Work Text:
When the Battle for the Dawn is won, he’s shocked to still be standing. But surviving a battle against the dead turns out to be far less shocking than what happens next.
Past experience has told Jaime that no matter what happens, he always finds himself back under his sister’s spell. With a babe still in her belly back in King’s Landing, he expects that this time will be no different. That with his oath fulfilled, he’ll disappear into the night, back to do Cersei’s bidding until it kills him.
Only… he doesn’t. He stays to celebrate, to cherish the fact that he’s alive, and Tyrion’s alive, and Brienne’s alive. That night, he doesn’t think of Cersei at all. Jame thinks of how nice this is, how it’s more like the life he always wanted for himself, before everything went wrong.
And then, he stops thinking, and acts on feeling alone.
He follows Brienne of Tarth back to her quarters that night, and everything changes.
In the weeks that follow, Jaime is happy . Genuinely happy, for the first time, and he thinks that the people around him are happier, too.
He watches as the men and women who fought in the war heal from their injuries, and though there’s a tenseness that comes with the fact that eventually, they must march South, the Dragon Queen and the King in the North (or whatever he is these days) seem in no rush to make a move on his sister.
Instead, he watches as Jon Snow enjoys the companionship of his family, and of his wildling friends, and seems to take comfort in their closeness, which might soon be lost. Jaime sees as the people of the North come to trust the Dragon Queen herself, even as she spends most of her time at the bedside of Ser Jorah Mormont, recovering from severe injuries suffered during the Long Night.
All the while, Jaime thinks he’s experiencing real love for the first time. The unselfish kind, the sort where two people respect one another and treat them like equals. He’d been so sure he loved his twin, so sure he loved Cersei, but the way things are with Brienne is so startlingly difficult that he’s not really sure what the truth is anymore.
He doesn’t think he’ll ever know the truth. Time may be standing still now, with the younger generation pausing before they resume the war they must fight, but when it starts moving again, he can only expect that it will move quickly. His sister stands no chance against them, Jaime knows that now — and nothing he can say or do will change that.
Sometimes, it eats at him, the idea of Cersei dying alone. The idea of their child, never to be born. But mostly, he thinks that for the first time in his adult life, he has other people and things to live for now.
It almost feels like Jaime’s living a whole new life. He’s been granted a second chance by the Starks, and he thinks Lady Sansa almost approves of his relationship with Brienne. They seem to trust him, asking his advice on war councils, including him in decisions, treating him like he’s a person first and a Lannister second.
He stays in the North, enjoying the quiet and peace while it lasts.
The guilt had to catch up to him at some point, though. He should have known better than to think he could idly sit by when the time actually came for them to march South and end Cersei’s reign — and likely her life.
Jaime knows her. He knows she won’t surrender, and that she will die a gruesome death because of it. In his dreams, he can imagine her being burned to a crisp by Daenerys Targaryen.
Worse, he can imagine the whole city burning, if Cersei refuses to cede it. He knows Brienne can sense his restlessness; sometimes in the night, she rolls over to hold him, to try and soothe and steady him as best as she can.
It works, to an extent, but Daenerys’s army has barely arrived at Dragonstone when he feels that pull, to go back to Cersei, to appeal to her, to get her to leave and cede the city. There’s hardly anyone there to defend it anyway; the Iron Fleet had been waiting at Dragonstone for Daenerys and she’d burned them all for trying to shoot her dragons out of the air.
Euron Greyjoy and the Iron Born probably deserved to die, if Jaime’s being honest, but the people that surround Cersei ? The innocents that are in the city with her?
He doesn’t just want to save his twin, he wants to save everyone . Jaime thinks Daenerys will be a decent enough leader, once the city is hers, but he doesn’t want to imagine what destruction will go into making the dream a reality.
He doesn’t want to imagine Cersei’s stubbornness, even when faced with two dragons, Dothraki and Unsullied, and Northmen with all the reason in the world to want her dead.
Jaime’s the only one who might be able to reach her. The only person who might be able to make her see some sense.
He packs his bags silently, and disappears into the night.
