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The Long Night was over. His long night had just begun.
Jaime wasn’t sure what he was doing in the midst of the revelry. Leaned against a corner of the great hall, sipping at a weak ale that tasted more of horse piss than true drink- which he unfortunately knew by experience- and speaking to absolutely nobody was not exactly his idea of celebrating their great victory.
The hall was filled with merriment, packed with bodies, twirling and drinking and laughing. A makeshift band had made camp on the dias, a ragtag group of smallfolk and nobles and soldiers alike. They strummed and hummed with zeal, despite many missing fingers, skin plastered in bandages, and tips of noses blackened with frostbites past. But for the first time in many moons there would be no freezing, and so they played a jaunty tune about some springtime maid and her summer lover, the notes thrumming through the walls of Winterfell like the water from the springs below.
The Lady Sansa was among them, hands fluttering across her high harp, Tully hair shining under the lantern light. Her sister was about too, likely underfoot the dancers in the center of the floor.
The Starks would never have love for him, but the more time that he had passed escorting the Stark girls home alongside Brienne and Pod, or fighting the frostbite alongside their half-brother during the night that would span years, the more they had developed a grudging respect between them. He walked their halls, dined with their northmen, slept curled next to Sansa’s most trusted protector. Occasionally, he could hold a conversation with the elder Starks, the two sisters, wherein they seemed near amiable.
But Brandon Stark, fifteen and bound to a chair affixed with two great wheels, was a harsh reminder of what could never be. The little lord was wise, adventurous and kind, but he would never be the knight he had dreamed.
Jaime had stolen that from his hands, and could still remember the way the boy’s voice had wobbled when he told them his age, seven.
During the Long Night, guilt could kill quicker than swords, tearing a man apart from within and leaving him just as dead as the wights who would take his body afterward.
Jaime Lannister was no stranger to guilt, and it was perhaps for that reason he could live with himself at all, after everything.
He took another gulp of ale, grimacing as the flavor hit his tongue. So bitter for what should have been a sweet night, the Others fallen, the remainders of their undead army driven back into the mountains beyond where the Wall once stood. It was near finished, the last five years of endless battle, darkness without end, cold and hunger and blood against snow.
And yet, the ale was bitter.
Jaime had been stuck with the man they’d named Dolorous Edd in the Wolfswood once. The scouting mission gone-wrong had lasted a mere two weeks, but he would be hearing the dour man’s voice in his head for years.
Just my luck, he could hear Edd saying, I survive the Long Night only to find the ale afterwards is worse than all of it put together.
Edd was over with the Night’s Men, the ragtag group of Night’s Watch members who had come of age with the war. Jon Snow had been their leader, and they had grown unbearable throughout the Long Night, moving in a clump of black, the less dour ones chattering away as if it were a day of sparring in the yards instead of an apocalyptic battle for their humanity and lives.
They were even together now, bunched together like a murder of crows. Though down a number of bodies and notably Jon Snow-less, there was still a pang of bitter jealousy on Jaime’s tongue. It had been a long time since he had moved with such ease through a space as they did through the crowds, such sureness in their belonging and faith in their companions.
Jaime was just beginning to consider holing up in his room for the night like the bitter old man he was starting to feel like, glaring at a group of younger, better men from the far side of the hall.
And he would have, had they not just then been forced to scatter when someone very large, very clumsy, and very blue stumbled into them.
Brienne! Jaime could not stop his feet if he wanted to, immediately propelling him in her direction. He wasn’t sure if it was an instinct he had developed over the years fighting with her against wights, Others and snowdrifts the size of mammoths, or something ingrained in him far earlier.
Pushing through the crowd, he was jostled this way and that, leaving feeling like a green squire in the yards for the first time. Somewhere along the way he had lost his ale, but he couldn’t find it in him to mourn it. He was sure Tyrion had sniffed out something better anyway, if only he could find him.
Brienne was apologizing profusely to the Night’s Men when he reached her, hands clasped together as if she could herself from causing any more chaos.
