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Brienne had long ago decided she would not put anything past Jaime Lannister. It turned out she was wrong: she had not thought the man could be bribed into getting up for karaoke, let alone expected him to do so willingly.
She would call this a nightmare, except that her nightmares have never been so creative as to have her entire office at a TGI Friday’s, on a Friday, with Jaime Lannister up singing Brick House. At her.
Very, very much at her. Not only did he bow his head pointedly at her right before the lyrics kicked in, he outright pointed the mic at her, with his one hand, at “built like an Amazon”.
Brienne’s cheeks flamed. She didn't want to know how red.
“What was he drinking?” Brienne hissed, grabbing the arm of Kingsguard Consulting intern, Podrick Payne. Jaime had hit the first round of ‘shake it down, shake it down now’s. Mercifully, there was no accompanying choreography.
Pod, stifling his grin at her expression, pointed to a craft beer on tap, Dornish Red. Brienne knew its alcohol content to be closer to wine, around ten percent, but Jaime usually seemed to know what he was doing, with drink.
They’d worked together since the Stark family’s forcible acquisition of Kingsguard Consulting, and the only time in her memory she’d seen him truly drunk, it’d been the night they met and Catelyn Stark was buying.
That had been six years, many secrets, and a great deal of work ago. Jaime, on his fifth repetition of the shake-it-downs, was losing the tune and his surety, too. Brienne stared at him flatly, gauging from across the bar. He was not sober. Neither was he so excusably drunk.
That made this all much worse. Muttering goodbyes to Pod, Brienne made for the door. On her way out, she accidentally made eye contact with Tormund, who dropped the chicken strips he was eating to clamber to his feet.
Brienne did not know Tormund well enough to know if that was his given name or surname. He was their latest liaison with Nightswatch Security, personally assigned by security lead Jon Snow, who had gotten everyone to Friday’s to celebrate the success of their recent joint contract.
Tormund was always wearing gear for some American football team, the Giants, and though he’d started to explain why myriad times since they met, Brienne continually dodged listening. The last thing she wanted was him following her out to the parking lot, which Tormund seemed to be getting on his feet to do. She picked up her pace, glancing behind her because the music was still going but Jaime wasn’t singing anymore—
No, he was getting off the stage, walking, very determinedly, after her. She hoped he hadn’t literally dropped the mic, which seemed to have been left to roll right onto the floor.
Jaime beat Tormund to the door, meaning he must have put on some speed. He pointedly closed it right in the other man’s face. Tormund could, of course, have pushed it open right after him, but Brienne saw him through the glass, looking from her to Jaime and back again, before turning back. Back to his meal, likely, but to Brienne’s surprise, an expression she recognized all too well, even from a distance, had crossed Tormund’s face, something of devastation and something of resignation.
She squared her shoulders as Jaime came after her, calling her name.
“You’re leaving?” he said. “Already?”
“Why,” Brienne said, with bite, “what do you have next on the queue, ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’?”
Jaime paused. “…Is that actually a song?”
Brienne pulled her keys out and moved toward her car.
“You are leaving because of me, then,” Jaime said, daring to sound vaguely surprised, as he dogged her steps, “because of the…”
“Karaoke, Lannister! Only you could manage to make karaoke hurtful!”
“Hurtful?” he said, astonished.
Stopping at her car, she brandished her keys, a small sword jabbed in his direction. He held up his hands in dramatic surrender.
“I thought you were, if not better than this, at least too old for this.”
That struck. His eyes went wounded. He was no less handsome, for passing forty, perhaps the opposite. But he was more salt-and-pepper now than the blond god she’d first met as the world’s most obnoxious, most corporate risk consultant. The grey showed especially in the beard he’d let grow in again this year, and he’d always been surprisingly sensitive about the decade he had on her, when it came up in conversation.
“I am,” he agreed, looking tired. He lowered his hands. “I didn’t mean to—"
“Offend me? Embarrass me? Be cruel?”
“All of that?” Jaime said. He crossed his left hand over the right, fiddling with the prosthetic he’d had almost as long as she’d known him. “I’m usually cruel on purpose. Cruel?”
“You chose that song to mock me.”
“…No, I didn’t.”
