Archive of Our Own ^beta

46.

Brienne Tarth wins the 59^th Hunger Games and no one can figure out what the hell to do with her afterwards.  It happens, occasionally, a victor who isn’t attractive enough, or exciting enough, or entertaining enough, and Tarth manages a clean sweep.  She’s ugly and awkward and a terrible public speaker, and watching the confused consternation of the Gamemakers trying to deal with her is the most fun Jaime’s had in years. 

The anomalous ones disappear, usually, one way or another; a very lucky few are even allowed to retreat to their home Kingdoms for a quiet life of solitude and deep psychological trauma.  Jaime assumes that will be Tarth’s fate; she has nothing to offer King’s Landing, where tastes run more to beauty than brutality in their women - or at the very least require the former alongside the latter - but equally the status quo has nothing to fear from her.  True, she has no obvious pressure points, her only family being an elderly father so plagued by ill-health that his imminent death is too much of an inevitability to ever be a threat, but she’s dull and slow and uninspiring, and it’s not really a surprise when no one seems to think it worth the admittedly considerable effort that it would take to kill her. 

In the arena she’d wielded a mace like it was a part of her own flesh.  The Gamemakers hadn’t liked it - too quick, too brutal, too unfeminine - and all anyone seems to care about afterwards is that she’s gawky and mannish, that she blushes mottled crimson and mumbles single-syllable answers during her interviews.  Even Jaime nearly forgets, when he meets her in person for the first time, on the last night of her Victory Tour.  The Red Keep is lit up for the Victor’s Ball, the great and the good of King’s Landing out in all their splendour, and Tarth looks more uncomfortable and unsure in the middle of it than she had at any point during the two and a half weeks she’d spent in the arena.  When they’re introduced she flushes an impressive shade of red and can’t seem to lift her eyes higher than Jaime’s shoulder, and Jaime laughs; he can’t help it, it’s just so ridiculous, that this creature should be their glorious victor. 

She somehow blushes even more deeply at that, and the hand that Jaime realises too late had been stretched out towards him drops away.  It does at least make her lift her eyes to look at him properly though; they’re bluer than the seas around Casterly Rock, and filled with contempt. 

Jaime opens his mouth to say – to say what?  So glad you’re alive, oh and by the way I thought you looked magnificent caving in the skull of that sixteen-year-old boy from the Reach, his name was Ben and he was a bit of a tit, to be honest, thought too much of himself, and he didn’t deserve to die but if he had to I’m glad it was quick, so, thanks for that. 

He doesn’t, of course, and she’s still glaring at him and then Renly Baratheon is there, shouldering in to claim her for a dance because the idiot will do anything to get a spot of attention, and Jaime assumes that’s it.  She’s packed off back to the Stormlands the next morning and Jaime doesn’t really think of her again until a year later when the lunatic actually comes back.

45.

Most mentors are victors who are tied to King’s Landing, whether by threats or lack of options or, in a few, rare, cases, actual desire to be there.  The ones who manage to leave mostly intact aren’t usually stupid enough to risk returning unless they don’t have a choice. 

So it makes no sense that Brienne Tarth does.  She doesn’t need to, the Stormlands aren’t frequent champions but they’ve scraped together enough over the years that they have options that don’t involve wheeling out their freshly traumatised most recent victor; it’s not like the North, with crag-faced Rodrick Cassell as their sole champion, holding on to his sanity and his liver with an increasingly feeble grip.   But there she is, in the crush before the parade, hovering over the Stormland tributes as they climb into their chariot like a hen with two chicks. 

Tarth at eighteen is very little improvement on Tarth at seventeen.  She’s somehow even taller, and broader too, filling out with maturity and a year of reliable food.  Her presence makes the two Stormlands tributes look even smaller and more pathetic than they actually are, and even setting that aside she’s really, truly terrible at the most important parts of a mentor’s job.  She’s got no charisma, no charm, no guile, no understanding for the inner mechanics of how the Games actually work, at least here in King’s Landing.  She wouldn’t know how to schmooze, even if she knew who.  Cersei thinks it’s hilarious. 

Both Stormland tributes are dead by the end of the second day.  It’s not her fault, to be fair; neither of them had stood a chance.  Brienne watches from the mentor’s Viewing Room as the boy is cut down in the initial bloodbath, as the girl does a little better, finding water, finding food, finding the girl from the Wall who knifes her through the chest.  There’s a murmur of commiseration around the room as Tarth climbs stiffly to her feet, yielding her prime spot to those with pieces still on the board.  Jaime catches a brief glimpse of her face as she passes, her stupid eyes wide with shock and grief, as if she could have been expecting any other outcome.  He feels a sort of vindictive pleasure as their gazes briefly meet; now, at last, maybe she’ll realise the gift she was given the year before, to leave with no expectation of return, to walk away from all of this.  Now, maybe, she’ll actually take it. 

Except when Jaime arrives the next morning she’s already there, lurking in a corner with her eyes fixed on the screen like it still matters to her. 

Jaime tries to ignore her, he really does.  He’s still got his boy in play and he’s decent, too, actually stands a fair chance, and so Jaime splits his time between the Viewing Room and the parties in the city, greasing palms and sweettalking sponsors.  But Tarth’s always there, whenever he returns, day or night.  Occasionally she exchanges a few quiet words with one of the other mentors but mostly she’s a silent, skulking presence.

On the ninth day she catches his eye as he slips back into the room after a particularly gruelling two hours trying to milk enough coin to send his remaining tribute a weapon.  He ignores her, and keeps on ignoring her right up until she’s suddenly taking the seat next to him and grabbing him by the shoulder.

“You might not be taking this seriously,” she hisses, her face so close to his that their noses are practically touching.  “But your tribute was bitten by a manticore beetle while you were off partying, and you’ve got about three hours to get an antidote to him before it’s too late to be of any use.”

“What are you talking about?” Jaime snaps back, but she’s already pulling up a clip on one of the personal screens in front of them, rewinding and zooming in to the shot that she’s after.  It’s a blink-and-you’d-miss-it moment; Jaime’s not sure even the boy himself realises he’s been stung, never mind what it is that got him.  He’s probably got another couple of hours before the tell-tale rash starts to appear, and by then his only hope would be the sort of medical care definitely not available to someone in the middle of the Games.  Right now, though…

It will be expensive, Jaime thinks, mentally tallying the amount of coin he’s secured so far and rifling through the likeliest targets to make up the shortfall.  It’ll be tight, but he’s got a bit of time… He’s getting to his feet before he realises Tarth’s still gripping him firmly by the arm, and there’s a look on her face he doesn’t like; surprise, maybe, or relief, like she’d thought he might not…

“Thanks,” he grinds out, ready for the gloating, but Tarth doesn’t say anything more, just nods at him once, calm and serious, and lets him go.

He manages to get the antidote in time, not that it matters.  The boy recovers, but he’s taken out two days later by the girl from the Iron Islands, and a few days after that Jaime will have to smile and shake her hand in congratulations. 

So Brienne Tarth’s first year as a mentor passes, strange but, overall, uneventful, and Jaime once again assumes that will be the last they see of her, whatever atonement she’d sought surely paid. 

Except she’s back again the next year, and the next, and the next, a looming figure behind her tributes in the pre-Games circus and a fixture in the Viewing Room once they enter the arena, silent and scowling.  Even after their inevitable deaths she stays, watching with those wide blue eyes that seem to miss nothing, and whatever she sees she passes on, regardless of Kingdom, regardless of any prior allegiance.  More than once Jaime knows her observations help a competitor who was directly responsible for the death of one of her own tributes; it never seems to matter to her. 

44.

Cersei’s children are born in King’s Landing, raised in the capital, no hint of a connection to any Kingdom to tarnish their names.  When Jaime visits she talks merrily about their futures, their lives, the things they might achieve, so blissfully certain that their names will never see the inside of a reaping bowl that it doesn’t even occur to her to be thankful for it. 

43.

Eventually Jaime can’t bear it any longer, and the year Brienne’s tributes are somehow both still alive on the third day he intercepts her crossing the viewing room. 

“Come with me,” he mutters, and it’s probably only the shock of it that has her following him out the door; he’s never approached her before, never addressed her directly save on the few occasions she’s cornered him with some snippet about one of his tributes.  By the time they’re in the corridor outside surprise has morphed back to her more customary displeasure and she grinds to a halt, forcing Jaime to backstep when he realises she’s no longer beside him.

“What do you want?” she demands and Jaime rolls his eyes, tries to grab her by the arm and pull her along, only to be soundly pushed back in response.  She’s of a height with him, now, all broad solid muscle, and with all her limbs intact besides.

“The Stokeworths are hosting a viewing party this afternoon,” he grunts, winded, and her expression sours even more.

“I’m not here to attend parties,” she hisses.  “I’ve got more important things to do!”

“No, you don’t,” snaps Jaime, because after four years she somehow still doesn’t get it.  “This is the single most important thing you can do!  You want to help them?  Get them food, get them weapons, get them medicine!”

“The Stormlands can - ” she begins, but Jaime cuts her off.

“There are people at that party who will spend more on a single, idle gift, than the Stormlands will manage to raise over the entire Games.  Your job is to make sure that at least some of them are spending it on your tributes.”

She blinks at him, swallows, and even has the decency to look somewhat abashed when she follows him without further complaint. 

He still regrets it, later.  She’s really, truly terrible at it, in a way he really should have foreseen; but he’s got too used to her presence within the familiar confines of the Viewing Room, or backstage during the parades and interviews.  He’d forgotten how jagged she is when set against the shine and glitter of King’s Landing proper, how the hard, brutal edges of her catch and snag on the simpering population of the capital.  The party twirls and twinkles around them, all colour and noise, and Brienne stands in the middle of it as solid and implacable as stone.  Lady Stokeworth twitters over her and a Florant tries to get her to dance and the Rosby sisters don’t even attempt to hide their sniggers, and within half an hour Jaime is dragging her back out again, because it turns out this is it, after all the horrors he has seen, this is the thing he cannot bear to witness, the silly twittering songbirds who seem so oblivious to the falcon in their midst.  No, worse than that: they’re not oblivious.  They see her and they laugh.    

“That’s not going to work,” he acknowledges and Brienne just stares at him, wide eyed and flustered in a way he’s never seen her after hours spent watching children slaughter one another. 

“That’s how you get so many gifts,” she says, an observation rather than a question, but there’s an undercurrent of – judgment, disbelief? – that rankles all the same. 

“How did you think I did it?” he snaps, but she ignores the question completely. 

“I won’t be able to do it,” she says instead, flatly self-aware. 

“No,” Jaime agrees, because…no.  It’s teachable, to a degree, he can think of any number of pointers he could make to try and improve her performance, but it will never be enough to count when it matters.  And, more than that, he finds he doesn’t want to turn her into the sort of performing monkey that would require. 

So maybe this will finally be it, maybe the solution all along was to show her the futility of her presence here; maybe this will be the thing that finally releases her from this strange penance, that lets her go, leave, get as far away from King’s Landing as she possibly can and never, ever, come back. 

“But,” he points out, and she’s looking at him with consideration and, for maybe the first time since he met her, no trace of disdain, “There are other people who can.”

42.

The next year Brienne’s there, of course, Jaime’s stopped expecting otherwise, but this time she’s not alone.  Year on year she haunts the viewing room while old Davos Seaworth gets dispatched off to charm and schmooze.  They make a formidable team; Brienne’s eyes don’t miss much, and Seaworth is a canny sort, well versed in managing the richest egos of King’s Landing.  It’s not enough, the Stormlands don’t have the resources to train and prepare their tributes the way they can in the Crownlands, the Reach, the Westerlands, but there’s never a day when Jaime doesn’t see Brienne in the Viewing Room, from the moment the starting horn sounds until the hovercrafts finally descend to collect the victor, no matter how early her own pair fall.  Most years the Westerlands have at least one tribute survive until the final few and more than once Jaime finds it’s just the two of them, late at night, watching whatever savagery is playing out on screen. 