“Brienne!” He called, and wondered when saying her name had turned into a prayer.
Someone, (and he would put money on Lady Sansa) had tied her hair into a braided updo. No small feat. Brienne’s hair had never been more than thin and flat at best, and the years of malnourishment had taken their toll. Still, with Sansa’s skill and a plethora of pins he suspected it had looked quite nice at the beginning of the fête. After hours of celebration, however, Brienne’s straw-blonde strands had begun to escape their confines, sticking from her head at odd angles. She looked not unlike a puff-fish from the Summer Isles.
She whipped around with no small amount of flare, catching her skirts in her hands.
“Jaime!” Her eyes lit up, and for a moment he was stunned solid, stopped dead in his tracks. A stray dancer slammed into his back, muttering curses. He did not budge.
There was something so bright and beautiful in her eyes that refused to be snuffed out, and that alone had remained unchanged in the years since he’d met her. Wide and innocent, despite all she’d seen, blue but alive, still enchanting despite the years spent duelling an endless stream of blue eyed monsters. None could match her, in hue or in feeling.
“Jaime,” she said again, blushing red to the temples despite already being colored a splotchy pink. “Jaime, isn’t it wonderful? Like all the songs.”
He stopped in front of her, grinning at the stars in her eyes and the sway of her body. She was wearing the dress he’d had made for her all those years ago, and though it hung off her frame looser than it did then, the blue looked as well on her now as ever.
“And were you blind drunk in all the songs as well, Wench?”
Brienne frowned, the puckered scar on her cheek pulled with the downturn of her mouth. “My name is Brienne.”
Gods, didn’t he know it.
“Ah yes, the honorable Brienne of Tarth,” he laughed, “I forget myself, my lady. Forgive an old man and his memory.”
She rolled her eyes, hands still fisted in her skirts. “You are not yet forty, Jaime.”
“And you not yet six-and-twenty. I’d say I’m old enough to you.”
“I am no child,” Brienne glowered, her expression a rather convincing impression of the tallest, most disgruntled child Jaime had ever seen.
“You are not,” he agreed, “but your case is not aided by that horrendous pout.”
She punched him in the shoulder, and the half-smile on her face was so sweet that it almost soothed the pain. It lanced through his left arm like lightning, and he took a moment to thank the gods he was no longer her enemy. The stubborn wench knew not her own strength.
“If I did not know better, I would say that you do not wish me to reach forty at all.”
Brienne sighed, sounding for a moment like any other young maiden. “I do wish it. I wish for us all to grow old and round and joyous. For the summers to last an eternity, like the songs. It’s always summer in the songs.”
“I can’t say I know many,” Jaime replied, clutching her elbow to stabilize her as a dancer brushed by, “My father only ever taught me one.”
She stumbled closer to him. He could smell the sweet wine on her breath, see every freckle smattered across her face and down the side of her neck. They disappeared beneath layers of blue fabric, but he knew they went further, sprinkled across the pale expanse of her skin like stars.
The band changed their tune. Jaime vaguely recognized the bawdy rendition of a song that some now-dead singer had penned during the Long Night, perhaps hoping his punchy melody could manifest the return of the sun. He had been sorely mistaken.
“You’ll have to sing me new ones,” he whispered, hyper-aware of the way Brienne’s breath hitched at his words.
Her eyes were faraway, but he could almost feel her heart beating like a hummingbird against her twice-broken ribs. He supposed he had his pretty face to thank for that. She was, under all the armor, still another maiden, and he had once looked the perfect, golden knight.
Not that she’d ever seen him in that state. Brienne had always caught him at his worst, imprisoned, infected and dying, kneeling for a dead woman’s vengeance. Brienne had seen everything and still stubbornly insisted on his honor. By some miracle she had pulled it from him after all.
