#braime ff

II

She is twenty three and she is picking out her own birthday cake. Her eyes skip over the number candles, because she's far too old for that kind of thing, and she doesn't even want the cake. She just doesn't want to think how sad he'd be if she didn't buy it. It’s her first after his passing and the thought of his worry is sharp. It’s never been deserved, but inescapable, because that’s what parents do, except she never managed to do what children are supposed to - to provide and take care so the final years are long and kind.

The cake blurs slightly as she exits the store, across the street from her apartment complex that seems to have lost the last of its colors in these winter months and the few strung up Sevenmas lights highlight that.

Brienne thinks her peers would call her insane if she told them she thinks winter in King's Landing is a lot more bleak than the ones she spent on Tarth. There is sharp quality to the contrast between the pale sky and darkening, rich color of water, even the jagged cliff edges stretching toward the horizon. It keeps one vigilant, wakeful. Here, the mild autumn grows more dulled and wraps everyone in an unassuming cocoon that slowly drifts toward spring, which finally hatches not quite rested.

But they have called her uglier things, too.

"Words are wind," her dad would tell her, but the wind isn't the same here, it doesn't take anything with it, only swirls dust around her. Brienne chokes on it, chokes on the echo as well.

Her father had loved the best he could, loved her truly, and if that rent ravines in her ribs, prone to collapsing in on themselves until she stacks them up again like a house of cards, then what hope of being loved gently, wholly, purposefully does she have?

She misses being hugged and told it's okay even when it's clearly a lie. She misses the certainty that her own love wasn't selfish. "He is in a better place now," they had told her, as if it didn't mean she had failed him utterly, repeatedly, until she had carved a crypt in the stone with her pacing?

Brienne falls asleep crying in a bed that doesn't feel hers, but she can't remember last time anything did.

III

Brienne is twenty eight and she pauses at the hallway mirror to fix her ponytail. There is half eaten cake on the kitchen table, bought at half price as leftover from Sevenmas, and a freshly opened wine bottle. It's the same kind her dad had brought her for her eighteenth birthday and she's never bothered to find another one she likes. (It tastes like the kind of summer she's never had.)

In this light, it's hard to tell if the shadows beneath her eyes are from the bit of mascara she had tried to scrub away a minute ago or the exhaustion she unintentionally cultivates like a little succulent garden on the windowsill.

She doesn't focus on the ugly or the beautiful of her face now, it's not what caught her attention. Brienne just stares at her reflection and thinks how she looks neither young nor old, that she just is. And that she has no idea what it means.

Shouldn't she know? Shouldn't she know by now? Shouldn't she be past the age where she is grabbing at dream colored smoke? Shouldn't she...

Brienne looks away before the first tears fall.

She eats her cake and thinks how her dad had told her that hawthorn and cranberries alike turn almost sweet after the first frost. How many frosts have been there now? Brienne's lost the count and the feeling of warmth alike.

She ends up drinking a little too much of the wine and going to bed early, looking at the single candle-look alike flickering on the table and willing herself to sleep after this completely ordinary day that should’ve been something, but it never is. (She isn’t.)

+ IV

Brienne is thirty six and her sides hurt from laughing.

She extracts herself from the couch corner, which Jaime immediately expands into like a lazy cat while flashing her a grin. When she comes back, he might try to coax her into his lap and maybe she will even concede.

She opens another juice carton and refills her glass, leans against the counter and watches her friends arguing over a board game in the living room. It's odd, to know you belong and yet to be so aware of it in this moment, and she cannot quite throw herself back in there, even though it is no mirage she could simply crash through. Instead, Brienne follows the cool and tethering moonlight that has looped itself around her feet.

She steps out into the garden - because that's a thing she has now. There is a thin, crunchy layer of snow that will bite through her fluffy slippers any moment now, chasing her back inside. But for now, she cranes her face toward the sky, sending white little puffs of breath chasing after clouds that slip across the moon.

The door opens behind her and she doesn't look who it is, because there's no one here that she'd want to hide away from. She's lucky, Brienne thinks, that trust was never a truly foreign concept to her, though she's had to learn how to expand it and recognize its many forms like a toddler would with a shape sorter.

Arms wrap around her waist and Brienne allows herself to lean back and rest against Jaime's chest as he props his chin on her shoulder. She considers telling him that she's fine, because she likes to say that, now that she knows how it feels to truly mean it, even if it's not every day. Instead, she allows the bittersweet ache in her chest to mend itself with his quiet warmth.

She frowns, opens her mouth to rebuke, but lightning strikes so close she thinks it might've embedded itself in her spine, and freezes. Moments later, thunder bellows in a way that blows any thoughts out of her head.

