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No sooner do his lips make contact with Brienne’s than she takes a half-step back, a perplexing blend of desire and consternation in her oceanic eyes. He gives her a rakish grin- he’s tried this on the Maid of Tarth before, and the roses in her cheeks plainly prove its effectiveness each and every time- and rests his left hand on the handle of her bedchamber door, a not-terribly-subtle sign of his intentions.
She gingerly places her hand on his shoulder, but gives him nothing but a light squeeze and an apologetic smile. “Good night, Jaime,” she murmurs in a falsely-even tone, and as she nudges him to the side and creaks her door open, he notices a deepening of the red hue overtaking her face. But she swiftly enters her chamber and pushes the door shut behind her, offering no invitation to her fellow knight.
The chill of rejection clenches at Jaime’s gut- between Cersei’s determination to keep him away and Brienne’s refusal to give him her maidenhead the night before their inevitable deaths, he finds himself once again mired in a dark torrent of thoughts, cursing himself for his longing for connection, cursing the women in his life for their constant denials…
He intends to head down back down to the hall in the hopes of finding Tyrion still buried in his cups, prepared to drink himself to sleep - I’ll be little use tomorrow if I’m drink-sodden…but then, how much use could a one-handed, middle-aged knight really be, anyhow?
But he finds himself distracted by a flash of tawny crimson in his peripherals; he pivots on his heel to face the Lady of Winterfell standing in the corridor, arms crossed over her chest, posture erect and chin tilted upwards. Not for the first time, he marvels over Lady Sansa’s ability to approach without a sound, every bit as silent as the mysterious coterie of assassins to whom her sister owes her training.
“My lady,” he calls by way of greeting. But Sansa replies with only a slight tilt of the head and an (uncertain? Annoyed? Disapproving?) furrow of the brow.
After a seemingly interminable spell of silence, Sansa takes a step in his direction, casting a pointed nod at Brienne’s bedchamber door. Her voice, usually smooth and mellifluous, bears an urgent and bitter edge when she hisses:
“Leave her alone.”
And in spite of the solemnity of her tone, the fierceness of her expression…Jaime cannot help but release a snort of laughter. Lady Sansa’s blue eyes flare with violent rage, and Jaime wonders for a moment whether they’d looked like this when she condemned her husband to death, when she watched his body torn to shreds by a pack of hungry dogs….
“You needn’t fear, my lady- Ser Brienne has already taken her leave of me for the night.”
“Good.” One silent step, then two, and Lady Sansa stands mere inches from him, her eyes nearly level with his own, the warmth of her skin radiating through the thick furs and wools she dons.
She’s close enough for the fragrance of her hair- juniper and lavender, an odd melange of northern and southern scents- to waft into his nostrils, and he feels a desperate impulse to slink into the shadows, far from her appraising stare and wordless accusations-
Her next question reverberates through the chilled air of the castle hallway: “And what would you have of her?”
Hesitation, coupled with a sardonic twist of his lips into something halfway between a mocking grin and a pained grimace. A heavy pause, then: “It’s the end of the world, my lady. No one wants to be alone tonight.”
She smirks as she extends her arm and uses a tapered finger to brush the one piece of Lannister iconography he still wears: a lion-engraved gold ring that’s occupied the index finger of his left hand since before he took the white. Cersei has one exactly alike, and he’s never seen her without it…
…nor, it seems, has Sansa Stark-
“But you’re never really alone, are you?”
He’s too astonished by the pointed nature of her question to make any attempt at correction or explanation-
She grains away from him only slightly, angling her body toward the darkened end of the corridor leading away from Brienne’s chamber. “Best to keep away,” Lady Sansa cautions with another nod to Brienne’s closed door. “Brienne deserves better than a dead man walking, don’t you think?”
The cool derision lurking in each syllable puts him in mind of Cersei, just enough to send a tingle racing up his spine. “We all could be dead on the morrow, my lady,” he responds, annoyed with himself for the stunned breathiness of his tone.
She answers him with a smile almost brilliant enough to be genuine as she laces her fingers through his and delivers a deliberate yank to the lion ring. “I’m not just talking about tomorrow.”
He realizes a moment too late that she’s leading him down the corridor toward her own chambers, and he can’t bite back the query itching at his lips:
“A dead man walking isn’t good enough for Brienne, but he’s good enough for you?”
Her eyes are canyons as she meets him with a long and hard stare- if not for the pressure she puts on his fingers where their hands are entwined, he could easily miss the sting of regret in her next statement-
“Brienne still has something to give away. Something precious.”
A gleam of tears interrupts the vacancy of her gaze, and it’s pure impulse that leads him to trace his golden hand along the curve of her cheek and jaw. But the tenderness clearly strikes a discordant note for her- she swivels her neck and gives him only the back of her head when she drags him into her chambers, snuffing out the lone candle as she latches the door shut behind them.