But soon, she would leave him. She would go back to her island, the island she was the sole lady of now. She would rule wisely and fairly, with the same stupid stubborn honor she’d maintained through everything. Brienne the perfect knight would win tourney glory, become the best sword in the realm. Brienne of Tarth would marry a young knight who might want her, might love her, even, for Brienne was difficult to like and easy to love. She might love him back, in that unselfish way she did. Brienne was good at giving love, and maybe someday she’d find someone who wasn’t good at taking.
Jaime was not that man. Jaime would go… somewhere. He would leave what was left of the Rock to his brother, who was always better suited for it anyway. Perhaps the skills he’d built during the Long Night with his left hand would serve him fairly in tourneys, and he could live the rest of his life as a hedge knight. He could die with a sword in hand, fighting bandits on Glory, or even protecting someone, and one person in the realm would not remember him as the Kingslayer. He’d write Brienne letters in his sprawling, ugly script, unable to let go, and one day they would simply stop coming, and she’d know. Maybe she’d even shed a tear for her partner in arms, her friend, Ser Jaime.
Jaime was a greying white knight, and Brienne’s time in the sun had just begun.
But she was here now, in front of him, standing a few excruciating inches taller, and he could be selfish for one night.
One night, to make up for the longest one.
He held out his hand. “The music’s still playing. Care for a dance, my lady?”
She colored further. “Ser Jaime—”
“Back to Ser now, are we, Wench?”
“Jaime,” she hissed, “You can’t— Everyone will stare.”
He laughed sharply. “Everyone is just glad to be alive. Trust me, sweetling, they’ll pay no mind to the cripple and the lady knight.”
“You mean Goldenhand and Brienne the Beauty.”
“I do not.” He scuffed his right boot along the floor, the sole leaving no marks on the already tread-worn stone. “And I regret ever telling you of that foolish fantasy.”
She softened. “Foolish? You are a hero of the Long Night.”
“And a villain of all the rest. Are we going to dance or not?”
Brienne regarded him carefully for a moment, brow furrowed. The wheel turning in her brain was almost audible, slowed by the drink and the clamor. Jaime was beginning to think she might refuse him after all, and was mourning the loss of additional pride he’d not known he still had when she finally clasped her hand over his.
“One dance.”
Her hand was cautious and calloused, yet gentle. He entwined their fingers and pulled her close, delighting in the girlish squeak of surprise she let out.
“I don’t know about that,” he grinned, wrapping his right arm around her waist, “Us Lannisters are greedy, you know.”
Brienne huffed a laugh, her wine-tinged breath hot on his face. “Among other things.”
“Other things...” Jaime quirked an eyebrow. “And what would those things be?”
He took a step forward with his right foot, and was pleased to find she stepped back with her left instinctively. They began their dance.
“Infuriating,” Brienne said, setting her other arm atop his shoulder. “unbearable.”
He spun her out suddenly, and she let out a bright burst of laughter. The drink had her unbalanced, unguarded in a way he’d rarely seen her. A warmth bloomed in his chest at the sight of her lopsided smile and crooked teeth.
She came back to him, taking the lead. Though the hall was packed, it seemed to him that she was the only other person in the room.
“Unbearable, you name me.” Jaime stumbled as she pressed forward, unused to following. “Yet you seem to bear me quite well, or do I not recall you carrying me from the battlefield?”
A blotchy crimson rose on her freckled cheeks. “Repayment of a debt. For the Quiet Isle.”
“All this talk of debts. Are you certain you aren’t a Lannister yourself?”
The man on the lute fluttered a high, piercing trill. Brienne’s face was similarly indecisive, shifting between a curl of disgust, and something almost akin to longing. For what, Jaime wouldn’t know.
Her indecision had given Jaime the opportunity to take back the lead. He pressed forward into her, laughing at the exasperation in her frown. They wrestled for a moment, stepping on toes and stumbling into each other.
“Watch it!” Caught up in their games, they’d crashed into a petite northern girl. She stormed off in a huff, skirts swirling around her feet with the same righteous anger.
