaya's stomach roiled with exhaustion as she gasped in a last breath that sliced fire across her lungs and pushed all her hope between Gren's lips, holding his nose and tilting his chin with hands that trembled in their bracers.

Her back burned as she pulled back – her face no more than a hand-span from his features, searching for anything, anything at all. Her hands had slid away from his nose and chin, ready to resume driving blood around Gren's body – but they stilled now, one in his fiery hair and the other drawing a thumb-tip across his freckled cheekbone.

The breath slid out between Amaya's lips like a storm gale; gusts that shook her frame in the cold air of midwinter.

Gren was still.

The first of Amaya's tears hit the edge of his right eye, rolled off his eyelashes and trailed down his temple as though the tear were his own.

Amaya closed her eyes against the pain that tore at her throat, and leant closer to press gentle lips to Gren's forehead.

A goodbye.

And there, where her fingertips brushed the angle of Gren's jaw – a swell and decline under his skin, like the rise and fall of a storm surge. An exhale of air that was not her own against her tear-stained cheek; it ruffled her longer fringe at her chin, brushed it across her left cheekbone like a caress.

Amaya blinked away the moisture obscuring her vision, and stared.

The pulse under her fingers grew stronger, and steadier, and as she turned disbelieving eyes down to Gren's chest, the wrinkles on his shirt that her hands had formed now shifted as his chest rose and fell.

As it did again. And again.

Amaya's breaths turned to quickening hitches that drew fresh tears from the corners of her eyes: tears of unexpected relief. She spared a glance upwards. The battlefield around them was yet without much movement; the bulk of Thunder separated them from much of the vanguard of Katolis.

And below her hands, colour was returning to Gren's cheeks, like a warm sunrise behind the stars of his freckles.

Amaya's shoulders shook as she sat back to scrub at her face, her free hand fastening around Gren's wrist and the pulse-point there like a lifeline. Her sister's hand had been cold on the bier when Amaya took it, she remembered. Gren's wrist grew warmer moment by moment under her bare fingers, as did his cheek, smooth under the callouses of her sword-hand.

Amaya focused on the steady back and forth of her thumb over Gren's cheekbone, and used that to center her breathing.

Then there, above her fingers – movement behind Gren's eyelids.

Amaya snatched her hand back from his cheek.

A sliver of blue appeared between long lashes, and then just as suddenly Gren squeezed his eyes shut against the light and hissed in pain.

Amaya reached out again even before she registered what she was doing, and brushed away the stray tear that had slipped out of Gren's eyelids; he stilled at her touch, and blinked his eyes properly open, slowly.

For a moment, they simply stared at each other. General and commander, friend and interpreter, and… what more?

Then Gren's bruised lips opened to draw in a deeper breath, and Amaya saw the moment his injuries made themselves known to him.

She let go of him as he twisted under her touch. "You weren't breathing," she said, fingers flickering between each sign with far more calm than what she was currently feeling. "I couldn't find a pulse."

Gren stared up at her blankly, then down to his still-smoking armour by his feet where Amaya had flung it earlier – and finally, across and behind her to the mountainous body of the king of dragons.

Looking at him like this – her Gren, loyal to a fault and still trying to make sense of everything despite the pain he must be in – Amaya felt his absence at her fingertips like her lungs craved air.

She needed to reassure herself that this was real.

Gren's breath hitched as she leant over him and wrapped her arms around his neck. She buried her face into the crook of his shoulder and breathed in his scent even as she felt him automatically raise an arm to wrap around her shoulders. What remained of her tears began to soak into the collar of his shirt, but Amaya could not bring herself to care.

She knew the moment he understood the severity of what had transpired, because he wrestled to sit up and was suddenly embracing her in return with as much desperation as hers. The shape of his eyes and nose, so familiar to her, buried itself in her hair as his arms bled warmth into her aching back.

Gren's pulse beat strong and steady at her temple, and his breath ruffled her hair. Where her nose pressed into his shoulder, she could smell the lingering smoke of lightning and Thunder's breath – but there also was her commander' scent: ink, parchment, and the faint sweetness of the strawberries he so loved to filch from the fortress kitchens. This, more than the feel of his arms wound as tightly around her as hers were around him, reassured Amaya that he was alive. Battered, bruised, but alive.

She had wrested him from the edge of the abyss with naught but her hands and her breath and her will.

Mere months ago when he had declared that he was moving out of the rooms beside hers in the fortress keep she had thought nothing of the added distance; for the sake of propriety, he had all but said, and smiled one of his peculiar smiles when she had hugged him and said that she didn't care but he should do so if it made him happy.

It was one of those smiles that seemed to hold a veiled sort of pain – pain that presented itself when she laughed with him, or laid her head on his shoulder when they stargazed, or smiled at him after a good day's work was done.

Amaya still did not understand the meaning behind that smile – it grieved her at times to think that her dearest friend was in pain.

But she knew now that to lose Gren would be her utter ending.

Gren's breath trembled against her temple, and Amaya felt him speak three distinct syllables through the vibrations in his chest; but she could not lip-read them, not with her face pressed against his shoulder like this.

She pushed herself back with an effort and looked up at him with the question in her gaze.

What she saw in his eyes took her breath away.

Gratitude. Loyalty. Sorrow, for causing her sorrow. And…something else. Something she could not identify.

"I thank you," he said, with his mouth, shapes familiar to her.

Still in a half-embrace as they were, Amaya felt the sounds she could not hear tremble in his side; the second syllable felt different to her touch as it did before. Had Gren truly said thank?

But the raw emotion in Gren's gaze only reminded Amaya of her own desperate fear – so foreign compared with the calm confidence she usually led her troops with – and she pulled him back into their embrace. He folded her back into the circle of his hold, his usual restraint gone.

The air of Winter's Turn was cold.

But this was…warm.

Amaya's eyes closed, and her world narrowed to the feel of Gren's heartbeat, his breath in her hair, and their arms, clasped so tightly around each other that she must surely be hurting him.

She let go of her remaining thoughts and was just…was. There. With Gren.

She did not open her eyes. If she had, she might have seen Corvus order a circle of Standing Battalion veterans to form a circle around them to shield them from prying eyes.

But Amaya, General of the Standing Battalion, sister to the Queen of Katolis, sister-in-law to the King, aunt to the princes, simply rested in the fact that her Gren – her Commander Gren was still alive.

A/N: Next up, season 2...unless anyone has any more burning interlude suggestions!