Chapter Text
Jaime arrives in Winterfell before Jon and Daenerys. He’s not quite sure how that’s possible, but he and Bronn had a smooth ride here, and they must have encountered some difficulties.
It’s probably for the best, Jaime knows. He needs to speak with Lady Sansa, and Daenerys would most certainly get in the way.
Considering, of course, that what he needs to speak about is Daenerys herself.
When he arrives at the gate, there’s no more fanfare than he anticipated. Less, perhaps, because it is bitterly cold and anyone out for too long would surely freeze. He’s half way frozen himself.
When the gates finally open, Brienne is standing just inside, staring out with a hardness to her gaze that Jaime knows to mean he’s done something particularly unforgivable. But he’s here, isn’t he, so he’s confident she’ll find it in her heart to hear him out eventually.
Brienne purses her lips up at him as his horse slowly takes him through the gate.
“No army, then?” she asks, brusquely, like she already knows the answer.
Jaime looks through the courtyard and up to the balustrade, Lady Sansa’s startling red hair visible even through the downpour of snow.
“No.”
Jaime looks down at Brienne.
“You came anyway.”
He doesn’t say anything, isn’t sure what to say anyway, but Bronn saves him the trouble by brushing past him. A stablehand takes the horses reigns from Bronn as he dismounts. Jaime follows quickly after.
“I need to speak with Lady Stark.” Jaime nods his head towards where the eldest Stark girl stood - though with a quick look he can see she is no longer there - rubbing his hand over his opposite arm.
“I think you should turn around and go back South, actually,” Brienne snarks at him.
“That would surer mean death than staying here, I think,” Jaime replies back, giving up his futile effort to get some warmth.
“I’m not sure why you think I care,” a voice interrupts. Jaime turns to see the beautiful Lady Stark standing behind him. “You did, after all, almost kill my brother.”
“Almost, of course, being the operative word,” Jaime says, and he’d meant it in jest, really, though he should know better by now than to makes jokes like that.
Sansa is unimpressed.
He steps towards her, intending to take her hand and lay a kiss upon her knuckles, but she keeps her hands by her sides and raises a disdainful brow at him.
“I’m here to protect the realm,” Jaime announces, with as much self-announced fanfare a man can muster in such conditions.
“I’m sure a single man will be a big help,” Sansa deadpans, then turns away from him, presumably to go back inside. Jaime knows immediately that it was Sansa who knew Cersei to be lying in her pledge of troops, and wonders no longer how Brienne had known when he had not.
Seeing that he truly is unwelcome here, though he had expected nothing less, he says bluntly what he knows will get her attention.
“I’m also here to warn you about Daenerys Targaryen.”
As expected, Sansa stops immediately. She is covered head to toe in thick furs, but he can still see her spine straighten.
She says nothing, but she doesn’t need to. Jaime knows that she, like any good leader, will be desperate for information on a would-be usurper.
Sansa nods her head towards the main doors into Winterfell Castle, and Jaime follows behind her immediately.
-
“Daenerys hasn’t arrived yet?” Jaime immediately clarifies as he sits down at the table in what he presumes is Winterfell’s war room. It’s smaller than that in the Red Keep, of course, and worn down, but he can guess the whole castle is like that.
Winterfell is a true skeleton.
He wonders what is keeping it and the North together.
The table consists of himself and Bronn, the Lady Sansa and Brienne, Sansa’s little sister Arya who Jaime knows stayed in King’s Landing but who he can’t remember for the life of him, and a portly man who is shifting very nervously in his chair.
Every single one of them averts their eyes from him as his question finishes, even Lady Sansa.
“No,” she answers him. “They haven’t.”
Jaime nods, encouraged. “Good, that’s good. Have any of you met her yet?”
Brienne nods, of course, but no one else does.
Jaime leans forward. “Do not let het get her hands on Winterfell.”
Everyone shifts around again, that guilty air about them that makes dread sink in his stomach.
Sansa purses her lips, ignoring the tension in the air, and says, “Why do you say that, Ser?”
