Ficlet: Winter's end
Post-series!ficlet. Brienne/Jaime. 800-ish words. For munditia who asked for Brienne/Jaime when I offered to write drabbles.
The concept of drabble eluded me here, I'm afraid. Brienne/Jaime is a pairing I love dearly, even if I've never written it so this is a bit scary. Also, I couldn't stop thinking about this post-series world that popped up in my head so it's now become my happy/delusional place for them.
The bed is much too narrow for two long-legged knights, the straw-stuffed mattress so worn-down she might just as well be on the floor for all the good it does.
Beneath him her hands are chapped and dry, above her his lips are cracked against the hollow of her throat and if she'd ever dared a dream quite like this one, she would have coloured it differently, painted it with a better brush. And yet, Brienne thinks as Jaime's good hand strokes the inside of her thigh and he groans softly at her arching, eager response, this is somehow everything.
This is somehow how it is:
Skies have opened and cracked, the Wall has fallen and every oath ever made has been broken before their eyes; in the scorched ruins of their history only the strong survive. And they are both creatures of strength, of pride, of infinite sadness and the flavour of grief that has no name, that merely burns quietly at the centre of your core.
She clings to him because he is the last thing in this world that is worth fighting for. Why he has tied his cause around hers - if she is a substitute or a mirage or something crueller still - she cannot say and has no desire to ask. She knows what she needs to know about him, leaves the rest of her questions for the crows to pick apart and devour in the ravaged lands they can never hope to fully subdue no matter how hard they try.
Somehow the world has been smashed and reassembled again. They are all new, a new fit in their own lives, like badly constructed armour chafing against unaccustomed skin or leather not yet supple enough to bend at will. Boundaries have been dissolved, fathers have died and severed them from every chain and obligation and sometimes Brienne feels that dark twist in her chest, thinking it odd how destruction leaves freedom in its wake, thinking it even odder that she almost enjoys it.
She has never placed much value on freedom; he has never lost enough to know it.
Now it’s all they possess.
Now, in this abandoned house with a hearth and a bed (they don’t ask for much anymore, comfort is spelled not being dead), where Jaime sits down on a chair to rummage through his pack for what little supplies they have left. He leans forward, revealing a bruise across the nape of his neck and Brienne stares at it, drawn in by its shape and the thundering echo in her memory. Her fingers land upon the uneven contours before she has thought better of it and somehow this is all it takes for him to turn around and pull her into his arms - as though he has been waiting, as though she is the kind of woman a man like him would wait for.
Their first kiss tastes of metal and smoke, a scorching trace at the back of her tongue as Jaime maps the line of her jaw with two fingers, a wistful smile on his lips.
In her dreams - the kind of dreams she has never dared to have - he would perhaps have opted for lies and gallantry and called her beautiful and she would have thought him the handsomest man in the Seven Kingdoms, shied away from his gaze. But she is uglier than ever and Jaime is growing old and their eyes are wide-open. Torn out of her fantasy he is merely human, and he's a breath away and he does not say beautiful or even wench.
“Brienne,” he says instead and the low, oddly reassuring tone of his voice carries more of her dreams than she would have thought possible. “Brienne.”
“Jaime,” she says - gasps - as they crash into each other without the virtuous comforts of steel and leather to separate them.
He looks at her all the time, as his fingers spill fire into her blood, as the hardened pad of his thumb slips inside her and she says something incoherent and then he’s inside her too and it hurts, of course it hurts, everything hurts these days but Jaime looks at her, all the time, and she forgets why she wouldn’t want him to.
They will not take us alive, she has sworn over and over in her head; she has sworn it to the gods that fell with the best and worst of them out in the battlefields; she has sworn it to Jaime's sleeping shape in the beds they've shared chastely like the siblings they are not.
She swears it again now, out loud and in a bed where they’re long past innocence and she knows somehow that this is her last oath, the only one that matters. They will not take us alive, I swear. As the words fall between them, she can hear their pompous dignity and expects him to scoff or laugh because even in her dreams of him he laughs but instead he merely wraps an arm around her bare chest and buries his face in her hair.
