Chapter Text
She wakes with him, the sunlight streaming over them.
His face caressed by the shadows cast from her curtains while the hairs on his chest look like a golden mane bathed in the glow.
She runs her hands through his hair, the natural loll of him leaning into her touch makes her smile.
His eyes chart a course over the rough angles of her, a journey he has taken a thousand times. He has come to love the familiarity as much as he once loved the freshness of the gesture.
She groans as he stretches and rolls over her, begins a caress along her neck and leaves a small trail of kisses in his path. She shivers as he touches the small markings of freckles collected in the shape of a sword sitting under the joining of her neck to her ear.
He stops.
“Still tender?”
She reaches, smoothes her thumb over it, then returns her hand to him, this time trailing her nails over his mouth.
“Just when it's you.”
He smiles and nips at her fingers, she laughs as he moves down her, following the folds of her body, the dip between her neck and her chest, moving to lick at her breasts as her laugher turns to an exhalation.
“I love when you do that.”
He leans up towards her lips, meeting her breaths as his hand works her. He hesitates as he brushes her hips.
“Do you ever wonder how old our souls are? How many times we have missed and met? How many times we have come together?”
The questions have turned themselves over in her again and again, as long as they’ve been together before he’s asked, before they’d even found each other.
There is a familiarity between them that seems too old for their time together.
There is something about Jaime that seems to unearth space within her. He knew she was settled and satisfied with her life and then he curled himself around her, within her, where he now feels like home. Perhaps there is some part of herself that knows there was a kind of inevitability stacked against them and she doesn’t want to admit it. She would always rather be the master of her own fate than think fate had any say over her. When they first came together, there was a new kind of brightness to them but the way he touches her, the awareness he has, the innate knowing of her, where she craves him and when to pull back, it feels like an ancient understanding. He doesn't need to test her limits because he feels every border within her and skirts the edges.
Brienne likes to think the small mark is sensitive to him because he is the only one she’s let in, the only one who sees the tender sites within her.
“You are arrogant, fierce and foolhardy,” She kisses his nose and smiles warmly at him, “You aren’t weary enough to be an old soul.”
“What a glowing endorsement,” He snorts and then hesitates.
“Is your soul weary?” He asks, his eyes cloudy.
She shakes her head, “Never with you.”
She rakes her hands through his hair as he pulls the sheet over them, basking in their heat.