"Don't you trust me?" Jaime asks, mistaking her silence for something else, and bringing her back to the present with the way he genuinely sounds hurt. Sansa still sleeps the sleep of an exhausted child and Brienne is suddenly almost envious. Except she isn't. She knows the weight of such sleep too well and…

Brienne tethers herself to this moment instead.

"I do," she tells Jaime, seriously, because she does. Despite the way he frustrates her, despite the way he knows how to cut her to the bone, despite the history that drips in his footprints all the way from King's Landing, she trusts him like any other member of her team. And it's never been misplaced, least of all today when he saved her at the expense of his own arm.

"You can't take that back when this little adventure's over," he announces, though still almost whispering, before sitting down next to her. She brings the blanket around them both before Jaime can even make an attempt, careful not to jostle his right arm. She's done the best she can for it and the ibuprofen should have kicked in by now, but it's a far cry from the actual medical help he requires.

Her heart is heavy, as if every bit of mud and rock and the fallen tree that had almost swept them away has turned into guilt manifestation and nestled in there, but Brienne's got no words to express it, so instead she pinches the edges of blanket together in front of them, so he doesn't have to hold them with his left.

She doesn't keep track of time, the only landmark in its vastness is the frequent and devastating lightning and thunder duet. At least she isn't thinking about the other stormy nights, at least she isn't being swept away by the other landslides of guilt that are always biding their time.

“Truth or dare?” Jaime suddenly speaks up, bumping his shoulder into hers as if it was some kind of inside joke of theirs. “Ah, but it's always the truth with you, Tarth, isn't it?" 

Brienne glances at him with a scoff, only to be caught off-guard by the way he's looking at her. Piercing and focused, more than he should with the pain he's in, and searching for something. He has made a habit of it, somehow, looking at and through her, in a way that never matches the insincere charm he often bears.

"I’ll go first," he says, lips pale and stretched into a ghoul of the bright, infuriating smiles she's so used to. "So, tell me, what are you so afraid of?”

"I thought you were supposed to go first." Her lips are dry and she escapes their blanket wrap a little to reach for a water bottle set next to the radio in front of them. There's another lightning streak and she spills some of the water, with the way she squeezes the bottle.

She drinks, ignores the way he's still staring at her. "Yes, with the question. You're shaking like a leaf, tell me why."

"It's cold," she tries to brush him off, but it'd not be convincing even if she was a better liar. She's not. And Jaime knows it - knows her. But she won't answer, she can't, she might unravel if she tries. And so they sink in silence, at least between the two of them, once she cocoons them in the blanket again.

"Fine, I will answer it myself." There is both steel and an echo of a broken string in his quiet voice and she tenses, unsure of what to expect.

"I am afraid of wildfire. And the smell of flesh burning in it. Did you know Aerys loved it? Both, really. The screams, too." He is staring blankly into the fire, but she can tell he sees something else, something he's far too late to be saved from.

"I stopped him. I had to. And the courts agreed, self defense, even though..." he gives half-shrug. "It wasn't me I was scared for." Her hand covers his left, where it's digging into his pants' leg.

"But now, I can't look at it, not even in those big, historic blockbusters. Used to love them, now I have to look up if there's wildfire in it first. Even a trailer can make me shut halfway down." He laughs a little at that, derisive and tired and she doesn't know what to think, because it turns her opinion of him upside down and at the same time, it doesn't change anything. It's still him, maddening and beautiful with sharpness. Brave to the point of recklessness. Good, too.

Maybe Jaime won't think of her much less if she says her truth, too. At least it should distract him enough to lose that expectant, empty look. Like anything cruel she could dish out he will laugh off with 'heard already', while hoarding it close like a dagger collection held under his pillow. She knows how easy it is to cut hands on them constantly.

"The storm. I am afraid of storms.” 

There is pause, for a derisive comment about her choice to be in SAR or her being an unlikely Stormlander, but it doesn't come. It's a small relief, almost the opposite. If he had said that, she wouldn't be propelled forward to drop the rest of the story at his feet.

"When I was 5, I wandered too far away from home. My brother had told me Just Maid was hidden somewhere on Tarth, most likely the cave system in the cliffs. And then the storm rolled in and I got stranded on an outcrop in one of the caves as it filled with water." She tries not to recall the piercing white through the darkness, the way the water had been sloshing almost at her feet and seemed to be teeming with shadows of beasts, the way each thunderclap threatened to collapse the ageless stone onto her body. The cold and the belief she's never been so alone in this world. Rather, that the world existed somewhere far beyond her reach.

It had only been the start of the nightmare.

