Chapter Text
Brienne Tarth is staring at a penis.
Not a real one, mind you—gods—but one of the novelty straws Margaery was insisting they all drink out of tonight. They came in an assortment of lurid colors, with the sparkly gold one having been bestowed upon Brienne.
“For the guest of honor!” Margaery had declared, plopping the vulgar piece of plastic in Brienne’s gin and tonic.
Brienne had tried to hide her discomfort as her friends cheered in encouragement.
She’s not entirely sure how she let them talk her into this. When they’d originally pitched the idea of this party to her there had been many exciting, persuasive reasons, but now that she’s drinking from a phallic-shaped straw in her local bar, Brienne is struggling to remember any of them.
Across the table, Asha has just made Sansa laugh so hard tears are streaming down her face. Dacey and Ygritte are singing along loudly to the song coming out of the jukebox, while Arya jokingly covers her ears, an exaggerated look of pain on her face. Right. They’re why she’s doing this. She loves her friends, and sometimes love makes you do crazy things. Like agreeing to go out for a night on the town surrounded by a group of bawdy women (and Renly and Loras) decked out in pink feather boas and matching “BRIENNE’S BACH” shirts.
Keenly aware of the satin sash draped across her torso and the miniature veil atop her head, Brienne knows she doesn’t exactly fit the image of a demure bride-to-be—all six-foot-plus of her with a mostly-faded bruise from the boxing gym mottling her already freckle-mottled cheek. Her looks had been off-putting to Hyle at the beginning. She’d always been off-putting to men, so that hadn’t come as much of a surprise—no, the real surprise had come when he’d asked her out on a second date, in spite of it.
Trying to ignore the sour feeling creeping into her gut, Brienne sinks back into the booth and takes another sip of her cocktail. (“Cocktail, get it Brienne?” Renly had said, placing it in front of her at the start of the night; Loras had declared her subsequent blush “a ten out of ten on the Brienne embarrassment scale.”) She’s never been much of a drinker, nursing that single beverage for most of the night. But now she wishes the relatively small amount of alcohol in her bloodstream would get to work at helping her forget the reason they’re having this party in the first place.
Her friends mean well, obviously; she appreciates how they’ve always had a gift for coaxing her out of her shell when, if left to her own devices right now, she’d probably end up spending every free moment unloading on the punching bag at the gym and every night curled up in bed by the—very responsible, if perhaps a little geriatric for a woman in her twenties—hour of eight thirty.
So she’s grateful to them, even if this particular party is feeling more and more misguided the longer the evening stretches on.
“Shots!” Margaery declares, her voluminous chestnut ponytail bouncing about her head as she drops a fresh tray of overflowing shot glasses to the table.
Grateful, Brienne reminds herself, carefully picking out the glass with the least amount of tequila and downing it to another round of animated cheers from the rest of the table. The noise garners the attention of some of the other patrons, several amused smiles turning their way. That’s when she sees him.
Jaime Lannister looks the same as she remembers him; those mussed golden curls, that jawline sharp enough to cut glass. It feels safe now to admit to herself how handsome he’d always been. Still is, as he stands there leaning against the bar, his body angled toward her, all lean muscle and careless elegance. His piercing green eyes catch hers from across the crowded space, and he smirks.
“It’s game time,” Sansa says, pulling a photograph out of her bag. Brienne’s attention snaps back to her friend at the sight of it.
“Do you think our aim’s sufficiently impaired for a round of darts?”
“It’ll take a lot more than a few drinks to impair my aim, especially with this for a target.” Ygritte shoves back from her seat, snatching the picture from Sansa’s hand.
“I’ll join you in a few,” Brienne promises as her friends hop, moving en masse toward the dartboard. “I’m just going to finish my drink.”
