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Jaime kisses her like a dream.
They’re going to die tomorrow. Or whatever you call tomorrow in a world without days. The sun had abandoned the North months ago and the only light they’ve seen since has been from their fires. The one in Brienne’s hearth crackles and roars, defiant, as if it too knows what’s walking their way.
She pushes Jaime’s jacket from his shoulders.
Somewhere out there in the snow, 100,000 dead march towards them. It is the perfect army, composed of soldiers who do not eat nor sleep nor fear death. If they lay siege to Winterfell, they will win. If they attack, they will win. If they do nothing but wait for the living to freeze in their castles, they will win.
But Jaime’s hand is warm where it rests on her stomach, just under her shirt. His thumb rubs circles into her skin.
Has anyone touched her there, ever? That little spot right below her bellybutton? A maester, maybe, or her septa when she was very young. If they did, she doesn’t remember it. She cannot possibly imagine that it felt anything like this.
“Brienne.” Jaime says. It’s not a question or a plea. It’s just there, her name on his tongue, like a living thing between them.
Jaime started this, because of course he did.
“Like a hero in a song.” Jaime had said earlier, when he’d caught her hacking at air. They’d taken apart all the straw dummies last week for fire supplies. “Valyrian steel and all.”
They had been preparing for months. She attended war councils and sat with Lady Stark to work out food rations and organized the allocation of winter clothes. She patrolled the walls and worked with her men and, in the moments she wasn’t occupied with one duty or another, she trained.
Oathkeeper had been a familiar weight in her hands for a long time. Brienne knew that sword’s every ridge and furrow. When she set it down, her arm felt light, as if it was missing a bone. She was glad it was here with her, at the end.
“I thought you’d be sleeping.” Brienne had said.
“I thought you would be too.” Jaime replied.
King Jon had gathered all the forces at supper to announce that, according to Bran Stark, the army of the dead would reach Winterfell within a day. Brienne couldn’t sleep if her life depended on it.
“Since we’re both awake,” Brienne had said and took a defensive stance.
Jaime smiled, a little sad, and said “I appreciate the offer, I do. But I think we’ll get our fill of fighting later.”
“It can’t hurt to practice a bit more.”
“It can, actually. Besides, I have a better idea.” Jaime had said and then threw something her way. She caught the malleable pouch and looked down at a wineskin in her hands.
“This is a better idea?” She had spent months preparing for this fight. When she went down, she didn’t want it to be because of a needless mistake.
“Thoros of Myr was so drunk at the siege of Pyke he couldn’t even remember charging through the breach.” Jaime said. Brienne just looked at him. “We need to save our strength. If we can’t sleep, we can at least give our swords a rest.”
He was probably right. The battle would be here soon enough. Brienne nodded and sheathed Oathkeeper. Jaime smiled and mimed drinking from the skin. Brienne tossed it back to him.
“I’m still not drinking.” She had said.
“Suit yourself.” Jaime said and tilted the wineskin back. For all his bravado, it wasn’t a particularly long drink. Just a sip, really.
Jaime, here, now, nips at her lip. She’s never felt something quite like how it feels to have her lip between someone else’s teeth. He lets it go, so that he can return to using his tongue in her mouth instead.
Moans escape him and Brienne’s not sure he realizes it. He seems a little lost in their kisses.
Which, she supposes, is the point.
“We shouldn’t talk about it.” He had said when they were settled at a table in a deserted chamber and he had taken a few more sips of wine.
They had been discussing, for the hundredth time, the battle strategies.
“What else is there to talk about?” She had replied, her head so full of dead things.
He turned to face her, purposeful and unguarded, and met her eyes.
He meets her eyes now.
“Brienne,” Jaime says and she never realized before how much she loves the sound of her name from him. His thumb traces over the scars on her cheek. “Brave Brienne.”
“Jaime.” She says. Words have never been her strong suit and she doesn’t know how to use them here. She abandons them in favor of what she does know.
She helps him pull his shirt over his head and lets it drop to join his jacket. She had helped him when they were with the Bolton men, taken care of him when he had lost himself. She’ll take care of him now.
She kisses him, takes his bottom lip between hers and tries to mimic what he did. It must work because he starts making those small sounds again.
Brienne lets one hand slide over his chest and feel the warm skin beneath her fingertips. She pauses over where she knows his soft, human heart rests. Jaime lays his hand on top of hers.