They rarely speak, barely even acknowledge each other’s presence most days, but it makes the whole thing one tiny iota more bearable, watching whatever atrocities are unfolding on screen with her arm pressed warm against his.  There’s a comfort he’s never sought in the sound of her breathing beside him, and for those three, four weeks of every year Brienne Tarth somehow becomes the best friend Jaime’s ever had.

41.

She’ll have heard the stories.  Brienne’s old enough to have watched and remembered Jaime’s Games, and the fallout afterwards was too loud, too wide-reaching, to shield it from the Kingdoms completely.  The disappearance of President Targaryen couldn’t be hidden; the rise of Tywin Lannister in the years that followed was, by its very nature, necessarily public. 

When Jaime’s feeling particularly maudlin, or particularly drunk, he starts to wonder which one people hate him for more: Aerys, or his family’s ongoing championing of the games.  President Lannister, with his Gamemaker son and stylist daughter.  And Jaime, the victor, who started it all.  He always remembers it doesn’t matter; that he doesn’t care; that the opinions of anyone else, especially anyone resident in King’s Landing, mean nothing. 

But.  As the years pass, and Brienne’s disdain thaws into something best described as ambivalent tolerance, he finds he would like to ask her the question.

40.

Insomnia has been a constant companion for over a decade by this point in his life, and more nights than he cares to think about Jaime gives up on his bed entirely.  Once the tributes are in the arena he usually ends up in the Viewing Room, but during the build-up he can only roam the empty halls of the Training Centre, aimless.

It’s on one such night that he notices the light coming from the gymnasium.  He can never remember which Games it was, later, and perhaps he should feel some guilt about that, about the way they all seem to blur and merge together over time; he remembers his tributes, their names and how they died etched into the deepest parts of his brain, but the whens start to elude him, after a while. It’s the night before the tributes enter the arena, the first time, but he’s damned if he can remember exactly who it was being sent to their death, which out of the very long list, years after the fact. 

But it’s night time, and the Games will start in the morning, and there’s a light on in the gymnasium. 

He assumes it will be a tribute, sneaking in some illicit last-minute training, and he goes in intending to harry them back to their bed and much-needed sleep before someone more official notices.

Instead he finds Brienne, hurling blows down on one of the dummies with deadly precision.  He’s not seen her in action since her own Games, and he’s forgotten, in the years since, how quickly she can move, how strong she is.  She’s lost none of the physical force that took her to victory then, and it’s much less complicated to admire it now, when her target isn’t another child. 

He's not sure how long he’s been watching for when she stops, pushing sweaty strands of hair out of her face with one enormous hand as she grunts, “Be useful if you’re going to stare.”

Jaime swaggers down, furiously ignoring the way his heart is beating madly in his chest. 

“I’m not sure what use you expect me to be,” he points out, lifting his truncated limb in demonstration, and waits for her to suggest a prosthetic, or question his lack of one, the way everyone always does, eventually.   

“I saw your Games,” she says, ignoring him like always and instead crossing over to a clear area of floor next to a weapons rack.  “You’re an excellent swordsman.”

“I was an excellent swordsman.”

That earns him an eyeroll.  “You still have three other limbs.  And more formal training than I do.”

“You want me to…teach you?” Jaime clarifies dubiously, which just gets another eye roll, and a wooden sword thrust in his direction.  He takes it automatically, the weight unfamiliar in his left palm, and tries a few experimental swings.  Brienne watches him with those sharp blue eyes that never miss a thing, and brings her own blade up to meet him. 

It quickly becomes apparent that, whatever and wherever Brienne spends her time between Games, it involves a lot less alcohol and a lot more physical activity than Jaime’s does.  The worst part is he hadn’t thought he was in particularly bad shape; not what he was, of course, but a damn sight better than a lot of other victors.  Brienne wastes no time putting pay to that delusion.  Within minutes he’s sweating and out of breath, and only some of that can be put down to the fact that he’s having to figure out how to lead with his non-dominant hand.  Brienne is a relentless opponent and a demanding student, making him demonstrate steps and turns again and again, first so she can watch and then mirror.  He’s no idea how long they stay there for, but when he finally makes his way back to his room, exhausted and aching, he falls into the sort of deep and dreamless sleep he can never normally find in King’s Landing.

They meet twice more that year, the night after Brienne’s boy is taken out by the career pack, and then again when half the career pack are ripped apart by mutts.  Brienne beats him soundly every time, which is infuriating, not least because she doesn’t seem to care about her victories at all. 

39.

So obviously Jaime has no choice but to spend the next twelve months training, dredging up as many drills as he can remember from his teenage years and working through them with grim determination, day after day.   It’s not just strengthening up his non-dominant side; it’s forcibly unlearning reflexes he’d burnt deep into sinew and bone, back when the sword had been a simple, uncomplicated joy, a game.  It’s torture, and it’s glorious.

The next year Brienne still beats him, every time, but at least he’s starting to make her work for it now.  Year on year they keep at it, until Jaime can barely remember a time when they didn’t, when he had to get through these weeks with no outlet, with nothing to sustain him but the knowledge that they would, eventually, pass.

Brienne is a stoic opponent, and Jaime finds himself increasingly driven to fill the silence between them, to push and poke and prod until he can elicit some sort of verbal reaction from her.  After the second year he starts to suspect at least some of her reticence is intentional; by the third year he is sure of it. 

He doesn’t realise, at first, how bits of himself have started to spill out over time, truths slipping out haphazardly alongside taunts and teases, until one night he finds himself looking across the ring at her and sees this strange, course-featured women realising she holds all his secrets in her too-large hands, sees her piece together the parts of himself he’s handed over and stand back, examining the whole for the first time. 

He braces himself for whatever inevitable fallout will follow, but though she looks at him differently, after, it’s not a bad sort of different.  It seems too unlikely to trust in it, but the years pass and Brienne keeps on coming back and sparring with him and rolling her eyes at him and occasionally, just occasionally smiling at him, like…like it never even occurs to her to do anything else. 

Jaime doesn’t know when he started to put his faith in that.

38.

In fifteen years Brienne’s only victor is a scrawny boy who wins more by default than any significant skill on his part, the year the main pack are all taken out simultaneously by an earthquake.  The remainder spend a miserable few days picking each other off until there’s only two left, just weedy Podrick Payne and Mandon Moore, a hulking brute from the Vale.  Jaime has to watch the replay four times before he fully understands it; Moore’s mace, crashing into the ground where Pod had lain just a moment before, the knife the smaller boy had pulled from Moore’s own belt and plunged up through his ribs. 

By then Jaime has watched Brienne Tarth through eleven games, has watched her watch twenty-one of the children she’s escorted to King’s Landing fall in the arena in twenty-one different, equally horrible ways.  The moment the twenty-second grips on to the ladder to the hovercraft is the only time he ever sees her cry. 

And the following year she comes back again.

37.

For the 74^th Hunger Games Robb Stark and Talisa Maegyr are reaped for the North.  Jaime doesn’t buy the love story the two teenagers weave, not for one second, but he can’t deny they do a very good job of selling the lie.  King’s Landing is entranced; Tywin is furious.  When Robb Stark reaches into his belt and pulls out the little handful of berries Jaime can practically hear the veins popping in his father’s forehead from half a city away.  It’s a tactical masterstroke and, all across country, from the Crownlands to the Wall, people are suddenly sitting up and paying attention. 

Robb and Talisa are going to die.  Jaime sees it in the tilt of his father’s head and the slant of his mouth.  Oh, Cersei talks about their deaths constantly, the way she does anyone and everyone who has crossed her in whatever guise it’s taken on any given day; King’s Landing would be a much emptier place, if every execution Cersei called for was followed through on.

But Tywin’s silence is damming. 

Jaime could say, don’t.  He could say, this will martyr them.  He could say this, this more than anything, will not work the way you hope it to.  Shame them, disgrace them, let them live long enough to fail. 

There’s a chance his father would listen, if he did; Tywin does, sometimes.  It’s been years since Jaime’s bothered pining for his father’s pride or attention, but showing an interest in politics beyond the Games themselves is usually a reliable way to get it.   But Jaime says nothing, and Robb Stark and his pretty girlfriend die. 

Later, much later, Jaime meets Sansa, and never tells her. 

36.

The funeral is a grand state affair, broadcast right across the country, and some idiot had signed off on a live broadcast of the eulogy, so Sansa Stark has a full audience when she speaks of her brave big brother, of the kindness and care that he’d shown to everyone and always expected to find in other people, of his love for his family and Talisa, his staunch belief in the goodness of humankind.  With her pale dress and red hair she’s a candleflame clinging on in a buffeting wind, the image hazy and blurred and beaming onto thousands of screens across the country.

It’s not open rebellion, not yet, but it’s there, simmering, months of discontent and unrest that spill over in brief, barely supressed bursts of violence.  Jaime is sent from kingdom to kingdom, parroting patriotic garbage and flashing flimsy smiles that hopefully don’t look as fake as they feel.  It’s a tactic Tywin’s advisors have always been keen on, whenever a kingdom is showing signs of malcontent; a reminder that the President once walked among them, that his belief in that games is so strong that his children once stood where their children stand. 

In the very darkest corners of his mind, Jaime has always suspected that at least some of his father’s contempt for him stems from the fact that his presence is a permanent reminder of just how far their family fell.  The Lannisters had been among the brightest and best of King’s Landing for generations until Tytos Lannister lost everything and was exiled to the Westerlands to boot.  Tywin spent his life clawing his way back out of that mire, fuelled first by familial pride and later by crystalised rage, convinced that his wife would have lived had she had the care of the capital’s doctors, but even when he became Warden of the Westerlands his children’s names had still gone into the reaping bowl, had risked coming back out.

And then Jaime had the gall to win, permanently altered but alive, a constant reminder to the world that no matter how powerful President Lannister now is, he hasn’t always called King’s Landing home.

But suspecting is not the same as knowing, as being faced with irrefutable proof of Tywin’s disregard.  Jaime’s spent years refusing to play into his father’s political maneuverers, refusing to take on any role in the running of the Games other than that of mentor, and he’s always known Tywin’s thin vein of tolerance would run out one day, but somehow he’d still never expected this, and it hurts more than it has any right to, to know that his father will risk throwing away his life so cheaply. 

35.

On the 75th anniversary, as a reminder to the rebels that even the strongest among them cannot overcome the power of King’s Landing, the male and female tributes will be reaped from their existing pool of victors.  If there is no living victor the tribute will instead be reaped from eligible members of their immediate family. 

34.

The first time Jaime was reaped he was seventeen and invincible.  He’d stood with Addam in their pen, idly wondering if they’d have time to go riding when the reaping was over.  He hadn’t cared about the reaping itself because the worst thing that could happen was his own name being called, and he’d never feared that.  He knew how good he was, and, if it came to it, he did not fear a glorious death.  He was seventeen, he was the son of Tywin Lannister, Warden of the Westerlands; he had money, he had power, he had skills and training that eclipsed any other living person, in or out of an arena.  There was nothing he feared.   

Then Pycelle had reached into the bowl, fished around, pulled out a slip.

“Tyrion Lannister,”

Tyrion was twelve, his first year in the reaping, invisible in the crowd, but the cameras found him anyway, the way they always did, and suddenly his face was everywhere, blown up on the giant screens around the square, pale and wide-eyed and so, so small. 

Jaime was seventeen and there was one thing he feared.

“I volunteer!” he’d shouted, shoving his way forward through the crowd, away from Addam’s startled face.  “Me!  I volunteer!”

33.

At Jaime’s second reaping he stands in a group too small to be called a crowd.  He knows them all, old Barristan Selmy, who had been Jaime’s own mentor and never forgiven him for it, Arys and Trant and Balon Swann and all the rest, none of them meeting anyone else’s eye.

