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The door of her cottage shook in its frame as it closed behind him, but Brienne did not start. She had been expecting him. Jaime. He stood on the threshold, his skin bruised and blood-blackened, looking like thunder.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, though she knew it was pointless. The brothers of the Quiet Isle could hardly force him out, even in his weakened state, and Jaime knew it.
“You lied to me,” he said, his voice low and hoarse and dangerous.
“Yes,” she agreed, blankly. She was guilty of every crime he would lay at her door, and there was no use defending her choices—she had made them, and she would make them again.
“Why?” Jaime asked, and Brienne wished she could not hear the hurting, pleading note beneath his harshness.
“Because I was frightened. Because I was faithless. Because I felt I had no alternative,” she told him, desperately trying to keep her voice even and detached. She doubted she succeeded. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want the truth.”
No, you don’t. If Brienne had learned anything in her short life, it was that nothing was more painful than the truth. Jaime might claim he wanted her honesty, but could he bear it, once she spilled it out into the small room and let it hang heavy around his shoulders?
Not for the first time since she had left him in King’s Landing—not for the second, nor third, nor fourth time—she remembered the baths at Harrenhal. He had been honest with her then, more honest than she knew she wanted him to be. She owed him her honesty in return, but it was a poor kind of gift.
“I was afraid you would not believe me,” she settled on; it was the truth, but not nearly all of it. “I was afraid you would not come if you did believe me. I was afraid you would not care enough for me to follow me into the dark. Will that suffice?”
“And yet I did,” Jaime said, as if she needed reminding. “I followed you.” There was something shining in his eyes that Brienne did not wish to examine too closely.
“Not me, your oath,” she said, and she wished it were true.
“My oath?” he snapped, taking another step into the room. “My oath is to the king, or have you forgotten? I abandoned my post, abandoned my duty and rode out into the unknown because you asked me to.” He let out a mirthless laugh. “I thought I had freed myself from a scheming woman, but I only delivered myself into the hands of another. Foolish of me to imagine that even if Cer—even if everyone else has betrayed me, I could still rely on your loyalty.”
Of course, this was never about me. It should not have made her sad, to think that Jaime’s ire was not not wholly directed at her, that he was—at least in part—still smarting from wounds his sister had inflicted. It was stupid of her to feel robbed of something, yet she could not keep the bitterness from her voice when she replied,
“I never knew you expected my loyalty. I certainly never expected yours.”
For a moment, a flicker of hurt crossed his features, and Brienne was suddenly reminded of the last words they had spoken to each other before she left King’s Landing, of the gruff way he had dismissed her when she had doubted his intentions. She almost wanted to take the words back, but then Jaime spoke, his words laced with a venom she had not heard since before Harrenhal.
“It is a comfort to know your feelings won’t be hurt if I stab you in the back. But perhaps that’s the difference between the two of you: Cersei expected my blind loyalty in exchange for her perfidy.”
“Yes, that’s the only difference between me and your sister.” Brienne muttered, but Jaime continued as if she had not spoken.
“While I was dragging myself through mud and filth to return to her, she was taking half the Kingsguard to her bed,” he spat, his good hand clenching into a fist at his side. Brienne waited, expecting him to continue. She could hardly imagine the crimes the queen had doubtless committed since Brienne had left King’s Landing, crimes she was certain Jaime would take issue with. After a few moments, she prompted,
“Is that all?”
“What?” Jaime looked taken aback, and the truth dawned—its light sickly and unwelcome—on Brienne.
“Truly, that is why you’ve turned away from her?” she asked, incredulous. “Because she took other men to bed? Of course she did, Jaime. She was alone and desperate and without power.”
“Without power?” Jaime scoffed, “she is Queen Regent, Brienne.”
“Aye, her power is all borrowed from men, and she has nothing but her beauty with which to buy some for herself. It is a truth all women are familiar with, whether they accept it or not.” Brienne could hear a hundred of Septa Roelle’s rebukes ringing through her head, a thousand muffled giggles and bursts of outright laughter, each one a sharp reminder that she was a poor lady in more ways than one. “I am only the woman I am because I have no beauty to spend, so I had to find myself a different currency with which to barter for my freedom.”