“You know what else.” Jaime said and Brienne had been seized with the urge to look away. She had made peace with her futile love a long time ago. She saw no reason to change this state of affairs at the eleventh hour.
“Drop it, Jaime.”
“Why?” He had said. “What harm can—?”
“Just,” she had closed her eyes and shifted away from him. They had been sitting close together and, with this topic between them, the proximity felt like a mockery. “Just drop it. You don’t want to talk about the dead? Fine. Tell me about…growing up on the Rock.”
“Lonely.” Jaime said definitively. Brienne huffed in frustration. She was trying to give him something happy to talk about. Or, if not happy, at least familiar. Nostalgic. A sweet distraction from the dead.
He hadn’t looked away from her. She was exposed under his gaze and it made her fidgety. She never understood how she could be so ill at ease in as mundane a setting as a conversation. Offering her sword or her life, those were easy things. But Jaime Lannister got a peek at her heart and she clammed up like a craven youth.
“If the idea is so uncomfortable to you...” Jaime started, which was absurd.
Her love for him wasn’t uncomfortable. It was a part of her. Like Oathkeeper, she would be unbalanced without him. But she didn’t enjoy dragging it into the light like this. It was big and unsightly. What had her devotion ever done for anyone?
“It’s not,” she paused, “uncomfortable. It’s just...”
“Abhorrent?”
“What? No.”
“Then why won’t you talk about it?”
“What’s the point?” She said. “We’re going to be dead soon anyway.”
“Exactly!” He said. “Brienne, this is our last chance.”
Her heart had pinched at that. He was right. If this was truly their last night in this world, maybe she should go to her grave unburdened.
Then he had taken a deep breath and said, “I love you.”
“I love you.” Jaime says and squeezes her hand. It is already one of her favorite things that he says.
She leans in to rest her forehead against his and slides her hands up to cup his face.
“I love you too.” She says quietly. She doesn’t want the gods to hear. It feels too much like tempting fate, to confess these things here and now, when they have so little time left.
“Stop thinking about it.” Jaime says, gently, as he puts his arms around her waist.
“I don’t think I can.” She says.
“Maybe,” he says as his hand finds its way under her shirt again, “I can help with that.”
He kisses at her neck as they both work on getting her shirt off.
She wonders if all lovers feel like they’re at the edge of something or if it’s the influence of the end of the world. Surely it can’t always be this intoxicating. It reminds her of standing on mountains in the Vale or the few times she climbed the Green Mountain at home. It’s like being on top of the world, that to reach the heavens all she needed to do was stretch out her hand and touch.
“What?” She had blurted out. “That’s not—what?”
“Surely, you knew.” He said, as confusion replaced the determined solemnity with which he’d confessed his love. “I’ve been following you around like a puppy for years, Brienne.”
She knew he was her friend. She knew he appreciated her trust in him. She was fairly sure that he knew she loved him. She had not been so blind as to think there was nothing between them, but it seemed like such a small thing. Or, not small, but disproportionate. Like Renly.
“But I betrayed you.” She had said.
“Are you still going on about that?” Jaime said. “I thought we put all that to rest back in the riverlands.”
“But—”
“Are you really arguing with me about whether or not I love you?”
Everything had been in a slight haze since Jon’s announcement but this conversation felt positively unreal. Brienne was still processing his question when the rest of her seemed to catch up to the moment.
He loved her. He loved her.
“I—”
How did you reach out to someone you loved, who loved you back? Was she permitted to touch his hand now, or his cheek? Where did she begin?
He was waiting on her to finish whatever sentence she had started but she couldn’t remember what she was going to say.
Instead, she sprung forward to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him.
Brienne brings his mouth back up to hers.
His bare chest brushes against her and it’s so warm in the little space between them that she backs them away from the fire. The only suitable place for what they’re doing is her bed. It’s not very big, but they’ll manage.
She lays down on her back and he settles himself over her.
She lets her hands move over him. She’s seen him undressed before but she’s never felt him, at least not like this. It’s just skin and muscle, it doesn’t feel too different from her own body, but when she touches him here or kisses him there, his body answers her. He moans a little or gasps or his hand clenches where it’s tangled in the furs.
She tries different places, tries using her hands or her mouth. He likes when she kisses him just under his jaw and when she puts her hands in his hair. He really likes when she puts her arms around him. She is in the middle of exploring his left nipple with her thumb when he slides his hand into hers and sits back out of her reach.
