Chapter Text
After Jaime has sent Brienne to find Sansa Stark, his thoughts go to Brienne more often than one might think, but it is of no matter. It is nothing at all. He tells himself this often, even more often as he lies in bed waiting for sleep to claim him, and tonight is no different.
Tonight is no different until it is.
For a moment it is almost like he is Brienne, out in the wilderness, on her horse with Podrick beside her.
It must have been Jaime’s imagination, he rationalizes as he opens his eyes where he lies soundly in his own bed. He had been thinking of Brienne and had been almost asleep. He must have dozed off and dreamed of her. That’s all. It was nothing. Nothing at all.
Jaime puts it from his mind.
*
Except it happens again.
He is awake this time. Definitely awake. Undeniably awake. He is in his room, changing the bandage on his wrist and suddenly he is not.
He is on the edge of a forest and he looks down at himself. At his hands. Plural. He has two hands. Oathkeeper is strapped to his hip.
The next instant Jaime is back in his room.
*
It happens again. One moment Jaime is in the throne room standing guard, and the next he is on a horse. He leaps from the horse he is on and manages to run to the edge of the nearby pond to look into the surface.
He just has time to see Brienne’s face reflecting back at him before he’s back. He’s standing exactly where he was. He hasn’t moved an inch. Not an inch.
*
Jaime tries not to think about it too much. He has no idea what is causing it, no idea what is happening, except that it is. It is. He’s sure it is. And even if it is not, he can’t stop it. So it’s best if he doesn’t think about it too much.
And it doesn’t happen that often. Not very often at all. Sometimes moons on end will pass before he finds himself looking through Brienne’s eyes once again. And when it happens it is never for more than the span of five or ten heartbeats. Just long enough to get his bearings, to look around, to look down at his hand and see both of hers instead.
Then he’s back in his body like nothing happened, right where he left himself just a few moments before.
It relieves him to no end to know she is alive and well. Every time he finds himself in her body, Brienne is alive and well. Thank the gods.
And even though Jaime is trying very hard not to think about it, he wonders what Brienne thinks of these strange moments between them. What does she think when she finds herself in his body, as he is in hers? What does she think of the extraordinary circumstances they experience but can not explain?
But then he thinks he doesn’t want to know what she thinks of where he stands today.
*
Tonight he’s in her body for almost no time at all, but the experience lingers long after he has returned to himself.
Brienne had been sitting watch. That’s all she was doing, sitting against a tree, awake in the night, but she was full of such an immense sense of injustice. Righteous anger. Purpose.
Things are wrong and Brienne is going to make them right. And she knows this. Her body knows this truth as well as it knows the necessity of breathing, of her beating heart.
Jaime lies awake long after he has left Brienne to finish her watch. It has been a long time since Jaime felt any of those things at all, much less all at once. And with such intensity.
The stories of knights of old, the ones on the most important quests, always made Jaime yearn for that purpose when he was a boy. But when was the last time Jaime actually felt like that?
*
Today Jaime’s first breath when he appears in Brienne’s body without warning is a pained gasp.
Brienne is hurt.
Brienne is hurt.
She’s still standing, still walking, but her pain is everywhere as Jaime desperately tries to take stock of how dire the situation is. As far as he can tell she’s not bleeding from anywhere critical, her head is pounding, at least one rib is cracked or broken, her leg is—
He’s back in his body, her pain no longer overwhelming his senses, but he thinks of her well-being and little else until the next time he finds himself inhabiting her body. He’s only her for a brief moment, but a brief moment is all he needs to learn what he needs to know:
Brienne is alive.
Still a little sore, but alive.
Thank the gods.
*
It happens again, not too long after. It is almost midday and he is on a ship, sailing for Dorne and then he is with Podrick, who is looking at him (at Brienne) like she just stopped talking mid-sentence and Jaime is lost as to what to do but he’s spared having to figure it out because a heartbeat later he’s back on the ship and himself once again and he has other things to occupy his mind for the time being.
*
It doesn’t happen again for a while, a long while, not until he’s back in King’s Landing. Not until he’d almost convinced himself that he’d imagined the whole thing.
But he hadn’t.
Because just like that he’s her again.
Jaime snaps back into his body and has to stop himself from exclaiming out loud. He was only Brienne for an instant, not more than three heartbeats at most, but the person beside her, he was there long enough to look over at the young woman Brienne was with.
Sansa.
Sansa Stark.
Brienne found her. Brienne is with her.
Jaime smiles. It has been a long time since he had reason to smile.
Oathkeeper indeed.
*
Jaime gets only a few glimpses through Brienne’s eyes over the next little while. Never for very long. Never in such a way that lets him get a full idea of what she is doing.
They are reassuring nonetheless.
*
Jaime hasn’t been Brienne since he was dismissed from the Kingsguard and sent off to Riverrun. He thinks of her often as he rides North. He thinks of her often but does not get to see the world through her eyes. It was never a frequent occurrence, but it has been a long time.
He is trying not to worry.
He is failing.
*
Brienne is Brienne. Precisely and exactly Brienne as she stands in front of him and tells him her plan to reason with the Blackfish.
Nothing about her expression betrays that she has spent a few strange moments looking out at the world from behind his eyes since they last saw each other. He longs to ask her, to know if those moments were as welcome to her as they were to him. Those brief glimpses that let him know she was still alive. That she was all right. Somehow, she was all right.
An unsettling thought strikes him as their conversation continues and does not address the unexplainable scenario they have found themselves in: maybe it’s not happening in reverse. Maybe she doesn’t live in his body in those brief moments he finds himself in hers. And if that is the case… If that is the case and he says something now, about how he happened to inhabit her body for a few moments several moons ago while she was building a fire, how he was in her body while she was traveling with Podrick, and on a handful of other baffling occasions… If he says something about it and she has no idea what he’s talking about well, he’ll sound crazier than he already feels.
So he won’t say anything about it. Just as Brienne isn’t saying anything about it. If she even has anything to say about this strange thing that is happening at all.
Brienne, oh Brienne. He has missed her terribly. He has missed everything about her.
She tries to give him Oathkeeper back and Jaime puts a stop to that at once.
The sword is hers.
It will always be hers.
And perhaps Brienne understands the weight of that because there is an undercurrent of something deeper when she addresses the fact that they will be honour-bound to fight should her plan fail.
Gods he hopes it doesn’t come to that.
He’s watching her walk away from him, watching her walk towards Podrick when it happens.
One moment Jaime is at the entrance of his tent and the next he is standing next to Podrick as the squire says something that doesn’t quite register but that definitely ends with “My Lady”. Jaime clenches his hands. Both of them. He is in a body that has two hands.
Jaime spins around to look back at the tent where he was just standing. Is still standing.
Jaime Lannister is standing at the entrance of his tent and the look on his face. The look on his face.
Brienne is unmistakably looking out from behind his eyes. Wide-eyed with shock but he can tell. He can just tell by the way she’s inhabiting his body and looking at him inhabiting hers that this is not the first time she’s experiencing this either.
“My Lady?” Podrick questions and Jaime does not know what to do. He knows what he wants to do. He wants to run towards her, towards his body that Brienne is currently in and get back in the tent so they can discuss this matter privately because he wants to ask her everything about everything.
But before he can do anything at all he’s back in his body looking at Brienne being back in hers and she’s looking at him and whatever silent conversation is passing between them in this moment is muddled and intense and Jaime has no idea what’s going on between them.
He takes a step forward but Brienne is already turning to leave and Jaime is so stunned he just stands and watches her go.
But now he knows that she knows.
And it’s happening to her too.