Chapter Text
He calls the tiny room home for weeks.
Tyrion is his most frequent visitor, filling him in as much as possible on the…unusual turn of events since his almost-death:
Daenerys dead, the throne a now-hardened pile of melted, useless metal, and Jon Snow—Aegon Targaryen, he refuses to be called---calling for a council to replace the role of monarch entirely.
Jaime wants to laugh at the notion, only because it would be the absolute one thing he knows Cersei would hate most.
No one’s ass sits on the throne, now. Now, there’s a big, round table sitting in the great hall, and only a handful of people have arrived so far to fill it. Cersei would roll over in her grave.
Jaime pushes himself up to lean against the wall beside his bed, look up at the cool morning light coming from the window.
It didn’t surprise him to learn that his sister had executed the Naath girl, lopped her head from her shoulders right there in front of the dragon queen and the Unsullied leader (Grey Worm, he recalls; as brave a young man as he’d ever seen during the fight against the dead). Daenerys’ rage would have been justified, he felt, if only she’d sought the Red Keep itself outright.
But to target all of King’s Landing?
It was just too much.
Too far.
Even now, weeks later, Tyrion still mourned.
“And is she? Different?”
“She is.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am.”
And perhaps, Jaime thinks, his brother was right.
But that was before Cersei did what she did best, and brought yet another world crumbling down around her.
//////////////////////
It’s Davos Seaworth, of all people, that brings him the walking stick.
Something obviously handmade, crafted nicely and from quality wood, Jaime almost wants to ask if it was commissioned for him specifically.
He doesn’t.
He’s had enough unearned kindness for a thousand lifetimes.
//////////////////////
He can only walk for short periods of time before his back threatens to seize up and his knees try to buckle underneath him, but it doesn’t stop him from hobbling outside the room at least once a day.
Just to see something, anything else.
A different set of cracked stones from the ones surrounding his bed.
Soldiers—now a confusing combination of his old forces (what few are left) and Northmen of varying houses—seem to ignore him, although he doesn’t miss the occasional passing glance from Jon’s men, appraising. Judging.
Ned Stark would be proud.
///////////////////
His unreliable feet carry him to the throne room one day, where he first lays eyes on the remnants of the throne, unrecognizable, grotesque.
But then, it was always an eye sore, he thinks.
Always fit for a monster.
The council table has been situated in the middle of the hall, papers and books and inkwells strewn across it as if in hurried frustration. Jaime can imagine Tyrion being to blame for most of the haphazard mess, his determination to put the realm back aright driving him forward into long hours over his notes.
Jaime smiles, proud, for the first time since…
Since Winterfell.
Since he laid his blade soft upon her shoulders and said the words.
His lips fall, and suddenly he’s too tired to stand, even with the stick.
He sits in one of the chairs and leans over the table, presses his forehead against his stump. He ignores Jon Snow wandering into the room, feels his presence hesitate for a long moment as the boy regards him…
And then hears the scrape of wood against stone, loud, close, and he looks up to find Jon watching him from the chair beside his, a cup in hand and the same tired look in his eyes.
“How are you feeling?”
How he wishes people would stop asking him that.
“I can walk, at least. For a time.”
A nod.
Jaime finds it strange, how un-strange it is to be speaking casually with this man, the once bastard of the North, now revealed to be the legitimate ruler of the seven kingdoms…
The heir who doesn’t want it.
Jaime can see it in those dark, exhausted eyes, like a reflection whispering back to him.
He just wants to rest.
The sound of liquid sloshing has him glancing down to see Jon holding out his cup of wine, shaking it slightly.
Jaime takes it, offers a small nod in thanks.
“Can I ask you something, Ser Jaime?”
Ser Jaime? Seven hells.
He downs the wine in two deep swallows, suddenly desperate to be drunk.
“Of course.”
“Would Rhaegar have made a good king?”
Jaime stills, empty cup resting on his knee.
Jon is watching him with slightly sharper eyes now, eyes searching for truth, for validation, for something Jaime isn’t sure is in his right to give.
But he tries, at least.
“A good king? I can’t say. Good to the people? Yes. There is often—unfortunately---a difference.”
Jon only nods, quietly, gaze sliding over the table and the mess its accumulated, before settling on the melted mass of steel that was once the iron throne.
“It shouldn’t be me.” It’s barely a whisper, but Jaime hears it all the same, and part of him wants to argue.
And part of him wants to agree.