He doesn’t hear the footsteps approaching as he tries to pack up his horse. Of course he doesn’t; Arya Stark is more of a shadow than a girl.
“She’s going to die no matter what you do. Nothing can save her,” Arya says, making him jolt. She sounds annoyed, like he’s the stupidest person she’s ever met for trying to do this. For trying to save the kingdom one last time, even if it ruins the happiness he’s built here. Even if it means he dies.
“And what about everyone else? Can this save them ?” Jaime asks her, desperate for her to understand. Maybe if Arya can tell Brienne… Maybe she won’t hate him so much, for riding off to his death, if Arya can make her see why.
He’s a coward for going without saying goodbye, but he knows if he sees her, his resolve will break. He will stay, and innocent people will suffer at the hands of his sister and Daenerys, and Jaime just… can’t let that happen. He can’t be that selfish; he doesn’t have it in him.
“No,” Arya tells him flatly. He deflates slightly; Jaime has convinced himself that this is the only way, that he’s the only one who can get there in time to stop a massacre, to create a somewhat peaceful transition between queens, but Arya Stark is so matter of fact that the cracks in his plan start to surface almost instantaneously.
“You can’t get there in time… but maybe I can,” Arya says, after she’s paused long enough that he’s started to wonder if his own thoughts will eat him alive. Jaime raises an eyebrow at the stranger of the two Stark girls, but he doesn’t need her to elaborate to know what she means.
She’ll kill her herself. Jaime has seen what Arya Stark can do — she’s silent, and deadly, and she could go unnoticed into King’s Landing and kill Cersei. End it all, without any innocents being harmed. He's numb to the thought, because if he lets himself be anything else, Jaime will not even consider her offer.
“It would be quick. Almost painless,” Arya offers. “It’s more than she deserves, but if it’ll stop you from doing something stupid, then… I promise.”
Jaime’s voice is hoarse when he asks, “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t want her to be wrong for trusting you,” Arya shrugs, glancing back towards the castle. Jaime doesn’t know if she means Sansa or Brienne, but either way, he knows she’s right.
His plan had been poorly thought out, and would have surely been poorly executed. It wouldn’t have worked, and no one would have believed he was doing it for the right reasons, anyway. He’d die the man without honor that he’d lived so much of his life being, and Brienne…
He can’t leave Brienne behind like that. Not when the only things compelling him are guilt, and twisted senses of loyalty and honor.
He nods wordlessly, passing the reins to Arya Stark and going back inside with his bag
By some miracle, Brienne does not wake until he is already back in the room. A selfish part of him wishes that she’d never woken at all, that he never had to see the hurt in her eyes when she saw his pack or the haunted look in his eyes.
“You were going to go to her,” she says, not a question so much as a statement.
“I wasn’t sure anyone else could stop her.” It sounds flimsy, the words coming out of his mouth, but there just aren’t enough words in the world to explain how twisted his relationship with Cersei has been, all this time. He doesn’t know that anyone could ever understand it, not completely.
Brienne would try, though. More than anyone else in the world, Brienne would try, and gods , does he love her for that. He can’t say it out loud, though. It feels too much like a betrayal, while Cersei is alive. When he’d been about to go to her, and either… sneak her somewhere to live out her days, leaving Daenerys Targaryen the throne, or else to offer her up to her enemies on a silver platter.
Every part of Jaime is conflicted, torn. Now that the inevitable is upon them, the guilt that he’d expected to feel from the start gnaws at him, and he doesn’t know how to tell her.
Still, Brienne pats the spot on the bed beside her. She’s tentative, and he can tell that she still hates it, how close he’d been to slipping away in the night. Brienne of Tarth does not show fear often — ever , maybe — but she looks afraid now, like he’s going to vanish at any moment.
“Arya says she’s going to do it. Hopefully she gets there before Daenerys, and the dragons won’t…” Jaime can’t say it, the things he’s seen in his dreams these past weeks. Brienne has guessed, he thinks, but neither of them are particularly great with opening up, and now is no exception.
“I am sorry, that there’s not another way,” Brienne tells him, and he slowly sits back down on the bed beside her. It’s going to be a sleepless night and he knows it, so he sits, and he starts to talk.
