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Jaime leaves the ceremony when the bards come out.
He figures he’ll enjoy a mindless, dull walk to the sea side, more than he would enjoy listening to paid men sing songs about honorable Lannister victories that never actually transpired.
With his back turned to the crowds he hears an instruments que up and a loud voice start up a familiar song that praises Joffrey’s war-skills, and decides that taking the longest path possible would indeed be satisfyingly mind-numbing.
He walks in long strides.
Once he’s a sufficient distance away he slows, walking aimlessly, trying not to pay anything to much mind. He simply takes in his surrounding with ease. The weather is just the wrong side of warm; the sun almost at its peak, the breeze practically nonexistent in the way it only can be in Kings Landing. Jaime has to have walked this very path a hundred times over, at least, since arriving in Kings Landing all those years ago.
And nothing, not the weather, the weed covered stones, or the dusty ground has changed in the slightest.
He’s approaching the end of his journey when he finally notices that the water’s edge is already entertaining company. Lady Brienne stands no farther than thirty feet from him, where the sun bleached stones meet the dark water of the Narrow Sea.
His heart takes a brief moment to beat faster than it should.
Jaime takes advantage of her back to him and openly appreciates seeing her properly fed, well dressed, and relaxed for the first time. They hadn’t been in the Capital for more than a fortnight and she was already looking alive again. His eyes sweep over her form, he appraises the width of her shoulders, her torso, her backside, her long legs, he is satisfied.
“Have you come to delight in the view, Sir Jaime?” She asks without ever turning away from the water, her voice holds a sarcastic edge.
Jamie understands her meaning is perfectly innocent but is unable to resist the smirk that pulls at his lips.
“How did you manage that?” He asks once he’s next to her, lets his eyes search her calm face. He stands close by her side silently asking for her unadulterated attention, but she shifts to allow a respectable distance to come between them and casts her eyes behind, knowing that in the shadows somewhere, they are being watched. His smile twitches just so.
“Manage what?” Her voice trembles slightly, she knows exactly what it is he asked, but plays coy.
He caught her in a good mood.
“That, just then! How did you know it was me behind you? How did you know there was anyone at all over all this noise?” His voice is raised to even converse properly with her, the sound created by the crashing waves around them are loud enough to even drown out the Kingdom-wide festivity taking place above them.
“You forget sire, I was born and raised on an island, I grew up to the sound of raving seas. I barley hear them anymore, even with all my time away.” She gives him.
“Does being down here by the open water remind you of home, Lady Brienne?” he raises an eyebrow and try’s to catalog her response. She hasn’t ever spoken to him of her life before Renly Baratheon.
“Not at all,” Her face pinches, “Your water is the ugliest I’ve ever seen, and there’s this smell.”
“Aoy!” He exclaims.
But she smiles at him, a real smile that shows her teeth reaches her eyes. And he doesn’t even pretend to take offence at her jest. Just smiles with her, at her.
The silence lapses for only a moment while she seems to contemplate something.
“Have you ever seen Tarth for yourself, even in passing, Sire?” Her face is curious.
“I can’t say that I’ve ever had the pleasure, no.” both his hands are by his side.
“I think, that if you saw it, you might like it.” she tells him, smiling still before turning her attention back to the sea.
He believes her. He knows he’s probably believed every single word she ever said to him.
Jamie watches her, as she watches the sea. He waits for her to speak again, to continue their dying conversation in some way, but she seems not to have any interest. She seems not to notice just how important it is to him that she’s with him now, alone but for the landscape alive around them, and a few curious eyes.
Ever since their journeys completion, she’s had less and less to do with him.
It’s worried him.
His miserable days, once full of her and not anything else, have been replaced with happy days where he has to fight just too maybe see her in passing. It surprises him just how displeased he is with the tradeoff.
“Tell me what it’s like then, as I don’t know if I’ll be able to see it any time soon.” He doesn’t plead, but it’s a near thing.
“You want me to describe it to you?” She seems surprised at his request, her eyes find his and he has her attention once more. She has the most striking eyes.
“Use small words.” he jests.
“It’s vibrant. Everything is bright and pure.”
Jaime listens attentively to every word she speaks, pays close attention to every inflation her voice makes and watches the words leave her mouth. She tells him how the city surrounds the Keep where she grew up in on all sides, she tells him what color the walls are, she tells him how wide the roads are, how small the gardens, how big the market, how kind the people. His ears hear nothing but her steady voice, breaking years of training, of always paying critical attention to his surroundings; he simply absorbs everything she offers.
But she’s leaving him, her eyes are there in Tarth with its hills and white sand and once again far away from him.
“Yes, yes that’s all very lovely. But tell me about your childhood there! What were your favorite places, did you spent a lot of time in the water?”
His request seems to jar her, it jars him too, he did not think to make it. She shifts. Takes a moment to look uncomfortable and wonder if he’s mocking her, realizing he isn’t, he wouldn’t, not anymore, she readjusts her story and stance alike, both please him.
“I did, my Lord. When I was very young, I wasn’t allowed out of the castle so I learned to swim in the pools in the lower rooms. And once I was old enough to sneak out of the Keep, I would play in the waters of the eastern beach.”
“You would run away?” He laughs despite himself and he relishes the look she gives him for it.
“You can’t run away on an Island,” She lets him know, standing straighter than before, “but I did get very far off once, they had to send a boat after me.” She laughs along with him this time, her shoulders shake with it.
It makes sense to him then, her pleasing figure, she has a swimmers form.
He sees it suddenly, as if he were there. He sees her in the water, her blond hair wet, she’s laughing. In his mind she is comfortable in the water, her strong shoulders and legs outlined by clinging wet cloth. He pictures the muscle in her stomach and the swell of her chest as she breaths in the ocean air. The sun is setting red behind her and her eyes are the color of the water she treads.
He is drowning.
She levels him with her eyes and he quite physically cannot breath for a moment.
He realizes that he should have said something by now, that he is just staring at her and she is catching on to how the atmosphere changed into something with more charge because of him. He’s a man, a killer, a hero, and a fool, and all he can do is take her in and force air into his aching lungs.
Though the burn has left his chest it is still uncomfortably heavy, he knows the feeling, knows what it means, and is powerless to stop it. Doesn’t really want to.
A rogue breeze pulls at the hair that frames Brienne’ face but he still can’t think of something to say.
The small smile that brightens her previously confused expression tells him that she understands him. That she is connected to him enough to feel it herself. The silence is filled with the noise emanating from the water and nothing else.
“Sir Jaime, your presence is required by the Hand of the King.” A squire finds them. Jamie will go to the grave with the knowledge that he was so distracted by Brienne of Tarth that a squire managed to sneak up on him.
With one last long look over his companion, he smiles.
“My Lady.” He bows low.
“Sire.” She inclines her head just so holing his eyes with her blue ones. It pulls at his heart as he turns to leave.
He’s walks away quicker than he came, quicker than he wants to. He will not look behind him, he worries that she is looking into the sea already moved on from him in a way he will never be able to with her.
The sun in the center of the sky glaring at him forces his eyes to the dirt, rock, and grass that serve as the city’s foundation. This time, however, his eyes catch on the slight blue sparkle embedded into the small stones that line his path.
He wonders at how he never noticed it before.