For as long as it took for him to arrive in Winterfell, and as fervently as he wishes to convey his message, he had not thought on his exact words in any detail. He had always thought that the right words would come to him when he needed them, but now he is here he doesn’t know where to start.
So he starts from the beginning.
“I got my name Kingslayer many years ago,” Jamie says slowly, his fingers splayed on the table in front of him. He watches his hand for a second, letting the silence drape over them all with suffocation. “I regret a great many things about my life, but killing Aerys Targaryen is not one of them.”
A tense quiet falls, and it seems as though all the breathing in the room stops.
Jamie leans forward, his chair creaking, breaking the tension in the room abruptly. He leans his golden-handed arm on the table and clenches the fist of his other hand.
“He kept saying –“ Jamie breaks off, and clears his throat. It’s been so many years, and still the memory of standing there, his king in front of him, laughing at the pain of his people, sadism in his eyes and heart – it still makes his throat close up. “He kept saying, burn them all. I thought the time for Targaryen’s with madness in their blood was over. But then – then I met her on the battlefield.”
No one reacts, though he didn’t expect them to. They don’t understand, yet, but he will make them see.
“There is honour in battle,” Jamie says angrily, jabbing at the table. “There is supposed to be honour in winning within the boundaries, and there is honour in falling to a worthy opponent. But she – she burned the grain that was to feed the people. She flew on her dragon to kill, not to win. And afterwards, she gave them a choice, to bend the knee or die, which is no choice at all. She burnt the Tarly’s, father and son –“
There is an instant uproar at the table. Jaime’s not exactly sure what he’s said to cause such a reaction, but if they’re enraged by their supposed Queen, then he’s done his job.
“Sam,” Sansa says gently, placing her hand on the arm of the portly man who Jaime assumes is Sam. Everyone else quiets. “Are you okay?”
Sam pushes back from the table. “If I may be excused, Your Grace.”
“Of course, Sam,” Sansa says, looking after him in concern.
Your Grace? Jaime thinks dumbly for a second, then he blinks through the shock and realizes that of course the man means Lady Sansa. Queen Sansa.
Jaime lets a smile curl on his lip. So the Northerner’s had some sense after all.
“Who was that?” Jamie questions, after the door closes.
“He is to be our Maester, eventually,” Sansa says evenly. “Samwell Tarly.”
Jamie’s eyes widen and he sits back in his seat. Shit. “If I had known –“
“If we had known,” Sansa interrupts, “I would have stopped you.”
Slowly, as the disgruntled group settles, he says, “I would have thought news of it reached far across the kingdoms.”
Surely, he thinks, that Cersei would take advantage of something like that. It doesn’t seem right that Winterfell could have no knowledge of such an atrocious act that could so easily put the North at odds with Daenerys.
“Perhaps some information has been withheld from us.”
Jaime knows that Sansa isn’t stupid. He’s been in this room with her for all of ten minutes and already he can tell she’s one of the most intelligent women he’s ever come across. It’s a far cry from the girl he knew in King’s Landing, but, then again, maybe she’s always been like this. Still, she must know that that isn’t a good enough explanation.
“What are you doing here, Ser Jaime?” Sansa finally asks. Smart, he thinks, yet again. Distract those around the table from the possibility that they’re being manipulated.
Jamie leans forward. Brienne and Arya instinctively lean towards their Queen. They surely can’t be worried he will try and hurt her, try and change his Kingslayer mantle to Queenslayer, though perhaps they grow more than the fair share of weary of him with their monarch sitting in such close and unprotected quarters to him.
“I have come to pledge to serve the realm,” he says intently, ignoring them. “I will help defend against the White Walker threat. Do you have a plan for what happens afterwards?”
Sansa holds her chin high. “I don’t think that it’s much of your concern, Ser Jamie, as I assume you’ll go back down South to serve your Queen.”
Jamie relaxes back into his chair, and drums his fingers on the table. It is not entirely selfless, the reason he is here.
He doesn’t know where else to go, afterwards.
