Chapter Text
“Brienne. You should eat something. Brienne.”
Brienne of Tarth starts from half-sleep, her heart still beating fast. She had been dreaming in confused snatches. Pod disappearing beneath a pile of the dead. Snow falling on Tarth. The Bloody Mummers returned as wights, mouths frozen open in grins, advancing on her and Jaime as Winterfell burns.
And then Jaime – the real one, not the bloodied man in her dreams – calls her back to the world of the waking. He stands in the doorway to the chamber Brienne and Pod have shared since the Battle of Winterfell, when Pod nearly lost his life defending the walls.
“Sleeping there again?” Jaime says.
“I didn’t mean to.” Brienne rises from her chair and stretches her back, which is stiff from sitting. It’s been three days since the battle, two and a half days since the Stark army’s chief healer bound the gaping wound across Pod’s chest, and mere hours since Pod’s fever broke.
“What was the point of dragging a cot in here if you were only going to sleep in that chair?” Jaime says. He makes it sound like a joke, but Brienne hears the worry in his voice. “They already served supper, and I didn’t see you, so…” He edges into the chamber, out of the dim hallway, and she realizes that he’s carrying a basket. “For you.”
Brienne rubs her eyes and peers out the window. The deep darkness of nighttime in the North has already fallen. Here and there are flickering orange lights: the bonfires where the surviving soldiers are feeding the bodies of the dead to the flames. They have been at it for days now, but the mountains of the dead go on and on. “Gods damn it. I only meant to make sure he was all right. I promised Lady Sansa I would-”
“-supervise the soldiers. I know. It’s all right.” He places the basket on the table. “Ser Davos was happy to take your place.”
“Ser Davos is a good man.” Brienne’s stomach rumbles, and she tears a hunk of bread from the two-day-old loaf in the basket. Most of Winterfell’s bakers fell in battle, and they are making do on little. “And so are you.”
Jaime sketches out a mock bow. “Only the finest stale bread and tasteless jerky for you, Ser Brienne.” He twists open a wineskin and fills Brienne’s cup. “Take that and go somewhere else. Clear your head. I’ll watch him for a time.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He sighs and rubs his cheek. He hasn’t shaved since before the battle, and he is close enough that she can hear the rasp of fingers on stubble. “Then lie in your bed, at least.”
At any other time, she would have fired back a retort. Sleep while you work? Not bloody likely. But Brienne is exhausted. When she hasn’t been sitting in council with Lady Sansa and Jon Snow, she’s been commanding the Stark forces as they assess the damages. When she hasn’t been with the army, she’s been at Pod’s bedside. Sleep has been next to impossible.
“All right,” she says.
Jaime raises an eyebrow. “This may be the first time you haven’t disagreed with something I said.”
“Even you have sensible ideas on occasion.” Brienne shucks off her outer layers, leaving her shift and thick, woolen leggings. No point in modesty. Pod’s eyes are closed, and Jaime – well. “Besides, I hardly have the energy to eat, much less disagree.”
They are silent for a few minutes as Brienne tucks herself into the cot, then reaches for the basket. She eats ravenously and does not care that each bite scatters crumbs on the sheets.
“He looks well,” says Jaime, only he’s looking at her and not Pod. “He’s like to survive.”
“I don’t know what I’d do if he didn’t,” she says, and she means it. Podrick Payne is the closest she has to a living brother.
“And you? Your leg, it’s-”
“Fine,” she says. When the dead had pulled her down, and she thought they were going to bury her until she choked and became one of them, a wight had sunk its teeth into the meat of her calf. Then she had heard Jaime scream with rage. A second later, he was pulling her to her feet and she was screaming too, in pain and fear and shock at being alive after all. “It would have been far worse if you weren’t there.”
He offers her a tired smile. “If you had told me years ago that a bear would be the least dangerous creature I’d pull off you, I’d have laughed in your face.”
Brienne swallows a mouthful of dry bread. “As I recall, you still laughed in my face plenty.”
He grimaces. “That I did. But after the battle-” He stops, and she knows what he’s thinking of. She had saved him, too, when a wight leapt onto his back and knocked him into the wall. She had lifted the dead man off Jaime’s shoulders, dropped it to the ground, and crushed its skull underneath her boot. “I promise, Ser, I will never laugh at you again.”