Hearing his own name called feels more like an inevitability than anything to do with luck or odds. 

He doesn’t expect any visitors afterwards.  That’s preferable, really, to what he had before; Tywin’s thin-lipped anger, Cersei lashing out in fury at his actions, Tyrion’s childlike tears.  Jaime’s perfectly content to spend his time stewing in his own company in restful silence instead, but he’s only just getting started with that when the door squeaks open and Myrcella steps in.

He stares at her, too shocked by her presence to formulate any sort of response.  She takes a few hesitant steps towards him and then stops, darting nervous looks around the room.

“Hello Uncle Jaime,” she says into the quiet, her voice finally jarring Jaime into some form of response.

“What are you doing here?” he demands, his voice far harsher than he would usually use with his sister’s children.  “How are you here?”

Myrcella blanches and swallows but doesn’t falter, a Lannister to her core.

“I got the train,” she says simply, as if crossing the country, even to the Westerlands, a popular holiday destination for the residents of King’s Landing, was some minor undertaking for a child alone.  “I…we thought we probably wouldn’t be able to see you when you got back, if…If.”  She makes a sad, helpless gesture that’s obviously meant to encompass everything that has happened today: the unsayable if. 

“Does your mother know where you are?” Jaime asks, swallowing down the bleak truth of her words.  He’ll return to King’s Landing on the tribute’s train and be taken straight from the station to the Training Centre.  There will be no special treatment, no detours to the apartment in the palace complex that has been his main residence since his father became president.  He will not see his sister or her children again; Cersei will make sure of that.

“She thinks I’m staying with Arianne,” Myrcella explains patiently, and then, casting another anxious look to the door behind her, thrust a small white bag out towards him.  “Here.  From Tommen too.  I wouldn’t let him come.”

“Good,” grunts Jaime, moving closer despite himself and reaching out to take the little package.  “You shouldn’t have either.”

Myrcella, poised and wise beyond her years, shrugs in a manner that would have made her mother scowl, secure in the knowledge that his reprimands can mean nothing now; she is, after all, already here, and Jaime has no means of invoking any sort of consequence for her actions. 

The bag is thin paper, small enough to sit in the palm of Jaime’s single hand, and filled with a rainbow of sweets dusted in sugar.  Jaime can picture the shop she must have bought them from, halfway between the palace and the park Myrcella and Tommen had favoured as small children.  Myrcella must have carried it on the train all the way from King’s Landing, without sneaking a single one. 

He blinks heavily and manages to croak, “Thank you,” around the sudden lump in his throat.  Myrcella’s composure finally fails her, and she darts forwards so quickly Jaime barely has chance to tuck the packet safely in his pocket before she’s throwing her arms around him.  He falls to his knees and scoops her up, and she buries her face into the point where his neck and his shoulder meet, the way she did when she was very small.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Jaime, I’m so sorry,” she whispers hastily, dangerous words even for her, even here, and he hushes her quickly, rocks her against him, tries to ignore the sticky salt-tears he can feel on his own face as well as hers. 

“You should go,” he rasps at last, forcing himself to loosen his grip, to put one foot of space between them, two.  The last thing he wants is for the Goldcloaks to decide their time is up and force them apart, drag Myrcella away.  Myrcella’s eyes are still swimming and her face is tear-stained and red, but she nods, just once, and Jaime is suddenly reminded of Cersei, the day of their mother’s funeral.  It’s a memory he didn’t know he’d retained until now, the way she’d swallowed her grief and her anger and forced them both into a semblance of dignity.  It’s not the way Jaime wants to remember Myrcella, nothing like her mother in all the ways that count, but what does it matter, really?  It’s only for a few days more. 

32.

It’s only later that night, aboard the train, that Jaime’s finally alone and free to pull up the coverage from the rest of the reapings.  The Crownlands, the Reach, the Vale, the Winterlands, face after familiar face; he watches them all one by one, slowly sucking on the sweets Myrcella had bought, trying to make each one last as long as possible. 

In the Stormlands Brienne stands alone in the girl’s pen.  Her expression is frozen, her gaze fixed on something beyond the cameras, and it doesn’t so much as flicker when her name is read out.  Only when Pod’s squeaking voice pipes up to volunteer in place of Seaworth does the mask falter, for the briefest second; and Jaime hates it, hates it, for how much she will loath having shown that moment of weakness.

31.

The stables feel more crowded than usual when they gather for the parade, filled with adult bodies looking ridiculous in kids’ costumes, and there’s an unusual hum of conversation rippling around the room as the tributes mix with one another.  Jaime’s gaze trips from face to face, and he doesn’t like half these people, barely tolerates the rest, but he finds the prospect of killing them is…distasteful.  Why should he murder Podrick Payne, or Margaery Tyrell, or even Sandor Clegane?  Loras Tyrell is a simpering fool and the red-headed idiot from the Winterlands is an annoying, loud pain in the ass whose brash and unreciprocated pursuit of Brienne has been a thorn in Jaime’s side for the better part of a decade, but not even he deserves to die, not even for that.

Jaime does not doubt his capacity to kill; he has known that truth for over half his life.  And, thanks in no small part to Brienne’s stubbornness, he probably still has the ability, despite his handicap. 

It’s somewhat startling to realise that what he lacks is the inclination. 

He’s still processing this when he sees Euron Greyjoy, leaning nonchalantly against his own chariot on the far side of the room, a ring of empty space separating him from the rest of the crowd.  Euron’s games went down in infamy for the maniacal cruelty of the victor, disturbing even to the strong stomachs of the King’s Landing crowds, and Jaime has seen enough of the footage to know that, for once, the gossip is not an exaggeration.   He’d been a favourite of Aerys Targaryen, by all accounts, and left to his own devices in the years since the old president’s death.  Rumour of his activities still occasionally reaches the capital, but Tywin has never seemed inclined to intervene, and Jaime at last understands why.  Why waste effort on killing him, when it was so easy to keep him alive and appeased, and ready to be retrieved for exactly this sort of scenario.  It was precisely the sort of efficiency that Tywin Lannister appreciated.   

Euron’s gaze is fixed on something in the crowd, and when Jaime looks he sees Sansa Stark, because the North has no living female victors and Talisia Maegyr had no living family, and so here Robb Stark’s sister stands, the only eligible female related to a Northern victor.  Jaime feels a stab of pity for her, this child who has lost her mother and her father and her eldest brother and now finds herself here.  She’s younger and smaller than anyone else in the room, and so completely inexperienced, the only tribute to have never stepped foot in an arena before.  Jaime wouldn’t have given her good odds on a normal year; this year, surrounded by proven, hardened killers, she stands no chance at all, and there’s nothing Jaime can do about that.

But he can try and ensure her end is not the cruel and protracted misery it would be in Greyjoy’s hands. 

He studies Euron carefully.  The man is mad and unpredictable and definitely dangerous, but he’s nearly fifteen years Jaime’s senior, and his prime is well behind him.  Jaime could probably take him. 

He smiles, involuntarily.  It’s a good plan; a simple one.  It’s a purpose beyond dying in the name of mass entertainment, at least. 

Euron’s weight shifts forward and he moves to take a step in Sansa’s direction.  Jaime tenses, ready to intervene, but when he looks back Sansa is no longer standing alone.  Of course Brienne has found her, with her unerring knack for seeking out the small and the weak, and now she’s talking to her quietly, gently, Pod hovering at their side.  Sansa looks marginally less terrified, and when Jaime checks Euron has moved away, whatever he was planning thwarted for now by Brienne’s presence. 

He looks again at Sansa, who will hopefully never know the service he’s decided to perform for her, only to find Brienne looking back at him.  Her face is set, unhappy – had she too noticed Euron’s attention?  Jaime wouldn’t be surprised, she doesn’t miss much - but when her eyes meet his they are burning with fury. 

30.

For years now it’s been their routine to meet in the gymnasium that first evening, after the parade.   There’s something about seeing Brienne, sparring with her, teasing her, that makes Jaime’s skin feel like it fits better, for a short while, that makes the prospect of yet another Games one tiny iota more bearable.  It’s one of the few things in his life Jaime actually looks forward to.  He’s halfway out the apartment, sneaking quietly past the rooms usually occupied by his tributes out of habit, when he pauses, remembering all over again how much is different, this year. 

To face her now, not as an equal but as an opponent, to look for weaknesses in her form he might expose – that, worse, others could expose… He can’t do it.  Their sparring sessions have been an outlet, a coping mechanism, but they’ve also been fun, a game just between themselves, pushing and poking each other to improve purely for the pleasure of it. 

To do so now would feel too real. 

29.

It’s not that Jaime’s under any illusions about how this is going to end.  He’s old and crippled and disliked by the kingdom he’s representing, not to mention his mentors.  Perhaps a few of the King’s Landing citizens he’s sweettalked for sponsorship over the years will throw something his way, but it won’t be enough to matter when it really counts. 

He hopes it’s quick, if only for Myrcella and Tommen’s sakes.  They don’t deserve to watch him die in some gruesome, grisly way, to have to carry that with them for the rest of their lives. 

Brienne, in theory, should stand a chance.  She’s younger and physically still in her prime, and Davos is a canny mentor.  She’s a favourite with the bookies, up there with Loras Tyrell and Sandor Clegane.  But the bookies don’t know her like Jaime does.  They haven’t spent sixteen years sitting beside her, sparring with her, watching her forge her own code of honour in a world where there was none to be found.  Jaime does not delude himself that she might survive; she will die in defence of Pod, or maybe Sansa Stark, or any one of the others.  The best Jaime can hope for is that her death is clean, and meaningful. 

No, Brienne will not win.  Jaime’s known that since the moment the Quell was announced and he’d realised the Stormlands had no other female victors.  Not at that cost; not at any cost set by the Games, a price she would never pay, not even for her own life. 

And so this is how it will, inevitably, end.  They’ll go in together and neither one of them is coming out this time. 

28.

Training is a farce.  Jaime bypasses the weapons completely; he knows his own limitations, even after years of Brienne knocking him about this very room, and he feels no need to display them to the group.  He loiters around a station dedicated to edible plants instead - starvation has never appealed – and watches the others watching each other. 

Not far away, Brienne is at the throwing station with Pod and Sansa Stark.  Pod has some familiarity with bladed weapons – of course he does, he’s been tagging along at Brienne’s heels for enough years now – but it’s obvious Sansa hasn’t so much as picked up an axe in her life, never mind thrown one.  Brienne watches her critically, making quiet comments and reaching out to adjust her stance, picking up a knife of her own to demonstrate. 

“Only one tribute to handle a weapon at a time!” snaps a Goldcloak from behind them.  Sansa jumps guiltily but Brienne ignores him completely, drawing the girl’s attention back to how she’s gripping the handle. 

“Hey!” the Goldcloak repeats, stepping towards them.  “I said stop!”

Still Brienne ignores him, though there’s no way she didn’t notice his approach.  All across the room heads are turning in their direction now and Jaime starts to drift over, a tight, uncomfortable knot of dread forming in his gut. 

Brienne’s continued disobedience is obviously too much for the Goldcloak, and he swings his baton up, ready to crack it down on Brienne’s hand.  Jaime opens his mouth to shout – what, he’s not sure, a warning to Brienne or a reproach to the Goldcloak or just nonsense to draw their attention – but Brienne moves too quickly for his tongue.  In the space of a blink she drops her knife into her other hand and spins to catch the baton in her palm.  There’s the smack of metal meeting flesh but no crack of bone, no cry of pain, and in the next moment she’s twisted the baton from the Goldcloack’s hand and turned to brandish it back at its owner. 

“I am doing no harm,” she hisses, her words carrying easily in the absolute silence of the gym.  “And we are not scared children you can bully with a loud voice and big sticks.”