Jaime made eye contact with his dance partner, whose horsey teeth were dug into her bottom lip in an attempt to hold back her laughter. The moment blue met green they folded, Brienne plunging her face into his shoulder to muffle her giggle. He laughed into her hair, marvelling at the curve of her against him and the unladylike snorts that accompanied her unabashed joy.
“I’d make a poor Lannister,” Brienne concluded finally, lifting her head. Her eyes twinkled in the lamplight, partially obscured by bits of hair that had fallen from her updo.
“Ah,” said Jaime, untangling his hand from hers so that he could comb the strands back from her face. “that makes two of us.”
Brienne hummed in response, leaning her cheek into his palm seemingly unconsciously. “You’re not so bad. You helped me drain pus from my leg.”
“Is that all it takes to please the great Lady Brienne? In that case, I should hope to see an island and a new lordship in my future.”
Her broad hand fisted into his sleeve. All at once, the constant cold seemed to seep back into the hall. “Do not jest of that, Jaime. Not you.”
A gaping pit opened in his stomach, warm blood pouring into it until his veins were ice. The music seemed grating now, obnoxious and out of tune, and the revelers stepped off-beat.
For a moment, every sound was too loud, the hall bearing down on him. Brienne was so close it made his skin crawl. There was a rushing in his head louder than the Trident and ten times as vicious.
The next he was far away.
“In that case,” he heard himself say, “I shall consider our dance finished. Goodnight, my lady.”
He saw himself untangle himself from her, barely registering the confusion and hurt on her face. He saw himself push back through the crowd, and felt nothing when his feet were tread on or elbows met his sides.
He watched the body he was inside carry itself out into the snow. The bed of white was the lowest it had been in five years and yet still reached past his knees, soaking down to his smallclothes.
He did not feel the cold.
⚔
Brienne was so mind-numbingly bored she almost missed the Long Night.
She paced the battlements daily, watching people come and go through Winterfell’s gates, tiny figures on the blanket of white. It was a cold spring, but a spring nonetheless according to the maesters. With any luck, it would melt into summer sooner than later. Food was still scarce, and the bed of snow that had been their constant companion for the last years did nothing to help.
But until that day came, there was a great waiting in the North.
At least during the Long Night she had had a purpose, dueling wights and keeping watch. Holding the blue fire of Oathkeeper high above her head, watching an Other shatter before the valyrian steel. It was painful and cold and never ending, but it was important.
Oh, there was work to be done still, endless rebuilding and recovering, work she’d have been happy to be any part of.
But that work was outside Winterfell, for the great celebration of its restoration had come and gone.
Brienne could not bring herself to leave Winterfell. Not yet. Pod, Sansa, and Arya were here, as well as the sweet Bran Stark, Robin Arryn and Samwell Tarly, friends she had made before and during the five years of darkness.
Jaime was here as well. She was less sure what they were to each other.
Five years with scarce a moment apart, and it still felt sometimes as if they were strangers. They had shared the same bedroll, fought back to back, wielded matching swords. They had patched each other’s wounds, bandaged the countless scars they both carried now. Jaime had seen so much of her, and her all of him, and yet…
She was a brother to him, she thought most of the time. His sparring partner, his favorite person to bother when she absolutely had something better to do, the person he clapped on the shoulder and shared jokes with and would part from when the night was done.
But other times he’d behave so oddly that it hurt to think of. He’d tangle himself with her in the night, or look at her in a funny way that made her heart do cartwheels in her chest, or…
Or ask her to dance.
She’d been dizzy from the wine that night, that had to have been the reason she’d gone along so far. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, they’d been through too much for her to suspect him of making a jape of her now.
But it was one thing to know you were in love with someone, and a whole other thing to let yourself entertain the concept that they may love you back.
It would do no good for her to get attached to the idea of Jaime loving her. In the end, he would always return to his rock, and she to her island in the opposite sea.
She supposed they would see each other only once every few years with luck, and the thought of it birthed an ache deep in her bones.