She immediately tries to sink further into the booth as her friends bustle away—no easy feat, at her size—and chances another peek at the bar. There’s only an empty space where Jaime had been standing moments ago. Her eyes dart toward the door—did he leave? Was the sight of her really so disturbing that he’d rather hightail it out into the cold winter night than risk laying eyes on her again? Or, worse yet, had she imagined him? Hallucinating Jaime Lannister, on this night of all nights, feels a little too on the nose to unpack at the moment.
Annoyed, Brienne stabs at the remaining ice in her glass with her straw. Absurd, she thinks. I am being absurd. Jaime Lannister isn’t my friend. He’s barely even my acquaintance. They’d worked at the same company for a couple of years, butting heads every time they had a project together, until one day a little over a year ago when she’d showed up to the office to find out he’d resigned over the weekend, effective immediately. She’d only seen him one other time, since, and had tried very hard to pretend she hadn’t.
Until tonight.
Under completely ridiculous circumstances.
Of course.
Brienne’s sliding out of her seat before even really understanding what her plan is, when someone appears at the end of the booth, blocking her exit.
“Well,” Jaime drawls, “this is interesting.”
The bar is loud and yet she hears every word, his voice slithering down her spine. Something like glee is flitting inside Jaime’s eyes as he takes in the scene before him.
“It’s a bachelorette party,” she says, defiant, not even sure why she’s trying to justify herself to him.
His eyes flit to the top of her head. “I gathered.”
She yanks the ridiculous veil out of her hair, tossing it aside.
Jaime chuckles to himself, reaching at random for one of the half-empty glasses on the table. She remembers the straws at the exact moment Jaime gingerly lifts a hot pink penis out of the drink. He gives it a twirl.
She watches the straw as it spins, transfixed by the movement of his long fingers, remembering how she’d always found it odd how calloused they were, how incongruous they were from the rest of him; he was Tywin Lannister’s heir, always so slick and put together, the wealth practically oozing off of him—but his hands tell a different story. His hands are no stranger to a little roughness.
“All those years working together, and somehow I never realized Brienne Tarth had such…pornographic taste.”
Her cheeks begin to warm. Other parts, too.
She forces her eyes back to his face. “Those are not my doing,” she chokes out.
His lip curls. “Heaven forfend.”
Jaime doesn’t sit so much as pour himself onto the bench across from her, cat-like as he languidly stretches an arm over the back of the booth.
“So I guess congratulations are in order,” he says. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
Tensing, she opens her mouth to speak, the rehearsed speech she’s been giving over the past few weeks nearly spilling out before she manages to catch herself. She doesn’t owe Jaime Lannister anything.
“His name is Hyle,” she says instead.
“Kyle?” Jaime tilts his head, shouting over the music.
“Hyle,’” she shouts back.
He leans across the table. “Myles?”
“No, with an ‘h,’ it’s—” Brienne stops, clocking the grin lighting up his face. He’s messing with her. She rolls her eyes, half-annoyed, half-amused.
It was like this when they worked together, too. Always finding something to disagree about, arguing for the sake of arguing. She’d leave the office at night with her blood pounding, making a beeline straight to Goodwin’s boxing gym, picturing Jaime’s face on the punching bag until her frustrations evened out to a more manageable level.
And despite all of that, it was the strangest thing—they actually made a good team. Somehow every project they worked on together was a resounding success. At the time, Brienne had chalked it up to her dedication and professionalism. But after his abrupt resignation, she found herself realizing how much she’d come to value his input.
Which was confusing, because up until the day he left she’d been so sure she hated him.
Things only became more confusing when, two months later, she walked into a bar nothing like this one, and found him waiting.
She and Hyle had been going through a rough patch—not their first—and without any real intent, Brienne found herself pausing over the personal columns as she flipped through the newspaper. There was something so charming about them, so analog, that she found herself beginning to read them.
The whole concept felt very quaint. Safe. It wasn’t like she was going to cheat on Hyle; she wasn’t going to actually reply to anyone’s letter. She was only curious; it was just idle entertainment, hardly any different than watching a reality dating show.
