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janie_tangerine
sing with me, just for today
“You know,” he tells her, “I find it really unfair that you will sing to your daughter but never when I’m around.”
“I’m not —” She shakes her head. “She can’t know if I sound ridiculous or not and you know it.”
“And maybe I want to see for myself,” he says, but his lighthearted tone dies the moment he sees her lips thin and her eyes move down to her hands.
“Hey,” he clears his throat, “it’s fine if you don’t want to. I was being my usual self, but —”
“It’s not your problem,” she whispers. “It’s just, the last few times I tried, it wasn’t — let’s just say I’m not in a hurry to do that again.”
“Fine, but this is a one-man audience, not your court or whatever.”
She looks at him with that face she always makes when he does something that leaves her speechless. Admittedly, it hasn’t happened too much recently, she’s getting adjusted to him most likely —
(and isn’t it a sweet thought to contemplate?)
— and then something in her eyes goes very, very soft as she moves closer.
“I can cut you a deal,” she proposes.
“I’m listening.”
“I — I can’t, like this. But if — next time she wakes up, you want to come with, you can. How about that?”
He thinks he knows how much effort it must have taken her to cut that deal, and so he moves closer, kisses her, his leg going around her knee, his tongue running across her lips, his left hand grasping at her shoulders, before he leans back and gives her a nod.
“I’ll take your deal, my lady. Hopefully it won’t be a one time thing?” He asks.
“No,” she smiles tentatively, her eyes bright. “I think not.”
won't you show me that you really care?
Sometimes it makes him forget how to breathe how she seems to just… give a damn in ways no one else ever did.
For most people it probably wouldn’t be anything groundbreaking. He figures most people, even if they married out of an arrangement, would care to ask their husband or wife if something is wrong when they look distressed, ask for their opinion as a general thing, inquire about whether something’s wrong if they wake up in the night soaked with cold sweat, or would ask an opinion about which septa to choose for their children —
He figures most people who are just in love would do all of that and more, but he hadn’t realized how much he had none of it until they finally landed on Tarth and decided to take a few years for — themselves, he supposes.
He hates that every time she does all of those things it feels strange and like he doesn’t deserve it and like she shouldn’t care when he would do all of that for her — and he does —, he hates that it seems to come naturally to her and it surprises him at every damned turn, he hates that he’s found out now that loving someone doesn’t have to mean devotion on his side only.
He hates that he can’t tell her that because he doesn’t have the words for it.
But, she does notice. Whenever that happens she tells him that they should take a walk around the shore, and maybe they’ll spend a while curled against each other on the sand saying nothing, her hands running through his hair, and he’ll feel at peace, and he’ll think he doesn’t deserve her, but… he did get her, so he will make the most of it.
this is your shield
“Wait a fucking moment,” he says, looking at the shield on her armory’s walls.
“Yes?” She asks, sounding surprised.
It can’t be, he thinks. He hasn’t seen that sigil in years, but if Jaime was ever good at one thing beside swordsmanship, was remembering the great swordsmen that came before him, and he was good when it came to sigils, and he’s fucking sure he’s not wrong here.
“That is Duncan’s fucking sigil.”
“Wait, you mean… Duncan the Tall?”
“The one and only. I’ve seen it countless times in King’s Landing. Are you seriously telling me you had no idea?”
“… Not really,” she admits. “I never had much of a memory for sigils.”
“And it’s always been here?”
“Since I can remember,” Brienne admits, and then he looks at her, then at the sigil, then at her.
“Brienne,” he says, “you do know how Duncan looked, don’t you?”
She doesn’t seem any more enlightened. “Everyone does,” she says. “Tall, obviously, blonde, blue eyes, large shoulders, fairly handsome. Why?”
“Wench, for — you’ve just described yourself.”
Her eyes go so wide, he has to laugh.
“I — I’m not handsome!”
“And you’re tall, blonde, with blue eyes, large shoulders and most likely built like him. And his shield is in your father’s armory. Fuck, if you wanted people to give you credit you could have just told them that he was some ancestor of yours, your life would have turned around.”
“But it can’t —”
“Oh, so surprising, Westeros’s best knight in this century descends from the best knight in the previous one. I’m absolutely shocked by this revelation. And she’s married to me? Now I really did luck out.”
He kisses her before she can complain.
And he’s never going to let her live down that she hadn’t known.
touch me
In hindsight, it’s really not surprising.
But it kind of floors her for a while, just after they finally kiss (and hadn’t it felt like a long time coming) that he turns out to be the kind of person that really has no issues with touching.
Considering that she has very little experience with that unless it’s what counts for sword fights, it takes her a while to get adjusted to his hand grabbing hers or touching the small of her back or grasping her hips at night, or at his arm being thrown around her waist, or at how he always seems to be touching her if they’re close, even if they’re in public or in front of the Stark army or whatever.
It’s not that she doesn’t like it, but she hadn’t expected it. It probably tips him off because at some point he does ask her if she minds, and he looks sad in a way a way he rarely had, since they kissed.
“No,” she says, “I don’t mind, it’s just — it’s not the kind of thing people do with me, you know.”
He laughs, but it sounds very, very bitter.
“Wench, do you think it happened anywhere that wasn’t beyond closed doors to me?”
Then she gets it, because of course he never had much of a chance to be openly — like this with Cersei, didn’t he, nor with his kids, and he’s done that for years, of course he would —
She grabs his face, leans in, and she tells him in between kisses that it’s not his problem and he can touch her in public as much as he’d like for all she cares, and the way he kisses her back makes it obvious that he got that message loud and clear.
Good.
we could be heroes
The first time she hears a song about how she defeated ten white walkers at once, she goes immediately red in the face and says that it exaggerate things and that it didn’t go like that and really, what was the singer even thinking?
“You killed ten wights, saved twenty people from the village who were with you and you did it all on your own,” Jaime tells her, and he sounds as delighted as he feels knowing that people are finally starting to see what he sees.
“But it didn’t go…”
“I thought you knew it was the point of songs, right? It doesn’t matter if it’s true, it matters what people remember, and you never look bad in them. Cheers, wench. You’re gaining hero status, you should be glad. It’s what you deserve, after all.”
Brienne scowls at him, but says nothing and goes to talk to the singer.
Jaime just hopes she’s not telling him to never sing it again. It was a pretty song, after all.
*
A week later, that same singer goes around Winterfell singing of that time he jumped into a bear pit one-handed to save a not so fair maiden, selling it as the updated version of The Bear and the Maiden Fair.
“You told him?” Jaime asks her, not believing she actually might.
“I told him and paid him, because it was high time someone sang your deeds, too, and don’t try to deny it.”
“But —”
“It was heroic to me. And to them, too, apparently. Deal with it.”
Jaime shuts up and does, deciding that it does sound nice. But hers was prettier.
*
When, months later, the singer has a new tale about how the both of them slew that dragon turned wight together, neither of them protests.