The Goldcloak stares down the length of his own baton at her, his breath coming in heaving wheezes as he finally seems to realise he is facing an adult larger than himself, with infinitely more skill and confidence in wielding his weapon.  None of his brothers in arms make any move to help him; they’re too busy side-eyeing the other tributes, as if realising, for the first time, how different they are to the usual fare. 

How outmatched they are, against a crowd of proven killers. 

It hangs in the air, a long, suspended moment, the Goldcloaks’ hands creeping towards their weapons while the tributes shift imperceptibly.  All it’s going to take is one misjudged move and the whole room is going to go up like wildfire – and actually, Jaime things with grim amusement, what’s the problem with that?  A fight to the death here, now, instead of a fight to the death in a few days’ time?  What difference does it make, in the end?  Euron’s even nearby, a nasty looking trident in his hands, and Jaime’s just starting to scout around for the nearest thing he can use as a weapon of his own when Margaery Tyrell’s voice rings through the air.

“Are you done with that, Brienne?  Only I was hoping you’d show me those snare knots you were talking about.”

She’s crossing the room as she speaks, passing between tributes and Goldcloaks seemingly oblivious to the danger hanging in the air, and Jaime knows she isn’t that stupid, has seen her play this act before – every single person in the room has, every single person in the room knows it’s what took her to victory to begin with – and yet they still fall for it, all the same.  The tension dissipates, Brienne turns her focus to Margaery’s question, the Goldcloaks relax, and the moment passes. 

Killing each other in a few days’ time it is then. 

27.

Tyrion comes to him, the night after the interviews.  They don’t talk about it – any of it – because what is there to say?  Once upon a time Tyrion should have died inside the arena, but Jaime took his place and lived instead, at least for a little while.   They sit together for an hour and talk about nothing and the single drinks that Jaime poured more out of habit than desire stay clutched in too-tight grips, the contents untouched.  Neither of them drinks when the games are on, for all that they make up for it the rest of year; why change the habits of a lifetime now, so close to the end? 

They joke and tease and it’s strained and stretched but if it’s all they’ve got left then Jaime’s going to take it still.

“It’s not your fault,” Jaime manages at last, as Tyrion stands to leave.  His brother doesn’t deign that with a reply, just looks at him with heavy, tired eyes and lifts a sardonic eyebrow, and Jaime has loved him since the day he was born, loved him because and in spite of everything, and he can’t regret that.  No matter what happens tomorrow, Tyrion lives and breathes and drinks and laughs, has had twenty-four years that Jaime bought him with his own blood, paid in full, and there’s no reason now why he shouldn’t have a lifetime more.  It’s worth it, just for that. 

“If there’s anything I can do…” Tyrion starts, fiddling with the hand-shaped broach pinned to his chest, and it’s not an empty offer; Tyrion’s Head Gamemaker these days, maybe not enough to keep Jaime out of the arena but doubtless enough to engineer him an easier time through it. 

Or someone else.  For a moment, just a moment, Jaime considers asking his brother for Brienne’s life.  It wouldn’t be a guarantee but it would be chance, a better chance, and he knows even has he thinks it that she’d never want it. 

“No,” he says at last, heavy with resignation that Tyrion probably misinterprets.  “Just…look after Myrcella and Tommen.”

Tyrion waves that away – of course, it goes without saying – and sighs a weary sigh.

“I suppose this is goodbye then.”

Jaime falls to his knees and they embrace in a way they haven’t in years, since the first time Jaime went into an arena.  Jaime can feel wetness on his face and Tyrion’s shoulders shake in his arms and it takes everything he has, every last shred, to break away, to straighten up and plaster on a smile.

“Farewell, little brother.”

26.

The lift brings him out into dazzling sunlight and he blinks repeatedly, clearing his vision.  There’s water everywhere, the Cornucopia in front of him perched on its own little island and the ring of tributes on their platforms surrounding it.  They’re going to have to swim for it, and that’s fine, that’s fine, Jaime’s swum one-handed before, he’ll cope, but it’s going to favour Euron and that could be a problem.  The countdown has already dropped twenty seconds and Jaime’s looking, looking, because his main advantage here is going to be the fact that Euron doesn’t know what he’s planning…

He finds Brienne instead.  She’s four platforms over, standing straight and tall and looking around, seeking, the same as him.  Jaime wonders if she’s picked a target too, and who; her aim will be to get Pod out, assumedly, and it’s not a bad plan at all, he’s as good a choice as any. 

Her gaze catches his and holds.  Jaime nods, just once, and Brienne nods back, and it’s like all those times in the Viewing Room, a better friend than Jaime ever hoped for or deserved.   And then that’s it, there’s less than ten seconds left and as the seconds tick down and Jaime wrenches his eyes from hers he hopes that’s the farewell they’re allowed; let him be dead before he sees her again, let that be the memory of her he can take to whatever end is coming, oh so soon – Brienne, whole and well in the sunlight.  That’s what he should have asked Tyrion for last night, he realises, as ever too late; his one, selfish wish, let her please live longer than he does, let him not have to hear the canon and see her face in the sky, let him never have to know a world that doesn’t have Brienne Tarth in it somewhere. 

25.

He doesn’t bother trying to swim to the Cornucopia.  With his stump it would be suicide, his strokes neither swift nor graceful, an easy target, and drowning has never seemed like a tempting death.  He throws himself towards the spoke to his left instead, churning through the water with haste rather than grace, hauling himself out onto blessedly solid ground and running straight and true for the centre.  Most of the others are still in the water; a few haven’t even made it off of their podiums, the giant red-headed brute from the Winterlands standing square on his bellowing words Jaime can’t make out at the distance. 

There’s still no sign of Euron, and Jaime doesn’t waste any time looking.  There have been twenty-three Games since he won his own, but some things remain constant; speed is everything right now.  Get in, grab a weapon, grab food, get out.  He’s ducking low to scoop up a likely-looking backpack when he spies the sword, hanging just inside the entrance to the Cornucopia, practically hidden behind a pile of crates.  The scabbard is plain but the handle is ornate gold with a ruby set in the centre, absurdly over the top, and Jaime knows in an instance that while the execution will have been Tyrion’s the instigation would have been Tywin; Tyrion would never have chosen to gift him something so ridiculous.  Jaime’s passable with his left hand but he's never achieved the same grace and skill that he once had with his right.  Tywin would have been better to send him a hook. 

Of course it’s equally possible that he wants Jaime to make a fool of himself; it’s impossible to say these days.  Jaime has spent over half his life being a disappointment to his father, trying and failing to understand him, and yet even now, at the end, it still rankles, just a little. 

But there are no other weapons immediately to hand and he’s already been here too long, so he grabs the sword and turns, running straight into Podrick Payne. 

There’s a brief, suspended moment during which they stare at each other.  Pod’s eyes are wide and startled; he obviously hadn’t noticed Jaime, shadowed in the mouth of the horn, until he was practically on top of him, and he’s sopping wet and empty handed, fresh out of the water.  His eyes flick from Jaime’s face to the sword in his hand and back again and his lips part slightly. 

Jaime could do it.  The boy’s an easy target, unarmed, defenceless, and even one-handed Jaime can manage a basic cut and thrust.  It might take him a moment to negotiate with the scabbard and it wouldn’t be pretty and Pod would likely die in agony from a gut wound, but he could do it.

He would have done, once, but he’s done with those games.

He’s already stepping away, sword held as non-threateningly as possible, when Brienne appears, a mean-looking mace in hand.  She takes them both in with a single glance and opens her mouth to – what, beg, cajole, threaten?  Jaime doesn’t care.  He shakes his head again, backs away a few more steps, turns, and runs. 

He thinks he hears her call his name, just once, but maybe that was just wishful thinking. 

24.

There’s no trace of Euron, that first day.  Instead he finds the fog, and then the Tyrells. 

He’d spent hours hiking steadily uphill with no sign of man, beast or water, and then a much shorter period of time racing back down, crashing through the trees heedless of the noise he was making in his efforts to outpace the burning, blistering mist.  He’s no idea how long he’s been running for when he finally bursts out onto the beach and, instinctively, throws himself into the lake, gasping both for breath and from the instantaneous relief the water brings to his hot and blistered skin.  The painful twitching in his muscles dissipates as he soaks, and for a short while he floats in the shallows, too exhausted to care about anything else. 

But as the pain recedes and as his mental fog lifts he realises he’s not alone. 

Up on the beach, near the edge of the jungle, Margaery Tyrell is crouched over her brother.  She looks terrible, her sleeves torn to shreds with blistering burns snaking up her arms where the skin is exposed, but Loras is almost unrecognisable.  Jaime’s not sure he’s even conscious, lying twitching on the sand, his face a red, swollen mess. 

As Jaime’s approach Margaery straightens – an impressive feat given the way her left leg keeps jerking – and turns to face him, wary, holding her hands open and empty in front of her chest, harmless.  They regard one another in silence for a moment, and Margaery fiddles with a hand-shaped broach pinned at her breast, a nervous tell Jaime would never have expected from her. 

“The water helps,” he says, stopping a few paces away.  The siblings have no obvious weapons, and he’s definitely in better shape than either of them physically right now, not to mention his sword lying on the sand a short distance away, but he has no interest in picking a fight here. 

Margaery nods shortly and bends down to grab Loras by the arm.  His limbs loll uncooperatively and, other than a groan, there’s no sign he even notices what his sister is doing as she tries fruitlessly to drag his heavier weight along the sand.  Jaime grits his teeth in frustration and, instead of heading off across the beach to retrieve his pack, he goes around to Loras’ other side.  Together they haul him to the water and dump him unceremoniously into the waves, and then Margaery wades in after him to sit almost fully submerged, holding his head above the surface. 

“Thank you,” she says quietly, and Jaime grunts in response.  He should leave now, all possible duties discharged, but something makes him linger.

“Have you seen any sign of water?” he asks abruptly; he might as well make use of any information they have.  But Margaery purses her lips and shakes her head.

“Nothing apart from this,” she says, and they exchange a grim look.  They’ve both seen enough games to guess at any number of ways that could cause them extra misery in the coming days. 

“Right,” Jaime nods, and he turns his back once more. 

“You’re leaving?” Margaery asks, sounding, of all things, surprised.  Surely she can’t be wanting him to ally with them?  He’d helped with Loras, sure, but that debt means nothing, in here, and right now Jaime is better placed than either of them.  Trusting him would be madness.  But when Jaime looks at her again Margaery’s staring at him with a strange expression he can’t parse, fiddling again with the broach on her breast.  She never once lost her cool in her first games; Loras’ close call has obviously shaken her.

“I’m after Euron,” Jaime says, the simplest and truest explanation he has.  It’s enough for Margaery’s face to clear, and she nods, as if in understanding. 

“He was next to Loras at the start; we didn’t see where he went, but he’d have been on the other side of the Cornucopia from here,” she says, which is more to go on that Jaime had had five minutes ago, so maybe this interlude hasn’t been a complete waste of time after all. 

“Thanks,” he says tersely.  It’s tempting to ask if she’s seen anyone else, if she knows who the canons after the bloodbath were for, if she knows if Brienne still lives…but to ask is to know, and, coward that he is, ignorance is preferable, for now.  He leaves before his resolve can slip. 

23.

Brienne’s face does not appear in the sky that night, and, despite the thirst parching his throat, Jaime breathes a little easier.

22.

Finding Euron isn’t hard, once he picks up the trail.  Facing him is almost easy, when the only thing Jaime cares about is living long enough to ensure Euron dies first.

But then the tracker jackers come. 

