janie_tangerine | cowt 9 S6 M3: assorted bits and piece of jaime and brienne (j/b, pg13)

It’s not until she sees him holding their first daughter that Brienne finally sees it.

Maybe she hadn’t let herself notice until now, maybe seeing him every day hadn’t made her, maybe it merely took seeing the difference that did the trick. She doesn’t know.

What she knows is that the moment she drops her inside the crook of his left arm his eyes turn a brighter shade of green, a lively one, brimming with an emotion she can’t quite place.

“Your eyes are glowing,” she tells him.

“Yours are, too,” he smiles back, and she thinks she gets it.

Sometimes, during the night, Jaime wonders, should I have tried to go back to King’s Landing?

A part of him knows he could have done absolutely nothing to help Cersei during her trial, and another is glad he didn’t have to see her blow up Baelor’s sept, not when he’s sure he doesn’t ever need to see wildfire again in his life.

Another is saying, you should have gone, she needed you, you failed her —

But hasn’t she failed me enough times?

That part of himself never answers back.

He thinks it says all there has to be said.

Something always hurts, some part deep down within her, when she notices that sometimes he speaks in such a way that it seems like he expects people to dismiss whatever it is he has to say before he’s even finished.

She thinks she knows why he does. Hasn’t she felt the same throughout most of her life? Haven’t people dismissed her over and over until he and Lady Catelyn came along?

She can’t do anything more than telling him she does value his opinion every time she has the chance to, and hopefully one day he will understand that fully.

The first time it happened that she lifted him up and slammed his back against they wall while they were fucking, it was over embarrassingly fast for the both of them.

The second, not so much.

The third, not at all.

He asked if he wasn’t too heavy for her only the first time. She didn’t even dignify that with an answer and held him against that piece of stone for long enough that he forgot it completely.

Years ago, she’d have never felt thankful for her size, but now —

Now she can see it does have its advantages.

Tarth is a green line over the horizon. The sea is calm and the same shade of blue as her eyes, as he had always figured it would be. The ship is sailing. He’s not wearing armor or his forsaken white cloak.

His fingers are shaking slightly on the rails.

“Everything all right?” Brienne asks, her right hand covering his left.

“Yes,” he says, “it’s just… I never thought I’d get this far, you know?”

She smiles slightly, their fingers tangling together, and for the first time in years he feels like he can finally move forward and not back.

She cuts in half one of those damned undead men prowling Winterfell’s forest, then another, then another, and then she realizes that Jaime was scouting on the other side, but she hasn’t heard him in a while.

That is, until she hears noise that she doesn’t like.

Fuck.

Brienne cuts off five more heads until Oathkeeper’s bleeding into the ground and she’s run off to where she’s hearing noise —

Just to find that Jaime has cut down five more wights on his own. He grins way more openly than anyone would in this kind of situation. She grins back.

She has a scar from that cut he left her while they fought in the woods. It’s a white cut by now, but it’s still there. She remembers the day it bled over her leg, when he still fought her with two hands, and sometimes she wonders if she could have avoided that loss —

Then she feels his fingers running over it lovingly as he says that he’s laying claim on that one because he doesn’t regret giving it to her at all, and she forgets all about things that can’t happen as much as they might both wish.

“Brienne, you’re not going out there on your own.”

“Jaime, you certainly aren’t. It’s night, it’s full of wights out there and —”

“What, I don’t have one hand so I can’t do my job properly? Really?”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Fine, let’s compromise. Either I come with you or you’re not going.”

“… All right, you’re coming with me. And stop looking that smug.”

“Wench, I’m not being smug whatsoever.”

“Yes, in your dreams. Come on, there are ten missing people to look for.”

“At your orders, my lady.”

“I’m already regretting this.”

Or maybe not.

His first impulse, the morning after their wedding night, is raising the covers and running out of the door.

Then he realizes that no, he really doesn’t have to.

Suddenly, his throat clams up and his fingers grasp at the sheets, his eyes burning with tears, hating that it was his first instinct —

“Jaime?” Brienne groans sleepily from his side. “It’s dawn. ’S too early.”

For a moment he wonders what he did right here, because he has no clue, and then he’s back under the covers, his arm around her hip, before she can realize anything is wrong.

10.

For all that he likes to run his tongue in any circumstance, Brienne hasn’t failed to notice how he tends to go silent when they’re fucking. He goes quiet at once most times, taking it slowly, never joking about it, always looking straight at her, and maybe the first few times it kind of felt weird, but —

She’s grown to like the intensity of it, she figures, and for all she tends to talk much less in any circumstance, so what if maybe she does while they share a bed and tells him exactly how much she likes it?