It feels wrong, to tell her of the past, to talk of Cersei and the child and all that she’d done to push him to finally leave. He has to, though. Jaime has to talk through it, to try and get her to understand why he was going to leave. To convince himself that he isn’t going to jump back up the second that she’s asleep and follow Arya Stark after all.
She listens, and he can tell she wants to ask questions — and she does, occasionally, mostly about Myrcella and Tommen. Things that bring him some small amount of joy to speak of, even if it’s all tinged with pain, in the end.
She doesn’t push too much, though. Brienne is treating him as if he’s fragile, as if one wrong word will send him off to die.
It’s enough. The fact that normally blunt Brienne is so careful, that she so desperately wants for him to live that she’ll hold her tongue even as he confesses some of his worst decisions, makes him determined to stay.
She doesn’t ask him to leave her, and Jaime is too selfish to find his own quarters. Still, he can tell there is a distance between them now, that wasn’t there before. Jaime broke something between them when he tried to leave her, and he doesn’t know how to repair it.
He doesn’t think he can , until he knows how this all ends. Until he knows that he’s done the right thing.
Even after Cersei’s gone, he’s not sure he’ll ever know that for sure. Still, he’d rather be close to Brienne, taking comfort in her, than by himself. Left to his own devices, Jaime might lose his resolve, and this might have all been for nothing after all.
Things are a shadow of how they were those first weeks, but even this shadow is brighter than the life he’d known before. Day after day, Jaime stays, no matter how hard it is.
And then finally, the news comes that Cersei has been killed, and that the Lannister regime had fallen. Daenerys Targaryen hadn’t even had to use her dragons. The city was hers before she’d even arrived.
Jaime silently thanks Arya Stark, then finds a quiet place to himself to mourn.
It’s a complicated thing, mourning when he knows in theory , the side he chose to align himself has won. Cersei was a rotten queen, and by the end, he didn’t recognize any of the girl he’d loved in her anymore.
Still, she’d been a part of him for so long. The only thing that brings him some comfort is a letter from Arya Stark that says there was no child . It’s a nondescript raven, no signature attached, but he knows it must be from her.
He knows it’s meant to bring him comfort, the fact that an innocent babe hadn’t had to die for the war to be won. He’s not sure it does, though. Jaime’s not sure he knows how to feel about anything anymore.
It takes time, to work through all of the emotional baggage. Brienne offers him what she can — an ear to listen, someone to train with, someone to hold him when the grief washes over him again.
She doesn’t offer him her bed anymore, though. It’s an unspoken thing, that he stops sharing her quarters once Cersei is gone. Once he doesn’t need her presence to make sure he doesn’t fall back into old bad habits. There’s nowhere to run to anymore, and Jaime needs the space to move past his memories on his own.
Brienne, he thinks, needs time to deal with things of her own too. Perhaps they’d moved too quickly because of the adrenaline of victory, or the threat of more war. Or maybe they’d moved too slowly; years of feelings built up in their heads, only for Jaime to turn out to be a disappointment in the end.
He’d left Cersei behind too late. He was too damaged. Brienne of Tarth deserved better than to help him pick up the pieces of a life that he’d largely wasted, and sometimes, he’s not just mourning his twin and his lost children. Sometimes, he’s mourning the bright future he’d let himself glimpse with Brienne, too, the one he’d undone in a moment of weakness and hadn’t quite managed to rebuild.
Jaime feels as if he’s only just shaken off the feeling that half of him died with his twin when the summons comes. Although Daenerys Targaryen has been acting as queen of the Seven Kingdoms, she’s not officially claimed the throne for herself yet.
Instead, she has called the lords of the major houses to King’s Landing. She wants to meet with them all, see them, ask them to pledge their fealty to her. Her letter to Sansa says that she does not wish to be a conqueror; she wishes to have the support of the kingdoms that she will rule before she takes the throne.
The journey back south doesn’t feel nearly so long as the one north had. Then, he’d been at war with himself — in the end, wanting to do what was right had beaten out the desire to make Cersei happy.