“I never imagined I would hear you, of all people, defend her,” Jaime said, and Brienne would have laughed at the petulance in his voice, were she not so angry with him, and so tired.
“I am sure she is guilty of myriad crimes that I cannot defend, Jaime, and I would not defend them.” She meant to leave it there, but he had insisted this night was about honesty, and she was so, so tired. “I wonder if you did, though,” she continued. “Did you overlook the ways she abused her power, until you found out how she came by it?”
Jaime froze, and Brienne took a perverse satisfaction in the way he opened and closed his mouth, desperately trying to find something with which to defend himself.
“I—no, that’s not true, I tried—I tried to…” Jaime stammered, his voice becoming more and more strained. “I wanted to—but she would never listen to me and I—she reminded me too much of—of—” he winced, and he didn’t need to say the name for Brienne to know exactly who his sister reminded him of. “I couldn’t stand it but I had to protect Tommen, had to protect my son and if that meant…” he paused, and the fight went out of him, his shoulders slumping as he admitted, “I saw it. I saw what she was doing and I hated it, but I could not hate her for it the way I hated her for...”
He trailed off, unable to look at Brienne. All the anger seemed to have bled out of him, and he looked so lost that Brienne felt some of her anger drain away along with his.
“Why are you here, Jaime?” she asked, finally, and Jaime’s head snapped up.
“What?”
“Why should you spend such energy on a woman who isn’t your sister, a woman ten thousand times uglier and just as much of a liar?” Brienne could feel the desperation leaking into her voice, but she was so tired she could hardly hold her body up, let alone hold back the emotion that boiled beneath her skin. She could feel tears pricking at the backs of her eyes, but Jaime looked at her as if his answer should have been obvious:
“Because I thought you were different.”
“Different how?”
“Innocent.”
Despite the pain lancing through her body, despite the hurt and the loss and the sadness in her bones, laughter bubbled up from the hollow in Brienne’s chest spilling out uncontrollably. Her bruised ribs ached with it, and the wound on her face burned at the exertion.
“Innocent? Is that how you think of me? I’ve not been innocent for a long time, Jaime. I was not innocent when Lady Stoneheart strung me up alongside Pod and Hyle. I was not innocent when Biter pushed me into the mud and ripped my flesh from my face.” Her hand fluttered towards her wound as she fought back the memories of mud and terror and Biter’s rank breath on her face. “I was not innocent when I killed Pyg and Shagwell and Timeon. I was not innocent when you gave me Oathkeeper, nor when you rescued me from the bear, nor when you stopped the Bloody Mummers raping me. You have never known me innocent.”
Jaime only looked at her for a long moment, and it was as if something inside him had shattered. Brienne wanted to go to him, to fold him in her arms and comfort him as she longed to be comforted, but she did not. She deserved neither the privilege nor the burden of soothing him that night. She only waited.
“No,” he managed, eventually. “No, you have always been innocent.”
“Jaime—”
“That isn’t—innocence is not the same as ignorance,” he insisted, his voice gaining strength as he spoke. “You have experienced the cruelties of the world and you have suffered, I cannot deny that. You have suffered too much and I wish I—I should have done more to prevent it. But suffering never stole your innocence from you. You are too kind, too stupidly, stubbornly noble for that.”
Brienne could almost weep at the earnestness in Jaime’s voice, the conviction with which he held her gaze, daring her to challenge him. She wondered if this was how he had felt when they were first together, when she had believed there was goodness in the world. I still believe that, she told herself; she had seen it more than once on her miserable journey through the Riverlands, but she had seen cruelty also, and far too often.
“That is a beautiful idea, Jaime,” she said softly, as if she could mitigate the harsh truth of her words with the gentleness of her voice, “but I am a woman and I lost my innocence with my first blood. The world said my girlhood was done and I could never be innocent again. If you asked your sister I imagine she’d tell you the same.”
Jaime flinched at the mention of his sister, but he did not snap back at her, only frowned and said quietly,
“When did you become such a cynic?”
