Work Text:
"Make it blue," Jaime had commanded the armorer, his voice in her head as clear as the day she had left the city with his sword, their sword resting on her hip. He had told her that only the best had names, and so, as Jaime held her blue gaze while her freshly forged blue armour glinted in the last of the summer sunshine, she made a promise to them both.
Oathkeeper.
Brienne had lost track of the cycling moon sometime after the journey had taken her and her squire into the North, the days seeming to shorten before her eyes, leaving the nights cold and bleak and lonely, with only impossible dreams to warm her freezing bones. Meanwhile, Podrick stood waiting for a sign that this quest had been worth leaving him behind. It was a thought she wished would linger less, a reminder of how better suited it was to a more delicate maiden, one who would cry and simper and seek comfort in the arms of the Lord Commander. It wasn't meant for a woman who had been trained with broadsword and mace, more comfortable on horseback than in a dress.
Maybe if Arya Stark hadn't chosen to follow one of the crown's former loyal dogs into the godsforsaken wilderness. Maybe if Littlefinger wasn't pulling on Sansa Stark's strings like a performer in a childish mummery. Maybe, on her return to Winterfell, if the oldest Stark girl could have trusted in an unknown but ever present friend, Brienne would have found a little respite beyond the call of his pleasantly dimpled smile or the memory of his breath ghosting up her neck as they had fumbled, three handed, to fasten the straps over her shoulders, taut as a drawn bow as he murmured triumphantly about getting her measurements 'exactly right.'
Escaping at night to the few moments she had snatched with him following their return to the capital were far better fodder than the horror of half whispered, half boastful accounts of the events at Robb Stark's wedding she had pieced together. Worse still was the image of the hooded woman that had followed like a portent, her red hair and deathly pale skin striking a note somewhere between familiarity and fear, her voice little more than an ominous rattle as she pointed an accusatory finger directly at Brienne's heart. The nightmare had laced a streak of terror through her so firmly that it was hard to shake off even as the sun had begun its increasingly languid ascent over the hauntingly empty towers. Podrick, as usual, spent that morning fussing around her with offers of food and news, though none of it important enough to pull Brienne away from what could have been the last chance to fulfil the oaths she had made.
For Sansa. For Lady Catelyn. For Jaime.
But tonight, as the winds howled and the snow fell, Jaime demanded that the nameless, faceless armorer in her dream, "make it blue" and Brienne found herself shivering from beneath her furs, seeking out the slivers of comfort it granted. "Blue is a good colour on my lady," he purred, the words she'd imagined time and time again soothing her restlessness and smoothing her way into deeper dreams. For he had made it blue.