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Brienne paused in the doorway to take in the two blonde heads bent over their homework at the kitchen table. Late afternoon sunlight flooded in through the window, making their golden hair shine.
One boy was diligently writing a report on the library book lying next to his composition book. His letters were slightly messy, and he always used a capital G, but his handwriting was coming along just fine.
His companion was painstakingly writing strings of letters, hesitating and changing his grip often. His letters grew slightly smudged, a light smear of graphite marring the paper where the side of his hand touched the page.
The pencil lead snapped, and he cursed, tossing the pencil across the table.
The first boy looked up with wide eyes. “I’m telling! We don’t use that word in this house.”
“ I do,” his companion grumbled.
“Jaime,” Brienne admonished, setting her messenger bag on the counter.
Three pencils were scattered on the floor by the balcony door, and it looked like Jaime was only halfway through his writing exercise for the day.
“How was your day, Tommen?” she asked, unloading her bag. Lunch bag by the sink, junk mail straight into the bin, bills to be paid neatly stacked on the counter, and a plastic bag from the local bookshop beside the bills.
The tip of Tommen’s tongue stuck out in concentration as he wrote. “Good. We played kickball and lunch was a meatball volcano.”
“Meatball volcano? I don’t think they had that when I was a kid.” Brienne did her best, but she still felt awkward with the children. She never knew what to say to them. “Are you staying for dinner?”
Tommen shrugged.
Jaime cleared his throat. "Your mom has a meeting, buddy. We can make some pasta or you can pick where we get takeout."
"Will Myrcella be joining us?" Brienne asked tentatively. Myrcella did not like her, and made excuses to avoid spending time at Jaime's. He often took the kids on outings alone, at Brienne's behest, so the girl wouldn't freeze Jaime out entirely.
"She's at Trystane's working on a science project or something allegedly," Jaime answered with a grimace. “Arianne will bring her home later.”
As much as Myrcella disliked Brienne, Jaime hated Trystane Martell more. He didn't believe that the kids were really just friends, said 14-year-old boys just weren't wired that way. Brienne’s only male friend at 14 was Renly, so her experience wasn’t exactly useful.
Jaime glanced at the clock on the wall, pushed away his unfinished homework from occupational therapy, and got up from the table. Had he picked up Tommen from his prestigious private school in plaid pajama pants and an ancient Lannisport Lions t-shirt? Probably, and Brienne doubted anyone had given him a hard time. Meanwhile the one time she'd fetched up to get him (in slacks and a perfectly serviceable blouse) she'd gotten the third degree until Tommen told the teacher that Brienne was his aunt, which wasn’t true, but Brienne didn’t want to open that can of worms in front of Tommen’s teacher.
Jaime passed behind her, trailing his hand over her hip and the small of her back. "You're running late. Your appointment go okay?"
Brienne nodded, cursed the flush in her cheeks. "It was fine. I'm fine. I just had an errand to run after." She shouldn’t be embarrassed. Jaime was supportive of her sessions with the Elder Brother, but there was still a voice in the back of her mind, sneering that she must be the only woman on the planet whose anxiety actually intensified when she found a rich, handsome boyfriend. As if having Jaime in her bed erased the memories of being attacked, disfigured, and almost raped, of watching Jaime maimed and beaten.
Tommen was watching her curiously, so she shook off the memories, forced herself to smile at the boy. He really was very sweet. Totally innocent, but not without his own traumas. Jaime had suggested therapy for both kids, but Cersei stubbornly refused.
"Did you get a sticker or a lollipop?” Tommen asked. “I like lollipops."
"Um, no, no lollipops. I got some homework." The Elder Brother did keep a dish of hard caramels in the waiting room of his office. Brienne often grabbed one as she left, and she kept a few in her purse. Sometimes when she was particularly anxious the taste alone was enough to invoke the peace she felt after a session.
Tommen's face screwed up in confusion. "Homework? Like Uncle Jaime?" Jaime had homework from occupational therapy as well as homework from his personal trainer, who’d taken over when he was released from physical therapy.
