cowt 10 S3 M2: what the thunder said (asoiaf, jaime/brienne, r)

[janie_tangerine]

They’re on the way to the Vale when the land dies.

 

Later, they’ll know it was the Others coming through the Wall which had fallen as its Lord Commander was struck down.

 

Now, they’ve barely started going up the mountains when the grass goes dry and their food goes bad and winter turns into a hot, scorching summer.

 

“Wench,” Jaime says, not unkindly, “we can’t.”

 

He doesn’t say we can’t go to the Vale, we can’t go looking for the Stark girl, we can’t fulfill our vow. There’s no need.

 

Brienne stays silent for a while, but she has to know that there is no way they can reach the gates like this, that their horses won’t survive the ride, that they can’t —

 

“I know,” she croaks.

 

They walk down the mountain.

 

She looks utterly defeated.

 

—

 

“Do you want to go back to King’s Landing?” She asks. They found a small river — water barely trickles. When they passed it before, it flew through its bed as usual.

 

“What would I even do in King’s Landing? Everyone is probably going there. I wasn’t wanted when I left. I won’t be now.” His missing right hand aches. The mountains look red in the scorching hot sun.

 

This isn’t normal. Winter had come, so how can this be?

 

Brienne’s hands shake as she passes him a wineskin she has filled with water.

 

“Where do you want to go?” She asks.

 

“And why is it my choice now?”

 

She turns, looks at him, blue eyes staring right into his, so bright, so wide, so —

 

“I failed Renly,” she whispers. “I failed Lady Catelyn, twice.” Her fingers twitch. There is still red blood under her fingers. Jaime wonders if she’ll ever manage to wash it out. “I failed Lady Sansa and I couldn’t even try. I swore you a vow, and I haven’t — fulfilled it. The only one I kept — I swore Lady Catelyn I’d keep you safe and it’s the only one I have left. I have no choices left to take. They’re yours.”

 

She means it, her stare holding his, her lower lip trembling.

 

Jaime wonders, when is the last time anyone gave me a choice, any choice?

 

He can’t remember it. He can’t remember it, he can’t recall, he only knows he took his own without anyone else to consult because they felt right and she is the only one who saw them, who understood them —

 

“You want to not fail the Starks?” He shrugs. “We can go to Winterfell. What do we have to lose?”

 

She nods, biting down another sob.

 

Jaime thinks of two corpses dangling from the Brotherhood’s trees and puts a hand on her shoulder, wondering if she’ll hate him for it —

 

She grasps it with her own. She’s warm, he thinks. Warm, but not scorching as the sun beating on their heads.

 

—

 

They’re told of the Others as they make their way North.

 

“Do you still want to go?” She asks.

 

“Will you follow if I do?”

 

She nods, not even thinking about it.

 

“Well, I suppose the Others are coming here. We won’t find them there, right?”

 

He’s not so sure of that.

 

“Very well,” Brienne agrees.

 

They go North.

 

—

 

The weathers changes as they ride.

 

The scorching hot sun leaves way to icy ground, cracking under their horses’ steps, and it’s still not cold even if all the trees are covered in snow and there are very few animals to be heard.

 

They barely find people as they ride, the few they meet look at them and ask if they’ve gone mad — who would go North? There’s only death to be found there, and no honor.

 

That’s quite all right, Jaime thinks. It’s not as if he thought he would find any, at this point.

 

—

 

“I’m sure that when you left your fair island you didn’t think you’d end up chasing death with me and eating from horse corpses,” he tells her as they munch from a strip of horse meat they got from a dead one they found on the road. It had been frozen in ice. The meat still was good.

 

“No,” she agrees, the scar on her cheek glaring red in the pale, deadly sun. “I suppose I could be chasing death alone.”

 

They haven’t talked about what he heard from the Brotherhood.

 

He knows she was about to die for him. He can see it in the purple rope scars around her throat, they haven’t faded at all. She’s thinner. He must be thinner.

 

“I guess it’s destiny that if the two of us travel together somewhere it has to go to shit, huh?”

 

She smiles, barely, her lips curling into a laugh that makes her sound more lively than she has until now.

 

“I could do worse,” she says, quietly. “Maybe next time we should stay put.”

 

Where, though?

 

It’s not a bad idea, Jaime muses. He thinks he’d like to stay put with her somewhere.

 

He doesn’t know if either of them is ready to hear it spoken out loud, and so he says nothing.

 

—

 

The Wall is bright white and resplendent with sunlight, Tyrion told him once.

 

Jaime stares at it now, blackened and dead and empty. There is no one in the towers, maybe a solitary bell rings in the silence, but the entire thing has changed color and is destroyed and the wells are all dry.

 

They’re getting water from melted ice by now. The sun still beats on them, though it’s not so hot, here.

 

He wonders how it is in Dorne.

 

He doesn’t want to know.

 

“Should we press on?” Brienne asks.

 

“Aren’t we both lacking any complete sense of respect for our own lives?” He winks at her. It’s tired, but he feels it.

 

Her right hand slowly takes his left.

