Work Text:
The bar is loud, and dark, and there is a haze in the air somehow despite there being no smoke. It is well past midnight, and she is sat with her friends, and she is happy.
Until.
There is always a moment in these type of evenings, a moment where the level of alcohol is high enough that the questions turn more daring, more bold, more direct. It is a mix of youth and the desire to prove oneself; wanting to impress and maybe even shock, hoping to prove someone wrong.
She hates these questions, hates already enough being in any kind of spotlight, hates the idea of being singled out. Usually when these questions and boasts come into the conversation she sneaks away to the toilet or the bar, but tonight she is sandwiched between Sansa and Pod, stuck in the middle of a bench and there is no quick escape.
“…I mean, you always remember your first right? You know what I mean, right Addam?”
Daven’s words are a bit slurred, the eight pints of Winterfell Lite making themselves obvious. She doesn’t hear Addam’s answer, from all away down at the end of the long table, but the others laugh and a dark haired man whose name she doesn’t remember answers next.
She rubs her palms nervously on her jeans, despite herself.
She wishes she wasn’t like this, that she could laugh with the others, try to be coy and yet daring in her responses, wishes she could lean in and give a soft smile like Margaery does, voice low and enticing, as she tells the rest of them at the table about the brown haired local boy she met on holiday with her family in the Summer Isles so many years ago. Or the way Jon just laughs and nods, lifting an eyebrow and raising his beer as he only says succinctly: “A cave, and that’s all I’ll say,” while the others cheers him joyously.
It all comes so easy to them, and yet these moments, these paths that conversations sometimes take are so alien to her that she wishes she could sink into the wall and disappear.
Luckily though, this time it seems the conversation doesn’t flow her way, doesn’t somehow land with her, drifting elsewhere. She sips her beer quietly, laughs when she should, and she tries to blend in. The topic starts to get tired, the air growing a bit stale, and she’s hopeful this is the moment it shifts away…
But -
“What about you?” asks one of the friends of a Tyrell cousin, who isn’t brand new to the group but isn’t someone she’s ever directly spoken to before. He’s looking over at her, and she can’t even feign complete ignorance.
“Me?” she replies, a last ditch delaying tactic.
He nods, expectantly.
She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. She doesn’t know what to say - usually people don’t ask the freakishly tall, unusually ugly woman in the group, but to his credit the man doesn’t seem to be asking in a malicious way, genuinely curious.
A pause, becoming awkward now.
Sansa leans forward, clearly having gauged that this was enough time, this is the moment to save her friend. “I don’t think Brienne has to-“
But then a new voice cuts in, from two seats down the table, his tone low and rich and with his typical, ever-present undercurrent of amusement. “Oh, I’m sure there’s a fantastic story of romance and desire and wanting there that none of us can compete with, but nothing can beat my brother’s first time in the back booth of the seediest strip club in Lannisport for the most ridiculous first time story.”
Tyrion, halfway through a pint, cleanly downs the rest and takes over the story, happy as ever to take command of the conversation.
She keeps her eyes on the other Lannister at the table, his eyes coming to meet hers. He smiles, not the sharp blade of the smile he uses on his adversaries in the court room, nor the smile he uses to charm the servers at the bar or the salesperson in a shop, but that same smile she will remember to the end of her days, a smile that reaches up into his green eyes, warming her from the inside out.
She blushes, despite herself, despite the years that have gone by since the first time she saw that smile. “Thank you,” she mouths to him.
His smile grows, nearly imperceptibly, at the sight of her blush, and he just tips his drink in her direction.
Later, as Sansa & Pod walk her home, her friend turns to her, still clearly bothered by the question earlier.
“Bri,” her friend starts, gently grabbing her arm and pulling her to a stop. “You know that okay number one, you never have to answer those type of stupid drunk questions, right?”
She nods. “I know.”
“And okay point two: you know it’s completely fine to be a virgin! I mean you know I was a virgin until I met Pod-“
The man in question reddens at that. “Sansa…”
Sansa turns to him, waving her hand. “It’s okay Pod, Bri already knows all about it,” a statement that does nothing to reduce the blush on Pod’s cheeks.
“Anyway, Bri, you know it’s fine right? It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, especially in a room like that, boastful boys with like ten pints each down them.”
Later that night, when Brienne has brushed her teeth, when she’s drank about a liter of water in a vain attempt to stave off a hangover, when she’s turned off the lights and pulled her duvet over her, she thinks about what Sansa has said. Her friend is right, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a virgin.
But that’s not why she didn’t answer.
She didn’t answer because she has no idea how to even explain it, to explain all the small parts of it that she sometimes cannot even fully believe, of meeting the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen in her father’s chip shop when she was sixteen, his blonde hair waving in the wind, his sparkling green eyes missing nothing. How that boy somehow, despite it all, became her friend over those long weeks of summer.
How he’d kissed her the day before he had to leave for the mainland. How he’d teased her with his words, gently and kindly, and how he’d touched her and she’d somehow found the courage to touch him. How he’d moved above her and with her and in her in ways she’d never even dreamed possible. How the things he’d made her feel then she has never yet felt again.
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a fantastic story of romance and desire and wanting there that none of us can compete with…”
She falls asleep thinking of him smiling at her from across the table, those same green eyes from so long ago locked now with hers, and she wonders…