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Jaime Lannister had always thought that you don’t get to choose who you love. After all, the gods had given each person a soulmate - a pairing for each soul, a perfect love match. As a kid, he was so excited at the prospect of a person ready to love him and be loved by him. His mother had always told him that he was made for love and he eagerly awaited his life’s greatest love.
But life had other plans. Jaime’s soulmate, Arthur Dayne, had needed a quiet love, not Jaime’s brand of loving out loud exclamation mark. They had been in different seasons of life when they met, Arthur his fencing coach at college while Jaime was in his first year. They had given it the old college try, with Jaime moving in with Arthur after a year of dating. When it was good, it was good. Their souls being entwined had made their intimacy so powerful and so special, it almost made up for the hurt Jaime felt at not being loved in the way he needed. He knew it wasn’t Arthur’s way to do grand gestures and public displays of affection, but was it too much to ask for any small act of possession? A sign that Jaime had made even a tiny impact on Arthur’s life? Jaime’s heart literally beat out a thumping mineminemine everytime Arthur was near (or far, let’s be real). But he just couldn’t be sure that Arthur’s did the same.
So they broke up. Jaime’s last year of college was a blur of grief and loneliness and it was quite the surprise that he managed to eke out the grades to graduate. And life went on.
Jaime met Brienne Tarth years later, on the island of Tarth, where he’d relocated to seek special treatment for his damaged hand. She was the office manager at the physiotherapy clinic on the island and he’d shown up for his first appointment all salty and snapping and she’d served back the exact same. He had said some not nice things about her appearance and she had retorted with some choice comments about “Daddy’s money.” Later that evening, she’d shown up to the bar he had come to to drown his sorrows and somehow shooting glares at each other across the room had led to them making out in the booth at the back of the bar, and then again on her lumpy couch at her flat across the street. Brienne had come to her senses and kicked him out of her house then, but it wasn’t long before repeated encounters for hate-fueled sex became something else entirely.
Jaime knew he loved Brienne the first time he heard her laugh. Not the polite giggle she let out in public but the braying guffaw she released, with her face reddening and tears streaming down her face, at a joke he made that wasn’t all that funny. After years of being dealt rejection and cruelty, Brienne had erected a 10-foot wall around herself to protect her precious heart, and she was finally shedding her defenses to let him in.
Brienne’s soulmate had loved her in his own way, but nearly rejected her on sight upon meeting her, and had made it clear that he was with her despite her looks. He was a small man in every sense of the word, and Jaime would have punched him if the man came anywhere within a 10 mile radius of him. It was so clear to Jaime that the gods had gotten it so damn wrong when it came to Brienne, for she was made to be showered in love and worshipped for every freckle that made up the unique constellations of her.
He knew Brienne loved him the first time she stayed over at his place. It had been a big leap of faith for her for them to go to his place instead of hers. The morning after, she’d woken up to make coffee (his Brienne, famously not a morning person) and had pulled on his oldest, once-white t-shirt and his favourite forest green sweatpants. Leaning against the kitchen counter, he watched her fondly, her normally neat hair uncivilized and sticking up at all angles, while she absent-mindedly peeled a Tarth orange. She looked up at him to hand him half the orange and she didn’t have to say the words because the look in her ocean blue eyes said it all.
(She’d shout the words later as she came, delirious with bliss. Iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou.)
Brienne was not typically a big gestures person, but her love was so constant and intentional. His office was scattered with debris of their relationship - a stray pistachio shell from the time she bought a bag of them on sale and spent an hour painstakingly shelling each one so Jaime could snack on his favourite nut at all hours, the notes she left for him on his notebook that he’d tear off and keep to reread, a postcard from the one time she went to Storm’s End for the week, even though she came back to him before the postcard did.
For his part, Jaime could not keep quiet about Brienne. He loved nothing more than entering a room with her by his side, holding her hand, and getting to introduce her as his girlfriend. He’d shout it from the rooftops daily if he wasn’t sure she’d die of embarrassment, but he could tell she basked in his attention. She loved being cherished, so he showed her at every opportunity he could.
Getting married was inevitable, though a smaller affair than one would have expected for a Lannister. Surrounded by their closest family and friends at Evenfall’s tiny sept, Jaime and Brienne stood at the altar, with his cloak around her, and her cloak around him. They said the names of the Seven who had gotten their soulmates so exceptionally wrong (silently thanking them for having done so), and before they kissed, Jaime whispered, “I choose you Brienne Tarth, in every lifetime.”