“Cersei isn’t my Queen,” he says finally. “And I will not let Daenerys Targeryen be either.” He looks into her eyes intently. “So that leaves only one other candidate.”
“Queen Sansa?” Brienne interrupts incredulously. “You would bend the knee to the Starks?”
“Perhaps not today,” he admits truthfully, and can hardly fault himself for not being willing to bend to a monarch he didn’t even know existed. “I would first prefer to make sure she’s not as mad for power as everyone else.”
The remaining in the room bristle at the insult, and Brienne opens her mouth to rebuke, but Sansa holds up her hand.
“Ser Jamie, you must understand the position I’m in,” she says firmly, clasping her hands in front of her. “You permanently crippled my brother. You blindly did Cersei’s bidding for years and years, I saw it with my own eyes. How am I even supposed to trust you to stay within the walls of Winterfell, let alone believe that you’ve sworn true fealty to me?”
He sighs and shrugs, suddenly weary with the conversation and with the world. He cannot convince her to trust him, not with such barbed accusations thrown at him with such conviction, and he will not beg. “I guess you’ll just have to believe me.”
Sansa eyes him for a long time, then nods. “Aye, I suppose I will.”
He can’t see how that is possibly good enough, but if it’s enough for Queen Sansa then he will not protest any further.
Sansa’s odd little sister, Arya, moves for the first time. It’s just to throw an incredulous look at her older sister, an expression Jaime is sure is mirrored on his own face, but Sansa ignores them both and stands.
She grips something in her hand tightly, and if he concentrates he can perhaps see the edges of parchment.
“Lord Lannister, you may remain here in Winterfell, but I am confining you to your rooms. You will be allowed to continue to train with my knight Brienne in the privacy of a secluded training yard. You aren’t to make your presence known to anyone residing here, even the serving hands.” Sansa turns her attention from him to everyone at the table. “I received word last night that Daenerys’ retinue is set to arrive in three days’ time. For now, we aren’t to let neither Jon nor Daenerys know the crown has passed to me. Let them both think that we will follow Jon’s lead and bend the knee. I’m meeting with the Lords after this to discuss this matter with them. You are all dismissed.”
Surely he heard that wrong. Snow bent the knee? Gods, what a foolish bastard.
He can see now why they had all shifted so nervously at the beginning of the meeting. Because Winterfell had already been given away, and because Jon has been unknowingly ousted over it.
Queen Sansa stands with all the grace and poise that Cersei wishes she possessed, and leans her head towards the door.
“I’ll show you to your rooms, Kingslayer.”
Jaime bites his tongue at the name, but does not argue. He can see that she is already extending as much hospitality as she is willing, and Winterfell may be cold and miserable but it is not as bad as being outside.
If he is fed a warm meal tonight with the opportunity to finally bathe and sleep through the night without having to keep watch, then he will be grateful.
Brienne and Lady Arya accompany the Queen as she first guides Bronn and then himself to spare rooms.
“The door will be locked,” Sansa says as she stands in the door to his rooms. He looks around. They’re bare, just a cot pushed against the wall, animal skins on the floor and a table underneath a small window.
He turns back to her, and she’s raised a challenging brow as if he’s going to argue with her over that fact.
It’s warm in here, he notes. He remembers, vaguely, a story of water running through the castle’s walls.
“As you wish.”
She turns from him slowly, as if she expected something more from him, then steels herself and leaves without another word.
Jaime stares at the door as the lock clicks, then remains in place a few moments longer.
He’s left wanting for a bath, but he can’t complain about the warmth. He shucks his furs, then his overcoat, then sits to pull his boots off.
The floor is colder under his feet than he expected, but the skins and his socks keep most of the chill out.
Jaime stands from the bed and wanders over to the desk. It’s bare on top, and pulling out the drawers reveals nothing, not even parchment or an ink well. If he leans over the desk he can see through the window and out in to the courtyard, though there’s nothing to see with the heavy snowfall.
He resolves to move the desk on the morn so he can see out more easily.
With nothing better to do, and a bone deep tiredness making him weary, Jaime lays on the cot and closes his eyes.