Instead, he watches Jon Snow Targaryen meander out of the room, and wonders if he’ll come back with more wine.
//////////////////////////
He dreams that night, of cold wind, screeching corpses, fire, and warm skin.
Jaime wakes, early, the light from his window grey and new, and finds himself groggy and weak. He overdid it, he determines, walked too much and perhaps shouldn’t be drinking wine when he still sometimes regurgitates water and bread.
He’s rolling his shoulders carefully, assessing the returned stiffness to his body, when he freezes. Peers through sleep-blurred eyes at the small table next to his bed. His blood feels like it’s going to stop moving inside him and suddenly the stiffness is pain, everywhere, and he thinks, dramatically, that his heart has stopped as well.
Brienne is sitting at the table, watching him.
Jaime trembles, sucks in a breath as if he’s been held underwater for too long.
He doesn’t speak, because he doesn’t know what to say.
The first thing he notes is that she isn’t wearing any armor.
She isn’t wearing the armor.
Instead dressed in a fine blue tunic, her house sigil emblazoned over her heart, she looks much like she did the last time she visited King’s Landing. The second thing he notices is that Oathkeeper is on the table, unbuckled from its belt.
It’s yours.
It’s yours.
It’s yours.
The light in the room bounces and Jaime realizes that the fire is still going from last night. That Brienne must have stoked it for him.
He wants to crawl back into the rubble of the keep, then.
But instead he lays there, muscles tight and burning, and stares.
They do not speak for an agonizingly long time.
And then, she straightens in her seat, and slowly runs her eyes over him, assessing, before coming back to meet his own,
“How severe are your injuries?”
He swallows the lump that’s formed in his throat, and chokes on it slightly, coughing.
“…few broken bones; ribs, back, perhaps. Unsure. I’ll live.”
But my spirit is dead. It died when I left Winterfell. Leave it buried, Brienne.
He fights tears, watching her blue eyes flicker over his face, somehow steeled and soft at the same time. Say something hateful, he wants to tell her.
But no, no.
That’s not Brienne.
She’s never, never been hateful.
Only angry.
Only hurt.
The steel in her eyes melts slightly and Jaime feels dampness slide down his face.
“Did you love me?”
gods.
He’s reaching out then, blindly through tears, but he can feel that his hand is shaking.
She doesn’t take it.
“Of course I did. I do.”
And he means it.
His eyes close against the pain behind them, and he hears the sound of her chair moving, of cloth and metal.
When he dares to open them, she’s gone.
And so is Oathkeeper.
///////////////////////////
When Jaime later learns that Sansa Stark is in King’s Landing to join the council, he understands that Brienne is there on duty.
He gives her space over the next several days, though Tyrion likes to tease that he’s outright avoiding her. Perhaps he is.
But on the occasion he does peek into the great hall, she’s always seated next to Sansa at the table, diligently attentive as the “representatives” discuss how best to transition the realm out of its lengthy history of monarchy.
He hears from Tyrion that Brienne is representing her home in addition to advising and protecting Sansa, so of course, she has no time to fret over the likes of him. A broken man who broke her heart, why would she want to?
He feels silly, and desperate, and heartsick, and he knows he doesn’t deserve to feel any of those things.
So he wanders, through the halls, around what’s left of the kitchens, in the decimated gardens on the rare day he feels strong enough to make it that far. He’s alone, more often than not, and Jaime thinks its fitting for his existence to be as a ghost, unnoticed and unimportant, even to those who once cared for him most.
Brienne doesn’t visit him again after that first morning, and though they occasionally spot each other in the halls or the grounds outside, neither does she speak.
She does nod one evening, as he’s limping back to his room with a cloth filled with cheese and bread tucked under his bad arm, and its all Jaime can do not to drop his food to the ground and throw himself at her feet.
Her demeanor is cool, but not cruel (because she could never be), and he understands that this is simply how it is now, and considers thanking the gods that she’s even bothering to look at him.
It also does not miss him that even with minimal armor, she always carries Oathkeeper on her hip. It speaks to him even when she doesn’t, and he’s grateful that she hasn’t tossed it into the bay.
////////////////////////
He finds the strength one night to scrub himself clean without the assistance of a servant, and it’s as he’s awkwardly dressing himself that Tyrion comes in with food and wine, mumbling something about not eating that day like a fool.
“She hates me,” he says over a bite of bread, and his brother eyes him in that knowing way that Jaime has always both resented and appreciated.