 

“I suppose so,” she says, her cracked lips quirking upwards.

 

—

 

Beyond the Wall, it’s colder, but not so much. The land is dry, dead frozen animals abound, and there is no sound except their own voices.

 

They find a small clearing after a while, a hole in the mountains covered in dead grass. There are bones frozen alongside the dull green of it, and it’s not animal bones.

 

He’s munching on some more dried meat when he hears thunder not so far, and it’s not even raining, just thunder booming in the distance, and he wonders what went wrong, what happened, what the fuck is even up with the world, nothing like this was ever in the songs about the Long Night.

 

“Did you hear that?” Brienne asks.

 

“What, the thunder?”

 

“Yes, but… gods. I’m losing my wits.”

 

“… Did you hear something in that noise?”

 

She turns, looks at him.

 

“I think it said find Bran Stark,” she laughs. “I am losing my wits. The child’s dead, for —”

 

“Not so much,” Jaime says.

 

“What?”

 

—

 

He tells her what he learned from both Cersei and his father, back… back when they reached King’s Landing. Theon Greyjoy never killed the real Stark children, they were in cohorts with the Boltons, no one knew where they had ended up.

 

“You might’ve lost your wits,” Jaime shrugs. “It’s not as if it would be any more strange that you did hear it than everything that’s happened until now.”

 

“And what does it even mean? That he’s somewhere here? That we should find him?”

 

Jaime looks at her, unable to stop a fond smile from spreading on his face. “Well, you did swear a vow to Lady Catelyn, didn’t you? If you find her son it’s about kept, isn’t it?”

 

Her eyes fill with tears before she moves and takes his face in her hands and kisses him, and then she freezes and moves back.

 

He reaches with his left hand, grasping her dry and brittle hair, pushing back, kissing her in return.

 

His heart beats faster now.

 

He thinks he’s wanted it for a long time.

 

Maybe even from before he learned the mad wench was about to get herself hanged for him.

 

—

 

She’s warm and gentle and careful when she moves on top of him later, her hands touching his scars and his face, her mouth kissing the stump of his right hand, their furs protecting them from the biting cold of the night, and maybe she deserved better than losing her maidenhead in a decayed hole full of dry bones, and then she shakes her head and says that he deserved better than wasting away in a dead land with her, and he hadn’t known he had spoken out loud, but he cares not, and so he kisses her again and tells her that he’d rather be with her than with anyone else, and that’s not a lie, it’s not.

 

He tells her to let him pull out before he comes inside her, later, barely holding on to a scrap of coherence, but she shakes her head and says it doesn’t matter now, does it, and so he comes inside her, his blood as hot as the sun down south, and her eyes are so wide and full of wonder as she clenches around him and calls out his name, and he’s glad he’s come with her.

 

—

 

They do it again in the morning, and later in the afternoon, and later in the night, and he’s only sad that they won’t go back to Westeros. It’s not likely, at this point.

 

He tells her after, as she wraps herself around his back.

 

“Don’t,” she tells him. “You can never know. And even if we don’t go back, I never dared — I didn’t dare imagine you could ever — just don’t.”

 

Somehow, he thinks he understand what she means. He holds on to her hand tighter.

 

—

 

There is green, lively grass around a cave they find a few days later. His throat is so dry he can barely speak and he feels so hungry he could faint, and Brienne looks the same, and for a moment he thinks he made it up.

 

“Is that — real?” He asks.

 

“We should go in,” she replies, and he follows her.

 

—

 

There is water inside the cave, and they stop to drink before they go ahead.

 

He hadn’t imagined they’d find Bran Stark’s legs twined with tree vines, his small body that should look frail but actually does not sat on a throne that’s too large for him.

 

The trees are lively with green leaves and flowers.

 

“I was waiting for you,” the boy says, sounding like he wants to cry but also like he’s older than his years, way older. “Ser Jaime. I see you also have been maimed.”

 

“So it seems,” he doesn’t deny.

 

—

 

“Is — is it you, doing this?” Brienne asks, barely believing it.

 

“So it seems,” Bran replies tiredly. “But everyone else is dead. To fix things, I need to be outside. And I cannot leave, like this.”

 

Jaime looks at Brienne. She nods, then hands him her spare knife.

 

—

 

Ice cracks under Bran’s hand as he kneels on the ground outside the cave.

 

A small green bud peers out at once.

 

“What are you even now?” Jaime asks.

 

“What you made me,” Bran replies. “But it’s all right. It was what I had to be.”

 

The ice cracks, and cracks.

 

The sun feels just warm, now.

 

—

 

Two weeks later, as they near the Wall, Brienne clears her throat.

 

“My moon blood is late,” she says.

 

Bran looks at them knowingly.

 

Oh, Jaime thinks. His left hand touches Brienne’s stomach before he can think of it.

 

There are lilacs crawling from the ground they’re sitting on. He plucks one, putting it behind her ear.

 

“Will this do, for now?” He whispers.

 

“Yes,” she whispers as what feels like spring rain starts falling from the sky.

 

—

 

They’re on the way back South when the land comes alive again.