Jaime runs, blindly, heedlessly.  Euron is dead, assumedly - he can’t see how anyone could survive their head exploding into a shower of scorpions – but Jaime is not alone as he staggers through the forest.  Cersei is there, and his father, their mouths open and closing but no sound emerging, only blood, pouring out and soaking their clothes.  Tyrion as he was, Tyrion-the-child, scampers at Jaime’s heels, berating him for taking his place and preventing him from finding glory in the.  Aerys steps out from behind a tree, flames dancing over his skin, as he calls for the bombs to fall. 

Jaime’s hand grows back and he stares at it in delighted wonder, wriggles the fingers, reaches for his sword, and it erupts into maggots that bury themselves deep into the flesh of his arm. 

He’s no idea how long he staggers on for, tripping through the undergrowth, chased by phantoms and shadows.  They call his name and it their words echo strangely in the dense forest; one of them gets close enough to reach out and wrap a scaled tentacle around his wrist, and Jaime lashes out, hacking wildly with the sword until it lets go.  Too wild; the sword drops from his hand, fingers numb, and to stop and retrieve would be suicide, so he forces himself on. 

Someone – something? – slams into his back and he falls to the ground, hard.  Dazed, in agony, he can’t even lift his arms to try and defend himself from whatever it is that seizes him by the shoulders and rolls him forcibly onto his back. 

A pair of faces swim into focus above him, and something that wants to be a smile tugs painfully at the corners of his mouth.  Maybe this is just another hallucination, a final, merciful squick from his dying brain, but he can’t bring himself to care.

“Brienne,” he sighs, and lets the darkness take him.

21.

He dreams.  Strange, feverish dreams, haunted by the ghosts of the tributes he killed in his own Games and the ones he’s mentored to their deaths in all the Games since.  Most of them appear as they died, bloody and mutilated, and all of them accusing.  Melara, his first Kingdom partner, watches and cackles and eggs them on in turn.

Sometimes the dreams recede enough that he thinks he might be awake.  The pain is still there but banked, distant, and he is lying on hard ground with the sun warm on his face, a gentle wind rustling through leaves, water lapping gently somewhere in the distance.  There are worse places to die, he thinks.  Maybe this, then, is Tyrion’s final gift. 

But then the dreams drag him back down, and the ghosts return. 

When he finally wakes properly, in enough pain to know he is still alive and definitely no longer dreaming, evening is falling, and Brienne is still there.  She’s not alone; Pod is with her, of course, and so is Sansa Stark, an alliance that would be bizarre if it were headed by anyone other than Brienne.

Which does nothing to explain Jaime’s presence.  He’s been unconscious for just over a day, they tell him.  The effort it will have taken to care for him, the supplies they will have spent tending to him –and he doesn’t recognise their surroundings at all, so they’ve carried him, which does help explain some of the stranger dreams he remembers – none of it makes any sense.  The tracker jacker venom has left him weak and shaky, but even when that passes there is the dirty wound Euron gouged into his leg, now washed and neatly dressed but still throbbing with every heartbeat. 

It goes beyond any debt Brienne could ever have felt she owed him, and he can’t make sense of it no matter how many times he turns it over in his exhausted, drug-addled brain. 

They risk a fire as the light falls, trusting the dusk to mask the smoke and feasting on the strange rodent creatures Pod had caught, mopped up with little bread rolls that a sponsor had apparently sent in while Jaime was still unconscious.  The sheer indulgence of warm food in the arena, something Jaime could never risk alone, warms him more than the temperature of the food alone has any right to. 

As they eat Jaime watches Sansa and Pod on the other side of the fire, sitting close with their knees pressed against one another, and tries to figure out Brienne’s angle.  She surely knows Tyion isn’t going to offer another double victory deal; she surely knows Tywin would never allow it to happen if he tried.  There’s no point asking, of course, Brienne would never risk telling him when the cameras might pick it up and betray whatever plan she has to the Gamemakers.  And Jaime has the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that Brienne might not even have a plan at all; that her only aim is to keep as many people alive as she can, moment to moment, ignoring all consequences. 

He asks about Euron, instead, but Pod shakes his head; there was no photo of him in the sky last night.  There’s always the hope for tonight, of course, but when the anthem sounds it’s not Euron’s face they see. 

Instead it’s Loras Tyrell. 

It’s a surprising blow.  Jaime hadn’t liked him, had honestly thought him a bit of an idiot, especially compared to his sister, spouting ridiculous poetry during the pre-Game interviews like the fool that he was, but if familiarity bred friendship then Loras had been an…acquaintance, at least. 

He wonders where Margaery is now. 

When Jaime looks across at her Brienne’s mouth is downturned in sorrow, but when she speaks it’s nothing to do with Loras at all.

“Do you think you can walk?” she asks him instead, which makes no sense until, hobbling through the trees a few minutes later, Pod explains the clock-like nature of the arena to him. 

“This section is a big wave,” he says as they walk.  “So we can go one ahead, wait for the wave to pass, and then come back.  It’s safe then until the next one in eleven hours’ time.”

It’s too simple, too easy.  It’s certainly not a sustainable plan.

“You won’t be the only ones to have worked that out,” he points out through gritted teeth, determinedly ignoring the pain that shots up through his leg with every step.    

“No,” agrees Brienne quietly, her eyes slanting briefly towards him with something that might be concern before turning back to study their surroundings.  “But it’s bought us some time.  We’ll figure our next step out tomorrow.”

At the allotted time they return to their original segment, now freshly damp from the passing wave, and settle in for the night.  Sleeping at ground level is another luxury Jaime hadn’t dared risk alone; climbing trees one handed had been a nightmare, though still better than being caught unawares and exposed on the floor, but it would have been an impossibility now.  Blood has seeped through the dressing on his leg while they walked, and it’s agony to pull the dried strips of fabric away.  The revealed wound is even worse than Jaime had feared, angry and red and gaping.  Jaime’s seen enough injuries in the games to have a good feel for what the human body can and cannot survive in such conditions, and he doesn’t need to see the grim line of Brienne’s mouth to know where this falls. 

“I’ll keep watch,” he offers when the gruesome thing is covered again; there’s no way he’s sleeping any time soon anyway.  Brienne hesitates, and Jaime realises too late what he’s suggesting, but before he can say anything else she nods and hands over the sword, as if she has no fear of him using it against them as they sleep, as if her reluctance had been…concern not for them, but for him. 

Sitting propped up against a tree, watching the three sleeping figures, that’s not what Jaime considers.  He is of no use to them, beyond this basic task they are perfectly capable of doing for themselves.  Injured as he is he is nothing but a handicap to them, a drain on what little resources they have, food and the precious desalination tablets they found in Sansa’s pack, and if Brienne is hoping that he might generate a better quality of sponsorship gift she will quickly realise how mistaken that is. 

Jaime stares at the sword lying across his lap.  There’s one obvious out, one solution that removes all chance of Brienne trying to follow him or convince him otherwise, and it’s a quicker, cleaner end than waiting for his leg to turn septic. 

But.  If he’s to do it, it has to be while the others are safely asleep, or he has no doubt they would attempt to stop him.  And then who knows how long it might take for one of them to wake, and to leave them completely unguarded in the meantime is a callus way to repay them for saving his life, no matter how unwelcome it was. 

In the morning, then.  He’ll thank them and take his leave, to hunt down Euron, or his own death, whichever comes to him first.   

20.

But the next day they meet the redheaded pair from the Winterlands, who have apparently teamed up with Margaery Tyrell and come up with some insane plan involving a length of wire and the lightning bolt tree. 

Jaime still intends to leave.  He really does.  Their idea is madness, relying too much on coincidence and chance, and he says as much.  The rest of them ignore him completely, of course, and Jaime has no choice but to limp after them, determinedly ignoring the worsening pain from his leg and the hot, clammy sweat that clings to his skin. 

Because he can’t go.  Because he doesn’t trust Tormund, or Ygritte, or even Margaery, with her pale face and grief-bruised eyes, anger barely banked in every word she says.  Brienne watches over Pod and Sansa with single-minded focus, and so it seems Jaime’s lot is to watch Brienne’s back until his own body fails him.

Early evening finds the whole crowd of them back down on the beach, where Brienne breaks off from the rest and practically frogmarches him down to the water.  He doesn’t have the strength to oppose her, but he still wishes he’d tried, when she sits him down on some rocks and carefully unwraps his leg again.  He can’t see it clearly at this angle, but the look on her face is enough. 

“You should leave me here,” he says quietly.  Brienne scowls at him but otherwise ignores his words completely, just like she always has.  There’s something strangely heartening about that. 

“I’ll clean it out again,” she says instead, as if saltwater is enough to stem the heat Jaime can feel tracking up his limb, the steady creep of infection.  He watches her, head bent over his mangled limb, mesmerised by the way the late afternoon sun is reflecting off the water and dancing across her face.

Or maybe that’s the fever talking. 

Brienne hovers as he gets to his feet when she’s done, but although he has to take a few deep breaths to swallow the surge of nausea he manages to stay upright without assistance.  Seeing he can manage this basic skill, her hands go to her waist to undo the buckle of the scabbard Jaime had passed to her without thought while he was incapacitated as she tended to his leg.

“Keep it,” he says roughly, ignoring her frown. 

“But - ”

“It’s yours,” he repeats, and she’s staring at him with something like – something very much like –

But then Sansa calls their names, and whatever it is, whatever else might have been said, is lost to them both.

19.

A lot of things happen very quickly after Ygritte lets loose her arrow.  There’s a crash and a blinding flash, and the force of the explosion knocks Jaime to the ground.  He lies there, too weak and dazed to regain his feet, his vision flickering with something that could be flames or fever.  He loses all sense of time; consciousness is a fickle and increasingly slippery friend, and the noise of the blast has done something to his hearing, so he doesn’t notice Brienne’s approach until she’s standing over him, a hand on his arm as if she’s about to feel for a pulse.

“Not quite yet,” he croaks, but of course she ignores him, gripping his arm and turning it roughly, which is when he notices the knife in her other hand.  For a single heartbeat a pulse of pure relief sweeps through him.  Brienne will be quick, he knows, and as painless as she can be, and finally, finally, after all this time and all this suffering, it will finally be over. 

But she doesn’t go for his neck.  She slices into the flesh of his upper arm instead, popping out his tracker with surgical efficiency, and then she’s hauling him to his feet, half carrying, half dragging him towards bright lights that are, on reflection, probably not flames.

“What…” Jaime manages as she pushes him into – a claw?  Why is there a metal claw in the arena? – that closes immediately around his torso.  The whole thing lurches and Jaime’s fever-addled brain finally realises that the bright lights around him are coming from a hovercraft overhead.  He’s stuck, caught in the claw’s grip, frozen, and Brienne is just standing there, shouting something he can’t hear over the roaring in his ears.  He reaches for her desperately, intending to grab her and not let go, to drag her up with him to whatever awaits above, but his stupid fucking arm has no hand and his stump bumps uselessly off her shoulder.  She meets his eyes and reaches up and for a moment Jaime thinks she’s going to grab on after all, but instead she gives his wrist a single squeeze, atypically gentle, and lets go, stepping back as the whole thing starts to rise, carrying Jaime away, away, alone.  He shouts her name, again and again, and there are other lights now, other figures moving on the ground and Brienne’s turning to meet them.  She’s getting smaller and smaller until she’s disappeared completely, but Jaime keeps shouting, screaming her name uselessly, helplessly, fighting with strength he didn’t know he had left against the strange hands that are reaching for him, grabbing for him, trying to sooth him, until there’s a stringing prick to his neck, and everything goes dark. 

18.

Jaime’s never wasted any time imaging what Dorne might be like; what’s the point, when the whole place was razed to the ground decades before he was born?  If he had bothered with such a pointless exercise, he’d have pictured nothing, a desolate wasteland, an empty desert. 

He certainly would never have imagined the sprawling underground city, or the stark white medical facilities, or the sheer number of people. 

There are some familiar faces.  Davos is there.  Varys is there.  Renly Baratheon is there. 

Tyrion is there. 

