Best not to mention the Dornish in his presence, for while logically he knows that the aggression Oberyn’s bastards harbored towards the crown was born of Cersei’s selfish wrath, he still holds Myrcella’s death against them. It’s perhaps not the most rational thought in his head, but it’s difficult not to blame them when he had to hold her lifeless form in his arms as she bled out all over him and the deck of that accursed ship.
“Tarly ordered it. Next time, tell me what you want and I will get it for you.”
Never let him pick anything out. He’d grab meat that’s gone bad and set aside for the dogs and bread that’s started to mold if left to his own picking through the kitchen devices. He’s a food disaster and everyone is grateful his handlers fill his plates for him.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
"Oh, stop that," she chastises him happily, and flushes because she doesn't know how to deal with the fact that she quite likes that he keeps doing these odd little things with and for her. Things she regards as private or too simple for anyone else to so much as think about let alone help her with.
"I'll eat what's on offer and be grateful for it."
But she can't hide her smile as she rips the other piece of bead to share with him.
JAIME LANNISTER
“Stop what?” He asks innocently, sitting — no, lounging on his side at the very foot of her bed like he’s Tommen’s cat and not an absurdly high ranking lord.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
"The, you know, the...attention." She tosses the bread his way, and sops more stew. It becomes very interesting to her now that she has to answer. She sops and sops until the bread just sort of dissolves.
JAIME LANNISTER
“Ah,” he chimes, taking a moment to munch on the bread, “so you’d rather I ignore you. That can be arranged.”
Jaime flashes her a playful smile and rolls over so that his back is to her and he’s resting on the opposite hip, facing the door.
“Better?”
BRIENNE OF TARTH
She wants to be irritated, but the laugh bubbles out of her before she can grouse at him again. He's infuriating and ridiculous and, frankly—
"Yes," she says, as primly as she can. Her nose might as well be in the air. Then she laughs again, and it feels a little out of place and mad. "The view is quite nice."
JAIME LANNISTER
Thankfully, he’s laying on his right side, which frees up his left arm for him dramatically reaching over and grabbing the shadowcat cloak that’s laying half folded up next to the tray. He drags it up over his hip to obscure his ass from her.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
She pouts, which is more like a scowl, and which he can't see anyway. And, still feeling giddy, she takes up her spoon and raps it soundly against his rear.
JAIME LANNISTER
“Hey now!”
Jaime twists so he can look at her over his shoulder.
“Is that necessary? Spoons go in your mouth, not on my arse!”
BRIENNE OF TARTH
She lifts an eyebrow, and does it again.
JAIME LANNISTER
“Eat your stew, you maddening woman.”
He pulls the cloak all the way over his head and lays down as if to hide himself from her. Which only works so well, given his long legs are peaking out and hanging off the bed.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
"I thought you were ignoring me," she says, and whaps him again.
JAIME LANNISTER
“Stop slapping me with your spoon!”
Jaime Lannister, Kingslayer and the famed Golden Lion, a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield retaliates by sliding all the way off the bed and curling up into an awkward, limbs-smooshed-in ball on the floor in a bid to disappear all the way beneath the cloak.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
Brienne can't help but giggle at his behavior as she lets her spoon drop into the empty bowl, and slides the tray before depositing it onto the chair next to the bed.
"All done. I promise." She shifts back to the middle of the bed, crossing her legs and laying her hands on her knees. "I'm not even holding the spoon anymore."
JAIME LANNISTER
Jaime sits up, peeking out from beneath the blanket as if it’s necessary for him to be double sure that the sound he heard was her dropping the spoon. Up on to his knees he goes, peering at the bed, her, where she’s set the tray, then back to her.
“Good.”
And then he’s up, dropping the cloak at his feet, and joining her on the bed. He sits right in front of her and leans in to press a quick, affectionate kiss to her lips.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
She kisses him back while moaning in dismay, and it takes her a moment to hold his face between her hands and pull away from him. Brienne scowls at him.
"Did you just drop your new cloak on the dirty floor?"
JAIME LANNISTER
He grins at her again, like a child caught with his hands... hand in the cookie jar.
“Whoops.” Jaime leans over to retrieve it, hooking the end of his right wrist in the fabric and drawing it up onto the bed with them without needing to use the fingers of his left hand to retrieve it. “There. Better?”
BRIENNE OF TARTH
She huffs out a wry laugh, shaking her head and trying to figure out how to be both proud of him for using his stump again and annoyed at what a disaster he is at the same time.
"It's yours to do with what you will, Jaime."
JAIME LANNISTER
You went into this fully knowing he was a disaster, Brienne. This is not new news.
“Thank you for it,” he says, pulling it into his lap and running the palm of his hand against the fur that somehow remains impossibly soft in spite of the harsh winds that whip through Winterfell’s walls. “It’s— Warmer than anything I’ve ever owned in my life, I think. I kept it with me wherever I went when you left. ...I kept your note, too.”
From an inner pocket of his tunic he pulls out the note she left with the cloak, folded into a neat little square.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
She's fully into the disaster, it's true.
Brienne reaches to run her hand along the fur while he talks, murmuring a you're welcome and smiling, shy and pleased with herself for giving him something he likes. She still doesn't know what compelled her to do it, but it had just…seemed right.
"Oh," she sighs when he takes out her note. "Did I write it all right? You were able to see everything yourself?"