He wakes to the deep groan of the door opening. He can smell the food before he can see who is bringing it, and he sits up eagerly.
It’s the Lady Arya who has brought it, presumably because Sansa has ordered no one to know of his presence in Winterfell, but Jaime still finds it a little odd.
Arya leaves without a glance or a word, and Jaime rolls his eyes but stands to go to the desk where Arya has left it.
A thick meat broth with warm bread awaits him, and Jaime is impressed with the heartiness of the meal. He had definitely expected food to be scarce.
He learns over the next few days that there is nothing else on offer.
He spends his time in complete solitary, light filling his room through the window the only way he can gauge how much time is elapsing. Arya brings him food two times a day, and while there is a small toilet off his room he does not get an opportunity to bathe.
He rearranges his room several times, as there is little else to do. Arya raises her brows at him the first time, but does not again make any acknowledgement of him.
On the fifth day, as Jaime stands in the middle of the room pondering what configuration he can try today, the lock clicks and the door swings open.
He turns at the unexpected entry. Arya always knocks once before she comes in.
Brienne is standing awkwardly in the doorway. Jaime wants to smile as he takes her in, but he’s afraid he’s forgotten how.
“Queen Sansa wanted me to give you this.”
She holds out an old worn book.
Jaime stares at Brienne for a moment, who rolls her eyes and waves it around.
Jaime steps forward to take it from her. The cover is faded and the book is not particularly heavy, but an unexpected gratefulness wells up in him.
Brienne turns on her heel and leaves, and he shouts a, “Thank you!” through the door with the hope she does hear it.
It’s a book of sonnets and poetry, and five days ago he would have scoffed but that was before he’d spent too many hours alone with his thoughts.
So he lays down and spends his entire day reading the book that has Belongs to Sansa Stark inscribed on the front page.
When Arya comes in with supper, Jaime is so engaged he almost doesn’t realize he isn’t alone.
She turns on her heel quickly, and Jaime has just enough time to squeeze in, “Bring a quill next time,” before she’s out the door.
Surprisingly, Arya does as he asks. She glares at him fiercely of course, in a way that lets him know she thoroughly wishes to stab him with the quill instead of gift it to him, but he is grateful nonetheless.
He spends the morning finishing the book, then the afternoon pondering exactly what he will write.
In the end, he lets out a huff of breath then sits down in the chair at the desk, smoothing his fingers over the worn cover of the book, then opens it to it’s front page gently.
His penmanship does not match her own neat writing, and it looks especially scrawled so close to hers, but it is good enough.
Perhaps bring a book on wartime next? Maybe then I can serve my glorious purpose and help you win a war.
Jaime closes the cover and pushes the book so it sits right in the corner of the desk, an equal inch from each edge.
He wakes the next morning to a plate of food and the book disappeared.
With nothing to entertain him now, his day stretches longer than it had previously. He’s had the taste of entertainment, now, and with nothing to do he has no choice but to change the layout of his room. Again.
It’s near on the original, now, expect the desk is not underneath the window, instead leaving space to be able to gaze out at the courtyard.
He spends several hours memorizing the view from each angle, standing in different positions to be able to see a wide arc from the stables to the main gate, though he can only ever get a sliver of it.
Eventually, though, as always, the sun sets and Arya comes in with food. Jaime can’t help the delighted grin that spreads across his face when he see’s she has another book with her.
He picks it up without even looking at his food.
He opens the cover, and it’s not a wartime book, it’s perhaps even further away from that than the last.
Sansa has written in the front.
I hardly think you’re in a position to bargain.
A grin settles on his face. The book suddenly feels chosen with meaning, unlike the last which had felt like he was an afterthought, something she’d felt vaguely bad about locking away and so was providing with some kind of comfort.
This, now, feels challenging. He’s always liked a challenge.
The grin stays on his face through his meal and until he falls asleep.
When he wakes, he rolls over immediately, rubbing his eyes with his palms as he does.