Brienne almost laughed at the memories that cascaded through her mind; her experiences would have made the Maiden herself doubt, and there was no single point on which she could place the blame.
“I don’t know,” she told him. “When did you become an idealist?”
Jaime did not hesitate:
“When I met you.”
Brienne’s anger rushed back at that; a few months ago, such words would have set her heart to fluttering, but now they sounded so horribly, monstrously unfair.
“A shame to have wasted your transformation on another scheming woman,” she snapped.
Jaime looked stricken, and he croaked her name,
“Brienne—”
But something inside her had given way, the walls she had so carefully, so meticulously built were crumbling around her, and she could not hold herself back any longer.
“I don’t understand what you want from me, Jaime!” she cried. “You come storming in to tell me how I betrayed you and now you—” she gestured futilely at the expression on his face, the one she still wanted to kiss away. “I know all too well how I betrayed you, Jaime. I made my choice with a rope around my neck, and I would make it again. Is that what you want to hear? Or do you want me to regret it? You want me to prostrate myself at your feet and beg forgiveness?”
“I—” Jaime began, but Brienne cut him off.
“No. You want the truth. The truth is that I would have given my life for you, but they wanted more than was mine to give. They wanted Pod and Hyle too, they wanted innocent life to pay for my betrayal, because I did betray her, Jaime. If she were still alive, Catelyn Stark would have condemned me just as Lady Stoneheart did. Do you think she would have accepted me back into her service knowing that I loved you?” Brienne was shocked by her own boldness, too tired and too heartsick to consider the words that wrenched themselves from within her. “I came to you at Pennytree and I lied and I led you into a trap because I was punishing myself for loving you. I betrayed my lady and I almost let Pod and Hyle die because I loved you. If I had told you what awaited you, if I had tried to save you again and others had suffered for it—I could not have lived with myself. That is the truth. I will not ask your forgiveness, though I know I should want it.”
It was only when she stopped speaking that Brienne realised she was trembling. She felt wrung out, oddly hollow now she had finally purged herself of the feelings that had weighed so heavily on her. It was with an odd mixture of dread and relief that Brienne waited for Jaime to say something, anything, but he only stared at her, mouth slightly open—infuriatingly, impossibly more beautiful in his unguarded shock than he ever was with his sharp smiles and cutting gaze. A memory struck Brienne, suddenly, the echo of his words ringing in her head just as they had in the cold stone of the bath house.
“Come,” she said, voice shaking, “curse me or kiss me or call me a liar.”
The corners of his mouth twitched upwards in a disbelieving smile, and Jaime took a step towards her. Brienne felt sure he must be able to hear the frantic beating of her heart as it thundered in her ribcage. She had expected him to leave, to stammer some lukewarm apologies and platitudes as he fled, but instead he was closing the gap between them. Every muscle in Brienne’s body was tense, ready to—she didn’t know what to be ready for as he walked calmly towards her, expression inscrutable.
She flinched when his hand touched the back of her head, but she let him guide her down so his lips could touch her forehead. The gentleness of the kiss took her aback, and her eyes fluttered closed, allowing Jaime to press feather-light kisses on the lids, before his lips pressed softly against her ruined cheek, then her whole one. Adrenaline thrummed in her veins as she felt the warmth of his breath against her cracked lips.
“Jaime—”
“I am only doing as you asked, Brienne.”
“This is not what you want.”
“Isn’t it?” His hand slid down so his palm could rest against her neck, and his thumb caressed the line of her jaw. The motion was too gentle, and Brienne wished she was strong enough to pull away from it. Instead, she said,
“You want vengeance on your sister for her betrayal. Please, you cannot use me so.”
“You think so little of me?”
“None of us are above weakness, Jaime.”