Brienne brought the bookstore bag over to the table and sat beside Tommen. She pulled out a large flat book and a box of colored pencils. The pencils might have been overkill. Did she really need 36 colors? Too late now.
"I have to spend twenty minutes working on one of these pages. Could you pick one out for me?"
Tommen took the book, flipped past the black and white drawing of a tree on the cover to the pages within. Castle. Owl. Hedgehog. Treehouses. Stag. Lion. Tommen tapped the lion head that took up most of the page, its mane framed with intricately woven leaves and flowers. "This one."
Brienne smiled. "Good choice." She pulled the book back in front of her and spread out the pencils.
She'd been skeptical when the Elder Brother suggested she try coloring as a method of mindful meditation. Brienne had tried actual meditation, yoga, and running, and still used a meditation app fairly often. But she still had nightmares, still occasionally suffered the panic attacks that had plagued her for the last seven months, since the night she and Jaime were attacked. She’d tried medication briefly too, but hated how the pills blunted all her feelings, good and bad.
So now she’d try this too. It couldn’t hurt. Once in the bookstore, she’d found books filled with patterns imposing order on chaos. Mandalas, paisleys, geometrics. Brienne had purchased one of those, but the one she’d shown Tommen was less abstract. The cover showed a forest scene, black and white accented with gold. Inside, trees, animals, castles. She’d also impulsively grabbed two other books and the largest box of colored pencils the store had.
Jaime came up behind her, set a plate with too many cookies on it in front of Tommen. Overcompensating, but that was nothing new. Cersei filled his room with toys when she couldn’t give him her time. Jaime fed him, took him to movies and ballgames, even bought a troublesome black kitten because Cersei wouldn’t let Tommen have one at her house.
Brienne looked at the lion again. She just needed a place to start. The eyes. Yes. She picked up an emerald green pencil and began coloring with short, careful strokes. She could feel both man and boy's gazes on her.
"Could I try that sometime?" Tommen asked.
"Is your homework done?" she asked without looking up.
"Almost," he admitted, a flurry of movement and crumpling paper erupting from his side of the table.
Brienne glanced up. The boy had yanked out his math folder and was feverishly plowing through a worksheet.
"Why don't you finish your homework while I make us some pasta, and then we can color together until your mom picks you up?"
"We can share?" the boy asked doubtfully.
Brienne pushed the bag in his direction and Tommen eagerly dug into it, unearthing the remaining books, including the one meant for him, filled with hidden cats. The look of pure joy on his face, folding abruptly into uncertainty, "Is this for me?" pushed the boy deeper into her heart even while she nodded in answer. She’d bought one for Myrcella, too, just in case.
Dinner passed easily, Tommen dominating the conversation as children tended to, Jaime chiming in to tell them about his new trainer. Jaime thought the Tyroshi was ridiculous, but Brienne saw his unending challenges for what they were—motivation.
Nights like this were her favorites. First unburdening herself with the Elder Brother, spewing out every intrusive thought that ran through her head, taking in the aura of calm the man himself projected. Then coming home to the simple pleasures of spending time with Jaime and even Tommen. If someone had told her a year ago that her arrogant, infuriating counterpart in Stark Manufacturing’s joint venture with Lannister Tech would become first her friend and now her lover, she would have laughed in their face.
After dinner she and Tommen sat side by side, sharing the pencils, while Jaime loaded the dishwasher and played with the kitten. The boy made suggestions and solicited her opinion often. Unlike his sister, Tommen liked Brienne. She didn’t talk down to him, didn’t try to police his behavior beyond a few basic house rules, and never said a word against his mother, which was more than Jaime could manage.
It wasn’t easy. Cersei was like a big rock dumped into the placid waters of her calm. She made waves, the ripples spreading until they touched everything and left it off-balance and unsettled. The first time they met, less than a week after Jaime came home from the hospital, Cersei had barged in holding a thick sheaf of papers, a background check conducted by Tywin’s favorite PI, insisting that Brienne was a gold digger. The Tarths had an old name but no money, she’d told him, and Jaime had laughed in her face. After that, her accusations only got more ludicrous. Apparently Brienne had masterminded their attack. She was also blackmailing Jaime about the children. Nevermind that Cersei herself had told Brienne that bombshell, thinking she already knew. Maybe it should have scared her off, they hadn’t even kissed yet, were still deep in denial that their feelings were anything more than a profound sort of friendship, but it hadn’t.
