Work Text:
'I mean it Tarth, we did great work today.'
Jaime flashed a lazy, heartbreakingly sexy smile at her. It was so wide it reached his emerald-green eyes, as his smiles always seemed to do when directed at her, shimmering under the soft lights of the local bar where he and Brienne had come after work. She sat opposite him, on the other side of the grimy bar table. It was too small for them both and she had to keep shifting to avoid knocking her knees against his under the table. But Jaime didn’t seem to mind.
They were tucked away in the corner, away from the rowdier Friday night crowd. It was a little quieter here but they still had to lean across the table to have a conversation without shouting. Brienne didn’t mind, though. She had always liked how Jaime smelled and, even after a long day’s work like today. He had a heady, musky scent that was no worse for the tinge of sweat. It made the back of Brienne’s knees itch.
Brienne raised her half-empty beer bottle and clinked it against Jaime’s in acknowledgement. She then took a deep gulp, enjoying the cool liquid sliding down her throat. She was getting hot in their little corner and she could feel a drop of sweat sliding down the back of her neck. Jaime didn’t seem bothered and he took a handful of nuts and popped them into his mouth, three at a time.
They had been partners for three years now, working together as investigative journalists at the underfunded yet principled KL Standard newspaper. They ran the newspaper on the smell of an oily rag, but Brienne wouldn’t have it any other way. She had never been interested in a lucrative career, and she loved having a job that fulfilled her and excited her and, yes, even frustrated her. And her job certainly made her feel alive. She managed to make rent on her one-bedroom shoebox every month, and she got to work with Jaime Lannister, the best journalist she’d ever seen.
She knew of him before she’d met him. Anyone who was anyone in media knew of Jaime Lannister. He had a reputation for getting the stories, by hook or by crook. Some thought that me must pay his sources – he was born into one of the wealthiest families in the city, but Brienne knew better. She’d checked him out before applying for the job. She had wanted to know who she would be working with, and wasn’t willing to push her principles aside even if it meant she moved up in her career.
Her background snooping had certainly been illuminating, to say the least. Jaime wasn’t just a good journalist, he was unsurpassed. He knew just which leads to follow, how hard to press a witness and which criminal low-life to lean on. And he knew how to get the tip that would blow a story wide open. When she was offered the job at KL Standard, she’d been ecstatic. She wasn’t a cadet - she had worked on her local, small-town community paper since she was 16-years-old - but she hadn’t had much more experience than that. Certainly, not working for a big city newspaper.
So, Brienne was more than a little surprised when, only three months into the job Jaime, the newsroom’s most senior investigative journalist, chose her to help him follow a lead on a story about money laundering in a series of state-run child care centres. It involved a little undercover work, and Jaime had said Brienne was perfect to play the ‘gormless, blustering matron-type’. Even now she bristles at his oh-so-neat assessment of her. What he said was cruel and rude, yes, but his words hurt because it was exactly the persona Brienne tried so hard to avoid. She knew she was a little uptight and occasionally defensive. And while she wasn’t a virgin, she may well be considering the last time she’d actually had any type of sex that she’d enjoyed. But to her surprise, although not Jaime’s, Brienne thrived working undercover. And they’d made a great team. She deferred to his experience - most of the time – but wasn’t scared to challenge him when she knew she was in the right.
And it had worked perfectly. Brienne’s act as a dim-witted health inspector was so convincing that the centre’s administrator had no qualms leaving her alone in the office. Five minutes on the office computer was all Brienne needed to find and copy the centre’s damning double-entry figures.
She is still proud of the work they did together on that story, but, if she was forced to admit it, she still blushes thinking of what Jaime had said to her one day, having watched her weave her way through the crowd of youngsters at the childcare centre.
‘I can see you as a mother,’ he’d said, seemingly out of nowhere, ‘All bossy and no-nonsense’. He laughed when she scowled, but continued, ‘But always, always there for your kids. A soft place to fall.’ Why he’d thought that about her, she didn’t know. Although in her late 20s, Brienne hadn’t really, seriously, thought about motherhood before then. Her mum had died when she was young and she had never had an example to try to emulate.
It was only later that Brienne realised what a complement Jaime had paid her. It was perhaps the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her, in her limited experience. And she had blushed hard thinking that he felt so highly of her. If she ever got the chance to be a mother, she’d like to be caring and loving, but also, as Jaime had said, no nonsense.
Ever since they broke that case wide open, they ran all of their stories together. ‘Why split a winning team?’ Jaime had said. They followed leads together, developed sources and, when the case warranted it, went under cover. They didn’t always crack the story, but when they did, like today, Brienne knew it was the best feeling in the world.
