Work Text:
Jaime wakes to a blinding light.
At first, he thinks it must be dragonfire, white hot and crackling through the crumbling castle walls to finish off what little Euron Greyjoy and the dungeon ceiling had left of him.
But he is not in the bowels of the Red Keep, crushed beneath the bricks. He is not in the Keep at all.
He is standing in an endless expanse of harsh, bright nothing, feeling nothing. Not the wounds in his gut and side, not the weight of the ceiling, not the strange and overwhelming relief that washed over him in the seconds before the darkness swallowed him.
Nothing.
There is only silence and emptiness and light.
It is the last thing he expected to find on the other side of death.
This can’t be anything else, Jaime reasons, even though his body is still here, battered and covered in dust, solid as it ever was. If it were life, there would be pain, and if it were a dream, he would have two godsdamned hands.
Here, he huffs down at the infernal golden one still fixed at the end of his arm. That he has not become whole again in the afterlife seems like a cruel joke.
Unless the light is merely an illusion, and he is in one of the seven hells after all.
“You most certainly are not,” comes a melodic voice, so boundless it seems as though the light itself is speaking.
Jaime looks around, surprised but unafraid. He has seen too much horror in life to fear something so paltry as a disembodied voice, even if it can read his thoughts.
“Where, then?” he calls back.
“It is not where that matters, Jaime.”
The voice brims with a raw, gentle fondness that reminds him of Brienne, even though he knows it can’t possibly be hers. It is pitched much too high, and she is not dead—she can’t be dead. He would fight the Stranger itself to make sure of it.
But only one other person has ever said his name that way.
Even as he thinks it, the radiant abyss begins to shift around him, softening, crystallizing, turning gold and green and blue until it isn’t light at all, but solid. Familiar. Home.
Jaime hasn’t surveyed the Sunset Sea from this vista in years, but he knows it instantly, from the scraggly clump of trees clinging to the edge of the cliff to the distant thunder of waves far below his feet. He turns toward the south, looking for the rise of Casterly Rock’s ringed stone walls, but the woman standing serenely beside him captures his attention instead.
Her generous golden hair and regal bearing remind him strikingly of Cersei, but she doesn’t feel like Cersei. She feels like someone he has spent a lifetime trying to remember.
As though she can sense his gaze, the woman looks away from the panorama before them and fixes her clear green eyes on his face. She ripples slightly as she moves—luminous and faintly blurred around the edges, like a reflection in a still pool—and Jaime worries she might dissolve back into the light before he can speak to her.
But then she reaches for him, and the touch of her hand on his face is as warm and steady as any he has ever felt.
“Mother?” he asks thickly, and she smiles.
It is his smile. He had forgotten that.
“Hello, Jaime,” she says, pressing her palm against his bearded cheek.
Tears prick his eyes. “Is this real?”
Her smile turns knowing and indulgent, and that he remembers. “Does it matter?”
Yes, he wants to say, though he doesn’t know why.
“Am I dead?” he asks instead.
“Yes.” She strokes her thumb across his jaw before lowering her hand. “And no.”
Jaime frowns. In his experience, mortality is not exactly an ambiguous state.
“I can’t be both.”
“You can,” his mother insists. “You are.”
“I don’t understand.” He shakes his head. “Am I being punished?”
He won’t argue against the justice of it, but this—she—seems like a particularly harsh way to mete it out, even for the gods. And they have never been overly kind to him.
“Quite the opposite,” she assures him. “You are being given a remarkable chance.”
“What kind of chance?”
“The chance to go back.”
Dread prickles in Jaime’s gut. “Back?”
“Yes, Jaime. Back.” She studies him, her gaze unsettlingly incisive. “That is, unless you don’t want to go.”
“I—” Jaime swallows.
Mostly, he does not.
He never planned on getting out of King’s Landing alive. He knew the price of his sins and made peace with paying it before he rode out of Winterfell. At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. The just thing. Death—or whatever the hells this is—has not changed his mind.
His heart, on the other hand, whispers temptingly of something he is too afraid to name.
Jaime clamps his teeth together, trying to ignore it, to will the unbidden longing away. It is pointless now, after what he’s done.
And even if it wasn’t, even if he did go back, it would only be a matter of time before he was executed by the Dragon Queen and her great black beast. He doesn’t fear it, precisely, but he can’t say the prospect of dying again strikes him as an attractive experience, especially when the people who care for him most would be forced to watch it happen. Nothing—not even the promise of seeing them again—is worth subjecting them to that.
