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Brienne is not yet captain of the Fealty the first time she meets Jaime Lannister. She’s still only a midshipman, wet behind the ears and so clean she squeaks.
She comes across him purely by accident. Fealty had been run off course during a storm and been forced to put in at one of the small islands littered off the Dornish coast. Brienne had been put ashore along with several others to see if there was any freshwater they might refill their stores with. The group had split up; Brienne had tramped over the top of a sand dune and found herself in the middle of Lannister’s camp. His men were clearly getting ready to have a bit of a party - some great fish roasting on a spit by the water and men (and women) in various states of undress toasting one another with bottles of liquor.
She actually walks straight into Lannister (who is returning to the festivities having quietly relieved himself behind a bush). He’s six feet tall. Beautiful and golden and Brienne’s only fifteen, she can be forgiven to being more than a little flustered.
He mistakes her for a crewmember at first. Makes a joke about not realising they’d taken on any giants with the new recruits. Then he catches sight of the insignia sewn onto her shirt and swears. To give Brienne her credit she makes a valiant attempt at arresting him but she’s outnumbered seventy-two to one and Lannister is also cursed quick. She thinks there must be a good chance he’s simply going to murder her but instead he binds her hands and feet and sets her down in the shade of a convenient palm tree. He sends his crew back to The Pride - who Brienne can now see is at anchor a little ways off shore - and kneels down in front of her. Brienne is very tempted to spit in his face but she has better manners (and besides, they’ve gagged her). When he tips her chin up to look at him, however, she does give him her very best glare and tries to kick at him. It makes Lannister laugh and tap her on the nose like a misbehaving puppy.
“Now, now, sweetling, no need for violence. Your people will find you by suppertime no doubt. Me and mine will be long gone by then so no point chasing after us.” Brienne simply glares harder. His hand is still on her chin and she can feel the sword callouses. She knows she must be blushing wildly and hates that she’s so fair-skinned. Lannister (thank all the gods) mistakes her blush for fury. “Oh dear, pet, have I made you angry? I’ll make you a bargain: if you can get out of those bindings before I leave the shore, I’ll give you back your sword and let you have a go at me.”
Brienne struggles wildly but only succeeds in tugging the knots tighter. Lannister’s laughter echoes long beyond his departure. Like the gentleman he is (or isn’t) he leaves her sword behind at the water’s edge.
Her shipmates do find her by suppertime (once someone realises that the island really isn’t large enough to warrant her still being gone for so long). It’s a humiliating episode from start to finish and the fire of it keeps Brienne warm straight through to her second meeting with Lannister ten years later.
A decade should have ravaged him. Piracy is hardly easy living and the sun and salt-wind leave most men leathery and weather-beaten. Lannister (because there is no justice in the world) looks better than he did when Brienne first met him. He’s sun-bronzed and his hair’s still thick and golden - not a shred of grey, for all he must be more than thirty. Brienne’s just been named First Mate and she’s in Tyrosh trying to convince the Archon of the day to hand over a Lyseni crew who had fled into his harbour trying to escape the Fealty. It’s more than a First Mate would usually be trusted with but Brienne is Selwyn’s heir and it gives her the authority. She wrings a grudging agreement from the Archon and on her way to secure her prize finds Lannister lounging against a pillar and eating a piece of fruit in a way that is bordering on the perverse.
When he sees her staring, he winks, reflexive, and then all at once seems to recognise her. His gaze turns sharp and hungry and Brienne is struck at once by the sensation that what she mistook for a housecat is actually a tiger. (The lion metaphor is a little too on the nose, even in the privacy of her own head).
“I remember you,” he purrs, “the little midshipman who glared at me.” His gaze flicks over her, taking in the insignia, the sword at her hip, the bars on her shoulders. “Congratulations on the promotion.”
“What are you doing here?” Brienne demands.
Lannister smirks at her, lazy, and goes back to doing obscene things to his fruit. “A little outside your jurisdiction to enquire, I think.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Hmm. No.” He throws the stone of the fruit away and ambles towards her. He’s not armed, as far as she can see, but that likely doesn’t mean anything. Rumours might disagree on whether Lannister’s a man or a monster but they all agree he is a very, very good fighter. He stops, just out of arm’s reach, but close enough that Brienne would never get her sword clear of the sheath in time if he rushed her. “You know, sweetling, you never did tell me your name.