Well, perhaps the second best.
When Jaime smiled at her, like he was smiling at her now, Brienne felt as if her skin was stretched too tight across her bones, like she needed to scrape her fingernails along something hard to make the ache go away. She tilted her head as she watched Jaime flick peanuts into his mouth, musing what she felt about him. What she really felt. No bullshit, no pretending.
Brienne had loved Jaime for a while now. She knew that. But she hadn’t been able to pinpoint when her feelings morphed from ‘fuck, if I could just get him to shut up for 30 seconds, I might be able to put the pieces of this story together’, to ‘Goddamn, why is he so gloriously beautiful when I have to work next to him all day?’. Oh, he still annoyed her, and infuriated her, but he also made her snort with laughter in public and teased her mercilessly about her freckles. His lightly lecherous ‘I bet they go all the way down,’ comment still keeps her awake on restless nights.
She couldn’t help it. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. At first, she felt quite superficial falling in love with him – his chiselled jaw, his grey-dusted stubble that just seemed to make him sexier even after a 48-hour stakeout. His strong hands. She had imagined what they would feel like stroking her cheek or clutching at the back of her neck. But she knew she’d love him regardless of his looks. He’d been the best partner she’d ever had. Sure, he was tough and rude and impatient and infuriating, but he was also a great teacher, surprisingly protective and quite sentimental. He’d forced her to help him pick out a Christmas tree over the holidays, and when he learned that she liked to run home for exercise and she only lived a couple of blocks from him, he joined her most nights, asking each time, ‘Run me home, Tarth?’
But then he’d had the crash. Brienne was undercover with a low-key drug syndicate and Jaime was listening through the wire in his car a few blocks away. When things went south and Brienne was punched to the ground, Jaime floored it and drove right into the warehouse. When they shot at him, he’d swerved into a concrete pylon, trapping his hand during the impact. The drug dealers had fled, and Jaime had saved Brienne from a fierce beating. But his hand was a mess and even six months later it was still weak and largely useless. They didn’t talk about it much.
‘Can I get you another one, Tarth?’, Jaime asked, gesturing at her bottle of beer. She’d been deep in thought she hadn’t realised she’d downed almost all of it. Jaime didn’t seem to mind her limited conversational skills. He was used to that, she supposed. She just never had the knack to fill in silences with inane chatter. That was Jaime’s forte, but tonight he was pensive too.
‘Sure, thanks Lannister’, she replied. She was enjoying herself, tired but happy for a job well done. ‘Make it two, if you can blow the cobwebs off your wallet.’
‘Ho ho ho, side-splittingly hilarious, Tarth,’ Jaime laughed out loud, nudging her with his hip as he squeezed past, making her spill the dregs of her beer all over her chin.
After buying their drinks, Brienne watched Jaime as he weaved his way through the crowd and back to their little table. The bar was packed in so tight he had to lift his arms above his head to slip through the bodies. She could see at least three women swivel their heads to follow Jaime as he passed. This happened everywhere. All. The. Time. It would be funny if it wasn’t so typical. Jaime was cute, sure, and she knew he knew it, but Brienne didn’t think he realised just how he affected women. And some men, for that matter.
Jaime clunked the drinks on the table and sat down. ‘So, what do you think Tarth? How will you celebrate tonight?’
She gestured with her hands, her mouth full of beer. Swallowing, she said, ‘What does it look like I’m going?’
Jaime shrugged, peeling the wet label off his bottle of beer. ‘Ah, come on Tarth. We’ve just spent every waking minute, and not-so-waking minute for the past 5 weeks joined at the hip. Don’t you want to ditch me, find someone here, take him home and have your way with him?’ He was waggling his eyes in what, Brienne assumed, Jaime though was a suggestive way.
It was true. They’d rarely had a minute apart while they worked the story. And she’d learned so much about Jaime during that time. How he drooled when he slept, curled tight with his arms around his waist and his knees tucked up to his chest. And he’d clearly learned how to push her buttons. She tensed immediately and narrowed her eyes. She hated it when he teased her about her love life. Or lack of one. And he knew it.
She looked around the bar, putting a show on for Jaime, and tried to make a joke of it. ‘On your toes Lannister, you may just have to beat the horny hoards back.’ Jaime barked another laugh, his eyes sparkling with mischief. She knew he loved it when she joked with him. He was always trying to make her laugh, or sigh, or get angry. He was always trying to get her to react. To something. Anything. Always.