Jaime, come back for me, she had whispered in her fever all those years ago, back when the only undead they’d faced was the shade of Lady Catelyn.
He had to have heard her say it at some point during his vigil at her bedside on the Quiet Isle. Brienne had never gotten a response, but sometimes she recalled a pleasant dream in which he squeezed her hand and whispered low in her ear and said: I never left.
But those were the fantasies of a different girl. A girl who calmed the ones who could not fight within the walls while the battle raged, like Sansa. A girl who had gentle hands and soft words, and a quiet woman’s strength. A girl who could grace a hall and charm a crowd.
Even the type of girl Arya was would have done. Boyish and fierce, yet compassionate. Arya who misliked dresses, but looked well in them anyway. Arya who loved loudly and without shame. Arya whose features told of a different beauty, but a beauty nonetheless. A different girl.
A girl fashioned for love if she wanted it. A girl fashioned to fit any role she chose.
But Brienne of Tarth was a woman now, and had never been that girl.
She pulled her cloak more snugly against her shoulders, wishing all at once she were armored in her dented blue plate once more, battered and broken yet familiar. It was harder for the hurt to pierce her plate.
“Brienne?”
The voice was sweet and welcome, floating above the chill and the breeze.
“Sansa,” she replied, turning to meet her friend’s gaze.
She was bundled into a thick cloak lined in fur, her hands folded in front of her and clad in matching grey gloves. Her sleeves were fitted, the cuffs covered in delicate embroidery of running wolves and leaping trout in deep blue thread. Long auburn hair was bound in white ribbons from her chin to her ribs, and she had hung thin silver pendants near the base. They clinked softly when she walked, as she was doing now.
Sansa had never feared approaching another in the way Brienne did. Sansa knew they would not run screaming.
“We’re back to tubers and pine needles,” she sighed, joining Brienne at the battlement. “We can't afford to deplete our stores further, at least not until we know when the ground will thaw. I do hope the Kingsroad clears soon. I’d do the whole Long Night over again for a lemon cake.”
“Tarth gets ships from Dorne all the time,” Brienne said, “they have the best lemons there.”
“Perhaps I’ll have to make a trip, then. We can go together, you and I, and Pod too. It’ll be just like the Vale.”
“Ser Jaime won’t be coming.”
“Won’t he?” Sansa gave Brienne a sideways glance. “He follows you like a lost pup. Gods know it’s the bane of my existence. I can hardly catch you alone.”
Brienne felt the heat creep up her neck. “Jaime and I spend plenty of time apart.”
A smile rose onto Sansa’s face, a glittering amusement in her Tully-blue eyes. “Of course. If the hours the two of you spend sulking in the wake of an argument count as plenty.”
Brienne did not know what to say to that, so she said nothing at all.
Sansa let out a huff of laughter, bright and sweet. “It’s alright, Brienne.”
Her friend had a way of looping her into the giggling, gossiping girlhood she had always been denied. With the steady stitches from her hands, Sansa threaded Brienne into the fabric, mismatched as she was. The teasing that had poked and prodded at her all her life was careful and kind in Sansa’s mouth. As if Brienne was any young girl, being courted by a handsome boy.
As if that were something that could happen to her.
Happen to her and Jaime.
“I suspect,” Brienne said slowly, marveling at the taste of the words on her tongue. They were foreignly teasing, light and airy as the lemon cakes her friend was so fond of. “This has become a remarkably entertaining mummer’s show to you.”
Sansa’s lips tipped upward, eyebrows climbing high on her forehead. “I’ll admit that your romance is of a great deal more interest to me than the castle coffers…”
She paused for a moment, drifting in thought.
“Though, a mummer’s show is fake.” The deep, roiling blue of Sansa’s eyes was turned on her, and Brienne nearly jolted back at their intensity.
“Yours is real, Brienne…”
The wind fluttered by on wings once more, the pendants clinking as if in agreement. She placed a hand atop Brienne’s, sighing. Sansa curled her fingers around Brienne’s wrist, as if trying to reassure herself she was real, and it was true.
