"It's better to know that something has gone wrong quickly. Could have been hours later, otherwise." He frowns. "But if you can protect her when I can't, that would be better, too."

He doesn't always like it, but there's been a circle of men around Daenerys as long as he's known her -- and long before that, too, much as there's a circle of men around him, and around his sister. It doesn't occur to him to suggest that someone might look after him as well. His fellows have his back enough.

"Then again, if you had been with her, they might have just taken you, too."

In the meantime, he feels the little clawed feet on his head begin to relax and loosen, and there's a trilling coo of "Stubbbbbbborn!" The little animal sounds pleased with itself. A moment later, it begins to shift back and forth as if it's dancing.

Chiron doesn't have to remove the dragokeet, because with little warning other than the way it dances against Jon's head, it suddenly launches itself directly from Jon's hair towards Chiron's... not without tugging at one of Jon's curly locks in the process. He makes a face and a soft noise of resentment when it goes.

"How best to shield...?" Jon says, when he recovers. "The other Chiron, you mean? And not Grothia, too?"

Now that he has his head back to himself again, Jon runs a hand quickly through his hair, trying to push it off of his face. It works, but only to an extent... what will work best is the comb he has back in his tent, and a leather thong.

"What are you worried might happen to him? Anything beyond the obvious?"

The dragokeet takes the opportunity to stamp around in a circle and coo, "Settled, settled, there."

Things he's been able to retain. What could that encompass? If Chiron wanted to say, he'd be saying, but he isn't -- Jon's frown remains quizzical.

"If either of them were to be in danger, it would be danger to BASE. They don't seem to leave it much. And if that were the case... wouldn't that mean that we would have nowhere to go? We'd be trapped wherever we'd been fighting."

He feels that explanation like a reproach, though he knows it isn't one.

"My brother Robb was here, and now he isn't anymore. For me, he's been dead a few years. That girl Jeyne... she's his wife. It's a little like losing him again... for her as well as for me, I expect.

"But him, our father, our youngest brother, even my father's wife, or what happened to my sister... if I could stop that... don't know what I'd do. If I'd been with them the whole time, I might be dead, and even if I survived, I'd be very unlikely to know about the White Walkers. I might not have met Daenerys. I might still have been made a king, but not in the same way or for the same reasons."

These ideas weigh heavily on him.

"It's hard for me to say. What happens if you can keep them alive? What would be different?"

Jon looks up, rather suddenly, distracted from his incipient brooding.

"He thinks he can get back to her?" It slips his mind, sometimes, that he's been lucky enough as COST recruits go: the person most (and most suddenly) dear to him is usually right at his side, or near enough that it makes no difference.

And that means Chiron -- this Chiron -- can't get back to his own wife, can't see her.

"I've wondered what would happen... if my father came here, what he would do. How he would feel about all this fighting. But maybe it's just me wanting to see him again."

Something happens in his posture: it twists until he's making a slow, helpless shrug.

"Maybe it's that once you see one person you should never have been able to see again, or you know that someone else has seen that sort of person, you start wanting to see all of them... the ones who died before their time. The Old Bear -- my old Lord Commander, before I was chosen -- he would be a great asset to COST, yet I've never wasted too much time wishing he was here. My father had less experience as a soldier, might not want to fight at all. Might agree to fight in the face of the risks. Might be that he was a moral guide to me, that's true enough: I've never gone wrong by asking myself what he would do."

His face sobers even more before he continues, "But might be that I just want to see him again and tell him what's happened. There are probably people who feel the same for you. If I'm lucky, if I'm to be very lucky, there may be some who feel the same for me."

No one can know. He's aware of it: there's at least as much chance that he'll go home when all of this is over and then the Night King will win, or Cersei will, or Dany will win with his help... but the witch will have been right about her barrenness, and it won't matter how many sons or daughters either of them has dreamed of. Any of these things could happen, or none of them: he could get everything he's ever wanted and die of a fever a year on.

Still, he knows that what Chiron is saying is kind.

"It simply is. But it has to be the memories.

"If the Regency can go back to any point in time, can make my world as if it's never existed, can wash me or Dany or anyone we know away, aren't we fighting for the memories as much as for what may come down the line? So you fight for your wife, I fight for my father, even for Dany's father. Has she told you anything of her father?"

"Not sentimentality, only -- it isn't only for our children. It's for Torrhen Stark -- the King-Who-Knelt -- or for Aegon himself, or Nymeria. The heroes of the past, maybe even the Last Hero himself. Elsewise they've fooled us into thinking there's some glorious purpose.

"Wouldn't be the first to get men to fight that way."

A long sigh, and he shakes his head in response to the centaur's question.

"Her father was -- she wouldn't have spoken of him much. A madman, the Mad King. She never knew him. Never knew her mother, either." I was luckier than her. Even if my father dishonored himself with my mother, he was a good man, and I knew him. That much is inescapable.