But his reaction stung more than it should have, Brienne knew, but she couldn’t help that it hurt. He had no idea what it was like for her. How could he? He was confident, assured, backed by a family fortune and beautiful.
‘Wasn’t that funny,’ she replied, mulishly, suddenly not interested in the joke anymore.
Jaime took a few deep breaths and then looked at Brienne intently. Then his face warmed with the gentlest smile. She didn’t know what he was thinking and she hated not knowing what he was thinking. She only raised an eyebrow to question his meaning.
‘What can I say, I don’t like having to compete for your attention.’
Brienne let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding. Jaime did that so much lately – surprising her by not insulting her. He made her think that she was the person he most wanted to be with that very moment.
Looking at her with an inscrutable expression, he said, ‘You know, Tarth, your looks are the least interesting thing about you.’
Brienne coughed and spluttered her beer. ‘What are you on about now?’ she asked.
She could feel the red cloud of her blush rushing up her neck and onto her face, but Jaime stayed quiet, sitting thee drinking his beer. She was going to let it slide, but she’d learned a few things over the past few weeks as well. One was that she needed to chill the fuck out because he was not trying to embarrass her or make her feel like shit. He was just teasing. The second was that she liked to tease him almost as much as he liked to tease her.
‘If you’re in the mood to celebrate, why don’t you choose one of the drooling women here and take them home?’
He didn’t take his eyes off her. ‘What drooling women?’
She flung her arm in the air, ‘Throw a net, you’ll catch one.’
He dismissed her with a flick of his wrist. ‘You’re exaggerating,’ he said, taking a long gulp from the bottle. His eyes never left her face.
‘You know I’m not. You know women find you gorgeous.’
He shrugged, looking at the table. ‘If you say so.’
If Brienne hadn’t known any better, she could have sworn he was embarrassed. Even so, Jaime would never do anything as pathetic as blush.
It was a fact. Women swooned at him. It would be annoying if it wasn’t so understandable. Jaime could have pretty much any woman he wanted. But the curious thing was, Brienne had never seen him with anyone. She knew he had a past and that it had left him pretty damaged. He’d come right out and told her. It had been quite early in their partnership; late one night and they were the only two in the office and he’d been distracted by his phone all evening. Brienne, sick of being the only one doing any real work, had come right out and told him to just sod off and just go see the woman he was obviously texting. That’s when he told her, right then, with no preamble. He had a twin sister and after their mum died when they were just kids, they’d gotten close and by the time they were teenagers it had become sexual He’d broken it off when they were 17, but it had left him really uninterested in any sort of romantic relationship. He hadn’t been texting a woman but his younger brother Tyrion, who had been acting interference between the twins for over a year, since their sister had married a multi-millionaire who she clearly didn’t love.
Thinking back, Brienne suspects that Jaime told her about his sordid past because he was trying to steer her away from him. She’d thought her crush, as it was then, hadn’t been obvious. But clearly Jaime, who knew an infatuated woman when he saw one, could read the signs. It had worked, for a time. Brienne had been shocked, of course, and just a little bit nauseated. But after a few weeks she’d be lying to herself if she admitted that his honesty hadn’t made her like him even more.
Fuck it. She would prove to Jaime how much women wanted him. She didn’t know why, maybe it was a pathetic attempt to make him as uncomfortable as he seemed to make her. She stood up, jostling Jaime’s knee as she rose.
‘Just heading to the bathroom. Won’t be long.’
Jaime nodded and took out his phone.
Brienne made her way through the crowd of people. She passed a striking, golden-blonde 20-something nymph, probably a student at the community college a few blocks down. She was leaning against the bar in a way that accentuated her voluptuous breasts, and she had eyes only for Jaime. She was sipping from a fluoro-coloured cocktail with way too many umbrellas, a dreamy smile on her face. Brienne stood behind the woman and whistled, short and sharp, just like she did in the newsroom when she wanted to get Jaime’s attention. It worked and he looked up from his phone. It only took a moment for his eyes to find Brienne’s and he furrowed his brow in bemusement.
Brienne stood behind the younger blonde woman and mimed sipping through the straw, copying her dreamy stare in Jaime’s direction, adding a little extra pout for emphasis.
At first Jaime was perplexed, but then he realised what Brienne was doing. Then he smiled. A wide, toothy grin that make Brienne laugh right there with him, their eyes locked across the crowded bar. He shook his head, not prepared to admit that Brienne had been right. That this woman, like most women, thought Jaime was gorgeous.