“Before I met you, I thought the knights of song false. It seems... only fitting you have a love from the songs as well.”
From the songs. Hadn’t she said something akin to that to Jaime that night? Dizzy on wine, drunk on him. Jaime was of the songs for certain. Brienne hated the way he sparked the first note without even trying. Golden and glorious, honorable and haughty. She still had trouble fathoming his interest in her, though she could not deny her gratefulness. It seemed unconscious, the way he wove them into melodies she had no claim to. As if he weren’t aware he was doing it. As if he weren’t aware of the way he tugged long-forgotten ballads from her heartstrings. She had wanted to sing for Renly, all those years ago, but that was nothing compared to what Jaime made her feel. She had wanted to sing for Renly, but with Jaime… it was as if they were the song.
Blue is a good color on you, my lady… it goes well with your eyes.
It would please me if you would call it Oathkeeper.
I dreamed of you…
Brienne shivered.
A gust fluttered the silver pendants on Sansa’s braids, sending a chill through the air. Both girls drew their cloaks around themselves in response, perfectly in-sync.
“Come inside,” Sansa said, as if she hadn’t just taken a lense to every tattered piece of Brienne’s heart and announced her findings to the world.
“The moths have gotten at your cloak. I can patch it up, if you’d like. Not to mention Arya’s been plotting the perfect time to get me back for shoving snow down her tunic three days past. If she caught us out here I’d have an entire snowdrift down my back before I even knew she was there, the sneak.”
It was not an inaccurate assessment. Besides, pulling at the hem of her cloak had revealed the truth of Sansa’s earlier words as well. There were tiny holes decorating the faded red cloth, right above Brienne’s clumsy stitches that attached the fur lining to the once-splendid outer fabric.
Sansa looped her arm through Brienne’s. She was a tall girl, but the top of her head still barely reached Brienne’s mouth, making the angle of her arm a bit awkward. The auburn-haired girl didn’t seem to mind, though, leading them across the battlements, back towards the main hall. The hem of her dress smoothed the footprints in the snow behind them.
“I wore a Lannister cloak once, too,” she said, giving Brienne a smile that was half a grimace, “I’m only glad you seem to be having a better time of it.”
⚔
It took him five days to pin her down long enough for a conversation.
For such a large woman, she could be elusive when she wanted to. Whether she was busy training children in the yards, consulting the Starks about some tower that still let in the chill, or simply vanishing from existence the moment he wanted her, Brienne was everywhere and nowhere all at once.
The first two days he grit his teeth and bore the insult, familiar with her tendency to withdraw after every moment of vulnerability, or what she perceived as such.
By the third day, he was sick of it, and by the fourth, he was seething.
He’d never known her to run from a fight. But she was not running from one, but avoiding it altogether. Just like she had after the Quiet Isle. Just like she had after the Vale. Just like she had after the battle of the Godswood, when she had clutched him to her chest and fought off the night to bring him to the next day.
Jaime was sick of following after her. Sick of chasing her down, just to return to the very same line they always walked with no change. Sick of doing it all over again a few moons later. Sick of having her lay beside him, miles away.
He saw her again down the third floor corridor, one of the guest wings that had been converted to barracks during the war. As people had returned to their homes and their lives it had cleared out, and those remaining were assigned their own rooms semi-permanently.
Brienne’s room was around a corner and eight doors from his, nestled near a small southern stairwell that spiraled down, ending near the branch of Winterfell that connected the Great Keep and the Armory.
He was not normally up so early, but of late he could not stop tossing and turning in bed, falling into fitful sleep filled with blue eyes going dark or worse, lighting up blue again after.
Figuring he was not like to get any sleep anyway, he was debating slipping on his sword belt and practicing in the yards before they were filled with orphaned squires and green girls, eager to prove their worth with enthusiasm that was impressive at best and exhausting at worst.