The book is lying on the ground beside his cot, right where he left it, and he picks it up. He doesn’t open it, not just yet, instead leaning back in the cot and lifting the book to just stare at the cover.
He isn’t sure what this feeling is, this kind of gratefulness. Perhaps he should feel useless in here, resentful maybe that he can’t much leave, maybe even like a dirty little secret which he is so loathe to be again, and maybe he will feel that way soon.
But he doesn’t, not really. It’s actually rather freeing, having absolutely no one expect anything from you, no one to whisper about you or distrust you. He lives in his own little protected bubble, and it’s peaceful.
He’s been through worse.
Jaime smoothens a hand over the cover of the book, then opens it to where he left off. By the time Arya comes in with the morning meal, he is on the last poem.
“Wait, wait,” he stumbles out, sitting up in the bed, his eyes locked on the passage.
Arya stills in the room, though he hears her shift her feet impatiently.
He finishes the last poem, then stands from his cot.
“Just, ah, one second,” he says, and shoots her a smile, hoping to waylay her, but it obviously doesn’t work because she raises an unimpressed eyebrow and her hand hovers over her hip, where her small sword is strapped.
“One second,” he repeats, fumbling at his desk for the quill and ink well. He scratches the tip of the quill against his tongue, then dips it in the ink well.
Jaime flips open the cover of the book, to the title page, Belongs to Sansa Stark inscribed at the top. He wonders what to write. He’d hoped to have a bit more time to write something meaningful, but he wants to return this book this morning so he can get another one at nightfall.
Sansa’s own text is written at the top, I hardly think you’re in a position to bargain bold and taunting.
He pauses once again, then turns to the last page, the final line of text a line that had been repeated throughout and which has struck him as profound every time he’s read it.
He bites his lip, flips back to the front page, and writes down the text.
Jaime lets it dry for a moment then shuts the book and hands it Arya.
Arya scoffs and immediately opens it up to see what he wrote.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Arya raises a brow at him as she looks up to him.
“And of which can you not speak, Kingslayer?”
Jaime sets back his shoulders and crosses his arms.
“And you suppose I should speak it to you?”
Arya snaps the book shut and glares at him. He hadn’t expected the conversation to be over, but obviously it is because she turns and leaves without another word.
-
Writing in the front of books becomes common for them. He has not seen Sansa since he first arrived, about two weeks previous, but still he communicates deeply with her. They reciprocate their favourite passages, and inch by inch Jaime bares his soul.
He ends up pledging to her in writing one evening, and the book the next day accepts him. It is a book on Winterfell’s fortifications and the best way to defend the castle.
That day a bath arrives for him, Brienne and Bronn carrying the heavy thing. Arya comes shortly thereafter to fill it with water for him. He doesn’t exchange any words with any of them, finding it all extremely odd, that Sansa is going to such lengths to conceal his presence here.
Still, as soon as Arya is done, he immediately undresses and slips into the bath and doesn’t get out until the water is colder than the air around him.
There’s a sweet knock on the door as Jaime finishes dressing after he gets out from the bath.
He doesn’t bother with adorning his shoes, as he so often does not these days, instead calling out for the person to enter. He knows who it must be before the door has even opened.
Not a single person has adhered so closely to highborn protocol with him, and he can think of only one who would.
Sansa stands in the door, one hand resting across her navel, the other squeezing something tightly.
“What brings Your Grace here this evening?” Jaime asks with grandeur. “Not my good behavior, I hope.”
“Jon is predicted to arrive on the morn,” Sansa tells him. Perhaps this announcement is what she clings so tightly to in her fist. She closes the door, but does not move from the entryway. “I’ve come to inform you that it changes nothing of your situation.”
Jaime cocks his head. Surely such an insistence could have been made by someone else.
“Yes, you had already made that quite clear.”
Sansa hesitates, her lips pursed, then sweeps further into the room so she can look out the window and down into the courtyard.
He wonders how she can stand to be so near him, can trust him so much as to turn her back to him.
Perhaps his little letters had shed as much light on his nature as he had hoped they would.