“You gagged me before I had the chance.”
“I did. My mistake.” He tips his head up to look at her. Brienne feels a savage sort of pleasure when she sees she has at least an inch on him. And then she feels something else entirely when she notes he doesn’t seem bothered by it, unlike most men. “You know,” he muses, “you really do have the most extraordinarily blue eyes. They’re really quite lovely.” Something Brienne refuses to name prepares to take flight in her chest. And then promptly has its wings clipped when Lannister adds, “shame about the nose. Though I suppose that was lovely too once.”
He’s toying with her. To what end or for what purpose Brienne couldn’t say, but she’s not going to waste any time trying to find out.
She walks away, ignoring his crooning entreaties for her to stay. He’s right: she doesn’t have the authority to arrest him on Tyroshi shores - not without the agreement of the Archon - and if Lannister is lolling about the palace, unarmed and unguarded, she’s not likely to get it. She can feel his gaze on her all the way down the steps and out into the sun-drenched courtyard. When she looks back, he’s still lounging in the shadows but she can see his teeth flash in a smile. He blows her a kiss and then throws his head back laughing when Brienne answers him with a rude gesture.
The third time they meet Brienne finally gets around to arresting him. It’s less satisfying than she thought it would be. He’s half-dead, bleary with fever and bleeding like a stuck pig. She never does get the details of what happened out of him. She gets him to the ship’s maester and then to a sickbed and finally to the jailhouse at Griffin’s Roost (not the first port she would have chosen but the nearest one at hand). She spends six days trying to interrogate him - where’s his ship? Where’s his crew? What was he doing in Westerosi waters? - and gets nothing more than vague flirtations and something that feels (appallingly) like the beginnings of a friendship in return. Lannister is clever (though he hides it) and charming and with such a chip on his shoulder she’s amazed he’s not crushed beneath the weight of it. When she enters his cell on the seventh morning to find him sweaty and shivering - the infection the maester promised was beaten come back in the night - she’s horrified to realise that she doesn’t want him to die. He’s a pirate. He’s due to face trial and then he’ll surely hang and there’s really no reason for her to call for a maester. Anyone else would just let him expire. But she can’t. So she bullies the maester into tending to him, under the flimsy excuse that she still needs to interrogate him, and she stays in his cell until his fever comes down and there’s a reasonable chance he’ll live to see morning. In the throws of delirium he confesses his secrets: how he slew a king to save a kingdom; how he made his name stealing slave ships and sacking cities; how he freed every slave that he captured and deposited them in the ruined towns of Sothoryos to make new lives for themselves; how he loves his family and misses them with a bitter, twisted ache he can’t escape no matter how hard he tries.
Her heart breaks for him before she can stop it. He’s a pirate - he’s the furthest thing from a good man - but he’s also dreadfully, perfectly human. She thumbs away the tears from the corner of his eyelids and shushes him like she would a child. He falls into a fitful sleep and Brienne’s gone by the time he wakes. She gives the order that his trial is to be delayed a full two weeks and turns a blind eye to the roguish fellow who has sellsword written all over him, who’s hovering in the alleyway opposite the jail.
She’s not even remotely surprised when she receives word of a daring jailbreak and a swashbuckling escape into the night. She is a little surprised when she makes her way to her cabin after putting in at Pentos more than two months later to find a tiny figurine of a bear, carved from a piece of almost translucent jade, resting on her pillow. The accompanying note simply says thank you.
They have a handful of interactions after that. Brienne’s a captain now, with a reputation as a pirate-chaser and if she’s chasing one pirate in particular, no one needs to know. They brush up against one another in Myr, Braavos, the Summer Islands - always in places well outside Tarth’s jurisdiction and always when Lannister isn’t actively involved in piracy so Brienne can’t even argue extenuating circumstances.
This goes on for years and Brienne’s staring at the horizon and the looming prospect of her thirties (still unwed, still dedicated to her ship and her crew, still lonelier than she wants to admit to anyone) when Lannister takes it upon himself to climb in through her window.