That was before he heard the footsteps outside his door. They were soft, near silent, but Jaime would recognize hers anywhere. Before he knew it, there were boots on his feet and furs about his shoulders.
He swung the door open with enough force to clatter against the far wall loud enough to wake the dead, again.
“Ah,” said Jaime, eyeing the newly embroidered sun and moon along Brienne’s cloak, “I should have known I wasn’t getting that back.”
Brienne swung around, startled. He saw her tense, hand jumping to her waist for a sword that wasn’t there. He couldn’t help the surge of pride that rushed through him when they locked eyes across the hall, seeing her relax at the sight of him.
The gray light brushed Brienne’s pale skin, illuminating the gooseflesh of her wrists. Judging by her guileless eyes, she’d not anticipated running into him, evidently hoping he was fast asleep at the early hour.
He was accustomed to seeing her flush a delightful red at his teasing, but this time Brienne only gave him a tight smile as she ran the pads of her fingers over the decals.
“Next you’ll be telling me I’m not getting the valyrian steel back, either,” he laughed, a vain attempt to break the tension.
There was a chill in the air, a biting breeze sneaking through the windows of Winterfell. While the hot water piped through the walls usually kept the cold at bay, it seemed today as if the pipes were filled with solid ice.
She blinked at him slowly with those twice-damned eyes. The long years had not improved her sense of humor, but it was unlike her to be so unresponsive. Whatever they had been to each other, and there was a lot, he could always rely on getting a reaction from her.
Something, he thought, more desperately than he’d have liked to, give me anything.
She nodded stiffly, once, and made to move past him. “It was… it was pleasant to speak with you. Jaime.”
Cat-quick, he caught the hem of the cloak in his hand and yanked her back. “What in the seven hells is wrong with you?”
She recoiled and stumbled, hands flying to the clasp about her neck. There was a sheen of hurt and confusion coming over her eyes, so expressive even now.
“Wrong with me?!”
He threw his arms up in exasperation. “No, with the other pig-stubborn wench standing right behind you— yes you! These past months you, you’re running away from me, and I don’t know why.”
Brienne frowned. “I’m not running away from you.”
“Yes, you are!” He jabbed a finger at her. “Eager to be rid of me now that you don’t need someone watching your back on the battlefield? Trying to distance yourself so you don’t have to go to Tarth with the stink of Kingslayer’s Whore on you? It’s been five years, wench, no amount of lye soap will get you free of it.”
“I’m not—” she sputtered, “why are you doing this?”
“What else am I supposed to do? We used to trust each other with everything, and now it’s as if we’re strangers again. As if everything we’ve been through- as if it doesn’t matter anymore. Like you’re trying to forget. I thought we were— you were— stronger. Stronger than that.”
It sounded more like a plea than anything else, and an old pang of resentment bubbled up. It stung like the faint recollection of his father’s open palm.
Brienne opened and closed her broad mouth, gaping like a caught fish. “We used to trust each other with—?”
She was flushing an angry red high on her cheekbones, her jaw working a tendon up the pale, freckled column of her neck. Her shoulders were squared now, defensive. As if she needed to defend herself.
As if she needed to defend herself from him.
She struck the fatal blow gently. Gentler than he deserved. “You don’t mean that…I haven’t— I can’t, Jaime. I can’t do that.”
Jaime’s heart dropped, cut like a puppet off its strings. It burrowed through the soles of his boots and into the ground, tunneling itself into the frozen soil. It lay there, hemorrhaging blood and trust, turning the dirt dark as pitch.
He wished she had been cruel instead. Then he could have hated her. “I just thought… you know all of me, Brienne. Everything.”
He wanted to go away inside, but quickly realized there was nowhere to go to, memories of gentle hands and blue irises and freckles smattered across a broken nose splintering, shattering. The stinging in his eyes grew more insistent by the second, prodding with burning malice.