Not at first.  But he’s in the room, the third time Jaime wakes.  The pain is worse but his head is clearer for it, which means he probably isn’t hallucinating his brother, sitting at his bedside looking a decade older than the last time Jaime saw him.

The story Tyrion tells– about an underground rebellion, about years of plotting, about a plan to get primarily Sansa and secondarily as many other rebel victors out of the arena as possible to help fuel a full-blown revolution, about Daenerys fucking Targaryen leading the charge to a glorious future, ready to right her father’s wrongs – seems too fantastical to be true. 

And yet here Jaime lies, definitely not in King’s Landing anymore. 

It’s too much to take in and process, and so Jaime asks for the one thing he knows he can count on, his one stable point in an ever shifting world, the bedrock from which he can maybe start to build the rest from. 

The way Tyrion’s face falls when Jaime says Brienne’s name is worse than any wound he’s received in the arena.

17.

Time passes oddly, from there. 

Tyrion visits daily.  Jaime mostly pretends to be asleep; that’s easier, cowardly though it may be, than facing his brother and having to deal with some of the maelstrom of emotion that incurs.  Face up to the years of secrecy and lies, those long, impotent years, during which Jaime was doing nothing but send child after child to die, raging his own silent, internal war, pouring everything he had into his tributes because saving even one of them was the closest he thought he could get to any sort of absolution…

Except all that time there’d been a bigger war at play, and he’d had no part in it. 

Because Tyrion had never told him.

Because Jaime had never asked. 

His brother, who has spent years helping run the games Jaime had saved him from.  And Jaime had never once dared asked him why, had shied away from even considering that very question, except it turns out that Tyrion – that Tyrion had a reason, all along, that it wasn’t just his own wish for power, his own desire to prove himself in their father’s eyes.  Tyrion’s a better person than Jaime ever gave him credit for, than Jaime could ever be, and he spent years sending hundreds of children to die while working towards this greater good…

And now, the one thing Jaime might have thought to ask for, to never have to live in a world that didn’t have Brienne Tarth in it, and Tyrion’s denied him even that. 

So it’s easier to pretend to be asleep. 

People find their way to him anyway.  He wasn’t the only one successfully plucked from the arena that night: Sansa drifts in and out, a silent ghost, which is better than Tormund, who weeps messily for Brienne as if he has any right to such grief.  Ygritte, who took the full force of the electrical explosion when her arrow hit the forcefield, is a nightmare patient, flirtatious and furious in turn, but she at least makes for entertaining, emotionally uncomplicated company.

It's mostly from Ygritte that he learns the fate of the rest of their strange alliance.  Brienne was seen cut down by Goldcloaks as she fought to get Pod to the last rebel hovercraft; Pod and Margaery are now held in King’s Landing. 

Jaime’s well practiced at not dwelling on what atrocities are being unleased on others.  He remembers Margaery’s wary acceptance on the beach, Pod’s awkward smiles, and hopes, hopelessly, that death finds them quickly. 

16.

He’s not allowed to join the army and actually fight, no matter how much he argues for it.  Jaime suspects Daenerys is actually on his side about this one: no doubt it would serve both her greater purpose and her own sense of justice, to see him fall in battle at the hands of his father’s men.  But no one else agrees.  They want him to film propos instead, stupid films of the surviving victors discrediting King’s Landing, as if Tywin Lannister has ever cared what anyone else says about him. 

Tyrion pushes for it passionately, insisting Jaime’s words will still carry weight in the kingdoms, that seeing the golden Lannister lion openly turn on the rest will help fuel further dissent.  Frankly Jaime’s never got the impression Westeros cares that much for anything he has to say; he’ll always be too King’s Landing for the kingdoms, and too kingdom for King’s Landing. 

But the others agree: Ygritte claims she doesn’t care, and Sansa shrugs, forcefully casual. 

“Why not?  There’s no one left they can punish me with.”

Which is how Jaime finds out that, following the attack at the arena, the North had been bombed beyond all recognition.  None of Sansa’s siblings had made it out.  The guilt sits rancid in his stomach; not just at what his father has done, but because there are still people in the world he loves.  But Tommen and Myrcella are safe in a way Sansa’s family has never been, because Cersei loves her children, would never allow them to come to harm, even to hurt Jaime.   

“Some of them might still be alive,” he says to Sansa later that night, when they’re safely alone.  “The North is a big place.”

He’s never been much good at offering comfort, and Sansa gives this meagre effort the desultory snort it deserves.  They’ve been spending a lot of time together since Jaime’s discharge from the hospital, united by their mutual grief and collective uselessness.  Sansa says very little and expects even less from Jaime in return, but Brienne had dedicated her time in the arena keeping the girl alive, and if Jaime has nothing else, no other way of repaying any of the debt he owes her, then at least there is this; and so he clings to it, her final, unfinished work, making sure Sansa eats and sleeps and heals.  It’s the only thing that keeps his own yawning pit of despair at bay.

Filming the propos feels ridiculous, and uncomfortably close to his years being paraded round the kingdoms by Tywin’s advisors, a puppet used to shore up a regime he doesn’t believe in.  Jaime knows better than to say that out loud, though, and Tyrion seems pleased enough with the outcome, for all that he went sad-eyed and quiet when Jaime spoke of some of the things he’d seen, heard, been party to. 

The refute, when it comes, is so brutally simple that it could only have been arranged by Tywin Lannister himself.  The lights go up on the interview stage, Baelish preening in his usual spot, but there are four chairs instead of two, and all of them are occupied.  Jaime barely spares a glance for the two tiny figures who must, from Sansa’s reaction, be her brothers.  All his focus is on the person in the final chair. 

She’s thinner than Jaime can remember ever seeing her, but stiff-backed and looking straight at the camera with the same set, obstinate expression that he knows so well.  Jaime can’t move, can’t speak, frozen in this moment, drinking in the sight of her.

“Is this live?” someone snaps in the background, and Jaime barely hears the affirmative someone else murmurs in response. 

“Does that mean Margaery’s dead?” Renly asks. 

“Our sources indicate she lives,” Tyrion says confidently, as is those sources weren’t the ones that had torn the ground out from under Jaime’s feet.  “Podrick, too.”

“Then why Brienne, and not them?”

Tyrion hesitates.  “Hard to say,” he prevaricates, but it isn’t, it isn’t, not to anyone who knows Cersei, who grew up with her games and her cruelties.  There were cameras in the arena, cameras everywhere, and Jaime hadn’t bothered being careful because what was the point, when his death, and Brienne’s, and everyone else’s, was so certain?  Even if his final, desperate cries as the hovercraft lifted him away hadn’t been recorded, every other word and move he’d made in there was, and Cersei will have seen, Cersei will know, the way she always knows when there’s someone Jaime loves. 

It's no good.  Jaime had thought…he had thought Brienne dead, safely dead, where none of this and nothing he did could touch her.  He’d even started to make some sort of fragile peace with that, started to figure out how he might live in a world that didn’t contain Brienne Tarth, at least for a little while, and now…

Now she lives, and everything that happens to her, every hurt, is directly because of him. 

His carefully rationed lunch rising in his throat, Jaime blunders his way from the Command Room blindly, not knowing or caring where he is going, only knowing that it needs to be away. 

Tyrion finds him, hours later, and for once he doesn’t have a witty quip or sly remark.  He takes Jaime by the hand and leads him back to his room, pushes him gently into the bathroom, makes him wash his mouth out and then down a whole glass of water, sitting on the closed toilet lid.  Turns on the shower and then stands there, staring expectantly, until Jaime numbly strips out of his clothes and steps under the spray.  It’s a strange facsimile of their childhood, a reversal of their old roles when Jaime was the one Tyrion came to with his sadnesses and hurts.  Jaime’s never seen this gentle, caring side of his brother before.  He wonders where he learnt it. 

Tyrion’s still there when Jaime emerges, clean and hollowed out.  He lets Tyrion bully him into the bed and only blinks in surprise when his brother pulls the chair over to sit facing him, taking Jaime’s only hand in both of his own.

“I’m sorry,” he says sincerely, and that’s such a startling statement from his brother than Jaime’s can’t look away from his grave, sad face.  “For so many things, I am sorry.  But right now I’m sorry I didn’t realise what she meant to you, before.”

Which isn’t…isn’t right, because Jaime would have wanted Brienne saved for her own sake, no his, but he knows that’s not how his brother works. 

“Did you ask her to get me out?” he asks dully, and Tyrion actually looks surprised at that.

“I…no.  That was meant to be the Tyrells, actually.  I was furious when you left them behind, on the beach.”

It’s a weak joke, and Jaime gives it nothing more than a weak nod in return.  Tyrion’s hands squeeze his tightly. 

“We’re organising a rescue,” he says more quietly, urgently.  “I promise you.  Brienne, Podrick, Margaery, Sansa’s brothers.  We’ve got enough people on the inside still that we think we can get them all out safely.”

Jaime wishes he could believe him.

15.

He’s not permitted to go on the rescue mission.  Too recognisable, too valuable, too unstable; his only solace is that Tormund and Ygritte are denied as well.  So he doesn’t see Brienne until she’s back. 

The room is dimly lit, the machines beeping a reassuring medley.  Brienne, trapped in her hospital bed, looks smaller and more vulnerable than Jaime has ever seen her.  Her skin is pasty white, apart from the angry red scar on one cheek and the dark bruises under her eyes, but her chest moves, steady and sure, and there’s only a single line going into her hand, an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth but no tube down her throat.  She’s asleep, not unconscious.

Jaime slips into the chair besides her bed, lets his hand rest around her wrist so that his fingers can feel the faint flutter of her pulse, and falls asleep enmeshed in the proof of her life. 

When he wakes up she’s looking at him, eyes hazy with drugs, but fond, pleased, relieved.  Like she’d been…worried about him, the stupid woman. 

14.

Pod’s in much better physical shape than either Brienne or Margaery, which Jaime’s trying very hard to be uncomplicatedly pleased about when he visits him.  There’s something odd about his expression, though, something Jaime’s just trying to put his finger on when Sansa walks into the room behind him and Pod launches at her and wraps his hands around her throat. 

13.

So that’s its own new, unique kind of shitshow.  Pod is on lockdown, and Brienne goes slowly mad with the doctors continued refusals to allow her to see him.  No one seems sure what has happened to him; no one seems sure who might trigger him.  Only Jaime’s safety seems assured, and so he gets to spend hour after delightful hour sitting with this strange facsimile of Podrick Payne, who wears his face and speaks with his voice and spews vitriolic bile the earnest boy who has been Brienne’s shadow would never have even thought.

Sansa at least seems physically unharmed, for which she seems to credit Jaime, for some reason.  Her brothers chafe against Dorne’s restrictions after months spent in the luxury of King’s Landing – they’d been taken the day after Sansa was reaped, as it turned out, long before any bombs fell – and she spends endless hours with them, unravelling truths from the propaganda they’d been fed. 

No one seems to know what happened to the last Stark, the other girl; that makes Sansa smile, for some strange reason. 

Bran and Rickon greet Jaime with a familiarity that makes no sense to him until they start telling him about their days spent playing with Tommen and Myrcella.  Tyrion seems absurdly impressed by Tywin using his grandchildren’s innocence and genuine kindness to indoctrinate his enemy’s loved ones.

“They’ll be so glad to know you’re ok,” Bran says with the sort of sincerity that can’t be faked, no matter how much Jaime wants to believe it is. 

12.

Cersei and Joffrey are killed by fluke, a lucky strike from a rebel missile.   Tyrion brings him the news, obviously braced for some sort of breakdown similar to the day they discovered Brienne was still alive, but Jaime listens in numb silence that holds even after Tyrion departs and leaves him alone. 