He’s seen men burned alive, and it is not a fate he wants for any of them.
“That will not be your fate,” his mother says, solemn and sure. “Or theirs.”
Jaime flinches at the invasion of his thoughts. “Of course it would be.”
Daenerys Targaryen would never let him live. Not again.
“No, it won’t. Not if you make the right choice.”
“I don’t imagine I’ll have many choices when they drag me bleeding from the rubble of the Keep.” He scrubs his hand along his jaw. “Going back won’t undo what I’ve done.”
“Ah.” His mother raises a long, pale finger. “But you will not be returning to your life where you left it. You will go back to a time before, when you made a choice that set you on this path. A choice you will be allowed to change.”
Jaime takes a half step back, his eyes stretching wide. It sounds utterly impossible, like a vicious jest or a mummer’s farce, yet somehow it is not believing her that is the difficulty—but believing it might matter.
“Why?” he asks roughly.
She hitches her shoulders, offering an enigmatic smile so brief he almost misses it. “Because none of this was supposed to happen. You were meant for a different path. A better path. You all were.”
“If that’s true, why in the seven hells would the gods send me back? Surely there’s someone better.”
“No, Jaime. There is only you,” she says with another faint, shrewd curve of her lips. “You have been chosen precisely because you are honorable enough to question your worthiness. And because you are strong enough to make a different choice.”
Mutely, Jaime shakes his head.
He has made countless choices throughout his life, but only a few dozen truly defined it. Despite the consequences, he can think of a handful he would not change—kneeling before Ser Arthur Dayne, watching Aerys’s blood pool on the floor of the throne room, telling a lie about an island full of sapphires, leaping down into the bear pit at Harrenhal, unlocking the door of his brother’s cell, riding north to face the army of the dead. But the rest…
He thinks of Cersei, of his father, of Joffrey and Tommen and Myrcella. Of Rhaella’s cries and Rickard Stark suspended from the rafters. Of the smoking ruin of Baelor. Of a tower window and his hand on Bran Stark’s chest.
He has certainly paid for some of them, one way or another, and the most egregious… well, those are the ones he died for. Here, there is an emptiness where their weight once threatened to crush him. If he goes back, he will have to carry it again.
Besides, how could changing a single moment make any difference in the face of so much wrong? How could it do any good at all?
His mother’s fingers close around his forearm.
“It will,” she says, and Jaime is too desperate to be annoyed by the way she keeps prying inside his head.
“How?” he rasps.
“In many ways, for a great many reasons.” She tilts her head, staring earnestly into his eyes. “For the good you could do in the world. For the suffering you could prevent and the lives you could save. For the life you could have, Jaime. For love.” Her fingers squeeze him tighter. “For her.”
Jaime’s blood runs cold. He should have expected it—she was mother to them both, after all—but he resents it, just the same.
“I lived one life for Cersei,” he snaps, shaking off her hand. “I won’t give her another.”
His mother’s eyes glimmer with sadness as she considers him. “I’m not talking about your sister.”
An ache blossoms in the center of his chest.
Brienne.
The pain grows sharper, burrows deeper, but Jaime doesn’t resist. It is, after all, a penance he deserves.
“I’m not the man she thinks I am,” he says quietly.
His mother arches her golden eyebrows. “Yes, actually, you are.”
Jaime huffs. “You don’t understand.” She may be his mother, but she doesn’t know him. Not as he is now. “I’ve done terrible things.”
“You have,” she acknowledges, unflinching. “That doesn’t make you evil.”
“It doesn’t make me a hero, either,” he bites back.
“No, it doesn’t.” She shakes her head, and her long hair glitters like sunlight on the surface of the sea. “It just makes you a man. A man who is capable of horrible and wonderful things. Brienne of Tarth knows that better than anyone.”
“She thinks she does, but—” Jaime’s throat goes tight, cutting off his words.
His mother sighs. “You believe because she loves you that she does not see you clearly, but you’re wrong. She knows you, Jaime. In fact, I suspect she sees you more clearly than you see yourself.”
Jaime sucks in a rush of the cool sea air, but it doesn’t quell the burning beneath his ribs.
Love.