It’s cold without him so close.
“What—”
“Your turn.” Jaime says.
He interlaces their fingers and trails kisses down her abdomen.
Jaime had made a shocked noise when his arms were suddenly full of her. She almost retreated and apologized, but he was kissing her back before she could. He kissed her softly, which surprised her but probably shouldn’t have. She already knew about his gentle heart.
“I love you too.” Brienne had said when they parted, because she owed him the words.
He had let out a small, startled laugh.
“What?” She said.
“I love you.” Jaime said, delighted, and then he kissed her cheek. “I love you.” Then her forehead. “I love you.”
“You’re delirious.” She had said, but was laughing while she did. She’d never seen this Jaime before.
“On the contrary,” Jaime said, “I’ve never been saner.”
He had pulled her in for another kiss, this one more urgent. She placed her hands on his jacket and felt the grainy leather beneath her fingertips.
“What do you want to do?” He had asked, while his thumb stroked her cheek.
“In…?” She gestured between them.
“There must be a septon somewhere in this place.” Jaime said. “Or any sort of priest. I think any will do for now, don’t you?”
Oh.
You want to marry me, she had thought, staggered. It was so far away from what her world had been this morning that the change almost overwhelmed her. She had no way to guard against such formidable joy.
“We don’t have the time.” She had said and braced herself against the despair that came with it.
“It’s the night before a battle, we can’t be the only ones awake.” Jaime said.
She had brought her hand up to hold the one still on her cheek. “We don’t have the time.”
Fuck it. Fuck it all. She could have ripped apart a hundred dead men in that moment for stealing this from her.
“I just want to be with you.” She said and went to her feet. They would be more comfortable in her room. She held out her hand to him. “Please.”
Jaime had stared up at her and she saw then how love pooled so undeniably in his eyes. It was a look she’d seen for years.
He took her hand.
“Damned ties.” Jaime says as he reaches the top of her trousers. He holds one with his mouth and tugs at the other with his hand. When it doesn’t unravel, he swears and it comes out muffled around the string.
She knows this Jaime. Seeing him frustrated but undeterred is the most normal thing that’s happened all evening. It reminds her of their training sessions or the way he reads lengthy scrolls.
Brienne pushes his bangs back so she can see his face better. His hair isn’t very soft and he could do with a bath. Then again, so could she.
No time for that now.
She takes over untying the laces, spurred on by a new urgency. While her hands are down there anyway, she pushes him back a little and unties the laces on his trousers too.
“I’ve always loved your hands.” Jaime says as he catches one of them.
“They’re just hands.” Brienne says as he bends to place a kiss on the back of one.
“They’re strong.” He says. “And gentle.”
She wants to respond in kind, something that would move him and show him how much she loves him, but she doesn’t know the words. She interlaces their fingers together.
“Weren’t you in the middle of something?” She says.
He lays his head on her stomach and smiles up at her. “Whatever might that have been?”
“Jaime—”
He gives her stomach a peck and then tugs her trousers off. Her smallclothes go with them. It’s a strange thought—that she is naked in bed with her lover—and she doesn’t quite know what to do with it so she puts it aside.
He isn’t looking at her, distracted as he is with kissing the inside of her thigh, and she’s a little relieved. She doesn’t want to be. She only has one chance at this and she’ll never forgive herself if she wastes any of it on shame.
She tries to push those thoughts away and focus on the feeling of his kisses. They’re light and almost ticklish on the sensitive skin of her leg. Then he moves upward and the sensation changes abruptly. Suddenly it isn’t just a nice feeling against her skin, it’s satisfying a need.
Brienne sucks in a breath.
His mouth is delicate against her as he places a kiss there. It’s too much and barely enough all at once. As if he knows this, he pushes something firmer on the same spot.
That’s his tongue, she thinks, Jaime’s tongue.
He moves in cyclical motions. The rhythm is a step closer to what she needs but it’s not enough. She wants more of it.
“Harder,” She says, “Please.”
He adheres immediately. She threads her hand through his hair again and moans.
“Yes.” She says. “Yes, like that.”
She almost shouts when he groans against her. It’s a muffled sound—obscenely so—and she grips the furs below her.
“Ah,” She pants. “Jaime, Jaime.”
He prompts her to open her thighs wider and she follows. He pulls her left leg practically over his shoulder, holding it there with his arm.
