Chapter Text
It’s easy—most of the time—for her to pretend the future isn’t already here. It’s easy when Brienne lives the way she lives, surrounded by old things. Telephones that have buttons rather than screens; cars that need wheels to move, and a road beneath them; televisions that run on cathode ray tubes and computers that can read floppy disks. Many, many years ago, the average household in Westeros would have owned all of these things. Today, they’re novelties at best; antiques. They were machines, once, but to call them machines feels inaccurate now. Machines of the present are so much flatter, smaller, smarter; so digital as to be immaterial. The things they call machines these days…
Nevertheless, there are still people, and places, that own old things. There are still those who find value in them, if not utility. Ceremonial pots from thousands of years ago, or film cameras from a not-quite-so-ancient time; collected with intent, or inherited from some relative no one alive can remember. And so, there still needs to be someone who can care for these old things. Someone to assess, to appraise, to clean, to fix—to do what everyone else has forgotten how to do, or hadn’t needed to do at all, when these old things were new.
Brienne’s father used to be that someone. Now, that someone is her.
Tarth Repairs, declares the unassuming hand-painted sign across her shopfront, and a smaller neon sign that lights up at night. Its flickering glow, so different from the other ageing holographic displays on the outer edges of Cobbler’s Square, illuminates the tagline: “We can fix anything”.
She’d always thought the proclamation was excessive. Thought it even when she’d learnt far more about fixing things than her father ever did; some new things, too, because one day those new things would be old. Whenever she voiced this thought to her father, though, he would just wave his hand and say, words are wind. That wasn’t quite how the phrase was supposed to be used—besides, what her father really meant was, people who come all the way here already know what we can and can’t do, and also, it’s catchy and I’m too lazy to change it—but she learnt long ago that there was no point in correcting him. It was just one of his eccentricities.
She would come to miss those eccentricities after he passed. That was over five years ago, and in all that time, she never felt the inclination to make any changes to those signs. At first, she considered it a tribute to her father. Then, gradually, she began to see the words in a better light. They are a gesture of goodwill to each person that walks through her door, she decided. Perhaps they even bring goodwill to her, considering the occasions when she really couldn’t fix things were few and far between.
As it turns out, goodwill wasn’t the only thing those words could bring her.
Brienne looks over at the figure sitting at her dining table. His eyes are closed, as if to better soak in the early morning sun streaming in through the nearest window, and she could almost believe that the rays are invigorating him, the way they might if she was there in his place. He’s not in the best condition—his face is smeared with dirt, and his scruffy hoodie and jeans might well have been pulled from a dumpster—but he is beautiful beneath it all, she can tell. There’s something regal in his face, in the precise architecture of his nose, his cheekbones, his jaw. His hair is a rich blonde, she thinks, beneath the dust and grime, and it looks like it might grow into curls if it was allowed to. He’s so beautiful, in fact, that it wouldn’t surprise her to see her fingers go right through him, make pixels of him, if she tried to reach into his body.
He is opening his eyes now. Even from halfway across her apartment, she can see how they flash an emerald green, or—and she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this association—the green of the old circuit boards that pile high in her workshop downstairs. These green eyes are staring at his right forearm, resting on the surface of the dining table; more specifically, they are locked on his right wrist. There is no hand at the end of it. Instead, there is the bandage she had wound around it a few hours ago, not knowing how else to manage the effects of the amputation. Not knowing what effects, if any, to expect at all.
“I saw that,” he says all of a sudden.
Brienne’s first instinct is to look around her to see what’s out of place, but then he adds:
“You flinched.”
“I did not,” she insists, even though she had. She’d barely realised it herself until he’d pointed it out, so she imagines it must have—or should have—been quite imperceptible. “You weren’t even looking my way.”
His eyes are still on his wrist as he lifts his forearm from the table, rotating it one way, then the other. “You were remembering what happened last night,” he says.
“Do you read minds, too?” she scoffs, more out of shock than disdain.
“No,” he replies calmly. “It was merely a logical conclusion, based on the sequence of events.” Turning towards her, he adds, “I could explain how I reached that conclusion, if it will ease your suspicions about my abilities.”
Brienne has the urge to glance at the ground, then catches herself; doesn’t want him to offer any conclusions or explanations about why she wishes to avoid eye contact. “That… won’t be necessary,” she says, without looking away.
He nods, and returns his gaze to the table. This time, it isn’t his bandaged wrist that holds his attention. Rather, it is the hand that used to be attached to it, lying just to the side of his right forearm. He’d brought it upstairs with him from the workshop for some reason, though it’s so mangled that she can’t see how it could ever be of use to him again. It’s strange—he hasn’t even asked if she can fix it. When he’d come through her door last night, stating matter-of-factly that your sign says you can fix anything, he’d only wanted her to remove this hand, not repair it.
Not that she could repair it, if he wanted her to. There is metal in that hand, and circuitry, but most of it is a material she doesn’t recognise. Under what remains of its skin is something silicone-like to the touch; almost… organic.
That’s the other thing machines are, these days.
More human.