Brienne never named it so, but that does not mean he hadn’t felt it—or returned it, though he was never brave enough to tell her.
It is not his biggest regret—he has made too many mistakes for that—but it is one of them.
“She deserves better.”
“Then go back and give it to her,” his mother says, fixing him with a stern look that reminds him of his childhood. “Go back and give it to yourself. You want to. I can feel it.”
Jaime folds his lips into a tight, thin line. He does want to. He can’t deny it, even though part of him knows he should.
Because he is tired of rules and vows and failing to live up to the expectations of everyone else. He is tired of the certainty that, no matter how much good he does, it will never be quite enough to wash away the bad. He is tired of how difficult it is to try. How frustrating it is to fail.
But he is not tired of her.
“Yes,” he murmurs, looking down at his boots, still coated in red dust from the Keep. “I want to, but it’s not that simple.”
The image of Brienne standing in that courtyard with tears streaming down her face, begging him to stay, is etched into his very soul. She loved him—he loved her—and still he left her, because he could not see another way. Even if he returns to a time when it has not yet happened, will never happen... He will know what he is capable of doing, how much pain he can inflict. He will know he can break her heart.
He doesn’t want to do it again.
“Then don’t,” she says, once again answering the words he has not said. “It will not be easy, I grant you, but you already know that. If you go back, it will be difficult, in all the ways you imagine and in some you can’t yet fathom. That doesn’t mean it is not worth it.”
Jaime’s gaze drifts away from his feet and out toward the endless blue stretch of the sea as he weighs the truth of her words.
His mother moves beside him, coming so close her shoulder brushes his upper arm. “Even as a child, you were led by your heart, Jaime. It has made you reckless and foolish and terribly brave. In this instance, it may also make you happy, if you are wise enough to heed it.”
Jaime squeezes his eyes shut, blocking out the sea and sky—everything but the swirl of feelings churning inside him.
He thinks again of Bran Stark, of his children, of King’s Landing aflame and the swarming army of the dead, of the life he could have and the things he could do differently. But mostly he thinks of Brienne.
Somehow, when he opens his eyes, his decision is made.
“How far back will I go?” he asks, turning to meet his mother’s gaze.
If he must go far enough that he risks losing her, Jaime isn’t sure he will be able to force himself, no matter what wrongs it might undo. A life without Brienne does not feel like a life worth living.
“Not so far as that,” she replies. “A few years.”
Jaime bobs his head, wanting more but aware he is unlikely to get it. If the gods wanted him to know, his mother would have already told him. “Will I remember?”
Her green eyes soften. “Do you want to remember?”
The worst fragments of his life flash inside his head—the death, the cruelty, the heartbreak—and he is tempted to say no. Then he recalls Brienne kneeling before him, fighting at his back, unlacing her shirt in the firelight.
“Yes.”
His mother smiles. “I hoped you would say that.” Once again, she reaches for his face. “Remember that it may start with one choice, but it need not be only one.” Her fingertips graze his brow, his cheek, his chin. “Be happy this time, Jaime. Be the man you are.”
Then, in a blinding burst of light, she is gone, along with the cliffs and the sea and the Rock.
For a terrifying moment, Jaime is alone in the dark, until suddenly, he feels it—solid ground beneath his feet, air inside his lungs, sunlight on his face.
Life.
It is so acute and overwhelming that Jaime nearly staggers when the world swims into focus, but he is anchored by the sight of her flaxen head.
Brienne sits astride her horse, riding away from him, her armor fresh-forged and gleaming a brilliant blue in the sun, with Podrick trailing after her on a mount of his own.
Jaime’s feet move him forward, a few slow steps he is powerless to stop because somehow he has already taken them. He remembers taking them, and a chill of recognition floods his limbs.
In that instant, he knows where he is—when he is—and what he must do. What he should have done. What he wanted to do with a ferocity he hadn’t understood when he lived through this moment the first time.
He thought, all those years ago, that the impulse was some sort of renewed compulsion of honor. And perhaps, in a way, it was.
But it was also love.
It is love.
Jaime knows it the second she turns, looking over her shoulder like she is leaving her beating heart on the road behind her, and his own heart lurches after her.
He remembers that, too, and it cements his certainty that this feeling has not traveled back here with him. It lived inside him, even then, in this past that is now his present—small and sacred and secret even from himself.