JAIME LANNISTER
He nods. “I was able to read it and the other note you left me just fine. The one you left with Sansa. She gave it to me after we thought... After we thought you were dead.”
BRIENNE OF TARTH
Her brow furrows as she tries to make sense of it, eyes drifting away for a moment while she thinks. And thinks.
And realizes.
All of the flush drains out of her, leaving her skin pasty pale. "Oh. Oh, gods. You shouldn't have—I'm sorry. She was meant to dispose of it for me, not bloody give it to you!"
JAIME LANNISTER
“You’re sorry for saying — or writing, as it were — that your heart was mine? Brienne, that letter brought me a great deal of comfort when I thought that I had lost you. I think Sansa understood that. Whenever I needed to hear your voice, I would read back over it. It was my way of being able to still hear you when I couldn’t actually hear you.”
He looks down at the pelt, picking absentmindedly at it.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
She moves her hand from the fur to cover his. Only a little pressure, just a suggestion that if he wants to stop fidgeting, he could hold her hand instead.
"It remains so," she says quietly, feeling extraordinarily exposed. "I'm sorry it was so old. I would have said more. I would have said it better."
JAIME LANNISTER
Jaime’s fingers turn over beneath hers, gasping at her palm. His gaze lifts to meet hers. “You said it just fine. You said it like you, which made it all the more perfect.”
He brings her hand up to his lips, kissing the back of it. “Come, you’re overdue for a bath. I already had Tarly ready one of the hot spring pools.”
BRIENNE OF TARTH
The feel of his hand in hers helps keep her from spinning off into more apologies and inadequacies. The prospect of a proper bath gets her moving almost immediately. (She's pretty sure the stench of dragon is still on her and it's kept everyone but Jaime away.)
"Did anyone bring my own clothes here?" Because wearing a dressing gown across the grounds sounds like actual hell to her. She cannot be seen like this, not by people who are supposed to respect Sansa. Not by anyone who sees her at Jaime's side.
JAIME LANNISTER
It’s a good thing his sense of smell is as warped as his sense of taste, for while he acknowledges that there is the smell of something he assumes is dragon clinging to her, it doesn’t bother him in the least. He knows for a fact that he’s smelled far worse, like filth and shit and rotting flesh. Dragon is likely better smelling than dying man.
“I did,” he says, releasing her hand and rising from the bed to grab the clothes and doeskin boots he’d grabbed from her room. “You’re lucky I’m sentimental enough of a fool to have held on to your belongings when others would have already done away with them or given them to someone else.”
Jaime wouldn’t let anyone touch her room, let alone her belongings. Not even Podrick.
BRIENNE OF TARTH
She keeps forgetting that part. That she had been presumed dead. Nobody had expected to see her again, because people don't just survive dragons. He gets a kiss in thanks for his foolishness, and another because she likes the tickle of his new beard on her face.
Between the three hands and two brain cells they share, they manage to get her dressed enough to be presentable to the people who thought she was dead. It had felt good to be under a roof and in a warm place, but it feels even better to get back outside and walking under her own power. Well, mostly her own power—her arm loops into Jaime's so that her balance doesn't leave her sprawled on the ground.
None of it is as good at the warm water. Brienne hisses in relief as she steps gingerly into it, nearly crying with delight at the heat.
JAIME LANNISTER
He's thankful for the privacy of the pools, and that Samwell had managed to secure them access to one of the larger pools that was reserved back in the day for the Lord and Lady of Winterfell with its own secluded access point in a small, private garden off the side of the castle that, before Theon Greyjoy set fire to the keep, had been separated from the main courtyard by an intricately carved wooden fence that had been a gift to Lady Catelyn upon the birth of her firstborn son by some pompous lord or another hoping to get in good with the Tully turned Stark and her Lord Husband. Sansa likely told him to give them this pool and Jaime will have to thank her for it next he sees her.
Jaime sees to laying their clothes out on a stone bench as she steps into the water, making sure none of it gets wet. There are fluffy towels made of thickly spun wool already set upon it, also Samwell and Sansa's doing, no doubt.
When he joins her, he walks straight into the water without allowing himself time to adjust, hissing at the warm, pleasant shock to his skin.
“I don’t think I’ve bathed in weeks...”
BRIENNE OF TARTH
"Isn't that supposed to be my line?" She says, entirely unperturbed as she lets herself float. Her eyes close, and her head tips just enough to keep her good ear out of the water.
She'll scrub her skin raw soon enough, but for now a soak is all she needs.
JAIME LANNISTER
“I’m an unkempt disaster and you are well aware of this fact, my lady.”
Jaime ducks beneath the water, holding his breath for as long as he possibly can before surfacing with a great gasp. He pushes his long, bronzed hair that’s streaked with the golden blonde he once donned a full head of back from his eyes.
“Only my rank prevents people from informing me that I am rank.”
BRIENNE OF TARTH
A laugh barks out of her at that, which becomes peppered with groans of pain. No laughing, laughing hurts.
"You're also stuffed quite full of yourself, Lord Paramount. I was talking about me. I was practically stranded on a barren island with a creature that smelled even worse than you when I had to suffer your gripes and swipes."
JAIME LANNISTER
Those pained sounds have Jaime splashing through the water to get to her, the part they’re standing in being too deep to run in and too shallow to swim in. He stands at her back, a silent solid pillar of muscle to help steady her should she need it.
“Quite an accomplishment, but if you smelled foul, I didn’t notice.”
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26 -- DONE
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