She’s on Tarth for shoreleave. Raiding season’s largely over and storm season is round the corner. Her father wanted her home - to introduce her to a motley crew of would-be suitors - and Brienne has obliged because she loves him and she knows he worries. Her childhood chambers are step down from her captain’s cabin - the bed less comfortable, the room less warm, none of the books and trinkets she’s picked up in the intervening years. Her clothes chest is full of all the ugly dresses Septa Roelle used to insist on having made for her. Above the fireplace there’s a yawning space where a painting of The Allegiance had once held pride of place. Someone had seen fit to move it somewhere else in the keep since she’s been away.
Brienne’s down to her breastband and breeches, feet bare and a little cold, trying to figure out what the maids did with her nightshirt when the shutters bang open and Lannister spills in through the casement.
He looks more than a little wild. His hair’s been roughly shorn on one half of his head and he’s missing one sleeve and there’s a rip in his trousers.
“Hide me,” he says and then dives beneath her bed just as someone starts pounding on her chamber door. Brienne throws a shirt over her head and wrenches the door open, jerking back in time to avoid taking a fist to the nose.
“My lady,” the guard gasps, “The Pride. She was spotted making landfall at Sheepshead Bay. The patrols lost her when they lost the light but she must still be in the Straits. They say Captain Lannister was spotted making his way to Evenfall with a hundred men. The watchman swears he saw him scaling the walls not ten minutes ago.”
“All by his lonesome?” Brienne enquires. “Without any of his hundred men? To take a castle manned by twice that many and with his ship more than ten leagues away?”
The guard blinks.
“My father’s already given word to double the watch, I presume?” The guard nods slowly. “And word’s been sent to the port to raise the boom chain?” Another nod. “And no one’s thought to question how a ship crewed by only eighty men could put a hundred men ashore and still make sail again?” The guard starts to nod then tries to shake his head and ends up just bobbling about for a moment before coming back to attention. “Right,” Brienne says, “when there’s a real emergency, you can come fetch me. Otherwise, goodnight.” She shuts the door in the guard’s face again.
She waits another minute just to make sure they won’t be disturbed, then drags Lannister out from under her bed by his ankles.
“Ow. Bloody ow!” he protests when Brienne dumps him unceremoniously in front of the fireplace.
“What are you doing here?” Brienne demands.
Lannister runs a rather sheepish hand through his shorn hair. “So,” he says slowly, “there was a little bit of a mutiny.”
“A little bit of a mutiny?”
“Just a small one. Those hundred men the rumours mentioned are actually only eleven - the ones still loyal to me. The rest decided they really weren’t so keen on my particular brand of piracy and marooned me here to enjoy the hospitality of the local constabulary."
“You can’t be marooned in the midst of civilization,” Brienne mutters.
“No but you can be hanged,” Lannister retorts.
“No one’s hanging you.” She hauls him up and shoves him into one of the chairs. By all rights she should be hanging him - or at the very least calling for the guard - but he came here because he trusted she would do neither of those things. “Where are your men?”
“Enjoying a restful evening at one of your delightful taverns, I imagine. They’re none of them particularly recognisable.”
“Unlike you, who has a face known to every captain in Westeros?”
“Unlike me,” Lannister agrees.
“That doesn’t explain why you came here,” Brienne says, fetching them both a glass of wine. She doesn’t ordinarily drink outside of mealtimes but she feels as though she’s going to need the fortification this evening.
“I had nowhere else to go.” And gods help her he sounds so lost. Like a child who looks up from playing in the market place to realise his mother’s wandered away.
“Well you can stay here for tonight.” She hands him one of the goblets, ignoring the way Lannister’s fingers drag against hers more than is strictly necessary. “We’ll figure out what to do with you in the morning.”
“You’re not worried about letting a rakish pirate into your bedchamber?”
Strangely enough she’s not. And it’s not just because she has several pounds of muscle on him. It’s because for all he flirts and calls her silly names like sweetling and dear one, he’s never once tried to put his hands somewhere they weren’t wanted. Not on her, and not on anyone else as far as she’s been able to determine.
She doesn’t say any of that though - it feels too exposing. All she says instead is “I’d trounce you if you tried anything.”
Lannister grins at her, “you could as well.” His eyes skim over her shoulders, her biceps - muscle hard won over years of hauling ropes and drilling with swords. From any other man that type of gaze might feel demeaning or lecherous. From Lannister it feels more like genuine appreciation - the type of look men reserve for the finest treasures or great works of art. Brienne decides she’s not going to think of it.