As usual, Cersei came to get the boy so late that he was curled up with his kitten on one end of the couch, drifting in and out of sleep as they watched a competition baking show. Brienne quietly removed herself from the other end of the couch before Cersei could see her so close to him, but she forgot to take her old quilt off of Tommen. Cersei visibly recoiled as she shoved the blanket off of him, spilling the cat onto the carpet, and shook his shoulder to wake him. “Darling,” she called him, but there was little softness there. Cersei took his affection for Brienne as a betrayal.
Brienne quietly gathered his things and waited by the door to hand off his backpack. Jaime had a whispered conversation with Cersei, and from the look on his face Cersei had one again done something to take away more of his time with the children. Their arrangement was informal and non-binding, because Jaime wouldn’t put the children through a custody fight and Cersei knew it. She liked to take them on long trips, schedule their lessons on his afternoons to give him less time with them, or offer him extra time only when she knew he couldn’t accept it.
The look Cersei shot her as she snatched away the bag was so full of loathing that Brienne had to resist backing away from her.
When the door closed behind them, Jaime rested his hand on Brienne’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “On a scale from shoulder massage to diamonds, how bad was she?” he asked.
He always did this, and Brienne couldn’t convince him that he didn’t need to make up for Cersei’s poor behavior. She used to only refer to Brienne as “that cow” and refused to speak directly to her. “Well, she didn’t mutter ‘bitch’ under her breath this time, so, progress?”
Jaime chuckled and wrapped his arms around her from behind, enveloping her in his warmth and scent. Home. Not the penthouse, which was honestly a bit much for Brienne, but him. Jaime was a bit much too, sometimes, but he was also her lodestone, her north star, as strange and unlikely as that sometimes felt. Jaime had his own gravity, pulling her into his orbit until she could barely contemplate a life without him in it.
“There’s some chocolate squirreled away in the freezer. Why don’t I pour us some whiskey and we can curl up on the couch and finish that baking show,” Jaime suggested.
“So you can heckle them?” she asked skeptically. Jaime had some very inflated ideas about his baking prowess, particularly for a one-handed man.
“My lips are sealed,” he promised, and she barked a disbelieving laugh.
But he found the chocolate and she poured their drinks, and in a few minutes they were cuddled together with a quilt over them and the cat glaring balefully at them from the bookcase. On the television, trick editing made it seem like one contestant wouldn’t finish decorating her sadly crooked cake in time.
“At least it didn’t fall over,” Brienne said when the judges had finished being gently and devastatingly disappointed in that cake.
Jaime groaned. “You are never going to let me forget that, are you?”
Brienne snickered. “Nope.”
Jaime had tried to bake a cake for her birthday, which was wonderful and unexpected. She’d have been happy with something from a bakery, but he wanted to do it himself. And rather than try something simple, he’d attempted three tiers covered in fondant. The top tier slid off midway through dinner, and she’d only managed to eat four bites once she realized that the crunchy bits were chopped unsweetened chocolate that Jaime had honestly believed would melt during baking.
He’d done much better with her gift, and honestly both showed why she loved him so much, why all the drama he came with was worth it. Jaime had given her a beautiful bowl, an artifact from the Age of Heroes that now sat on their bedroom dresser collecting pocket change. The porcelain was decorated with a detailed scene of knights fighting a dragon, but that wasn’t unusual. What made it different, what made Jaime buy it, was that the bowl had clearly been broken at some point, long ago. The breaks had been mended with gold, beautiful scars joining the broken pieces until it was whole once again.
That was them. That was their life, two people who had walked through all seven hells and come out the other side, slowly falling asleep on a couch that was slightly too small for them. And she loved it.