“You blatantly sang that at me, Jaime,” she said, not meaning to slip back into calling him his first name when angry, but he’d been Jaime for so many years to her now, she couldn’t help it. “Trying to deny it—
“I’m not,” Jaime said, “but I wasn’t mocking.”
“Do I suddenly look stacked to you?” Brienne demanded.
“Yes,” Jaime said, baffled, then as Brienne waved her hand in front of her chest, “…Oh.”
Brienne crossed her arms as she waited for his apology. He seemed to be taking his time lifting his eyes to her face, though the simple sports bra she wore made her chest look even flatter.
“I was working under a different interpretation of that phrase,” Jaime said.
Brienne snorted, before she could help herself.
“I thought it’d… amuse you,” Jaime said. “That you’d laugh at me, at—"
“Would you laugh, if I walked back in there and belted out Prince’s song ‘Sister’ in front of everyone we work with?”
Jaime narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know that song, but I suspect it’d be a low blow.”
“It is,” Brienne admitted. She preferred to ignore Jaime’s unspeakably weird family dynamic, which she’d barely seen firsthand and was mostly behind him; it had been one of the first things she’d known about him, which had contributed to a rough first impression, but she’d known him so long now she forgot about it for whole stretches at a time. His relationship with his brother, at least, was wonderful, and relievingly brotherly, and if the only therapist Jaime would see was his aunt, he at least went and talked to someone else about it all. Someone besides Brienne, since for a while there after the corporate kidnapping they’d endured on their first project travel together, she had become the person he told everything to, even though they’d been barely tolerating each other at the time. She suspected she was still the only one to know what had really happened with Kingsguard Consulting’s most famous client, back when it was under independent ownership; Jaime had carried the sole blame for driving the consulting firm from thriving independence to the slowly-dying arm of a mismanaged corporation. They’d been steadily on the rise again for some time now, even if the primarily-nonprofit risk consulting Brienne focused on was less than lucrative, but through all the firm’s worst days, Jaime refused to leave, despite his evergreen opportunity to work for his father. He still struggled for their colleagues’ respect, and there would always be whispers about the Lannisters.
A song with the line “incest is everything it’s said to be” would have been much too low a blow.
“And I never would,” Brienne said, “of course not, just… how would you like it? Do you know how many times I’ve been told I’m built like a brick shithouse?”
Jaime’s eyes seemed to flash in the dark, catching the parking lot lights as he stepped closer. “The word ‘shit’ was not in that song,” he said, then, more urgently, “Brienne. I like the way you’re built. I thought you…”
“Yes, I’m tall, athletic, and I wouldn’t change that, fine,” Brienne said, “except sometimes I still wish I was a little less of both, and a little more—”
“I wouldn’t want you to be less anything, or more anything,” Jaime said. “I was not mocking you.”
“Oh,” Brienne said, and then, as a nearby car beeped and two restaurant-goers, thankfully no one from their group, headed out, became increasingly conscious that they were standing in a parking lot, practically toe to toe, and how raised their voices were, and that Jaime Lannister had just half-shouted at her he liked the way she was built.
“If you weren’t mocking—” she began, and saw how tight Jaime’s jaw went as she did, saw the motion in his cheek.
She didn’t think she could get more aghast, but the very concept that karaoke may have been Jaime Lannister’s bizarre idea of a courting ritual managed the trick… as well as sending a frisson of something else, entirely, through her.
She couldn’t help the slight shudder, anyway, and Jaime’s jaw went impossibly tighter, his eyes distant.
“Are you trying to say that whole…” at a loss for a description, Brienne just motioned, back toward the restaurant. “Was for my benefit?”
Jaime sighed, closing his eyes for a second, before meeting hers. “I thought you’d laugh, at worst,” he said, almost brisk. “I thought, at best, you…”
“What?” Brienne said, reeling that the never-in-a-million-years theory, which had admittedly crossed her mind before but been dismissed, just as quickly, could possibly be confirmed. “You’re an idiot.”
“So I’ve heard.” Jaime tilted his head at her, his expression fighting between cocky and rueful. “Would it have been clearer if I’d taken my shirt off?”
“On stage?” Brienne said automatically, then, processing, took a stumbling step back. “You’re drunk.”
“Just enough,” Jaime said. “I don’t suppose you’d want to take me home?”