Brienne chuckles. “Come, now. That’s a promise you’ll break before nightfall tomorrow.”
“But it is an awfully nice idea, isn’t it?” he says in that smooth, low voice he uses when he is joking. She feels a jolt of something she refuses to name. She always does, when he speaks in that tone.
Now that Brienne is no longer hungry, sleep tugs at her eyelids again. “Wake me after an hour. Or if he cries out. Or if his forehead is too warm. Or if his bandage-”
“I will wake you if there is cause,” Jaime says. “It’s all right. Rest.”
She closes her eyes and listens to his movements: footsteps, followed by a thunk, then a crackle. He’s thrown another log on the fire.
The chamber grows warmer. She sleeps.
Brienne wakes past midnight to a hand stroking her hair. “Ser Jaime?” she says, her voice hoarse.
“You were moaning in your sleep.”
She opens her eyes. The fire has burned low, but her cot is warm: Jaime has tucked in one of the hot bricks that the Northmen use at the feet of their beds. “I told you to wake me after an hour,” she says.
“So you did,” he says. He’s still running his fingers through her hair. She can’t look at him for fear he will stop. “But you clearly need the rest, and besides, I find myself unable to sleep.”
“Mm,” she says, too drowsy to respond with full sentences.
“Is this all right?” he says. “That is, should I…” The stroking slows.
“No. Please. It’s soothing.” She shifts position so he has better access to her head and neck. Is it wrong, she wonders briefly, to feel such pleasure in the scrape of his nails across her scalp?
“Good,” he says, so softly it’s almost a whisper. “I would not touch you unless you wished it.”
This time, when she sleeps, her dreams are pleasant.
They fall into a routine of walking the hills around Winterfell in the hour before the sun goes down.
The earth to the north of the city has been trampled flat by a thousand dead men’s footfalls. The earth to the east and west is scorched black by dragon fire. Only the south still looks as it was. The broad ribbon of the Kingsroad curls over the crest of the horizon.
“How much longer will you stay in the North?” Brienne asks on that first day.
Jaime snorts. “I can hardly go south. If I fall into Cersei’s hands, she’ll kill me.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“She would.”
“She loves you.”
Jaime stops short, eyes suddenly wild. “I abandoned her.”
Brienne takes him by the shoulders. “You risked your life to come here and warn us of her betrayal. You did something brave-”
“She is with child.”
Brienne’s mouth drops open in shock. “Oh,” she says. She can think of nothing else to say. A battery of emotions is tearing at her heart. She pushes them down, deep within herself.
“You think I’m weak,” Jaime says. “You always try to act the stoic, but I can see everything you’re feeling on your face.” He sets his mouth in a hard line and starts to walk again, fast, away from her.
“Jaime,” she says. “Don’t be cruel.”
He relents immediately. “I’m sorry,” he says.
They walk in silence until the sun is almost gone. In the fading light, Brienne can see the gray in Jaime’s hair and the lines in his forehead. Things he didn’t have when they first met, years ago.
“I lay with her again because it was easy,” he says at last, so softly she strains to hear it. “Haven’t you ever done that?”
Brienne pauses. “No,” she says, “but I can understand why someone would.”
“That’s right. I forgot,” he says, turning to look at her. He is smiling, a rueful, pained smile. “You never do anything because it is easy.”
A week later, a raven arrives for Varys in the morning, as the survivors are breaking their fast. Varys reads the message, winces, and passes it to Jaime, who grows white and leaves the room.
Brienne finds him pacing in his chamber. She doesn’t knock. “What is it?” she says.
Jaime doesn’t look at her. “It turns out,” he says, “that there is no child after all.” His voice is hollow.
She sits in one of the chairs by the fireplace, head in her hands. Jaime’s sadness is so vast that it fills the space between them like a cloud. “How did the news reach Varys?”
“One of his little birds helps with the royal household’s laundry. Cersei’s monthly bleeding never stopped, apparently.” He smiles, but there is no mirth in his eyes. “She wanted to entrap me, I suppose. She did a damn fine job of it.”