She stood in front of him, blinking as if she hadn’t just ripped his heart out of his chest and tore into it. As if she hadn’t pulled it apart and ground it beneath her feet, mashing his flesh to a pulp as if it were nothing. She gaped at him as if she couldn’t see the crimson painting her hands, dug underneath her fingernails, dripping onto the stones.
Then there it was, the rage, unfurling inside of him like a dragon spreading its wings, huffing hot air into his lungs and onto his tongue.
“If you never trusted me in the first place,” he spat, “you should have told me six years ago. I’d have left you to your liege lady’s mercy then and saved us both the time and heartache.”
“Stop it, Jaime.”
“I’d have stopped long ago if I’d— if you’d—” With a jolt of terror, he realized his vision was beginning to blur.
“Jaime?”
She reached out for him, and he slapped her hands away. Brienne was a smudge now, red and blonde and blue swirled together on canvas. He suspected the tears before he felt them, burning like fire down his cheeks. There was a scorching shame in them, and it burst like blisters when they reached his chin.
Finally, he spat it out like a curse. “I love you.”
He’d finally stunned her into silence.
Brienne may have been an innocent, but she was never stupid, and no longer naive. Jaime couldn’t puzzle out why she now stood gaping at him, like she’d never suspected. Like he did not hold her too close and too tightly, or backhand men defending her honor, or brush kisses to her hair when she cried. Like she’d somehow foolishly believed the man she’d spent the better part of six years practically married to in all but name couldn’t have possibly fallen in love with her during the process.
A horrible wheezing laugh clawed its way out of his throat. “Come,” he said, “curse me, or kiss me, or call me a liar.”
There was quiet between them, and calculation behind her eyes that brewed like the storms of her homeland. He ducked his own so he would not have to see the answer she landed on, feeling more a craven than he ever had.
“You… love me,” she said slowly.
He hadn’t the energy to put any bite behind his words. “Yes.”
⚔
Jaime had made a queer habit of ripping his heart out and putting it into her hands. He was so confusing, a man made of contradictions, sharp edges and soft insides, biting wit and a healing hand. Over the years she had grown accustomed to reading him, to knowing what he was trying to say behind the sharp teeth and cold steel. And when he exposed his true self, the tender feelings he hid under his tongue, she had grown better at accepting them as they were, though they perplexed her still at times.
He loves me.
Five years ago she would have dismissed him off-hand.
“Liar,” she would have said, cursing herself for trusting him, cursing him for making her.
It would not have mattered that her heart fluttered behind her ribs then the same as it did now. It would not have mattered that she saw him in her fever, his cloak, a rose. It would not have mattered how prettily he had said it, because it could not have been true to Brienne of Tarth, twenty years old and carrying the scars of a lifetime.
She was not twenty years old anymore, and he had not said it prettily.
But he was standing in front of her, ribs cracked open, staring determinedly at the stones beneath their boots. He looked suddenly very young and very old all at once, graying and gold, the boy who had believed in Arthur Dayne and the man who believed in her.
She reached a hand out, heart pumping in her chest, her breath coming short in visible puffs. Her fingertips made contact with his cheek, and he shuddered, but did not move away.
“You do know me,” she sighed, “Jaime, better than anyone. Not all of me… but I would- I should like you to.”
Slowly, excruciatingly, she brought her face to his, until they were close enough to share breath, the air melding between them. Wet still clung to his golden lashes, somehow serving only to make him more heartrendingly beautiful, and she could have laughed were she not sure it would send Jaime running. How strange it was to think that he was scared. Brienne had never been more sure of anything in her life.
She brushed her fingers beneath his jaw, and brought her mouth to his.
It was nothing more than a simple press of lips, but when she pulled away and met his eyes they were shining with an emotion so strong she was nearly bowled over. He turned his head to kiss her palm, green irises glittering.
She inhaled once, and expelled everything she had been holding in since the Others had shattered to splinters in front of them. “Come to Tarth.”
Jaime grinned leisurely, all cat stretching in a sun spot. He set his hand and stump on her hips and kissed her again.
“Only for the sapphires.”