“She doesn’t,” Tyrion assures, but then he pauses, watching his wine for a long moment before clarifying, “but she also doesn’t seem to react at all whenever your name is mentioned at the meetings.”
“I can’t fault her for it. I left her first.”
“Did you?”
And Jaime swallows thickly at that, eyes unfocused and seeing not his brother but her, standing in the snow, tears falling and eyes pleading.
Stay with me, please.
He should have.
He should have.
“I did. And it was the wrong decision. And now I’m paying for it because the gods are both cruel and just.”
Tyrion pours more wine into Jaime’s cup and slides it across the table.
“If you’d stop hating yourself for a single fucking moment, maybe you could be better.”
///////////////////////
He doesn’t tell Tyrion that he sought out Cersei to die with her, not out of love, but out of a sense of justice. Cersei toppled houses and destroyed lives with her cruelty, and Jaime helped her, walked in her shadowed steps for decades, complicit in her hateful schemes.
Brienne did not deserve a man such as he, and he did not deserve the happy life she offered him.
He knew it.
Tyrion knew it.
Brienne probably knew it, too.
He sits at the empty council table one afternoon, in the chair he knows she’s claimed as her own, and stares at a correspondence letter from Lord Selwyn so long he falls asleep.
/////////////////////
“…annister. Wake up, you’ll miss it.”
Jaime jolts upright, nearly toppling over and out of the chair at the firm voice at his ear, and looks to his left to find Arya gently poking him with his walking stick.
A small grin has curled at her lips and she dangles the stick in front of him, jerking her head to the great doors behind them.
“You’d better get moving.”
He’s utterly confused, and she knows it, and he knows she knows it.
He’s used to it, by now.
“What are you talking about?”
She presses the stick into his hand, looks him in the eye with more sincerity than he’s ever seen from her before, and pats him once on the shoulder.
“The docks. Brienne is leaving. Right now.”
Jaime ignores every angry bone in his body as he rushes from the room.
///////////////////////
He didn’t even know she had a boat.
But there it is, in the bay, starbursts and crescents emblazoned on the mast. It’s a relatively small vessel, but large enough, sturdy enough, to get her home.
Tarth.
There’s no doubt about where she’s going.
Jaime is in agony by the time he reaches the dock, covered in sweat and shaking from the effort to run (hobble swiftly, more like) past the pain. The stick in his hand served little more use than to catch him when he nearly tripped no less than five times on the way.
His right knee is on fire, and it hurts deep in his chest to breathe.
Any cracked ribs that had begun to heal were likely rebroken, and he does not care.
He stumbles to a halt on the dock, meets her gaze as she’s passing a box of supplies off to a worker. She’s dressed simply and comfortably, in brown pants and a white tunic, and Oathkeeper, he notes, is nowhere to be seen.
Brienne walks down the dock to meet him, and he can see her brow furrowed, can feel her apprehension and confusion. She stops just before him, and he’s forced to look up at her, and suddenly his nerves claim him as they did that night in Winterfell, and this time, he’s not drunk enough to ignore them.
Jaime heaves for breath and stutters despite himself,
“You—you’re leaving.”
She nods quietly, and he can see the lines drawn taut above her eyes, and then her gaze moves from him to settle somewhere behind him.
“Help the men load the rest of the previsions, please, Podrick.”
Jaime glances behind him to see the lad toss an uncertain glare his way before picking up a box,
“You’re taking Pod?
“He asked to accompany me. He is my squire, after all.”
“I know, I made him your squire.”
“Do you want him back?”
“Of course not.”
“Good, then.”
He tries not to wince as every word comes with pain, but Brienne catches it all the same, glancing down at his chest as he breathes unevenly.
“You should go back to the keep and get tended to.”
“I don’t want to go back to the keep.” And he sounds like a petulant child, he knows, and he also knows that there are tears forming in both his eyes and hers, and his breath keeps catching and souring in his chest.
He coughs, tries not to stumble forward into her.
Brienne steps closer, then, brings her hands to his shoulders, close to his neck, and steadies him, and he can see her so much clearer in the sun of King’s Landing than he could in the hazy grey of the north, and he wonders just how stunning she looks next to the blue waters of her home.
He holds a breath when she catches his eyes and holds them, and it hurts to do so, and he doesn’t care. She’s crying, silent, but her gaze is firm and open. Certain.
“Do you want to get on the boat, Jaime?”
An exhale, a release, and gods, it feels like being reborn, like breathing for the very first time.
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
And he does.
And she lets him.
And he lives.