“I am so sorry,” she says, quietly.
“I saw two of my children die, you know,” he says. His tone is level, as if discussing the weather. “Myrcella died in my arms. And you know what happened to Joffrey. You were there that day.” His hands clench and unclench. “Joffrey was a sadistic little shit, but he was my son.”
“You told me something once.” Jaime’s quiet grief is making her own throat tight, and she has to clear her throat until she can continue. “You said we can’t choose who we love. It’s all right to love them, your children. Even the one who…” She trails off.
“…didn’t exist,” he says. “I loved that one most of all, and do you want to know why?”
Brienne is silent.
“I hoped,” Jaime says. “I hoped this child meant we could start again. However impossible that seems. That Cersei and I could be good.”
She comes to stand beside him. “I have tried to tell you,” she says. “You are already good.” Then she summons up her courage and embraces him. But he doesn’t pull back, as she’d feared. Instead, he leans into her.
Brienne doesn’t know much about comforting, but it feels right that her arms hold him. It feels right that she rubs circles on his back with her palm. And when he weeps into her shoulder, that, too, feels right.
For the next few days, their walks are mostly silent.
One morning, Arya Stark and the Hound are gone. “They took horses in the night,” says Lady Sansa when Brienne asks. “Gone to King’s Landing.”
“Alone?”
“The less noticeable they are, the easier it will be.” Sansa doesn’t say what ‘it’ is. She doesn’t have to. Sansa has told Brienne of Arya’s list, and there is only one name left.
Later, when she and Jaime are walking, he turns abruptly to her. “The Stark girl intends to kill my sister.”
It is a statement, not a question. She nods.
“Gods,” he says. His mouth moves for a moment, but nothing comes out. Whatever else he has to say is so vast, so painful, that he can hardly articulate it. She has seen this look on his face many times before.
Brienne chooses her next words carefully. “I would not hold against you,” she says, “if you ride south.”
He snorts. “Wouldn’t you? I’d be deserting. Again.”
“Love is also an oath,” she says, and she means it, though it almost burns her mouth to say it. “An oath you would be remiss not to keep.”
“I don’t love Cersei,” he snarls. “I owe that woman nothing now.”
Confusion blooms in her, and hope, and pain, too, to see him wrestle with himself like this. “Come,” she says, and sits on the lip of a ravine that runs along the forest path. Above them, the dead leaves that have clung to the oak trees whisper in the wind.
He sits next to her. “Would you really be so cavalier if I left?”
“I already told you, I would understand-”
He looks at her, something wild in his eyes. “Is that all you would feel? Understanding?”
Brienne is silent. This is how they have always been: silent. They look at each other and do not speak, hoping the other understands. They let their swords say what their mouths cannot. And now he is asking –
“You’re asking if I would miss you?” she says.
“Yes! You, Ser Brienne of Tarth, would you feel my absence?”
“Of course I would.” Now her voice is as heated as his.
Jaime holds her gaze for a long moment, his dark green eyes probing her blue ones. “So that is the way of it after all,” he says.
“Yes,” Brienne says, not daring to look away. Her heart is pounding in her chest. She thinks about his fingers in her hair. “That is the way of it.” She shifts, moving a fraction closer to him. “And you?”
He snorts. “If I left, I would think of you while saddling my horse. I would think of you with every passing mile. At night I would make camp, and I would lie on the ground, and I would imagine you there with me. Does that answer your question?” She gapes at him. “I don’t mean any of lustfully,” he adds. He leans closer, then, and enunciates each of his next words. “Though let me be clear. I do, sometimes, think of you with lust.”
Brienne’s eyes go wide, and she looks away. “Nobody thinks of me with lust,” she says, automatically.
He snorts. “On the contrary. I have been tortured by it.”
She stands and whirls to face him in one fluid motion. Now she towers over him. “If you dare make this sort of joke at my expense, I will-” She stops. What would she do?
“I am not joking.” He stands, too, and then he takes her hand with his. She gasps at the unexpected sensation of his skin on hers. He steps closer, and closer, until his face is inches from hers. Brienne closes her eyes, her breath shallow in her throat. How can she tell him that she knows next to nothing of what people do when they lay with each other, which must be what he expects –
Then she feels his forehead against hers. She opens her eyes again. He has to stand on his toes to reach her like this, she notes, and she has to stop herself from giggling like a child.