Until one day, when Hyle had blown her off for the third time that week, she sat down with the paper and came across a letter that felt like it had been written specifically for her.
I’m looking for someone who likes the quiet of early mornings, listening to the world slowly coming alive. Someone who loves the sound of waves crashing against rocky cliffs, who doesn’t mind the spray of the ocean or getting caught in the rain. Someone who will understand (or maybe even join me?) when I need to let off steam at the boxing gym. Who knows that even though we’ll argue, we won’t ever mean it. We’ll match wits, and we’ll match dreams, and we’ll always be finding something new about each other to fall in love with. I know you’re out there. Come escape with me.
How could a complete stranger have touched her so deeply, so thoroughly? She sat there long after reading it, heart beating out of her chest and hands shaking, feeling like she’d somehow been truly seen for the first time in her life.
And so Brienne allowed herself to wonder if there was something more out there. Someone more.
She responded to the letter before she could second-guess herself, writing of her childhood on the island of Tarth, her love of sailing under the island’s soaring cliffs, how much she loved the smell of the rain blowing in on a summer storm. She wrote about how she’d joined a boxing gym when she moved to the mainland, how learning to fight had helped grow her confidence in unexpected ways. I didn’t know I’d been looking for you until I read your letter, she wrote, and suggested a time and place to meet.
When she’d walked into the restaurant a few days later she found not prince charming waiting for her but her professional nemesis, the man she despised—Jaime Lannister.
Their eyes met, her own shocked recognition mirrored on his face.
It wasn’t even until she’d seen him, sitting there alone at the bar, that she realized how much she’d actually missed him. And that was a disturbing enough revelation to send her spinning directly back out the door, fleeing before he could say anything, feeling like her world had just slipped a little bit off its axis.
Surely the Jaime she knew from work would have never been so desperate as to submit a letter to the personal column. He may have been recently divorced, but he was still Jaime Lannister. His family was rich, and powerful, and every time he and Brienne were forced to attend a gala for work women were practically throwing themselves at him.
The Jaime she knew professionally was sharp-edged and acerbic—sometimes cruel, often cutthroat. But the man in that letter showed a side to him she’d never known existed. He was…poetic. Romantic. The man in that letter was sure of what he wanted, and Brienne had wanted the same things.
Apparently, what she wanted was Jaime Lannister.
She didn’t know what to do with that.
So she went home and reconciled with Hyle, accepted first his apology and a few weeks later his proposal, and tried to forget all about her old coworker.
Which is proving difficult at the moment, what with him sitting so close she can smell his aftershave even through the alcohol-thick haze of the bar. The scent is faint, but so familiar from so many meetings and late nights working that she almost feels dizzy from the flood of memories assaulting her senses.
Because whether she wants to admit it or not, his letter changed something. It planted a little seed of wanting in her, and it had grown steadily no matter how often she’d tried to hack it away.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a miserable bride-to-be,” Jaime remarks, breaking through the haze of memory.
This is the Jaime she remembers—snarky, arrogant and perceptive, immediately honing in on which of her buttons to press. Whatever weird feelings his letter might have stirred shouldn’t matter.
“I wasn’t miserable until you showed up,” Brienne mutters.
“Liar,” he says, nostrils flaring. “I’ve been watching you for the past forty-five minutes, you were miserable long before I came over.”
Inexplicably, her pulse quickens—he was watching her?
“Why do you care, anyway?”
“I just thought…”
Jaime stares at her for a long moment, and she knows he can see right through her bravado. Her skin prickles; it’s like he can see straight to her soul.
His smile falters, the muscles around his eyes softening.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asks quietly.
Brienne doesn’t say anything.
Jaime leans a little closer; she angles her ear towards his mouth. His breath tickles the side of her face and she barely represses a shiver before he says, “Don’t you want to escape?”
Come escape with me. The words from his letter echo in her mind like a bell, sweet and clear.
“Okay,” she hears herself say. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”