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Time isn’t supposed to matter anymore. Not down to the minutes and seconds, anyway. There are no more jobs to clock in and out of; no more appointments to be punctual for; no more notifications and reminders and alarms, not least because there’s no more electricity left to power them. No more movies or television shows, no more sports or even plain old exercise. None of the things for which one moment might have carried an immense weight. Fine, perhaps a split second might be the difference between staying alive and getting your throat ripped out by a direwolf. But it isn’t so clear these days if staying alive would be that much more preferable; if an extra hour of one’s life is a privilege, or a torture. Let the animals strip our bones clean, Jaime Lannister thinks on occasion, in light of all the terrible things his species has wrought upon the earth. Better animals than humans to survive the end of the world.
No, that’s not right. It isn’t the end of the world—just the end of the one he knew. The world will continue long after he’s dead, for millions and millions of years. This isn’t the first Long Night to have descended upon it, human-made or otherwise, and it likely won’t be the last. It just happens to be the one that Jaime has the misfortune of experiencing firsthand.
He reckons he should be grateful that—assuming the old stories are to be believed—there aren’t any wights this time around. Bad enough that survivors have to fill their own stomachs and deal with the wildlife that want to fill theirs; he can’t imagine having to fight off hordes of reanimated corpses too. This time around, there’s just a whole lot of snow and very little sun to go with it. Time isn’t supposed to matter anymore, except in the strategic use of the scant hours of light that the gods have deigned to grant them each day. Jaime uses the term ‘light’ just about as liberally as he refers to the ‘gods’, considering he has no faith in the new, old, drowned, or red. If one or all of them is responsible, they’ve decided that the world is only worth brief periods of general gloominess, which can barely be called ‘days’ at all.
At least he’d been eased into it, relatively speaking, having been in the North for months already by the time everything started going to shit. Surrounded by a small town’s worth of people who knew how to deal with the cold and the dark and the misery; who have simply had to adjust to circumstances that are colder and darker and more miserable. Back when everything started going to shit, Jaime hadn’t quite grown accustomed to these conditions yet. He’d been resisting the process, actually, thinking he’d be back in King’s Landing before he knew it. Once his father decided that he’d learned whatever lessons he was meant to learn from this experience—‘this experience’ being ‘managing a Lannister Industries mining operation in a place so desolate it might as well be on the moon’—he would be on the first plane back to headquarters. Now, cut off as they are from everything south of the Neck, there is no way of knowing if Lannister Industries still existed. Lannister anything, including his family. He couldn’t go looking for them, and they certainly hadn’t come looking for him.
He looks out over the snow, and doesn’t think about his tyrant of a father, his imp of a brother, or his… twin sister, who was undoubtedly the subject of one of the lessons he was supposed to learn while in the North. Time isn’t supposed to matter anymore, not when there is no future, and the past feels as irretrievable as an amputated limb. It took him a while, but he’d eventually accepted that he would never see them again; a while after that, he accepted that this might be for the better. That limb was foul, gangrenous. Shame that the world had to end for him to realise it. Shame that it ended before he could find beauty in the North’s endless white monotony, instead of hating how the landscape would blind him whenever the sun was high in the sky. It’s funny, if one can see the humour in it: snow isn’t ever white anymore. Just grey, grey, grey, as far as the eye can see. What was that ridiculous disproven claim—that the wildlings had something like fifty words for ‘snow’ in the Old Tongue? Maybe if there are still humans at the end of this Long Night, they will claim that survivors had twice as many to describe all the nuances of grey.
Jaime wonders if the person walking a few paces in front of him will find this amusing at all. It barely amuses him, but he might well bring it up out of desperation. Doing so is better than this damned silent treatment he’s been getting from her since they set off back in the direction of town, and they may or may not arrive before darkness descends upon them again. It’s not like she’s ever been a great conversationalist, but her silence feels more deafening than ever before, especially coming so soon after… recent developments. The snow crunches beneath tired feet and the air echoes with harsh exhales and time isn’t supposed to matter anymore except Brienne Tarth is—she is somehow slowing time with every word she doesn’t speak.