Still, Jaime feels like he’s been at war with himself for so long. Now that Cersei’s gone, now that the grief has finally started to subside, he feels almost as at peace as the Seven Kingdoms are after Daenerys’s summit is held.
He sits on a council with Gendry Baratheon, the new Lord of Storm’s End, the Starklings, Yara Greyjoy, the new Prince of Dorne, and Bronn, who’s been appointed the Lord of Highgarden in the end. It’s a ridiculous move, but the Lannisters had been promising him a castle for so long — their promises must have built up to owing the man one of the largest ones they could think of.
Jaime almost laughs, when he joins in the unanimous support for Daenerys to rule Westeros. He never would have imagined that he’d instate a Targaryen over the twin he’d thought to love so much, but it feels right, and Brienne nods her head in barely discernible approval at his decision. Like she’s proud of him again, and Jaime’s heart swells.
He’s felt dead inside these past few weeks, but more and more, he’s starting to come back to life.
Perhaps deciding to support Daenerys Targaryen’s claim to the throne didn’t surprise anyone in the end, but what happens next seems to.
Negotiations for the North to retain its independence go well. The truth is revealed, that Jon Snow is actually a Targaryen, and Daenerys seems happy to grant her family the freedom they so desire. Jon decides to remain in King’s Landing on her small council for a time, and Jaime suspects he does it less because he wants to live in the South and more because he wants Sansa to be able to be crowned Queen in the North without fuss. Daenerys accepts the compromise and seems confident that her alliance with the North will be a strong one, and the Starks are granted the freedom to keep their home under their own terms.
And while the Starks cling to their home, Jaime doesn’t. Instead, he tells Tyrion that the Rock should go to him; he doesn’t want to be the head of House Lannister, never has. Instead, he wants to go North, pledge himself to the Starks — partly for the pledge he made to Catelyn so many years ago, parttly because he knows it is where Brienne will be.
Mostly, though, Jaime realizes that some of his life’s happiest memories, no matter how brief, are in Winterfell. Maybe, perhaps if he’s lucky, he will be given the chance to create more.
Jaime doesn’t expect things to fall back together all at once, and they don’t. Still, he thinks that after he’s made his choice, after Tyrion has taken on his duties as Lord of the Rock and left Jorah Mormont as Daenerys’s hand in his stead, that things become a bit easier with Brienne.
He wouldn’t be alive without her support throughout all of this, and they both know it. Still, he’s not sure how to express his gratitude, and she’s still not sure how to approach him, now that they’d moved forward then back again.
They spar, though, every chance they get the journey back North. Brienne starts to open up to him more, mostly about her time with Lady Sansa and what to expect of the Queen he’s decided to serve. Her stories make Jaime wish that he’d been with her on her journeys; that he’d been able to help Brienne through more than just swords and armor and horses.
He can’t change the past, though. All Jaime can do is embrace the future, and the ghosts of things that came before don’t seem to haunt him anymore as they finally reach Winterfell and cross through its gates.
They settle into a new routine in Winterfell; a new life, one where Jaime feels he can finally make his own decisions and truly be free .
The first decision he makes is the one to court Brienne, officially, this time. He thinks that the distance he’d put between them has closed; he catches her looks, and he recognizes them for what they are, because they’re the same ones mirrored back on his own face.
He wants to do it right, though. He doesn’t want to show her what she means to him in a drunken fit of jealousy, high on the euphoria of surviving. She may be a knight, but she’s a proper lady as well, and she deserves to have it all. Deserves to live both identities — the strength of the Warrior, but the gentleness of the Mother as well.
Jaime’s never been able to show his love for the world to see before, though. He’s never been able to openly declare his intentions, and he doesn’t even know where to start .
And then, one night by the fire, they sit and tell more tales, of a time before their paths crossed. There are few secrets between them now; her life before him is painted so vividly, and she knows all his darkest corners.
Tonight, she retells the story of the time she’d danced with Renly Baratheon, of how that had won the man her affections for an embarrassingly long time, and Jaime feels foolish for not thinking of it sooner as it hits him. Sansa’s coronation celebration — the perfect time to show her his intentions.
