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He can’t quite hear the words as she speaks. There’s this ringing in his ears that won’t seem to go away, building since he rode through the gates of Winterfell, rising since he stared into the eyes of a boy who wasn’t really a boy anymore [or even fully human?], and humming loudly now as he is surrounded by a room of people who, he is certain, want him dead.
He can still see, though. He sees anger. Anger and hate and loathing and disgust. He sees in it her eyes, in the hard set of her jaw, in the way her fingers curl in towards the palm of her hand. He sees it in her rigid back, the taut muscles of her neck, the quick flare of her nostrils as she glares at him from the high table.
He sees other angry faces too. New faces, and familiar ones. He heard the whispers when he entered the hall, and he hears them still now, from all corners of the room: Kingslayer. Oathbreaker. Man without honour.
He sees Daenerys Targaryen, the first Targaryen he’s seen since he plunged his sword into her father’s back, since he took the blade and sliced it across his neck. He sees her anger and sees it mirrored in Sansa Stark’s face, in Jon Snow’s frown, in Arya Stark’s eyes. He should want to look away, but he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want them to see him shy away from what he’s done.
Suddenly, he notices that she’s stopped speaking, that she’s waiting for him, for something.
“What do you have to say in your defense, Jaime Lannister? Do you deny it?”
He opens his mouth on instinct, ready to smirk and to spit sarcasm at her, but he loses his voice before he can say anything at all. He isn’t that man anymore.
“No,” he says, and leaves it at that.
The ringing in his ears threatens to overwhelm him, and it’s a rushing sound now, and he can’t believe this is why he rode north, that this is what honour and vows and promises look like when you keep them. They look like death, they look like justice for all those that he’s wronged, and he can’t quite believe that he didn’t figure that out before he took off his white cloak and rode off into the fading evening light. This is what years of sin feel like, he suspects. This is what stabbing kings in the back and pushing little boys out of towers and murdering your own kin and fighting for the losing side get you.
He’s so in his own head that he doesn’t realize that someone else is speaking now, a voice that echoes into his bones, a voice he’s heard in his sleep a thousand times. She’s telling them about the Mad King, and the wildfire, and the mantra he repeated: burn them all, burn them all, burn them all…. He turns and stares at her, unable to breathe, as she puts her name and her honour on the line for him, and he can’t say he didn’t dare to hope she’d be on his side, but he also can’t quite believe that she’s standing in a room full of Stark and Targaryen bannermen and yet championing a Lannister name.
And then there’s another voice too, his brother’s, telling the dragon queen that it’s all true. And Varys – of course, Varys was there – confirming to the Queen that he saw the barrels under the city streets, under the houses, and the sept, and the stables. And finally there’s the last voice, the boy he pushed out of the tower, and he thinks this is the craziest part of the whole thing, having Bran Stark vouch for Jaime Lannister like this. Bran’s repeating words he could have never heard, could have never known, and yet somehow he knows them, as if he was there in the Throne Room the entire time, silently watching as the Mad King demanded the deaths of everyone in the city.
The dragon queen hears it all, and she turns to her wolf, Ned Stark’s bastard, and somehow despite it all, they allow him to live.
He is escorted from the hall, not a prisoner but not yet free, and he grabs Brienne by the arm as he goes. “Why did you do that?” he breathes, “You risked your own safety in there. Why?”
She just stares at him for a long moment, with those big blue eyes, and then her gaze drops to her feet. “I could not let you face them alone, Ser Jaime. You would have done the same for me.”
And then she smiles at him, an actual smile, and he is marched out of the room away from her.
The castle prepares for war.
He hears from the Stark men that follow him around the grounds that the Night King is only a day away, and they quickly shift from watching him with a weary eye to actively helping him prepare for battle. He may be an aging one-handed knight, but he’s still Jaime Lannister under it all, and he does what he can to get the men around him ready for battle. He’s given an old set of armour [that looks suspiciously like it once belonged to Ned Stark] and his sword, and he tells the men around him what he knows about staying alive in a battle, what to do and what not to do, and how to protect those that fight next to them.
And soon, impossibly soon, the horns sound and they all dash off to their posts, adrenaline beginning to pump through their veins. So many of the men around him are young, so young, and he can see their hands shake as they grip their swords. He calls out to them, telling them that whatever they will face they will face together, and as he turns to get into his place in the line, he sees a tall figure in gleaming silver armour next to him, her hand on the lion pommel of her sword.
He nearly gasps, shocked to see her beside him.
“Ser Jaime,” she says, nodding to him.
“Why are you up here?” he asks, and then he remembers of course he knows why she’s up here, she’s a knight, she belongs here just as much [probably more] as any of the men around them. Including him.
She grins again, and he thinks this is the most he’s ever seen her smile, and his heart suddenly aches when he realizes that this might be the end of it all, the end of all things, and all he wants is endless future days of that same smile.
“You’re a bit weak on your right side,” she remarks, “I thought I’d protect you.”
He closes his eyes, unwilling to let her see him cry.
The battle rages for a whole day and a whole night, and after it all he walks through the carnage, burning bodies where they lie. He sees so many faces, faces he knew and faces he didn’t, and he tries to count them until they all blend into one single face, covered in blood, skin pale and eyes locked onto the sky above, unblinking.
He walks through the castle later, covered in dirt and blood and sweat, and he walks until he finds her, where she’s half-taken off her armour and staring into the middle distance, her gaze a blank stare.
“Podrick…” she whispers when she sees him, and he sees then that she’s been crying, crying for a long time.
Before he even realizes it he’s brushing the tears away from her cheek, brushing away the grime and the salt and blood from her skin, and then he’s leaning forward and he is kissing her, his eyes closed and his lips pressed up against hers. He pulls back for a moment, and in another time [another life] he would have laughed to see the shock upon her face, but now all he can do is breathe her name, breathe it against her skin as he kisses her again with everything he has.
All he wants is her, all he needs is her, and he wishes he could have done this differently – a better way, a more respectful and honorable way. The way she deserves.
He looks down at her as he moves above her, his hand on her breast and his stump on the mattress below, and even as he pushes his hips into hers he can still see the shock and disbelief in her eyes as she kisses him, as if he’s an apparition that might suddenly fade if she even dares to look away. She looks at him like no one's ever looked at him before, like she can see into him even as she gasps his name and lifts her body up to meet his own. He tries to kiss the fear away, to get rid of her doubt, and he’s overcome by the sheer need to love her, to be inside her, to keep her safe and to never let her go.
Afterwards, he tells her that he came north for her, and she tells him that she loves him too.