“Do you want me?” Jaime says. His mouth is close enough that she could take it, if she wanted.
“Yes,” she whispers, before she can stop herself. “But I’ve never been with a – I don’t know how to-”
“I don’t care.” He is staring at her lips, she realizes, and she swallows. “My whole life I have only ever touched one person. I am almost as green as you.”
She tries to respond but cannot. The smell of him – soap and sweat and metal – is making her dizzy.
He kisses her on the cheek and steps back. “Take a day to consider it,” he says. “If you would rather remain – what we are now, I understand.”
Brienne nods, slowly. What are they now? “Yes,” she says. “Let me think on it.”
That night, Brienne can hardly sleep. She has a chamber to herself now that Pod is well again, and she paces in front of the fire until well past midnight.
To think that someone looks at her with desire. To think that she looks at him with desire. And there is no question, she realizes, that what she feels for Jaime is desire. The sensation thrums just beneath her skin. It has a pulse and a mind of its own. It is a living thing.
Brienne is not a complete innocent. Around the time she got her first blood, there was a girl. Nell, the daughter of the cook at Evenfall and one of her playmates growing up. She doesn’t remember who started it, Nell or her, but there were kisses stolen in the shadows of the stable, and sometimes caresses, too.
Then Septa Roelle found them, and Nell was sent to live with her cousins. That was when Septa Roelle’s warnings started to come thick and fast. A woman’s body is for childbearing, not earthly pleasures. A woman’s body is like a delicate flower, best left untouched. A woman’s body should be bound up in silks and velvets like a gift, which is given to her husband and no one else. Brienne was not sorry to hear, years later, that Septa Roelle had died of the measles.
For the past fifteen years, Brienne has used her body to strike, to defend, to endure. It has been hard work. She struggles to remember the feeling of Nell’s hands on her and the memory escapes her, like a gasp of smoke in the wind.
Then she thinks of Jaime and the desire returns. If she doesn’t know how to please him, or herself – well, what of it? There have been countless nights when she has conjured up his face in her mind and felt heat course through her. That must count for something.
Brienne pulls off her shift and kneels before the hearth. Her fingers reach between her legs, and she finds that she is slick with want. She stares into the fire and strokes herself until she feels shivers of pleasure wrack her body. This is right, she thinks, as she moans into the hand she presses to her mouth. This is good.
The next afternoon, Brienne watches Jaime and Pod spar. It’s the first time Pod is back on his feet after the battle, and he is favoring his right side. That wight’s claws cut clean through the meat on his shoulder, the healer had told her. Truth told, milady, he may never move the same way.
She had been so worried over her squire that she hadn’t corrected the man for calling her ‘milady.’
Now Pod is facing off against Jaime in the clearing outside Winterfell’s walls, wooden sword in hand. Pod’s face betrays the pain of forcing his still-healing shoulder to move, and so Jaime is gentle and encouraging. “Shift your weight so you’re not favoring your right side. That’s it.” Thwack. “Careful. With the state you’re in, no need to hit so hard.”
“Yes, Ser,” says Pod, teeth gritted, and they go around each other in circles. Brienne nods approvingly. Her want for Jaime mixes with tenderness.
When Pod tires, Brienne sends him inside. “That was excellent,” she tells him, and he gives her one of his radiant smiles as he tromps back to the halls of the keep.
Brienne and Jaime regard each other for a moment. “Take his place?” says Jaime at last.
“All right,” she says. She tries to sound diffident, but her heart is leaping.
Before the army of the dead arrived, they practiced together every day. If they had not known each other’s strengths and foibles before, they do now, just as well as they know their own. She parries every one of his blows, and he feints around every one of her strikes.
He is magnificent when he fights. She thinks back to the time the Bloody Mummers had them, after they’d cut off Jaime’s hand and he’d grown still with grief. You were lucky it was only your hand, she’d said.
I am that hand, he’d bitten back.
He was wrong, Brienne is pleased to note. He fights almost as well now with a golden hand instead of a flesh one.