Brienne was still gripping her keys. That wasn’t fair, this wasn’t fair; the very beautiful men she found herself attracted to never seemed to be attracted to her, and though she’d tried, she’d realized a long time ago, she was either going to have to settle for trying to make herself want one of the few people who seemed to want her, mold herself into someone a broader range of men would find interesting …. or simply let go, of it, all of it, sex, love, lifelong companionship, as something that wasn’t working out for her, something that she didn’t really need, anyway, when there was so much else to life. And she’d done a very good job of letting it go, of accepting that she wasn’t going to have the fairy tale and that she didn’t really want the cost of the compromise, and here was Jaime Lannister, secret dream of her stupid heart for too-too many years, singing karaoke in some sort of faint-heart-never-won-fair-lady disaster gambit—
It was all too much and Brienne found herself laughing, after all. No one’s face had ever gone soft, at her laugh, the way Jaime’s suddenly did, though his footwork was shifting, uneasily.
And then his mouth was on hers, hot and… wanting, his hand spanning from her neck to the back of her head. He must’ve gone on his toes, his eyes were suddenly above hers, and her mouth, caught open in the laugh, stayed open as she surged back into him. On his toes he wasn’t entirely ready for her weight, and they both staggered, slightly, Brienne managed to direct the stagger so her hip landed against her car. And suddenly Jaime had her pressed in a lean against the car, tongues dueling, and he wasn’t close enough, still, so she looped her ankle around the back of his calf, a move she might use to trip an opponent but here was just to drive him closer. His jeans pressed against her own, and overwhelmed by his warmth against her in the night air, she outright moaned into Jaime’s mouth. She could have sworn he was trying to swallow the sound.
Her car alarm went off. Her keys were still in her hand—she must have accidentally pressed the panic button on her key fob. Appropriately enough, since Brienne was, suddenly, panicking, looking around the parking lot. She didn’t particularly want an audience she’d have to face again Monday. Jaime pulled back long as she scrambled to turn the alarm off, but he kept his hand against her face.
In the distant background, she heard karaoke music. Jaime, smiling in a way that made Brienne think, oh, that’s what that old cat-with-cream adage was all about, still had his face jarringly close to her own. She knew his face so well, but rarely from this close up.
““Ice Ice Baby?”” he said, of their background music, and then, as it got going, corrected himself at the same time she did, ““Under Pressure.””
This time, they were both laughing, bright delight as writ in Jaime’s eyes as Brienne could feel on her own face.
“Jaime,” she said, cupping his cheek against her hand, “honestly though, what were you thinking? This isn’t even a decent spot as karaoke goes.”
“…Of holding nothing back?” he suggested, and Brienne looked at him sternly to say, “That’s a lyric, isn’t it,” and he confessed, “Most of one,” his eyes jumping between her lips and her lies all the while.
Brienne swallowed hard and opened her car door.
“Get in the car before we never make it out of this parking lot,” Brienne said.
She found herself very, very grateful that she lives around the corner from their office at the Winterfell Building, that they’d gone to the nearest restaurant instead of any better, farther-away bar, as Jaime slid into her passenger seat.
“You are going to take me home, then?” he asked. Then, as if he wasn’t sure, “With you?”
She shot him an incredulous look.
They were too distracted, to turn on the radio for the two-minute drive, to bother with mood music when they got themselves, tumbling, inside Brienne’s door.
But Jaime let out an appreciative “Ow” later, that was very clearly another lyric of the damn song and even in tune, which had to be met with a pillow thwack.
“You’re lucky I’ve overlooked the song choice,” Brienne said. “Jaime, there are measurements in that song.”
“I didn’t know all the lines,” he said, ducking her pillow again and catching her up. His expression turned serious. “Only that it made me think of you. So many songs do.”
He’d been trying to tell her for a while, Jaime said, how he… He didn’t manage to finish his sentence, looking abashed, but his face spoke for him. He was always better at action anyway, but none of his attempts had been getting through. He'd figured she wouldn't be able to miss this one.
She found herself staring at him, weakly, before mustering up her business briskness enough to say, “Let me choose your song, next time.”
“Next time?” he said, and for a second her heart lurched, until she saw the relief on his face at the promise of a tomorrow, together. “Next time, I assure you—we’re going to damn well duet.”