“If you’re willing to rise before dawn, I can get you out of the keep,” she says. “You can take my horse - I’ll tell my father I’ve put her out to pasture. Grow your beard, put walnut stain in your hair and people will look past you long enough for you to buy passage on a ship leaving one of the eastern ports.”
“Leave? Just like that?” He’s looking at her so intently, a question in his face that Brienne doesn’t know how to answer. For a moment she thinks he’s going to do something mad like ask her to go with him. An even madder part of her wants to say yes.
They barely know one another. She can count on both hands the number of times they’ve actually had a conversion, on one the number of times that conversation lasted more than ten minutes. And yet, at the same time, she’s known him almost half her life. Since that night in the jail she’s read every report from every ship that ever encountered him. She knows he relies on the threat of his reputation to win surrender more often than not. He avoids needless violence when he can. He’s notoriously selective about his crew and ferociously devoted to them (which must make this mutiny burn like salt in a wound). He took the risk of The Pride running aground to try and rescue a pleasure craft that had been swept out into open waters. Reports say he did it to ransom the young lords and ladies on board back to their parents. But Brienne thinks he might have done it even if they were paupers. That, underneath everything, that’s just the type of man he is.
“You can’t stay here,” Brienne says softly, regretfully, “Jaime Lannister is the most wanted man in Westeros.”
“Oh,” he winks at her, “that’s solved easily enough. Jaime Hill, at your service.” He bows gallantly, absurd from his seated position. “Merchant sailor, recently retired, seeking new employment.”
“For himself and a dozen of his friends?” Brienne asks wryly.
“Quite.”
“And what was this merchant vessel that Master Hill so recently sailed upon?”
“The Spotted Calf,” Lannister replies promptly and Brienne snorts into her goblet. It’s the ship every smuggler names when arrested on suspicion of interloping. Yosef Cobbles, who owns the Calf, is both notoriously feckless and notoriously easy to bribe. He’s sworn in court, more than two-dozen times, that this sailor or that sailor (who has clearly never done an honest days’ work in his life) is one of his hired hands and a very dependable fellow. Bit rough around the edges perhaps but honest as the day is long and a credit to his profession. Any captain would be lucky to have him. So, why’s he being put off the Calf you ask? Why because Master Cobbles has overextended his pocket book, taking on more hands than he can really afford. Terribly foolish of him and no doubt his accounts will be straightened up soon enough, but for now this poor sailor is having to look for work elsewhere and surely this good magistrate would never be so cruel as to deprive a man of the means to make an honest living all on the basis of a scurrilous rumour, would he?
“Would that be enough for you? Retirement somewhere in land? A cottage by the woods and a little patch of land to grow vegetables?”
“Or I could try sailing in a new direction?” Lannister says and for a moment Brienne thinks he means to sail west back to Lannisport and the home he was forced to abandon all those years ago. Then he reaches forward, takes one of her hands in his and says, “I heard your Mate just retired. Surely you’ll be looking to fill the position?”
There’s a very sensible answer to that question but Brienne can’t quite think of it. His fingers twining with hers are doing something terrible, wonderful, to her insides. It’s true, there’s no one aboard the Fealty ready to take the position as First Mate. She could draw an officer from one of the other patrol vessels - should draw an officer from one of those vessels - but now that Lannister’s put an alternative before her she finds she doesn’t want to. She wants to sail with him. And its madness. True madness. But she wants it.
“You’ve been a captain for twenty years, at least. Could you really step down to be First Mate?”
“Not for anybody else. But for you? Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because somewhere along the way I fell in love with you. Every noble, self-righteous, inch of you.”
“You barely know me,” Brienne protests.
“I know enough,” Lannister tells her and then leans in for a kiss.
It’s a very, very good kiss.
So good, in fact, that when she’s done kissing him, Brienne has no reservations about leading him back to the bed and seeing what else he might be good at.
Quite a lot, as it happens.
In the morning she sneaks down to the stillroom and liberates the necessary ingredients to stain Jaime’s - and he is Jaime now, he has to be - hair. She ruins her favourite gloves and Jaime ends up splotched along his shoulders and chest where they were careless in applying the stain.