The perfect time to give her another dance she won’t forget.
The whole affair passes in a blur. He’s seen more kings and queens rise and fall in his life than anyone should have to, and as the men and women in Winterfell’s hall chant “the Queen in the North!” while Brienne looks on proudly, Jaime prays that this one’s rule, at least, will outlast his lifetime.
As bizarrely proud as he is of the older Stark girl, though, he’s glad to move onto the part of the evening that he’s been looking forward to. Jaime’s confidence wanes as the celebration of the new Queen begins. Brienne diligently stays by her Queen’s side while he instead notices the couples beginning to fill the hall with dancing and laughter.
It’s Podrick that asks him if he’s quite all right, and Jaime realizes exactly how ridiculous it is, to be so tense. This is Brienne . She wants the same thing he does; she must , or else what’s left of his heart after all he’s been through will break.
And they’ve been through far more spectacles than dancing .
“Quite, Pod. I think it might be your turn to watch over her Grace for a while, though,” he says pointedly, and Podrick looks to where Brienne attends to Sansa proudly. The squire is puzzled for a beat, then makes sense of the meaning behind Jaime’s words and ushers off to relieve her.
It makes Jaime snort, the predictable way that Brienne acts put out that Podrick would think she needs a break from her duties at all. Sansa has hardly been whisked away to talk to another Lord with Podrick at her side when Jaime makes his approach, though, and she blinks those startlingly blue eyes at his purposeful stride and the hand that he offers to her.
“My lady, might I have this dance?” he asks, and her brief moment of hesitation makes him worry that not as much has changed as he’d hoped. Maybe he hasn’t repaired the rift between them; maybe it’s all been wishful thinking on his part.
And then, she flashes him one of her rare smiles, her cheeks blotting red as she accepts.
Jaime might be the only one in the room who’s not surprised by how graceful Brienne is on the dance floor. She’s quick on her feet and nimble with a sword; he doesn’t see reason for dancing to be any different, except for how uncomfortable she sometimes feels in her own skin. She’s timid at first, shrinking into herself as if she’s worried about people watching her in her armor, towering above the main she’s dancing with.
Let them watch . It’s what Jaime wants; for the whole of Winterfell to see how proud he is to have Ser Lady Brienne on his arm. Eventually, she senses how at ease he is, regardless of who’s watching, and it allows her to relax, to fall into the same easy rhythm they have in almost every other aspect of their relationship.
One song bleeds into another, and he doesn’t even have to ask her to stay. She just does , letting Jaime spin her around the dance floor as if this is something she’s been missing the chance to do for so very long.
He knows he should state his intentions plainly. Tell her that he wants this night of dancing to be the first of many they share together; to let her know that he doesn’t want to let her go anywhere away from him ever again. Jaime doesn’t quite find the words, though; he’s worked through so many of his past traumas, but he thinks being able to speak plainly of his love without worrying that it will be used against him is something that will only come with time.
Just as Brienne’s trust that he’s really here, that he isn’t leaving after all, has come with the moons since he’d tried .
Jaime finally gives up trying to find the right words. He has time. They have time .
Instead, cheekily, he asks, “Have I proven I’m a better dancer than Renly Baratheon, then?”
Brienne rolls her eyes at his antics, but it’s a fond gesture, and Jaime feels warm from head to toe. “You’ve more than proven yourself, Jaime,” she tells him, and Jaime gets the distinct impression that she means more than just the dancing.
“We’ll have to do this more often, then,” he tells her, and that same blush from earlier paints her cheeks.
“I think I’d quite like to have a regular dance partner,” Brienne agrees finally, and Jaime pulls her closer to him, almost closer than is proper, as the music slows.
He thinks that he could stay here in this moment forever, and it would be enough. The fact that he’s lived long enough to have this kind of moment to cherish, that this feels like it’s just the start of a new chapter for them, is everything he’d never thought he could have.
Winterfell’s not his home; it never will be. But Brienne is , and as he holds her in his arms for all those gathered to see, Jaime feels certain that he’ll have a home with her for the rest of his days.