“I will sleep sounder for it,” he mumbles and Brienne lies awake for a while, counting his heartbeats as they seem to fall rhythmically along the unbroken plane of her back.
The concept of drabble eluded me here, I'm afraid. Brienne/Jaime is a pairing I love dearly, even if I've never written it so this is a bit scary. Also, I couldn't stop thinking about this post-series world that popped up in my head so it's now become my happy/delusional place for them.
The bed is much too narrow for two long-legged knights, the straw-stuffed mattress so worn-down she might just as well be on the floor for all the good it does.
Beneath him her hands are chapped and dry, above her his lips are cracked against the hollow of her throat and if she'd ever dared a dream quite like this one, she would have coloured it differently, painted it with a better brush. And yet, Brienne thinks as Jaime's good hand strokes the inside of her thigh and he groans softly at her arching, eager response, this is somehow everything.
This is somehow how it is:
Skies have opened and cracked, the Wall has fallen and every oath ever made has been broken before their eyes; in the scorched ruins of their history only the strong survive. And they are both creatures of strength, of pride, of infinite sadness and the flavour of grief that has no name, that merely burns quietly at the centre of your core.
She clings to him because he is the last thing in this world that is worth fighting for. Why he has tied his cause around hers - if she is a substitute or a mirage or something crueller still - she cannot say and has no desire to ask. She knows what she needs to know about him, leaves the rest of her questions for the crows to pick apart and devour in the ravaged lands they can never hope to fully subdue no matter how hard they try.
Somehow the world has been smashed and reassembled again. They are all new, a new fit in their own lives, like badly constructed armour chafing against unaccustomed skin or leather not yet supple enough to bend at will. Boundaries have been dissolved, fathers have died and severed them from every chain and obligation and sometimes Brienne feels that dark twist in her chest, thinking it odd how destruction leaves freedom in its wake, thinking it even odder that she almost enjoys it.
She has never placed much value on freedom; he has never lost enough to know it.
Now it’s all they possess.
Now, in this abandoned house with a hearth and a bed (they don’t ask for much anymore, comfort is spelled not being dead), where Jaime sits down on a chair to rummage through his pack for what little supplies they have left. He leans forward, revealing a bruise across the nape of his neck and Brienne stares at it, drawn in by its shape and the thundering echo in her memory. Her fingers land upon the uneven contours before she has thought better of it and somehow this is all it takes for him to turn around and pull her into his arms - as though he has been waiting, as though she is the kind of woman a man like him would wait for.
Their first kiss tastes of metal and smoke, a scorching trace at the back of her tongue as Jaime maps the line of her jaw with two fingers, a wistful smile on his lips.
In her dreams - the kind of dreams she has never dared to have - he would perhaps have opted for lies and gallantry and called her beautiful and she would have thought him the handsomest man in the Seven Kingdoms, shied away from his gaze. But she is uglier than ever and Jaime is growing old and their eyes are wide-open. Torn out of her fantasy he is merely human, and he's a breath away and he does not say beautiful or even wench.
“Brienne,” he says instead and the low, oddly reassuring tone of his voice carries more of her dreams than she would have thought possible. “Brienne.”
“Jaime,” she says - gasps - as they crash into each other without the virtuous comforts of steel and leather to separate them.
He looks at her all the time, as his fingers spill fire into her blood, as the hardened pad of his thumb slips inside her and she says something incoherent and then he’s inside her too and it hurts, of course it hurts, everything hurts these days but Jaime looks at her, all the time, and she forgets why she wouldn’t want him to.
They will not take us alive, she has sworn over and over in her head; she has sworn it to the gods that fell with the best and worst of them out in the battlefields; she has sworn it to Jaime's sleeping shape in the beds they've shared chastely like the siblings they are not.
She swears it again now, out loud and in a bed where they’re long past innocence and she knows somehow that this is her last oath, the only one that matters. They will not take us alive, I swear. As the words fall between them, she can hear their pompous dignity and expects him to scoff or laugh because even in her dreams of him he laughs but instead he merely wraps an arm around her bare chest and buries his face in her hair.
“I will sleep sounder for it,” he mumbles and Brienne lies awake for a while, counting his heartbeats as they seem to fall rhythmically along the unbroken plane of her back.