Work Text:
Brienne’s life flashes before her eyes as the glass of red wine is knocked from the groom’s hand, its destination the priceless wedding dress that the bride had inherited from her grandmother. It shouldn’t be much of a life—she’s only lived thirty years, on paper—but she feels like she’s lived another thirty in the past two years alone.
By tomorrow, she might have added another ten years to that number.
“You’ve got to be—” The man beside her sighs heavily. “This wedding is being dragged through all of the Seven Hells.”
“Jaime,” she pleads, “Forget the stupid experiment. Just let me do a quick Rewind and fix even just this one thing. All I need to do is—”
“Absolutely not,” he says, though she knows he’s tempted to let her, based on the way he’s fiddling with the golden watch strapped around his right wrist. “We agreed, Maid, and we’re seeing this through.”
“You couldn’t have picked a worse wedding to try this on,” Brienne retorts in a harsh whisper, forgetting to scold him for that ridiculous nickname. She’s too distracted by the sobs of the bride, as well as the groom’s useless attempts to dab at the stain with what looks like the world’s tiniest napkin.
“I didn’t pick the wedding,” Jaime reminds her. “We selected it at random.”
“This shouldn’t even have been in the running. It’s not our first Frey wedding, and you know what their whole clan is like. Half the men are drunk and picking fights with Edmure’s family, we’ve had three separate women turn up in white gowns, and everyone has their phones out to record all of it!”
“Just log the Incident.” He gestures at her tablet. “We’ve already gotten this far. We just have to hold on till the end, and then we can sort everything out with the Do-Over tomorrow.”
Brienne checks her own golden watch, then types quickly: 8:24 p.m. Edwyn F. knocks into E, spills wine on R’s dress. “There is no way we’re going to resolve all this in a single Do-Over,” she says, scrolling through the rest of her log. She’s never had so many entries for a single wedding before. “See, this is why I—”
“Relax,” he says, even as Brienne notices the crease between his brows that wasn’t there before. “Let’s just see how this plays out.”
“So you’re just going to let poor Roslin live through the trauma of having stained her heirloom wedding dress.”
“She’s not going to remember that this happened, because it won’t have happened. In the end, she’s going to have the perfect wedding day, just like every other client we’ve ever had.”
Two years ago, it seemed like everything was finally working out for Brienne Tarth. With a portfolio of independently-managed, meticulously-planned events, she had gotten hired at Oathkeeper, the most exclusive wedding planning company in Westeros. Oathkeeper had a reputation for making every couple’s dream wedding come true, a reputation it had built rapidly after emerging out of nowhere seven years before. No couple had a single bad thing to say about an Oathkeeper wedding, not even a tiny gripe. It was the company’s promise: Guaranteed Perfection.
In hindsight, Brienne probably should have been far more suspicious of Oathkeeper than she was. By definition, perfection is impossible, and yet Oathkeeper managed to achieve it with every wedding. Naturally, this came at a price—and Oathkeeper’s prices were eye-wateringly high.
They had to be, considering the secret to its success was time travel.
“Shouldn’t this technology be used to… save the world?” Brienne had dared to ask, while still trying to recover from the shock of her first training session with Jaime Lannister. “Or something more important than—wedding planning?”
“How do you know it hasn’t?” he’d said with a smirk.
“Well—” she blurted out, slightly taken aback by the implications of his response. “Because there are still so many things that can be fixed.”
His smirk disappeared. “We already tried,” he’d said solemnly. “And this is the best outcome we’ve gotten so far.”
“W-what?”
“How many years has Oathkeeper been around?” Jaime asked.
“Um. Seven?”
“Wrong. Fifteen.” He picked up the golden watch lying on the table. “By a different name for the first eight years, of course.”
“But—” Brienne’s eyes travelled to the Oathkeeper logo on the wall, the words Guaranteed Perfection emblazoned beneath.
“Perfections on a global scale aren’t easy,” Jaime explained, handing the watch to her. “To fix even one problem requires us to map and predict an infinite network of cause and effect. And that doesn’t even take into account that everyone has a different idea of what ‘perfect’ is. Small perfections, though—perfections that only matter to a small group, or just two people—that, we can guarantee.”
“But—” she said again— “weddings?”
“Do you think this is all we do?” He spoke as if she were a naive child. “We have subsidiaries. Wedding planning is one of the things that funds those subsidiaries.”
“Oh,” she said, though what she really wanted to say was, what in the world have I gotten myself into? She bit her lip, and looked down at the watch in her hand. “And you trust me with this technology?”
“We did our due diligence. Your background check came up very clean.” The smirk crept back into his voice. “Not even much of a dating life. Always the wedding planner, never the bride, eh?”
She snapped her eyes back towards him. It was interesting how quickly handsome men stopped being handsome once she’d had a long enough conversation with them. “That—that’s none of your business.”
