Chapter Text
Jaime’s life is a river of wildfire.
The world lies just beyond his golden grasp. It always has. It is merit and jargon, a cold unknown. He wonders what it’s truly made of, and if it will accept him. He wants to be worthy of it, to clasp it, to understand it, to be known. Perhaps he has no right to ask again, let the skies sneer at his twisted soul, strangle him with frozen rain. He wants to believe there’s a road to salvation, a traveler on a path criss-crossed with vines, knotting around the doorways with their tightly laced branches, like clasped fingers, the sense of mold and forgotten hope.
He brushes his phantom thumb around the rim of worthiness and that makes it unsettlingly alive, all these feelings and thoughts and oaths, as real as his other limbs, like blood flowing smoothly through his dreams. The world will not pardon the words which he has spoken, which have cut and nicked and burnt and hurt others, words he will not take back.
These are the stars of his day. After all, sunlight is the most forceful.
At dusk, the shadows twist through him, laughing. They will not let him go, they cannot. His life has been monumental. It has shaped a century, a civilization. It has been harsh to him and he’s been cruel too. His innocence has been lost with the rubies, now a yarn, a tale, a mocking smirk, as if neither had ever existed.
He cannot be forgiven.
~~
Brienne’s life is a river of rocks.
The world has always been just the world to her, as open as a promise, as easy as knowing that the sea could never be conquered and a great swordsman had to have exemplary footwork and that she loved her father and hated liars. She knew she was too tall and too ugly. It was all so simply there.
That’s why Jaime flummoxed her. He had to be sly and sarcastic, as if there was a need for it. As if he could not survive without always, always acting. There were rare moments when she saw Jaime for who he was, and when she did, she firmly decided that he was not as complicated as he thought himself to be.
‘You’re the only one who actually cares about me,’ he remarks, through his teeth, and she cannot tell if he’s being sincere or it’s one of those constant casual japes. He knows she does not understand when he speaks in tongues, and yet he chooses to torment her so.
Perhaps she should smile at him like one of the pretty girls in taverns, skirts swishing around their legs, brushing against his boots, bringing out his wry amusement, with the absolute knowledge that he was in control and they could never have him. She knows that if she tried, she’d look ridiculous.
‘You’re a good man,’ she replies, completely sincerely, because that’s all she’s ever been able to be.
Jaime snorts at this. She feels strangely sorry for him. It’s as if all he knows is deceit. Perhaps this is a challenge. Brienne has always liked challenges, to fix things that are so broken that everyone else has given up on them. Perhaps that’s why she’s so stubborn.
The fire whispers and whistles, she holds her hands above the flames, and the heat is drawn to her heart. Jaime’s eyes are wicked in the flames. The green is all dangerous predator, waiting for her to fall, to be caught, to lose this game.
‘I helped you a few times,’ he shrugs, ‘it does not make me a saint.’
‘Jaime,’ she explains patiently, ‘no one else would have cared at all.’ Suddenly she feels extraordinarily grateful, because the people she’d met would've preferred her dead and even her father had wanted her to be gone, inevitably married to some creepy crone. She was always in the way, less than a human, more than an object, and honestly, it was not as if she’d been that eager to live either, not happily at least, and Jaime had saved her. He had saved her life.
‘That was a debt paid,’ he mumbles.
‘No,’ she spits viciously, flicking sand grains into the fire, because she hates that, the connotations behind it are terribly wrong, it makes her feel queasy when he mentions that phrase, as if life is more of a transaction than an emotion, and how can you live like that?
‘Maybe,’ he’s looking at her, dissecting her existence. And she does not know what he’s trying to say. She’s never been smart at all of this, there’s generous and kind, selfish and horrid, and why does Jaime never say what he truly means? How is she supposed to know?
‘You’re lying’ she stares at him. He has to be. She feels the horror of her high opinions of him curdle slightly. Something is strangling her inside and she flinches back, afraid of crying. She feels so awfully young, as if this war has not happened at all and she’s back at Tarth, drawing spirals with her toes on the beach.
The world blurs beautifully for a second. She’s drowned in tears that do not fall. She cannot survive this mockery of Jaime. She will not. She has to be right. He has to be good. She knows that.
‘I’m good at lying,’ he snarls at her, as if it’s her fault that he’d grown up in a court of snakes. He likes blaming her sometimes, for things that are out of her control, all kinds of metaphorical feelings that she doesn’t know how to balance, and she realizes that Jaime has always thought that it was the duty of others to listen to him.
Maybe royals are not meant to have humility within them.
Still, she is not one someone living off the scraps of Jaime’s arrogance. She’s Brienne of Tarth and he’ll treat her as such.
‘You cannot lie through your actions,’ she says resolutely, because she’s surviving and that means fighting with every moment, trying to tell yourself you’ll absolutely live another day, when you know that the curse of a weapon cannot be unraveled, ‘no matter what you’re saying.’
Jaime looks at her for a long time. Her eyes are a theater and he watches his story in all its molten glory.
‘You’re naive,’ he finally says. It seems bitter and generous all at the same time.
‘I’m a good person,’ she hiccups, trying so wonderfully to be brave.
He smiles. It’s a sweet expression, and the anger in him settles, quietening the air, wind ripples on a still lake. Yet, she does not know how to react to it.
After all, Jaime has a library of smiles.