The realization sends a thrill of possibility coursing through him, a hope that raises goosebumps on his skin.
Perhaps, this time, they can have more than a mere few weeks in the frozen fucking north. Perhaps they can be happy.
Perhaps they can rescue Sansa Stark and spare her the horrors she endured in his future. Perhaps they can save Myrcella and Tommen, and he’ll have time to be the father he should have been—the father they deserved. Perhaps the Lannister army won’t be burned to cinders before his eyes, nor the citizens of King’s Landing sacrificed to a war between two mad queens.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is all destined to happen again, no matter what he does. Perhaps he will just make different mistakes this time.
All Jaime knows for sure is that he will not start with this one.
“Wait!” he shouts, and Brienne stiffens in her saddle. “Come back!”
A heartbeat passes, then another, before she wheels her mare around and canters back up the road.
“You forgot something,” he says lightly, as soon as she reaches him.
Brienne makes a familiar face, one of irritated exasperation he now knows conceals something much softer underneath. “I’m quite certain I did not. There can’t possibly be anything left for you to give me.”
Not yet, he thinks.
Then Jaime sees her eyebrows spike and realizes he’s said the words out loud.
There are other things he longs to say, too, but he knows she isn’t ready to hear them. She will be, though, if he does this right.
And the best way to do that with her is to get straight to the point.
So he does.
“I’m coming with you.”
Brienne’s lips part, and her hands go slack around the reins. “You—you can’t.”
“I can.”
“You can’t,” she insists. “The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard can’t just abandon his—”
“Tommen has other men far better suited to protecting him than I will ever be,” Jaime cuts in, holding up his golden hand. “I’ll do the kingdom much more good out there, looking for Sansa Stark, than I ever will inside the walls of this city.”
He doesn’t know if that will prove to be true, but it can hardly turn out any worse than it did the last time.
Brienne swallows, and her gaze skitters toward the ground. “What about the queen?”
Jaime feels the old tug of her in his gut, but it is weaker now, hollow. He finds it surprisingly easy to ignore. “Cersei needs to learn to clean up her own messes. Gods know I’m done doing it.”
“Are you?” Brienne murmurs, and Jaime can tell by the sudden tightening of her jaw, the mottled pink spreading across her cheeks, that she meant to keep the question to herself.
“Yes,” he says evenly. “I already told you, I’m coming with you. I mean it.”
“I believe you.” A crease forms between her brows. “But...why?”
He can’t tell her the truth of it, not yet, nor can he drag her down from her horse and kiss her in front of Bronn and Pod and anyone else close enough to see. Even if they were alone, this would not be the right moment, no matter how much he’s missed her heat and taste and fervor.
So Jaime settles for placing his good hand gently on her leg, just above the leather of her boot.
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he says, staring up into her bottomless blue eyes. “For Lady Catelyn. And for you.”
She inhales sharply, and Jaime watches a fragile, astonished hope tremble across her face.
“All I ask is that you delay the start of our quest for one more day.” He sweeps his thumb back and forth across the fabric of her breeches, never once taking his eyes from hers. “I’ll saddle my horse now, if you demand it, but I would appreciate a little time to get my affairs in order.”
It is strange to think that his father and his sister are both here, alive, but Jaime has no plans to negotiate with either of them—or even to see them. He does, however, need to see Tyrion, to ensure that his brother’s life is not sacrificed for the sake of his different choice.
Brienne gives him a shaky, wordless nod, and Jaime feels the same rush of purpose, of rightness, that he did the moment he knighted her. This is it, he knows. This is the path he’s meant to take.
And so, the next morning, when Brienne departs King’s Landing, it is not by horse, but by ship, with four traveling companions instead of one.
The ship will dock at Gulltown before crossing the Narrow Sea, and if the winds and roads treat them kindly, Jaime expects that he and Brienne will arrive at the Bloody Gate in a moon’s turn or two. His brother and Bronn will be safely ensconced in Pentos long before that. And Podrick… well, the lad will have to choose for himself.
So much has changed already that Jaime can no longer anticipate what will happen after that, though he hopes for a great many things. He hopes for a better world. He hopes for happiness. For her happiness. For love, open and unafraid.
For now, though, Jaime is content just to be here, watching Brienne as she stands on the deck, looking resolutely toward the north with the sea breeze ruffling her hair.
To stand beside her.
To stay.