He was so close she could feel the unsteady breath he took before replying:
“You are right, I have been weak. I have been weak since I returned to King’s Landing. I have been weak since I let you go out into the world alone, with nothing to protect you but your own virtue.” Brienne tried to protest—he had given her more than she would ever have asked for—but he only shook his head and continued; “I sent you into danger while I stayed and did my sister’s bidding, I stayed and resented her for taking other men to her bed, though I had committed a far greater infidelity. She might have given away her body, but I had given away my heart, though I did not notice you had it until it was too late.” Brienne’s own heart was thumping in her chest. He cannot mean this, she told herself, he does not mean what you want him to mean. “If I were not so weak, I would have gone with you,” Jaime continued, his thumb brushing the ragged edges of the wound on her face. “If I were not so weak, I would not be here now—I would let you be free of me.”
I will never be free of you. Brienne’s hands came up to clutch at the fabric of Jaime’s shirt, though he had made no move to pull away. His own hand still rested against her neck, and it took only the slightest pressure of his fingers for Brienne to tilt her head down and meet his lips with her own. Jaime leaned into the kiss, fingers moving to bury themselves in her hair, while his right arm snaked around her waist to pull her closer. Brienne winced in discomfort as her bruised ribs protested the movement, and Jaime pulled away, a concerned frown wrinkling between his brows.
“I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”
Brienne could not help but smile at that, remembering the triumphant gleam in his eye when they had fought for the first time, bright blood blooming from the fresh wound in her thigh. There was nothing but a thin scar there, now.
“Just my ribs. It’s not your fault,” she said, reaching for him again. He came to her easily, his hand returning to her face, and he rose up onto his toes to press another gentle kiss to her lips. This time, his stump simply rested on her hip, and Brienne allowed one of her hands to mirror Jaime’s, stroking the scratchy hair of his beard until he opened his mouth to deepen the kiss. Brienne let out a shocked hum as he drew her bottom lip into his mouth, and she could feel the way he smiled in response.
There was still a voice—getting smaller by the minute—tell her that there was still too much unsaid between them. The bruises Stoneheart had left on their bodies and their minds were still too fresh, and Jaime too newly divorced from his sister for any of this to be a good idea. But if Brienne had learned anything since she set out from Tarth what felt like a century ago, it was that she ought to take comfort wherever she could find it. Tonight, she wanted the heat of Jaime’s mouth, and the touch of his calloused fingers against her skin. They could figure it out in the morning, she decided. In the morning, they could talk about the lingering resentments and this new, fragile, beautiful thing that was growing between them. But for now—
A noise from outside caused Brienne to start, pulling away from Jaime to listen. They were both frozen in place, as the voice’s owner moved past the entrance of the cottage—pressed so close together, Brienne could feel Jaime’s heart racing as fast as her own was—but soon the brother in question moved on, and they breathed a sigh of relief.
“I—I ought to go,” Jaime said, reluctantly, though he made no move to extricate himself from her embrace. “It would not do for one of the brothers to catch me here.”
He was right, and they both knew it, but Brienne found that she did not care.
“Stay,” she whispered, feeling bolder than she had ever imagined herself being. “Stay with me tonight.” Jaime pulled away to look at her, eyebrows raised in amusement. He started to say something but Brienne soldiered on, horribly aware of the patchy blush that must be staining her face. “I don’t—I only mean that I haven’t been sleeping well. I would—I would prefer to have company, if I must spend the night in wakefulness. I am so, so tired but I cannot rest.”
“Well then, my lady, if you will allow me, I believe I can help you with that.” His hand moved slowly down her torso, passing between her breasts and over the taught muscles of her abdomen before pressing between her legs, and Brienne gasped at the sudden rush of pleasure there.
“If I do allow it,” Brienne said, trying desperately to keep her voice steady (though, judging by the smug smile on Jaime’s face, she was not succeeding), “will you think me less innocent in the morning?”
“Less ignorant, perhaps,” Jaime smiled as he pressed an open mouthed kiss to the livid marks on her neck, “but never less innocent.”
Brienne wasn’t sure if she believed him, certain that if any part of her was still innocent, it would not be so by the sunrise. She whimpered as he slid his hand from between her thighs, bringing it to rest lightly against the lacing of her breeches. Blue eyes met green, and Brienne nodded. She had long thought that innocence was overrated.