He finds Brienne in the canteen with Sansa and Ygritte; she takes one look at him and rises from the table, concern writ large all over her face.  He shakes his head before the inevitable questions can start and leads her out, away, down, deep down, to the lower levels where the soldiers train.  The Dorne army doesn’t fight with swords, of course, modern military technology is too sophisticated for such up close and personal brutality, but they have long wooden batons that are an acceptable substitute, in a pinch. 

Brienne’s still recovering from her time in captivity and so it’s a fairer fight than they’ve had before.  Which is just another complicating layer in the messy, complicated knot that is everything Jaime’s felt and feels towards Cersei, towards her eldest son.  He can’t even hope to begin to start untangling the mess and so he fights with Brienne instead, pushes until they’re both soaked with sweat and heaving for breath, pushes long past the limits either of their doctors have set them.  Sparring is simple and Brienne is simple, and he needs simple, right now, because a lifetime ago he saved his brother and it cost him his sister, a choice he hadn’t known he’d been making until long after the fact, and he’s never managed to tally the two halves of that equation in all the years since.  And now Cersei is dead and it is…it is…

It is. 

11.

The war grinds relentlessly on.  There are victories, but they come with heavy costs that are discussed endlessly, gloomily.  Jaime wants no part in the war games they play in the Command Room, but Sansa had made her involvement a condition of her cooperation in the ongoing propaganda campaign.  After the near-miss with Pod Jaime and Brienne made their own private pact to ensure she was never without at least one of them, and so so Jaime spends far more time than he would wish listening to the ongoing debates and arguments.

Daenerys Targaryen has wide silver eyes that track everything, everyone, always watching.  She stares at Sansa like she’s a prize she isn’t entirely pleased to have won; at Tyrion like he’s threat; at Margaery with something that might be jealousy

She doesn’t watch Brienne at all, and that, more than anything, is why Jaime doesn’t trust her.

10.

Most of the kingdoms have capitulated to rebel control, but the North, that ever-capricious beast, has seen a third faction rise and start to vie for control, as if things aren’t enough of a mess already.  While the bulk of the rebellion armies make steady progress towards King’s Landing, Sansa is dispatched to appeal to the populace of her home and remind the dissenters of who is actually on their side.  Brienne will not leave Pod, who is finally allowed visitors in brief, heavily supervised windows, and so it is Jaime who travels with her. 

Which means he’s a thousand miles away when the bombs that kill his brother fall.

9.

At the end of the first games Tyrion had worked as a junior Gamemaker, they’d both spent the night getting grimly, determinedly drunk.  At one point Jaime, in a fatalistic mood, had started trying to calculate the odds of Tyrion’s name coming out of the bowl, the first time; one single name, amongst all those thousands of slips. 

Tyrion had stared at him, and the exasperation had been familiar even if the confusion was new.

“Jaime, my name was always coming out of that bowl.  The odds were stacked against me from the day I was born.”

The night after he gets the news of Tyrion’s death Jaime lies in the dark, staring sightlessly up at the blackness, and wishes he’d asked his brother what he meant. 

Wishes he’d dared to ask what odds he’d been facing, the second time around.

8.

At the end of every Games the victor is awarded a private meeting with the President, to be congratulated on their achievement.  Sometimes Jaime likes to imagine how the one between his father and Brienne went; it’s an amusing tableau no matter which way you look at it.

He tries to never think of his own.  The cloying heat of the room, the acrid stench of strange incense, the way Aerys had paced and snarled, his eyes skittering around the room from shadow to shadow as he muttered about conspiracy, about rebellion, convinced of an uprising that wouldn’t exist for another quarter of a century.  The bombs he’d called for, weapons none of the kingdoms had any sort of defence against.  The brief flash of surprise, when he turned and saw Jaime with the blade in his hand.  The way his body had crumpled as he slumped to the floor. 

Wars, it turns out, have similar formalities.  By the time Jaime and Sansa arrive in King’s Landing the initial rush of jubilation has faded and the practicalities have taken over.  There are debates; there are meetings; there is talk of elections.  There are trials, and there are funerals. 

Jaime stays removed from it all, separate, adrift. He asks for news of Tommen and Myrcella and is refused.  He does not ask about his father, and yet people insist on telling him anyway.  He walks the once-familiar streets, distorted now with the scars from weeks of martial assault.  Sometimes Sansa walks with him, or Brienne; occasionally even Margaery, weighed down by her own grief and guilt and her tongue honed even sharper with it.  Jaime heard about her own rage-fuelled mad advance into King’s Landing, against orders and without backup, knows how many lives it cost, Renly’s among them.  There’s a self-loathing in her that cuts a little too close to home, but she left Brienne out of her plans, and so he does not begrudge her the strange comfort she seems to find in his company, like recognising like.

There are some bright spots, brief and fleeting though they are.  Between the Dornish doctors and those based in the capital Pod is increasingly himself, still prone to strange moods and fits of odd behaviour, but improving with every passing week.  The night after Brienne manages a whole visit without triggering any sort of abnormal reaction from him she breaks down in Jaime’s arms for the first time since Pod had been plucked from his first arena all those years before, whole if not healthy, and that’s its own sort of catharsis, as well. 

Then there’s the afternoon they find a strange child sitting on the steps outside the Training Centre as if waiting for them.  Jaime and Brienne barely have a chance to exchange confused, concerned looks before Sansa is throwing herself at her, laughing and crying all at once.  Arya never shares the full story of how she escaped the North, nor how she found her way into the city, but she openly admires Brienne and distrusts Jaime in equal measure, and Jaime cannot argue with such good instincts as that. 

7.

And then one day, some undefinable number of days after Jaime had arrived in King’s Landing, Daenerys assembles the remaining victors together. 

There are so few of them left.  Sansa, Margaery, Pod, Tormund, Ygritte, Davos.  Clegane, weeded out from gods knows where.  Himself and Brienne.  Jaime thinks of the huddle he stood in, on that last reaping day; none of them left, really?  Maybe there are others out there, clever enough to have run when the chance came.  Jaime’s chest is too empty to care.

“Tywin has grandchildren,” Ygritte points out after Daenerys has laid out her proposal, and the snort escapes before Jaime can catch himself.  He supposes he ought to take it as a compliment, that she has apparently forgotten Tywin is his father; or perhaps she just thinks an old man might have found a way to love his grandchildren in a way he never could his sons.

Tormund, Ygritte, Clegane and Margaery vote yes.  Sansa, Pod, Davos and Brienne say no. 

Jaime looks at Daenerys, her bland expression and her cold eyes watching, always watching. 

He thinks of Tyrion, who believed in this woman above anything and anyone else, who went to his death on the strength of her word.  He thinks about how his brother was not and never would be a fighter, about how he had no reason to be in the militarised zone when those bombs fell.  He thinks of the way Tommen used to close his eyes whenever they replayed a tributes death on the screen, of Myrcella slipping him the candy.  He thinks about how close the Boltons came to capturing Sansa while they were in the North, how they seemed to know exactly when and where she would have been, if not for Jaime’s own paranoid interference. 

He thinks of Brienne, and code of honour she has carved out for herself, against all the odds.

He votes yes. 

6.

There is a moment, after Jaime has plunged his sword into Daenerys’ chest but before the world has had chance to process what they are witnessing, when Tywin catches his eye, and Jaime resigns himself to his father’s smug, satisfied pride being the last thing he will ever see.

5.

But the inevitable blows do not fall.  Jaime is braced for them, ready for one of Daenerys’ most fervent guards to cut him down where he stands, but they never get a chance to reach him.

It’s Brienne who saves his life, of course; he’s not sure why he wastes his time expecting anything else.  In the chaos that follows she actually places him under arrest, and then stares down anyone else who dares try and get too close.  Jaime scrabbles desperately for the wolfsbane pill stitched into his uniform, but her hand closes over it, refusing to let go even when he bites into her flesh hard enough to draw blood, and Jaime hates her, he hates her, he hates her. 

4.

Time passes. 

He keeps waiting for the inevitable; if not execution, then surely assassination.  Daenerys’ pet commander, perhaps, or one of her more fanatic soldiers.  But Brienne has taken the idea of protective custody to a whole new level, and none of them seem able to slip past her guard.

He has a therapist, a short, skinny woman who seems too young to hold the qualifications she lays claim to.  She seems content to let him sit in silence though, so Jaime doesn’t begrudge her overmuch. 

Brienne visits daily.  It reminds him of Tyion’s vigil, from those early days in Dorne, and that’s enough to add it to the list of reasons he hates her, at first.  She brings him notes from Tommen and Myrcella that he can’t bring himself to read, food he refuses to eat, news from the outside world he doesn’t care about hearing.  But then one day she turns up with a pair of sparring swords and, when Jaime refuses to take one from her, trips him out of his chair and rests the tip against the side of his neck.

“Point,” she says evenly, which is so completely unfair that Jaime actually looks up at her, for what feels like the first time in weeks, months.  She’s staring down at him, patient, waiting, but when Jaime shoves her sword away and hauls himself angrily to his feet she goes and damn well does the same thing again.

“Two.”

“What in the seven hells are you doing?” Jaime bellows, or tries to; his throat is cracked and dry with weeks of disuse, so it comes out as more of a croak. 

A smile skitters at the edges of Brienne’s lips, a moment of triumph cracking her stoic façade, and though she doesn’t say it Jaime knows she’s just awarded herself a third point.  

“You can talk to Gilly, or you can fight with me,” she says instead. 

“I don’t want to fight you.”

“Then you can talk to Gilly.”

“Like you do?” he mocks.

“Yes,” she says, with the straight honesty that has always so disarmed him. 

“Why do you keep doing this?” he asks, suddenly exhausted by it; by everything.  “You don’t owe me anything.”

She looks at him for so long that Jaime thinks she isn’t going to answer.  Pity then, or some silly emotional obligation he has no patience for.  He shuffles back to his chair and turns his back.

“I refuse,” she grinds out at last, “to waste one more bloody life if I can possibly help it.  So pick up the damn sword.”

And then she tips him to the floor again.

3.

He isn’t executed.  He isn’t imprisoned.  There’s barely even a trial, just a load of guff from Gilly about his precarious psychological state and a bunch of sworn testimonies from various bigshots in the rebel chain of command.  Mostly, Jaime suspects, mostly everyone’s just relieved he did the dirty job no one else had been willing to face up to – and isn’t that just the story of his life.

Brienne brings him back to the apartments above the Training Centre, afterwards, where she’s somehow managed to stash Myrcella and Tommen as well as all four Starklings, tucked up in the tributes bedrooms for want of anywhere else to put them, and that’s where they’ve stayed ever since.  Maybe Jaime should find it disquieting, to be once more living in a space haunted by so many ghosts, but it isn’t; it’s familiar, and comfortable, and Jaime’s choosing not to examine it any more closely than that.  

He has no expectation of it being any more permanent than anything else in his life has been.  He assumes he’ll be sent back to the Westerlands, pushed safely out of sight and out of mind.  He has a house there, technically, not that he’s seen it in years, and while it’s not home, it’s still better than King’s Landing, where he intends to never set foot again if he can possibly help it.  He thinks Myrcella and Tommen might be allowed to come with him, and that makes the prospect seem just about bearable.

But, to his horror, people start talking to him in sincere tones about what comes next; about rebuilding, about the importance of strong leadership, about duty.  It never fails to make bile rise in his throat, because this was meant to be Tyrion, Tyrion’s world, Tyrion’s game, and despite everything Jaime did his brother died playing Jaime’s instead.  Jaime can’t be him in exchange, no more than he could be his father.  The irony isn’t lost on him; Tyrion, gone, along with all his ideas for after, and Jaime left behind, who never once thought he’d live to see it.  It’s such a stupid waste of all the plans that Tyrion had, the ones it never even occurred to Jaime to make. 