“Why are you so afraid of Daenerys?” Sansa asks quietly from her place.
Jaime shifts on his feet slightly, wondering if he should stay standing where he is or get comfortable.
“I should think I made myself rather clear that first day,” Jaime says, staying where he is.
Sansa makes no visible move nor any audible sound.
“Do you mean why am I so afraid she might rule the North?” he asks.
Sansa’s long red hair sways against her back as she shakes her head. His vision is mesmerized for a moment, so he distracts himself for a second by taking a seat at his desk.
“I mean,” she says, a profundity to her voice that Jaime does not understand, “why do you care? Do you truly, truly wish to live here, under my rule, Stark rule? I am less than half your age, and a woman at that. You do not have any discernable reason to be here.”
To her, perhaps he doesn’t. To him, she is absolution.
Sansa turns away from the window and faces him.
“I think I know why are you here, though,” she says softly, and he almost believes her, but how could she? She has not seen him since he first arrived, and he had hardly known the truth as he rode North.
It was only upon seeing her that he had realized.
“I think you came here because you think I could be your redemption, your salvation.”
He blinks at her accuracy. Her perspicacity startles him, and he finds he has no answer to her.
She seems to know him better than anyone else ever has.
“There is no other reason for you to be here, to promise to be so loyal to me.”
Jaime manages to find his tongue, but he does not have the same ability for insight as she does, and so says something that makes him feel rather silly when she answers. “Would it not be reason enough for you to simply deserve loyalty?”
She fixes him with a heavy stare. “No,” she says, with so much gravity in her voice that he knows this is something she learnt with great difficulty. “That’s not how the world works.”
Jaime swallows the lodge in his throat as she sighs and turns away.
“I can be that for you. Your redemption.”
Again, Jaime’s mouth goes dry with her gall. She has a courage he will not even pretend he possesses.
“But I need you to be something for me.” And this is something Jaime understands. Exchange. “Will you?”
He tilts his head at her. “I don’t know what I can be other than a protector.”
She does not waver in her conviction, does not move her eyes from his. “I don’t need a protector. I have two I trust with my life and with the North.”
“Then what do you desire me to be?”
He cannot see what is it she is missing, what she thinks he can give her that no one else can.
“A confidant.”
For the third time, Jaime feels his breath stop. He does not understand what she’s asking, why she’s asking, and the confusion makes him drop his gaze first.
Queen Sansa continues to be an enigma for him, but for all he’s worth he knows she’s worth a thousand times more.
For the first time, he wonders exactly what Cersei did to her. What her following journey was like. He wonders what, exactly, has changed her so thoroughly from the quivering girl he first met to the woman who stands tall and proud before him now.
It must always have been in her.
He wants to find out.
“I can be that for you.” He repeats her words before he realizes the significance of this agreement. He throws a smirk at her to lift the gravity. “Who else would I tell?”
Sansa seems satisfied enough with this answer, because she turns away from him and back to the window. She will not be able to see the main gate from her angle, he knows, but she has a direct view at the training yard.
“Brienne reminded me today that you are supposed to train secretly with her.”
Jaime has spent many hours standing in her exact spot and thinking on the same subject.
“Yes, I had wondered on that myself,” he says casually, like he has not counted the hours since he last picked up a sword.
Sansa lips quirk like she sees right through him. “I must admit it slipped my mind.”
He understands that this is how her confidence starts: not with secrets but with admissions.
He treads carefully, unwilling to ruin what has only just started. She has gifted him something beautiful, something he already treasures even though he knows not what it entails, and he will not break it so soon.
Break it he will, inevitably, as he does so unintentionally with everything, but not today. Not yet.
Sansa does not part with a goodbye, instead fixing him with a small smile, before she sweeps out with all the grace with which she entered.
Jaime blinks at the door. Now she is gone, he realizes how affected he had been by her.
“Strange,” he mutters.
He wonders when she will be back.
With nothing better to do, a full tummy and clean body, Jaime falls down on his bed, staring out at the night and feeling almost glad that he is not out playing at being a soldier.