But Brienne wasn’t finished and she found another target amongst the female barflies. This woman was slightly older, perhaps in her early thirties – still younger than Jaime by at least half a decade – with long brown wavy hair. She was stunning in a figure-hugging jade green dress. If she had to guess, Brienne would say that she was waiting for a date. And had been for a while, if the number of times she looked at her watch meant anything. She had her mascara out and was looking at herself in a compact mirror. Brienne moved a couple of steps and stood behind her, mimicking her actions, exaggerating her preening. She wasn’t looking at Jaime but when it was clear that she was happy with her looks, she stood up, flattened her dress and walked directly towards Jaime’s table. She was just three steps away when a man, her date, Brienne supposed, intercepted her and pulled her into a searing kiss.
Jaime had been watching with wide-eyed, comical horror, sagging with relief when he was in the clear. Brienne left Jaime laughing and went to the bathroom, returning with a bowl of peanuts she’d swiped from the bas as she passed. ‘II cannot believe you did that,’ Jaime chuckled, eyes shining with mirth.
They sat in silence for a few moments. He was peeling the label off his bottle of beer, rolling it between his fingers. ‘Well, what do you think?’
She looked up into his face. 'About what?'
‘This,’ he gestured at the bar, ‘All of it.’
‘All of what?’ Brienne answered, not sure what Jaime was getting at.
‘Do you think I’m gorgeous?’ Brienne couldn’t believe he’d just come out and asked. He was smiling, but Brienne could see the tension in his shoulders. She knew he was vain, but something was telling her that he wasn’t really asking about his looks.
She stared at him for a few beats. ‘Lannister, you’re the best journalist I’ve ever worked with.’
He smiled, ‘I know that. I told you that the day I hired you.’ Then he let out a long, shaky breath. ‘That’s not what I asked. Don’t be shy, I can take whatever you’ve got to say.’
Brienne cleared her throat. ‘As I was saying, before I was interrupted, ‘I think you’re arrogant and you can be dismissive of those who aren’t as smart as you. But you’re loyal and brave and not afraid of getting your hands dirty to get a lead.’
He was staring at her now, and Brienne knew she had his rapt attention. Taking a deep breath, she continued, ‘You are confident but don’t really seem to know what you want. You have a fridge full of fancy wine, but I’ve never seen you drink it with anyone but your brother or me.’
‘Because I know you’re a famous lush, Tarth.’ Jaime tried to joke. Brienne ignored the tease and continued.
‘You say the most horrible things one minute, and then the next you make me speechless. You risked your life for me, even though we hardly knew each other then. You work with me on the flimsiest of leads, because you trust me. It took me a while, but I trust you as well. With my life. You’re the best man I know. Well, perhaps second best. After my father.’
At some point Jaime had broken eye contact and looked down at his hands resting on the table. He coughed and straightened his back. Brienne could see him getting ready to say something. But she had one more thing to say.
‘Trust me Lannister, your looks are the least interesting thing about you, too.’
It was probably as close to a declaration of her feelings as Brienne was ever going to make. But she could see Jaime got the gist of what she was trying to say. Not long ago she would have been mortified of her boldness, but she was sick of feeling so wired around him all the time. She knew, no matter what happened next, that they trusted and respected each other. And would keep trusting and respecting.
‘Tarth, walk me home?’ Jaime asked, out of the blue. His tone was light, but there is vulnerability behind his eyes.
‘What? Why? I haven’t even fini- ‘
Brienne gasped as Jaime stood up suddenly and yanked her to her feet. Gods, he was strong. She bumped into him, flush against his hard chest. He put his hand on her waist, holding her there.
‘Brienne.’
He’d only ever used her first name one other time, when he first woke up, groggy and sore, in the hospital room after his accident.
‘Yes, Jaime,’ she said in mock serious voice, jutting out her chin and creasing her eyebrows.
But Jaime wasn’t smiling. He leaned in. His breath skated over her cheek and his warm lips brushed the corner of her mouth, a feather-light touch on her skin as he spoke.
‘Brienne. Walk. Me. Home.’ He gently squeezed her hip with his long fingers to accentuate each word. They were hot on her skin, just above the waistband of her jeans. He was asking, not pleading, but Brienne could see the longing in his eyes. She looked him up and down, hardly believing what he was saying.
‘Why?’, she teased, knowing full well what he was asking.
He smiled when Brienne held his hand and led him out of the bar.
‘Maybe’, she continued, turning to look at him and wrapping his scarf around his neck against the cool night air, ‘we can find something interesting to do together.’