It's not just him.  Every time he sees Brienne she looks a little bit more drawn, her lips thinner, the circles under her eyes darker.  She’s under even more pressure than Jaime is, and the worst of it is, he can understand why; who wouldn’t want to live in a world Brienne has helped shape?  Jaime’s spent over a third of his life trying to do exactly that, in his own small way; of course everyone else has finally pulled their heads out of their collective assess for long enough to notice it too.  And she’ll do it, of course she will.  Brienne Tarth, the most dutiful person Jaime’s ever known, with no thought for what it costs her.  Two arenas weren’t enough to kill her and instead it will be this, the greedy grasping politics of it all, lash after lash carving strips from her flesh day after day until there’s nothing left in her to give.  She’ll spend her life in the service of their glorious new age and go to her grave broken and hollow and yet still trying to give away more pieces of herself.

“You don’t have to stay, you know,” he finally tells her one night, both of them up too late and drinking too much, as has become their wont.  They’d been talking about Ygritte and Tormund’s plans to return to the Winterlands, about whether the sullen soldier Ygritte’s taken such a fancy to would go with her, and the wistfulness in Brienne’s voice is making something twist uncomfortably in Jaime’s gut.  “You could go with them too.”

Brienne looks at him blankly, because of course she’s not even considered leaving as an option, and he lets the matter drop, but a few days later she sits down across the table from him and says, with a sort of dawning wonderment, “I don’t want to stay here.”

“Ok,” Jaime says, because that’s a more acceptable response than falling to the floor and weeping. 

“Sansa doesn’t want to go back to the North.  Neither do the boys.  Arya claims she doesn’t care, but I don’t think she does either.”

Jaime nods, swallowing down the panic rising in his throat.  “So where will you go?”

He’d thought it an innocuous enough question to ask, at this point, but Brienne’s looking at him strangely, like the words coming out his mouth aren’t making sense to her ears.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.  I…I thought you…I thought you might want to come with us as well.  Myrcella and Tommen too.”  A pause, Brienne looking at him looking at her, and Jaime has no idea what his face is doing to make her eyes drop away from his as she adds, in the smallest voice he has ever heard her use, “Do you want to?”

Jaime can’t actually remember the last time someone asked him that. 

Words aren’t working, his tongue lying thick and heavy and useless in his mouth, and he realises, with a strange, abstract detachment that he’s breathing too quickly, every inhale harsh and sharp.  His hand his shaking where it rests on the table between them, and he moves automatically to tuck it away, out of sight, but Brienne reaches out and covers it with her own, anchoring him the way she always has.

“You don’t have to,” she says quickly, quietly, urgently, but Jaime shakes his head roughly and she falls silent, squeezing his hand in reassurance.

“I want to come,” he rasps at last, who knows how long later.  “Please.”

Brienne’s smile is like the sun. 

It’s another two days before she brings it up again.  Jaime’s taken the children to the park he used to bring Myrcella and Tommen to; winter has the city in its grip, and the boys and Arya are running in the cold air, playing some sort of four-way tag game he doesn’t really follow while Myrcella and Sansa sit huddled together, talking about gods know what. 

Brienne’s been gone since early that morning, sitting through yet another round of inquiries about the final days of the war that Jaime is thankfully exempt from by dint of having been a thousand miles north when it was happening.  He hears her approach but he doesn’t turn until he can feel her, warm and solid at his shoulder.

“I’ve got an idea,” she says in lieu of a greeting, her words misting in the air between them.  “For somewhere we could go.”

“Where?” Jaime asks, like it matters. 

“There’s an island, out in shipbreaker bay.  People lived there before the Dark Days - my dad was born there.  I’ve always wanted to go.”

Jaime stares at her, this strange, mad woman who has never once been fooled by him, who sees him for everything he is and everything he’s done and yet still refuses to let him die, day after day after relentless day, who’s stubbornly building her own new future and for some reason wants him in it.  What has he ever done to deserve her? 

“Ok,” he says, a word too small and simple to contain all the multitudes of what it means, but that’s all right, Brienne’s smiling at him and he’s smiling right back, and words have never mattered much between them anyway. 

2.

There are old houses scattered around the island, some of them little more than piles of stone, but the one Brienne picks out is sturdy enough, nestled amongst a small copse of trees besides the water and protected from the worst of the sea winds by the headland at the mouth of the estuary.  Each day they wake and eat and work, putting the crumbling building back together piece by roughhewn piece.  In the evenings they light fires with no care for who might see and eat a warm meal and fall asleep back to back, shared warmth soaking through the cloth between them. 

Jaime had worried how the children would cope, especially Tommen and Myrcella, used as they are to the luxury of a King’s Landing upbringing.  Perhaps they ought to have left them behind, come over alone to ready the house first, rather than drag all six of them across a sea to camp out on the floor of a leaky house with holes in the roof and the walls and no reliable plumbing or electricity.  Perhaps they shouldn’t have bought them at all; the Starks have family yet living, distant though it is, as do Myrcella and Tommen, kin far more mentally stable and physically equipped to take them in. 

But truthfully it never occurred to Jaime that they might leave any of the children behind until so long after the fact that it could no longer be of any consequence; he suspects Brienne never thinks of it at all.   

Of bigger concern is the potential of the divides that lie between Tommen and Myrcella and the Starklings, the surely inevitable fallout as a result of the breadth of the differences between them.  Tommen and Myrcella had, after all, loved their mother, even their grandfather, just as the Starks had loved their brother, and within that lies a world of potential for emotional hurts, inflicted intentionally or not. 

But it never comes to pass.  All six of them carry their anger and hurts differently, but for all of them it seems to turns outward, away from anything contained by shores of their little island.  Jaime begrudgingly credits Gilly and the regular phone consults she has with each of them for at least some of that.  The children squabble and bicker and occasionally fight, but though Jaime and Brienne watch for it carefully, it never seems to become anything of any consequence. 

Sansa teaches Myrcella how to sew and mend and embroider, the two sitting side by side singing old Northern songs to pass the time as they work, Sansa looking and acting like the girl she still is for the first time since Jaime has known her.  Arya and Bran forage for food, string fishing lines, remind one another of the snares and hunting tricks their father and brother had taught them, and eagerly learn new ones from Jaime and Brienne in turn.  Tommen joins them at first, but one day he stumbles across a dead cat, her orphaned litter mewling nearby, and then his days are filled with their care. 

“At least we’ll not suffer from mice,” Brienne sighs philosophically when it becomes clear Tommen will not be steered from this task.  

Rickon, in turn too young and too loud and too impatient for any of these tasks, struggles the most with adjusting to their new lives.  He starts to sneak away, disappearing to explore the woods and shoreline with no care for any danger, or for the panic he causes Brienne, whenever she realises one of their ducklings is unaccounted for.  As spring starts to creep it’s way across the island Jaime is struck by a flash of inspiration, and he sets the boy to digging instead, laying out the markers for a garden beyond the back door.  Rickon revels in the physical activity and the permission to get himself completely caked in dirt, but, to his own surprise, Jaime finds himself equally enchanted with the project.  On one of her supply trips to the mainland Brienne returns with a bundle of soft green leaves, earth still clinging to their roots, and packets and packets of dried seeds of all shapes and sizes.  Jaime sows and weeds and waters, and starts to think of what he will grow next year; then the realisation that he’s thinking about next year at all sends him into a spiral of panic that ends with Rickon fetching Brienne, who says nothing but sits beside him instead, her shoulder pressed hard against his own so that he has no choice but to feel every exaggerated breath she takes until his body subconsciously matches them. 

Brienne’s scars are subtler, but no less entrenched.  They have repaired enough of the house that the practical necessity for the two of them to share a room has long since passed, but Jaime can’t bring himself to suggest they give up that simple comfort, and to his relief Brienne doesn’t either.  But they both still have nightmares, despite the company, and they react to them differently.  Jaime tends to thrash and cry, often waking himself as well as Brienne, where she goes stiff and rigid, locked in her own torment.  Jaime tried, unthinkingly, to shake her awake the first time, which ended with him pinned beneath her, her hands tight and firm around his neck as the sleep cleared from her eyes to be replaced by horror.  He’d had to coax her back to their bed the next night, and the bruises faded long before her guilt.   

Then there’s the morning Jaime wakes before her and wanders down to the little stream where they wash while they’re wrangling the houses old plumbing back into working order, and he’s interrupted by her panicked shouts, calling his name, when she had woken and found him gone.  Even when Brienne knows where they are, she doesn’t cope well with any one of them being out of her reach.  Pod had stayed in King’s Landing on doctor’s orders, and though he writes regularly, letters filled with assurances of his daily improvement, Jaime doesn’t see Brienne truly relax until months later, the day he arrives on the island to stay. 

Pod is not the only new arrival.  Others from the Stormlands make their way across the water; Davos sets himself up in a cottage next to the tumbledown pier and sets to repairing it, and before long there’s a regular stream of boats passing back and forth to the mainland, carrying people, livestock, goods.  Fishermen from the Iron Islands come, drawn by the rumour of untapped waters.  Farmers from the Reach.  Stonemasons from the Vale.  There is a new government forming in King’s Landing, democratically elected, sworn to oaths even Brienne had approved of, and watched closely by Margaery, who has stayed in the city and started writing sharp, cutting articles for the newly launched national paper.  But Jaime still finds relief in the distance their island grants them, the natural borders not readily overcome, and their increasing self-sufficiency as the range and breadth of inhabitants grows. 

He’s not sure he’ll ever take that comfort for granted; he can't think why he'd need to. 

1.

And as spring turns to summer, and the house emerges from beneath their hands, bearing the marks of its years but solid and whole all the same, other things start to awaken as well. 

There’s a day, warm and sunny like so many of the ones before it, and like so many of the ones before it after dinner they all walk down to the little beach not far from the house.  After they’ve swum Jaime and Brienne sit together on some rocks, drying off in the evening sun while the younger children chase each other across the sand, while Pod and Bran poke inquisitively through one of the rockpools left by the retreating tide, while Sansa sits not far away, carefully combing out her hair and humming quietly to herself.  Brienne’s eyes move over them all, absently counting, and she looks – content, happy to be here in this moment, besides him - and Jaime suddenly realises that it’s been a year, a year practically to the day since they sat together on another beach.  The wound on his leg is nothing but a pink scar now, and there’s no sword at Brienne’s waist, Sansa is safe and so is Pod, no lurking danger or ticking clock, nothing the same apart from this; Jaime, sitting on a beach, watching the sun dance across her face and never wanting to look away. 

He reaches over to rest his hand on her wrist, where her pulse beats, solid and sure, and she glances over, quizzical.  They touch each other often, they have for years, when sparring, shoulders brushing when they sat besides one another in the old Viewing Room, steady hands to treat a wound, gentle taps to gain attention, a firm hold to relieve a nightmare.  But never this; never just a touch, for touchings sake. 

Brienne’s still looking at him, and though her expression doesn’t change under his fingers her pulse leaps, thrums.  He wants to say – to say so many things, too many, the words all caught and snarled in his throat, but somehow Brienne seems to hear them anyway, because she smiles and twists her hand in his so that their fingers can entwine, and they sit like that as the sun sinks behind the hills until the children start clamouring for their attention. 

They do it more and more in the days that follow, little, fleeting touches, the worlds slowest, gentlest dance, building and building until there’s nothing to be done except to tug her close, touch her scarred cheek, press his lips to hers.  Jaime thinks that, after everything – after Aerys and his father, after three separate arenas, after years of slaughter and misery and another fucking Targaryen – after the enormous shitshow that has been most of their lives to date…Jaime thinks that this, this thing between them, shouldn’t feel so momentous.  And yet, afterwards, lying in bed with Brienne curled up asleep besides him, he thinks of the first night he watched her sleep in the arena, convinced he’d never get another; and now, somehow, here they are, both of them alive and together, against all the odds, in a house filled with children they have kept safe and can continue to keep safe, and surely there is nothing so miraculous as that.