“Are you planning on keeping this up?” Jaime calls out a bit too combatively, rather than easing out of the quiet like he’d meant to right up till he opened his mouth.
Brienne’s step falters a little, but she continues on. “Keeping what up?” she replies, without even looking over her shoulder.
“Whatever this is,” he says, gesturing at the air between them as if there was anyone to see it. “This sulking.”
He’d said it knowing it would provoke a reaction out of her. It does—she stops so suddenly he almost slams into her backpack—but then she just murmurs, “I’m not,” and starts walking again.
Very convincing.
It takes a few huge strides for Jaime to be abreast with her, what with her stupidly long legs and her determination to maximise their use. He isn’t that much shorter than she is, yet whenever they travel together, it always seems like he’s having to play catch-up. He suspects her gait is an occupational hazard from back when she had an occupation; the necessity of getting from place to place with purpose and urgency. A memory surfaces in his mind, his first with her in it: Officer Tarth marching towards him from across an icy street just to say, Ser, you can’t park there. Her tone was so serious and her expression so stern that one would think she was warning him not to commit murder. He’s pretty sure he’d laughed in her face, half from the shock of discovering that this imposing figure was in fact a woman, half from the absurdity of obeying traffic laws in a town that could hardly be called ‘populated’.
If anyone had told the Jaime of back then that he would one day willingly bury himself between those stupidly long legs, he would have called them insane. The Jaime of now is slightly worried that her sulking might be about exactly how willing he had been, which he had thought was somewhere between ‘eager’ and ‘this is the only reason why I would ever want to prolong this godsforsaken existence’. He is also entirely certain that if he makes any allusions to what happened, he will never bury himself between those legs again.
“Do you think we’ll make it back before it’s dark?” he asks her neutrally, because he would very much like to bury himself between those legs again.
“There’s the old lighthouse between here and town,” she says, which isn’t an answer. “If you don’t mind the detour.”
“It’s a… good place to be alone,” he offers carefully, wondering if she’d be so bold as to suggest the detour just to revisit last night’s activities. There’s an easy way to confirm this: if Brienne dared to say anything within spitting distance of coy, her face would most definitely be bright red. Yet when he glances in her direction, he can tell even through the gloom that her skin is as pale as ever. The angry scar on her cheek—the result of a close shave with a bear that they were lucky to escape—stares defiantly back at him.
“Yes,” she agrees, and falls silent once more.
It’s clear that Brienne has no intention of revealing her troubles anytime soon, so Jaime spends the journey rewinding through the past day in his head, just to see if he can decipher her on his own. When he’d been woken up by her getting ready to leave, he hadn’t noticed anything odd about her behaviour, though he recalls now that she might have already been inordinately quiet. It was starting to get light by then, so he’d read this quietness as focus on the tasks at hand, which was the packing of the few supplies found in the cabin where they’d spent the night. In another time and place he might have hoped for something different: a tender kiss good morning, or the sight of her walking around the room wearing nothing but his unbuttoned shirt, or the smell of fresh coffee, one mug for herself and another for him. He might have had a hunch that something was wrong when she didn’t do any of those things. But they belonged to a past life, and besides, there was nothing fresh about that tin of ground coffee long forgotten in the cabin’s pantry. The place had been spotted on a previous hunting trip—far enough from town that no one knew who the owner was or if anyone still lived there—and they’d ventured there on the off chance that it might contain something useful. The most useful thing it had was a reasonably comfortable bed, a luxury compared to the bedrolls they would have otherwise had to use. Oh, and the fireplace was welcome too. As it turned out, the bed and the fireplace were a potent combination.