“It is when you’re using our top secret technology.”
“You say that like I’m supposed to be a—a spy or something.”
“A spy?” he laughed. “We can’t transition you to that department quite yet. We can give you a codename, if it’ll make you feel more welcome here. How about… The Maid of Tarth?”
Brienne’s cheeks went hot. Before she could think about the possible consequences of any impertinence, she shot back, “On a completely unrelated note, you do have an HR department, don’t you?”
Jaime only laughed again. “Fair’s fair—I’ll give myself a codename too. I’ll be… the Bachelor of Lannisport. Much more appropriate than my other codenames.”
Other codenames? “Are you really just a wedding planner?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him.
“For the foreseeable future, I am,” he shrugged. “Is that so hard to believe, Maid of Tarth?”
“It’s Brienne,” she insisted, although some part of her already knew this insistence was futile. “You seem to know… a lot. For a wedding planner.”
“I do,” he said nonchalantly. “But I needed a break from… the rest of it. Call it a midlife crisis.” He paused for a moment, and drew a little closer to her. “What do you know about us Lannisters?”
“Not much,” she answered honestly. “Other than what’s in the history books. I wasn’t aware there were many of you left.”
He gave her a cryptic smile. “Strategising, and spending money—two of my house’s favourite things. Wedding planning involves both, wouldn’t you say?”
Before Brienne could reply—that wasn’t how she chose to frame her career, personally—Jaime reached over and tapped the watch he’d given her. “Tomorrow, I’ll show you what this can really do.”
As it turned out, time travel wasn’t as dramatic as the movies made it out to be—not the travelling they could do with the watches, anyway. Brienne found she didn’t have to worry too much about paradoxes and irreversible damage and getting stranded with dinosaurs. It was all very safe and contained.
Yet in spite of the fact that the technology had been available to her since the start, she still felt more comfortable thinking of time travel as her last resort. She’d determined early on that she’d use her watch only for the finishing touches, just to correct all the things that one couldn’t exactly anticipate: a steak accidentally served to a vegetarian guest; a drunk uncle making an inappropriate comment; a sister who decided to announce her pregnancy during the reception. Human error, human foolishness, human spite—all she had to do was step back in time as things happened, and make the necessary adjustments.
Everything else, she could plan for.
“You don’t have to be this obsessive,” Jaime had said one day in the office, with the breezy tone of someone for whom things always fell into place.
She’d just been tending to her rigorously organised filing system, which she loved dearly and didn’t want insulted. “I just like to get as much right as I can without having to rely on the watch,” she’d replied through gritted teeth.
“But you can’t get it all right, can you?” He points the pen he’d been holding in her direction. “Have you done a single Oathkeeper wedding where you haven’t had to use the watch?”
“No,” she mumbled to her stationery. “But only because—”
Brienne stopped—she didn’t think it was right to say what she’d intended to say—but Jaime finished her answer for her. “Because the type of people who can afford us have an inflated sense of entitlement, and like to blame it on the help when they don’t get things exactly how they want them?”
“I just—” she sighed. “I think it’s much easier to work the way I do, alright? Besides, I don’t enjoy listening to clients’ complaints. Especially if it’s about things I could have dealt with in the first place.”
“Aw, do they hurt your feelings, Maid?” Jaime said condescendingly.
“No,” she lied. “And it’s Brienne.”
“I bet,” he continued, ignoring her correction as usual, “you wouldn’t last a full wedding without using the watch.”
She scoffed. “What do you think I did before I started working here?”
“Sure. But once you’ve had a taste of it, you can’t go back. It’s too easy to fix every little thing.” He twirled his pen lazily between his fingers. “Why don’t we do an experiment?”
“An experiment,” she repeated flatly. She didn’t like the sound of that. “What kind of experiment?”
“We get through a whole wedding without using the watch once.”
“What? How—”
“Oh, don’t panic. We’ll just have a Do-Over the next day. Maybe once we’ve run through all the Incidents, we’ll find that we won’t need to do much fixing at all.”
Brienne highly doubted that, but Jaime’s expression was so smug that she wanted to wipe it off his face. He’d been time travelling for much longer than she had, and doing without the watch was going to be as much of a torture for him as it would be for her. “Alright.” She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “Tomorrow’s wedding—”
“Nope. We’ll select the wedding at random.”
Her eyes went wide, thinking of the handful of weddings that wouldn’t survive without the use of a watch. “You’re joking.”
“Oh come on, it’ll be fun.”
“Are you having another midlife crisis? Is that it?”
“Maybe I am.” Jaime stood up from his chair, walked towards her, and perched himself on the edge of her desk. “If you do this with me, I’ll… buy you dinner at the best restaurant in King’s Landing. That Dornish fine dining place, what’s it called—”
“You can’t get a reservation at Sunspear,” Brienne rolled her eyes. “They’re booked solid for the next year, and in a year’s time you’ll just pretend you forgot all about this.”