“Are you distracted, Ser?” Jaime asks.
“No.” She surges forward and nearly knocks him across the chest.
He dances back, dodging. “Not at all? You’ve given no thought to what we discussed yesterday?” He is trying not to smile.
“Oh, I have.” This time she goes for his knees. Too slow. Another miss.
“And the conclusion you have reached is…” He is breathing hard, but not hard enough to keep him from speaking.
Brienne hesitates, unsure of what to say, and that is when he strikes. His wooden blade whistles through the air, and though she blocks the first few blows – one, two, three – the last makes her lose her balance. She goes down hard on one knee.
Jaime kneels in front of her and, slowly, brings the sword to her throat. “Do you yield, Ser?” he says. His voice is a whisper.
Her pulse quickens. “Hardly,” she says, and she places her hand on the flat of his sword. Lowers it. Then kisses him.
The intensity of it shocks her. He gasps into her mouth, drops his sword, and grabs her face with both hands, golden and flesh alike. Her lower lip is between his, and he bites, gently, but enough for a fire to light inside her. She does the same and he gasps again. Then his tongue is in her mouth, and hers is rising to meet it, and her arms find their way to his waist, and she wonders what she ever worried about –
“This is all right?” Jaime says, panting. “This is what you want?”
“Yes,” she says, and she means it. “Do that again.”
Instead of kissing her, he slides his cheek against hers until she can feel his breath against her ear. He takes the lobe between his teeth and bites, the same as with her lip. This time, she is the one who gasps. “Do you yield now, Ser?” he asks again.
She starts to smile. So this is the kind of game he wishes to play. “No,” she says, and shoves him backwards. His eyes fly open as he hits the ground, but he has hooked his feet around her ankles and she comes down with him. Then they are not fighting so much as they are wrestling, and each place where they touch is like a small flame against her skin.
He rolls on top of her and wedges his knee between her legs, then draws it upward, to the place she touched last night. Brienne tenses in sudden pleasure. They stare at each other, and she sees the longing plain in his open mouth as he shifts his leg between hers, studying her face to see how she responds.
“Do you like this?” he rasps.
“Yes,” she breathes. He leans down and places his lips at the base of her neck, then sucks at the skin there. The length of his body covers hers, and she pushes her hips against him, desperate for as much as he will give her.
“What about now?” he says, drawing out the words. “Do you admit defeat?”
Her mind clears at the challenge, and she snorts in his face. “Of course not.” Brienne hooks her legs around his waist and rolls until she is sitting astride him. She places one hand on his chest and one at his throat to keep him from pulling the same move. He bucks against her, and it brings him pleasure too, she can tell.
She brings her face close to his. “Yield,” she says.
“Do what you will.” His breath is coming in short, shallow bursts.
Then it comes back to her, what they are doing and where. Brienne glances around the clearing. They are lucky: there is no one. She looks back at Jaime, but some of the heat is gone.
“Too much?” he says softly.
“I just – I…”
He sits up to run his knuckles over her cheek. “We can continue this inside, you know. On a bed.”
Her eyes widen. “That already?”
Jaime chuckles. “No. It doesn’t have to be that already. We can sit and talk, if you want. Or do…” He wets his lips with his tongue. “Whatever you like.”
She narrows her eyes. What is there to discuss? From what she understands, when people lie together, there is little discussion about it. “Talk about what?”
“How you want me to touch you.”
“Oh.” Brienne thinks of the night before and blushes. He grins back. “And…will you say how you want me to touch you?”
“Of course.” He kisses her, and this time they are gentler. Their teeth knock against each other a few times, and Brienne winces, but Jaime just laughs into her open mouth.
“Come to my chamber tonight,” she says. It’s a sentence she had fantasized saying before. Had feared saying before. Now she is not afraid.
Jaime nods, slowly. “I swear it. On the bruise you have on your neck now, I swear it.”
She touches her neck where he kissed her. “You aren’t serious.”
“Would I lie to a knight of the Seven Kingdoms? Don’t answer that. It’s rhetorical.” He shifts the collar of her tunic so it covers the spot. “There.”
They stand and brush the dirt off their knees. Though the Northern wind bites at them on the way back, she can’t help but feel warm.