Jaime almost trips over his own feet as his mind drifts further back in time, which earns him a concerned frown from Brienne. He clears his throat and keeps looking forward, where he thinks he can already make out the lighthouse in the distance. Without letting himself dwell too long on the details, he assures himself that Brienne’s enthusiasm had matched his, even if she’d shown some apprehension at first. Was there something else that had happened afterwards, then? He can’t quite recall…
Wait. What was it they had talked about, before he’d drifted off to sleep?
And they thought we’d never do it, he remembers mumbling through the bliss.
Do what? Brienne’s words tickled the skin of his arm where her head lay. Who’s they?
I think they’ve been trying to get this to happen. Some of the people in town. I overheard the Stark kids talking about it the other day.
She’d stiffened at this, though he’d brushed it off at the time. Get this to happen? she repeated, slowly.
You know. He yawned. Us. It’s why they keep sending us off together.
Oh, she said, just as he fell asleep.
Cautiously, Jaime glances over at Brienne again. She looks tired—everyone always is—but maybe this is the distinct exhaustion of someone who hasn’t had a good night’s rest. Was it genuinely because of what he’d told her? He’d been annoyed by what he’d overheard, yes, but not to the point of sleeplessness. He just didn’t need a bunch of bored teenagers interfering in his affairs, or their parents, the ones who actually had a say in who went fishing and hunting and scavenging. And he didn’t appreciate how they’d deemed him hopeless for not taking advantage of the opportunities they’d provided. Most of all, it had been maddening to discover that they might have orchestrated those opportunities in the first place. The duties he’d been assigned alongside Brienne were responsibilities he thought he’d earned, which he’d privately attributed to having proven his own competence and trustworthiness. To think he might have these people to thank for it—people who had hated him when he first came to town, when he was a Lannister suit here to run a Lannister mine, which had been the town’s necessary evil until it wasn’t necessary at all…
Okay, so he had been really annoyed. Perhaps he’d carried his annoyance for days after he’d accidentally eavesdropped on that conversation. But Brienne’s response is something else. Something he doesn’t quite recognise.
It’s close to dark by the time they reach the lighthouse, which he’s only visited once before, and that was when he still had a car that worked. He heard it was built on a cliff back in the day, but the cliff isn’t really a cliff anymore; the sea levels have risen by so much, and now that most of the coast had frozen over, one could practically walk from the lighthouse right out to where the ice becomes water. The place is in decent condition otherwise, or as decent as one could expect from a building that has stood here for centuries; even the small attached cottage still stands, where the lighthouse keeper must once have stayed. Brienne doesn’t head to the cottage, though, and goes straight for the door to the tower instead.
“You don’t have to come with me,” she tells Jaime, nodding her head towards the cottage. “We can stay there until it gets light again.”
“Would you rather I stay behind?” he says. She only shrugs, so he follows her through the door, and sets down his backpack next to hers as she proceeds up the spiral staircase.
In all honesty, the wind isn’t much stronger than a light sea breeze at the top of the tower. It still makes Jaime say, uselessly, “It’s fucking freezing up here,” like it isn’t fucking freezing everywhere.
Brienne doesn’t acknowledge this. Lost in thought, she is gazing out at the expanse of water, where the black of night will soon swallow the greys. As Jaime moves to take his place next to her, he feels keenly aware that this is a rare chance to observe her without her shrinking away like she is wont to do. In this dying light, which caresses the peculiarities of her face, he thinks she could almost be a beauty. In this dying light, which softens the angry scar on her cheek, she looks just as young as her twenty-five years. Not that it means anything, when the end of the world has a way of ageing everyone it doesn’t kill. But it dawns on him now that she’d had a decade less of the world to experience than he had, and he finds that to be a great pity.
“I used to come here pretty often,” she says. “Reminds me of home.”
“Tarth?” Jaime asks; he isn’t sure if that’s the home she means, since she’d mentioned before that she hadn’t been back in years.