She claims to have a headache for the rest of the morning and then one the second morning - once Jaime’s beard is more than the barest stubble - she leads him to her father’s study and announces she has a new First Mate and also they’ll be wed before they take ship again.
Her father - to give him his due - takes it all in stride. He really hadn’t had much hope for her finding a husband from the men he had gathered. And he’s not fooled for one instant as to who Jaime Hill is - but he’d read all the same reports as Brienne and reached many of the same conclusions.
Jaime keeps the stain in his hair until the end of the storm season. By the time the crew meet him, his beard’s fully grown in and he really doesn’t look much like the wanted posters. As he lets the stain fade away with the sun, he gets a few curious looks from some of the sharper crewmen but he keeps the beard and that seems to throw most people off.
His first mate succeeds in taking back The Pride. Brienne has a single night’s doubt that she’s about to lose her new husband back to his old life but when Jaime drags Addam Marbrand over to her in a backwoods tavern and declares her to be both his wife and his captain she stops worrying. Marbrand seems like a decent sort and committed to the same sort of ‘punish the wicked’ piracy that Jaime had engaged in. Brienne does warn him that she won’t hold off chasing him just because he’s Jaime’s best friend and Addam declares that to be eminently fair and also that he’s thinking of avoiding Westerosi waters for the time being. As a wedding present.
She’s a mother twice over before Brienne decides she’s ready to give up her captaincy. Jaime’s been truly retired for almost two years at that point, resigning his post as Mate in favour of Podrick Payne, who’s not quite ready to succeed Brienne as captain but is about to be thrown in at the deep end regardless.
She finds Jaime on the beach when she comes to tell him the news. He’s splashing about in the shallows with Jason, letting their son clutch at his hands as the boy wobbles and stomps and shrieks with delight. Joanna is throwing a stick for one of the castle dogs, sand in her hair and something that looks suspiciously like kelp draped around her waist like a belt. Brienne’s entire family is going to smell like salt and wet dog until she can wrestle them into a bathtub.
Jaime greets her with a kiss and a squeeze to the buttocks, which Brienne only lets him get away with because there’s no one around to see it.
“I’m retired,” she tells him without ceremony, “just handed in my papers. Fealty’s Podrick’s now. Though I did say I’d be around for a while yet if he needed me.”
“He’ll be fine,” Jaime promises, “you trained him well.”
Brienne makes a noise of agreement.
“Why now?” Jaime asks, setting Jason down into the sand to crawl around and poke at the shells he discovers.
“It felt right,” Brienne says. “Father’s not getting any younger and I don’t want you to have to take on everything. Besides, in another six-months I’d have been confined to shore at any rate. At least until the babe was weaned."
It takes Jaime a moment to catch up with what she’s saying - he’s distracted trying to keep Jason from eating a fistful of sand. When he does he jerks round to face her, eyes wide and mouth already smiling.
“You're certain?”
“Confirmed with the maester. We’ll have our third by the turn of the year.”
Jaime gives a shout of delight and swings her about, lifting her clean off her feet. She scolds him and grabs at him and can’t help but kiss him once he sets her down again. Joanna jumps about demanding to know what all the fuss is about, whilst Jason takes advantage of the diversion to eat that fistful of sand his father had denied him. Brienne grimaces, as does Jaime. That’s going to make for an interesting napkin in a couple of hours.
That night, lying in bed, Brienne asks Jaime if he ever misses The Pride. She knows she’s going to miss Fealty and the siren-song of the open water - for all that she loves her family and is confident in her decision to retire.
“I did once,” Jaime confesses, “that month we came ashore before Jo was born. And then you put her in my arms and I realised I didn’t give a damn about the ship.” He rests a hand over Brienne’s belly. “I have my pride right here. How could I want anything else?”
Brienne calls him a sap. Because Jaime is a romantic and Brienne is oddly allergic to overt expressions of sentiment. He knows her well enough not to take offence and simply pulls her head down so it's nestled on his shoulder.
She can feel the steady thump of his heat in his chest. He kisses her fingertips.
When Brienne was fifteen she had sworn to herself that she was one day going to capture Jaime Lannister, the world’s most infamous pirate.
And would you look at that? She caught him. And now she gets to keep him.
The End