"They found me two days later. But Galladon, who had been desperately looking for me... He had been caught in another cave quite like me, but he. He didn't make it out." She had been crying for her brother and father the moment she was pulled into the daylight, even before, but every adult hauling her toward the ambulance had been too busy telling her it'd be okay now.

They had been lying.

"I joined SAR thinking that maybe I could make a difference, that maybe I could prevent a night like that. My father had grayed in those days, thinking both of us dead." She almost hadn’t recognized him. It had felt like the world the people pulled her into wasn't the one she came from, like she was thrown into some other, cold reality that wasn't hers.

Sometimes, Brienne still feels like that. On days like these, on days she's hurt and afraid of the storm's wrath that rattles in her bones, like some doom-promising amulet. There's been so many, since then. The fireplace she's staring at blurs at the edges.

"And then the floods took Renly. Right before my eyes. I was too slow, too afraid of the storm. I failed him, I failed him, I failed." There are so many she has failed that she can't even begin to name the pressure in her chest now. She's crying now, the blurriness leaking down her cheeks in yet unrealized sobs, but her voice grows choked before it fades out.

"You did your best, Brienne. You did your best today, you pushed where others fell back, and we found her. We found her, Brienne. She is safe from the storm and she will make it home."

Lightning flashes beyond the window pane, swallowing everything in white, horrid light. They're always so insatiable, the storms, and today they almost took Jaime, too. Or her, but part of her expects it someday.

If it had taken him…

"And I know you did your best back then, you're just incapable of doing otherwise. It isn't your fault. Nature is a dick. We aren't gods. We just try to do what they're too nonchalant for."

It doesn't heal her, because nothing will in one swift and graceful touch (she might never, the best she can hope for is a scar), but it soothes her, the conviction in his tone. Jaime's always been blunt with her, he wouldn't coddle her now if he didn't think it true.

He wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer as she starts to sob. "But Galladon," Brienne manages to whisper into his neck through sobs, part of the twisted echo that no logic and therapy manages to silence.

"You were a child, for fuck's sake. I hope your father never blamed you for it, because if he did..." Jaime trails off, with intensity she can almost physically feel like heat. Maybe it's just because he's warm and despite the blankets, she hasn't felt not freezing since they left the base in the morning.

"No, never." It might have been easier if he did, like some of the townsfolk did (Roelle, her homeroom teacher, might as well have written 'disobedient little killer' in her journal, with the contempt she filled Brienne with.). Maybe if he didn't mourn so carefully around her, as if afraid that if he showed his hurt, he'd hurt her.

But she understands, she does. After all, for the same reasons, Brienne could never speak about the canyon of hurt and guilt in her heart, because how could she ask her father to comfort her, when he was in pain, too, and because of her?

"Good," Jaime tells her and lets her cry, seemingly understanding that no shushing can fix this broken dam, battered by too many different blows today.

Maybe she dozes off, maybe she just cries softly for so long that the only thing she can register anymore is the crackle of fire, but at some point, she snaps to the realization that there's no more thunder and white hatred dancing beyond the window.

Jaime's head is resting atop hers, so she must've fallen asleep, and there is a crick in her neck, so surely his, too, but he isn't aware just yet as his breathing is deep and even. She doesn't move to wake him up, he needs every moment of rest he can get.

It's not comfortable like this and yet it somehow is. She feels empty and almost light for it, instead of just floating down the stream like... Like something else than the first comparison on her mind. Brienne closes eyes again, allows the warmth to settle somewhere deep in her, anchored there with Jaime's inhales and exhales.

And then, the radio crackles to life. "Selmy to Tarth and Lannister, can you hear me? Over."

She untangles herself from the nest they've made somehow as fast as she can while being careful so that Jaime wouldn't fall over and hurt his arm. Her hands are shaking when she grabs the radio, though for different reasons now.

"Tarth here, with Lannister. In Rayder's cabin. We have Sansa Stark, safe, but with a sprained ankle. Lannister has sustained a severe arm injury, we will not be able to make it back on our own. Over." The relief rushes to her head with speed that makes her dizzy. She feels Jaime stirring behind her and she turns to look at him, smiling.

"Copy that. We are on our way. And just so you know, Arya Stark was brought in by Sandor Clegane a few hours ago. Over."

Brienne sags because that is better news than she could've hoped for and it's so unexpectedly much.

"You did it, Briene," Jaime tells her and his smile looks more familiar. But not quite the same. Warmer, somehow. The shift is almost imperceptible, but she's always been good at telling when winter sunrises become those of spring. And he calls her by her name still, with almost fondness, that settles somewhere in her chest like a golden chain with a little bell.

"We did it," Brienne corrects him. Then, she wills her legs to function once again and gives his good shoulder a gentle squeeze on her way to wake Sansa.