Brienne nods her reply. “Everywhere I go, the waters are so different. But the sound of the waves…” She trails off as if to make space for that sound. It can still be heard beneath the wind if they listen closely enough, even though the shoreline is so much further from the lighthouse than it was before. They stand together in that non-silence until Brienne begins to speak again.
“My first posting was to Highgarden.” Something seems to tense within her at her mention of the place. “There were some… challenges, being the only woman there. I used to drive along the Ocean Road when I needed to clear my head.”
Jaime has had his own share of drives down the Ocean Road, or the northern half of it anyway. “Did you ever come up to Lannisport?”
“I almost did, once,” she says, some note of sadness in her voice. “I found out about something and—I wanted to be far, far away from Highgarden and everyone in it.”
Jaime can’t tell if that is an invitation to him to ask further—he can’t tell if he wants to know in the first place, since he can’t travel south to break the nose of whoever had hurt her—but before he can decide what to do, she turns to him suddenly.
“Can I ask you a question?” she says, her blue eyes piercing earnestly through the gloom.
“Sure.”
“Would you have done what you did last night—” and there it is, finally, the red blooming on her face even as she holds his gaze— “Would you have done it if they hadn’t put that idea in your head?”
Of all the things she could have asked, Jaime hadn’t anticipated this. He is so thrown off balance by it that he can’t help but let out a nervous chuckle. “Well, I thought that was something we both did. Together.”
“You know what I mean,” Brienne sighs, and squeezes her eyes shut to brace herself for his response. “Just… answer the question. Please.”
This—this is what had been unsettling her all this time? Not knowing if he truly wanted—
“Alright,” Jaime says, resisting the urge to lift his gloved hand to her cheek, if only because he wishes to save it for when he can touch her skin to skin. “I’ll put it this way. The only idea that they put in my head… was that you might have wanted it too.”
As much as it might pain him to admit, the annoyance he’d felt at the time—that had all been threaded through with the glow of some warm and crystalline hope. It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed, and been encouraged by, how her gaze lingered too long upon him on too many occasions. He’d just noticed, too, the amount of space she’d often deliberately put between them, which he is only just beginning to understand as protection, rather than indifference. Perhaps, before that overheard conversation, he had been holding out for a more obvious indication of her feelings. Perhaps that had been expecting too much of her, and too little of himself.
Brienne cracks open one eye, then the other, as if she can’t quite believe that everything about this is real; as if she’d only now realised that Jaime hadn’t just taken something conveniently offered. “O-oh,” she stammers. “So you—before—you already wanted to—”
“I wanted to,” he states plainly, saving her from having to articulate it. Then, he corrects himself. “I want to. Unless you don’t want to.”
“I—want to.” The first word comes out too quickly; the last two come out as a squeak. She breathes in deep before saying, “It was… nice.”
Ignoring the prick in his chest at such a mediocre assessment, Jaime lets a corner of his mouth quirk upwards. “Just… nice?”
Brienne turns back towards the sea, pulling her lower lip between her teeth as she does so. After a few moments, she concedes, “... Better than nice.”
“I thought so,” Jaime teases, relieved. “You were very—ow!”
She’d punched him in the arm without even looking his way. “Stop,” she says, trying to keep a laugh from bubbling up. The punch aside—which might have actually stung if it hadn’t been cushioned by so many layers of clothing—Jaime finds her embarrassment so endearing that he leans over to brush his lips across her scarred cheek. Brienne stills almost immediately, and he can hear her breath catch in her throat. He pulls back, but not by much, then just waits.
“I can’t feel anything there,” she whispers eventually.
“Oh,” he says, still waiting, until she inclines her head towards him. Tentatively, she closes the distance between them. Her lips are chilled from the icy breeze, and chapped; then again, so are his.
It’s a brief thing, this kiss. But time doesn’t matter.
“I couldn’t really feel that either,” she murmurs when she breaks away. “It’s too cold.”
Jaime smiles, and takes her hand in his. “We should get warm then,” he says, as he leads her down towards the cottage.