“You underestimate me, Maid of Tarth.” He took out his phone from his pocket, and began to scroll through his contacts. “The owners owe me a big favour. I could get a table any time I wanted.”
“Fine then,” she said, more out of wanting to call his bluff than anything else. “If you can so easily get a reservation, then let’s do the damn experiment.”
Even a twenty-four-course Dornish feast that costs a good chunk of her very generous monthly salary wasn’t worth the pain of this wedding.
“Someone brought their pet bear.” Brienne slumps into a chair at the end of the night, as the wreckage of the wedding is being cleaned up around her. “A BEAR, JAIME. All the way from Harrenhal to the Twins! And you know what its owner said? Oh, he gets so lonely when I’m away from home.”
“It could have been worse.” Jaime’s weak attempt at consolation sounds just as exhausted as she feels. “At least it was just a cub, and it was quite well-behaved.”
“Ethical issues of bear ownership aside, who in their right mind would bring a bear here?” She turns on her tablet to review her Incident Log. “I don’t think I even managed to note down everything that went wrong. Even if we were doing Rewinds today, no amount of them could have prevented this from being a disaster. It’s like—like all the guests on the Frey side of the wedding collectively decided that they should descend into madness. I’m genuinely surprised no one died.”
It’s a rant she’d been holding in all night, and she gets a modicum of relief from letting it all out. But all Jaime says in response is, “Hmm.”
Brienne looks up from her tablet. “That’s it? That’s all you have to contribute?”
“Let me have a look at that.” He takes the tablet from her, and begins to run through the entries himself. “None of the incidents were instigated by a Tully, or a Stark, or any of their guests. Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“Well, no, because regular people don’t act like this at weddings. And the Starks have more to lose from acting badly in public. Edmure’s nephew Robb is running for—”
“Yes,” Jaime cuts her off, still deep in thought. “Like you said, it’s mostly Freys and their guests that were responsible for all the mess. And it was… excessive. Humiliating. Nothing we could have fixed with Rewinds or Do-Overs.” He meets her eyes. “How did Edmure and Roslin meet?”
“Um—through family, I believe?” Brienne says, realising that Roslin had been quite vague about it. “I suppose it was as close to an arranged marriage as one can get, these days. They seemed to like each other well enough, though. Or at least, they were happy to escape to their suite together.”
Jaime’s finger traces a pensive line across his jaw. “Wasn’t there that rumour going around last year?” he asks. “That Roslin was supposed to marry Robb Stark?”
“That was just gossip, wasn’t it?” Brienne isn’t sure why, but Jaime’s questions are making her feel a little nervous. “He eloped with Jeyne Westerling a few months ago.”
“And the public ate it up. His approval ratings went through the—fuck.”
At that, Jaime looks all around them, as if to check who else is nearby. It must not be private enough for his satisfaction, because the next moment he’s pulling a very confused Brienne out of her chair.
“What is—where are we—” she sputters, barely able to process that she’s brisk walking out of the hall with her hand in Jaime’s. This isn’t exactly the right time for her to have a thought like, I quite enjoy having my hand held by Jaime Lannister, but there it is. Before she can do much else with this thought, though, Jaime’s squeezed them both into some musty alcove that’s far too small to comfortably fit two people, and so the thought becomes, I quite enjoy having my body pressed against Jaime Lannister. He reaches into his breast pocket to take out his phone, except it isn’t a phone Brienne’s ever seen before—it doesn’t even have a screen, only a few buttons. Jaime presses one of them, and puts the phone to his ear.
“Brother,” he says, after the phone rings just once.
Brother? “You brought me here just to call your—”
Brienne has to swallow her question then, because Jaime has put a finger to her lips. This is definitely the wrong time for her to have a thought like, I quite enjoy having my lips touched by Jaime Lannister.
“Who do you think has something to gain from making sure Edmure Tully and Roslin Frey’s wedding was an absolute catastrophe?”
Just as Jaime had back in the hall, the person on the phone also says something that sounds like fuck.
“That’s what I said. Send transport to the Twins as soon as possible.” Glancing at Brienne, Jaime adds, “And make sure there’s space, because I’m bringing a new recruit.”
“A new what?” Brienne says, as he hangs up. “For the love of the Seven, if you don’t tell me what’s going on right this second—”
She’s interrupted by a sudden bright flash outside the alcove, and then there’s what looks like a small elevator floating in its place.
“Oh hells. This is the real time machine, isn’t it?” She’s going to be stranded with the dinosaurs now, she just knows it.
“Of course not,” Jaime grins. “That’s just the teleporter. Congratulations, Maid—you just got a promotion.”
Perfect, she groans internally, as she follows him into the elevator. Just perfect.