She had thought about exactly this, once or twice before in the dark. It was in Renly’s camp that she’d heard of the act for the first time. There had been a group of men that regularly hung around the tent next to hers, who only got louder the more they had to drink. They had been so needlessly crass, and she found their conversation distasteful, but Brienne can’t say she didn’t learn anything from them. Most of the things they’d talked about she will never get the chance to try.
Her next moan comes out more like a sob.
She clutches at Jaime’s hair and throws that thought away from her. She has him here now, that has to be enough.
His mouth leaves her and she opens her eyes (when did she close them?) to see him looking at her with concern.
“I’m fine.” She says, but it comes out flat. She strokes his head apologetically. “It’s not you. You’re—” Brienne doesn’t know how to describe him. “—great.”
“If you don’t want to, we don’t have to—” He starts but that’s the furthest thing from what she wants.
“I do.” She says. “I do want to. Very much so. What you were doing before that was, that was good.”
He considers that and then the corner of his mouth twitches up. “Only good?”
She huffs and lays back against the furs. “Obviously not.”
“No, come on, how would you describe it?” Jaime says. “Amazing? Phenomenal? Spectacular?”
“Is that what you want to hear?” She says.
“A man likes to be reassured.” He pulls a pouting face. It’s hard for him to keep the joke up when his smile pokes through. She snorts.
“It’s very, very good.” She says while looking at the ceiling. She hopes he can hear how much she means it.
“Good enough for more?”
She raises her head. “You’re not tired of it yet?”
“Brienne, I could do this for the rest of my life and not be tired of it.”
“Oh.” She says. “Yes, then.” It doesn’t feel like enough so she adds, “Please.”
“As the commander commands.” He says while he lowers his head again.
“I’m not—”
The touch of his mouth sparks her want, which had simmered in its absence. Jaime adds his hand this time, just below his mouth. He rubs two fingers in circles, edging lower, until he dips them inside of her.
She’s had her own fingers inside herself and knows the sensation, but it is strange to have it out of her control. She can’t anticipate Jaime’s movements, how firm he’ll press or how slow he’ll push, and the unpredictability makes her wild.
She tries to keep her hips still out of courtesy for him but the rest of her twitches and shifts.
Amazing. Phenomenal. Spectacular.
One of the most important things she’s ever learned about Jaime Lannister is how startlingly honest he is when he talks. If you strip away his tone and leave the words on their own, unprotected, the truth of them slips out.
“Amazing.” She says to test the waters. He doesn’t stop but his attention to her stutters. “Jaime, that’s amazing.”
He picks up the pace and then he is moving his fingers in earnest. He uses his hand and his mouth as complements to one another, so that the two sensations unite into something greater.
“Phenomenal.” She says. He has such a hard time believing the good things about him. If it’s the last thing she ever does, she’ll get through his thick skull how much he is loved. “Don’t stop, please, Jaime, keep going.”
He listens.
It’s so much. It’s so, so much. Her world shrinks and she no longer measures time by the candles but by the pulses of his rhythm. Images and thoughts float in her mind but they are hazy and drift lightly through.
She sees him as he was in Harrenhal and King’s Landing and the riverlands, the little differences and similarities between all these fragments of him. She remembers his expression when she named Oathkeeper, a little awed, a little sad.
Brienne loves what his mouth is doing, but she misses Jaime’s face. She wants to see him so she raises her head and watches. It’s heady, the sight of him between her legs. She could look at it forever.
Then he raises his gaze and meets her eyes.
Something about it makes their situation undeniable. Jaime is really here, in her bed, and they’re not going to leave until they’ve satisfied each other. Her head spins in a circle of he knows that I know that he knows…
He sucks once, hard, and she is gone.
His hand and mouth see her through it. He stops his rhythm and presses himself firmly against her. While the desire sweeps through her, his constant presence is exactly what she needs.
The tension seems to slip out of her in waves. When the bulk of it has passed, she loosens her grip on his hair. She doesn’t even remember grabbing it again.
His touches become lighter and lighter, until only a finger brushes gently over where his mouth had been. She’s still catching her breath and her heart pounds but her body is liquid, held together by who knows what.
He pauses. She thinks he is done completely but then he strokes her one last time and she shivers. The rest of her is still molten but the unexpected touch kindles a new need in her.
