Prompt generator: Braime A3 B Quiet Isle C6 💖
Okay, so we’ve got “forehead kisses”, “quiet isle”, and “for the first time”.
It ended up longer than I expected, so under the cut:
She was finally asleep. It was the only reason he did it. But he kept thinking about it afterward, and he felt the same embarrassment he would have felt if she had been awake for it. He relived it, remembered it. The unthinking way he used his left hand, still shaking, to brush her sweat-lank hair away from her face. The way he bent and kissed her on the forehead. The feel of his lips against her skin. It had been newly scrubbed clean, but still he thought he could taste the blood that had been there before. He couldn’t understand the impulse. Why he had done it.
She betrayed him. Nearly led him to his death. Immediately tried to fall on her own sword for him, because of course it was the life of the boy that she was willing to bargain with Jaime’s for, and of course even feverish and sick and half-dead she thought she could fight her way out. Jaime would have probably been the same, at her age, though he’d have been a bit more clever about it. Wouldn’t have ended up half so full of holes.
He had still been angry when they escaped from the remains of Stoneheart’s followers. The boy and that hedge knight had both been concerned for Brienne in a way that Jaime couldn’t be. Not until Brienne had fallen from her horse. He’d gone away inside himself for most of the ride before that, and so he hadn’t noticed her swaying, losing her grip on herself. Not until she’d fallen.
She was a big woman, Brienne. Broader and taller than him both, and she made a fearful sight, flopping from her saddle so gracelessly, hitting the ground with such a thud. It shook him awake, and he had not been able to retreat within himself since. A woman who looked like a statue should not be able to fall like that. But that was stupid. Of course she could.
Then it had all been panic, and guilt, and cold fury. Jaime was at his best when he was feeling things. He knew that. Unable to escape inside himself, he’d been all efficiency, so that even Hunt followed his lead without question.
The Elder Brother tried to set Jaime up in a separate house, going on at length about things like purity and honor and innocence, and it made Jaime sick. She’s not an innocent, he wanted to say. She does not have honor. She betrayed me. She struck her former lady’s head from her neck. Are you so concerned with her purity now? What does it matter, when her soul will rot like mine in time? What good is her maidenhead? It has not protected her. I have been a stain on her already.
He didn’t say those things, though there was an angry part of him that wanted to. This beast raising its head within him and trying to make him speak. When he did tell the Elder Brother to go fuck himself, it was as kindly as he’d ever said anything. He did not curse or rage. He did not pull out his sword and threaten the man.
Lady Brienne is my charge, and I will not be parted from her, he had said simply, and the Elder Brother had nodded, and that had been that.
He’d been given a bedroll to lay out on the floor. Some of the brothers brought food with their medicine and bandages, and Jaime had helped them quietly. Podrick had wept so furiously over Brienne’s insensible mumblings that Jaime had eventually forced him outside to bother Hunt. Brienne did not wake. The brothers managed to rouse her enough to feed her some broth and fruit, but still she was not fully there, and she did not fully see them. When she finally fell into a more peaceful sleep, the brothers took their leave, and then it was just him. Just Jaime. Left to watch.
The wound on her cheek still festered. It had been cleaned and tended to by the Elder Brother, but still the smell of those old bandages and that old flesh lingered, and Jaime felt unmoored, standing by Brienne’s side. It made him think of another recent vigil. The smell of it. Tommen’s watering eyes and Cersei’s ire. It made him think of that dream he’d had. The one where his mother had cried. Jaime had never been very good at ordering his feelings, but there was a connection there that made his insides squirm.
That was when he sat on the edge of her bed, and leant down, and kissed her on the forehead. And after, he lay in the bedroll on the floor and hated himself for it. For all of it.
He remembered Brienne as he first met her. Strong, resolute. Hating him and everything he stood for. He remembered her as she was when she rode into his camp and asked him to follow her. Shrunken. Wretched. He sent her out into the world to rescue Sansa Stark. For his honor. He could still taste the blood on his lips from the skin of her forehead. Have I ever cared for anything without destroying it?
prompt generator meme thing