Again? She thinks. But it just ended!
Not for him though, she remembers as he leans back. She can see the bulge of him in his trousers and it is frankly ridiculous that he is still wearing clothes at all. Determined to remedy this, she moves forward to push them down his hips.
He helps her and then they throw the trousers somewhere on the floor. She pulls him back up so they are face to face again.
“Eager.” Jaime says fondly as he rests his index finger on her cheek. She feels heat warming her ears but, as with all his teasing, refuses to give him the upper hand.
“Yes.” Brienne says, resolute in her tone and the way she holds his gaze.
The teasing expression slips away and all that’s left is a raw wonder. He looks at her like she holds the world and his heart in her hands, which is coincidentally the same way she looks at him.
She kisses him but startles at the flavor. It’s salty. She leans into it tentatively, tasting herself on him. He opens his mouth to her and she lets herself explore. His poor tongue, she thinks as she slides against it, it’ll be worn out by the end.
“Brienne,” Jaime says as he rests his forehead on hers. Feeling him hard against her thigh, she can guess what he’s thinking of. Gods, she wants to give him everything, make him feel what she has.
His breath falters, when she reaches down to put her hand around him. His eyes close and his brow furrows, just a little bit, just there.
“It’s okay,” She says, “I’ve got you.”
Together, they guide him inside her. She wants him so much it’s as if she didn’t already just have him moments ago. Her breaths are shallow again and he moans against her neck. It’s easier than she thought it would be.
They don’t take long to establish a pace. They keep pulling themselves back, trying to go slow, to savor this, but that is beyond their reach now. Any other time, she would be careful with this thing between them but they are severely short on hours.
She wraps her legs around his back and pulls him close. He is precious to her. She wants them to stay here, in this bed, forever.
Jaime kisses her neck, open-mouthed and messy. She keeps his head there with her hand and screws her eyes shut, chasing down that aching hunger. He shifts his weight to free his hand from where it was tangled in her hair and they are so entwined that it moves both of them.
He slides it down and, yes, yes, that is exactly what she needs.
“I love you.” He says. “I love you.”
Words are distant things for her now. Luckily, he has enough for the both of them.
“I can’t concentrate sometimes when we train. There’s no one like you.”
“We should have been doing this for ages. Could’ve started at Harrenhal.”
“Brienne.”
“Love of my life.”
“I’ve dreamed of you.”
Fuck winter. Fuck the army of dead men. She’s living, now, this very moment. Her lungs fill, her heart pounds, her hips move in time with his. She loves and is loved in return. Nothing can take this away from her. Not even death.
Dying is only the end. It has no power in the shadow of thundering and prosperous life.
She kisses him.
“Jaime,” She says, cupping his face, and tips over the edge.
Her eyes close but she opens them again so that she can see when he falls too. He makes a sound which might have been her name and holds her desperately. She holds him back tight.
As they climb down from that peak, their movements slow until only their breathing breaks the stillness between them. His hand finds hers and he threads their fingers together. He squeezes and she squeezes back.
Her other hand finds his stump and she brings both parts of him to her mouth. She kisses one and then the other.
Don’t leave me, she wants to say. Don’t die.
“I love you.” She says instead.
“I love you too.”
“Yes,” she fights a smile, “You’ve made that quite well-known.”
He beams at her. “So have you.”
They untangle their bodies but stay close to each other. The sweat is starting to chill on their skin so they slip under the furs. Laying on their sides, they settle face to face. The pillow beneath Brienne’s head is soft and warm. Jaime is still holding her hand.
She doesn’t feel herself drifting off until Jaime kisses her cheek and she jolts back awake.
“Don’t fall asleep yet.” He says.
“I won’t.” She yawns.
She tries not to, but her eyes are too heavy. When she does fall asleep, she is warm, content, and in the arms of the man she loves.
It’s a nice way to go.
When it is all over, she doesn’t need to find him because he has been at her side the entire time. Her world expands again, as her mind loosens from battle haze, and she takes in the endless waves of dead that litter the ground. But there are figures moving amongst the corpses, the living bodies who are living people.
Their legs seem to give out at the same time and they lean back against the wall to keep themselves standing. They take deep breaths of air they never thought they’d breathe.
“Still up for that drink?” She says.
He laughs, a small and incredulous thing.
Jaime kisses her there, where they just spent hours fighting back-to-back, and it feels like the sun has returned.