Chapter Text
The siege was over.
The Lannisters and Freys were taking control of Riverrun.
And Brienne was still in the castle somewhere.
Jaime refused to run. If he did, it would draw the more obsequious of his men to him like large metal moths to the flame that was the chance to win the favor of their one-handed commander. He kept his expression level, and he walked as quickly as he dared past his men and through the underbelly of Riverrun as the Lannister and Frey armies rounded up the Tully household in the courtyard of the castle above. The tunnel beneath was quieter than the courtyard had been, and the sound faded further as Jaime followed it. It seemed the most likely place to find her; the Blackfish had not been in the courtyard to greet them, and it would be so very Brienne, to try and help the man escape.
Surely she can’t be so much a fool. But of course she could. He knew she was.
There were shouts from deeper in the tunnel. A clash of swords, growing louder, then going quiet quickly. His stomach tightened. So much for a peaceful surrender. He checked to make sure that none of his men had followed him, and the tunnel was empty behind him. He broke into a jog.
He needed Brienne to be safely away. The Lannister forces were distracted with ensuring the compliance of the hostages, but it wouldn’t take long for more men to come down this way and block off the tunnels to prevent escape. He couldn’t let her linger. He knew that she would linger if Tully gave some fool, impassioned speech about honor and duty, because Brienne of Tarth was too easy to sway with pretty words like those. She would be moved by the old man’s courage, and she would be killed by the old man’s courage. Jaime could not allow it.
He scarcely understood why he was so determined to save her. He had warned her. He had all but begged her in his tent, their eyes locked as they spoke about the possibility of battle, but of course she was still here. She never listened to him. Even after they formed something of a respect for each other on the road from Harrenhal, she was always so sure she knew better than him. Always so suspicious of every well-intentioned piece of advice or comfort he tried to offer. She had stopped calling him Kingslayer eventually. Offered him the title of Ser Jaime, and seemed to recognize how much it meant to him. She believed too much in his goodness, and she trusted him more than she should have. Still. She had her own ideas of honor, and they would not allow her to listen to him when it counted the most. And it all came to this: Brienne very honorably getting herself caught in a siege she should be far away from.
And Jaime, scrambling through a dimly lit tunnel, desperately trying to clean up the mess.
The mess. Jaime Lannister was the mess. The Lannisters and the Freys, snatching the ancestral home of the Tullys from the fucking Blackfish: a man who had long been a hero of Jaime’s. How had it gotten to this point? How had Jaime allowed it to get to this point? He lost his sword hand and returned to Kings Landing to find that he had lost a lot more than just the five fingers and the palm to hold a blade in. He thought he could make something of it. Use it as a reason to be better. Become again the boy who had worshipped Brynden Tully and who had dreamed of knighthood and all it entailed. Protecting the innocent instead of solely extending his efforts to shield his guilty family from the consequences of their choices. Meeting Brienne had made him remember a time before Kingslayer. It made him want to try. Why had he stopped?
Cersei, he knew. It all came back to love. It always had, with him. It just felt more disappointing this time. He had been so sure that he could change. Maybe that had been naïve. Maybe a man like him couldn’t change.
Perhaps he was always fated to grow into a monster, no matter what the boy he was had wanted him to be.
He increased his pace and ducked his head past a wooden beam. The tunnel grew slightly wider, though it grew no taller. The walls became rough-hewn rock. The torches were more spread out, and darkness yawned between them. There was a dead man quite suddenly at his feet, in the shadow. Lannister armor. Another up ahead. Jaime tripped past them, his golden hand scraping along the rock wall as he placed it there for balance. He stumbled as the shadows messed with his perception. There was another dead man, just ahead. He wondered if the blades had been driven home by Brienne or the Blackfish. It could have been either. He had seen Brienne take down three men before. She made it look as simple as it had once been for him, before he lost his hand and more than half of the skill that had come with it.
She really was a remarkable woman, for all she was also a stubborn fool.
He rounded a corner, and at last he saw her. She looked bigger than ever in this small, narrow space. Her frame filled the tunnel the same way it had filled his tent, leaving it feeling empty when she had gone. She was speaking to the Blackfish. Her voice was too low to hear, but the urgency was obvious. She was tugging on his arm. The insane woman was trying to get him to abandon the castle. Jaime sighed, a performative exhalation that carried down to them. They both looked in his direction. Brienne’s expression was impassive, but he could see the surprise in her features. Surprise, and wariness, too. She eyed his left hand near his sword.
Honor compels me to fight for Sansa’s kin, she had said in the tent, and Jaime could see the way her own words were haunting her now. To fight you.
Jaime had no intention of drawing his blade, but Brienne stepped forward until she was fully in front of Brynden Tully. She pulled her sword from its scabbard. Oathkeeper, he thought. And she means to keep my oaths for me, if I’m too much a Lannister to keep them myself. Even if it means running a sword through my gut.
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
“Ser Jaime, please,” she said, and she set her stance wider.
“I will not surrender,” the Blackfish said at the same moment.
“I was speaking to the lady,” Jaime replied. He was trying for sarcastic, trying to pretend that the daggers the Blackfish glared in his direction weren’t piercing. There was sweat on his brow; it trickled down his temple. He dared not wipe it away. “Brienne, I can’t let you take him.”
“And I can’t let you stop me,” Brienne replied. “I told you it might come to this.”
Jaime continued to move closer. He still didn’t draw his sword, but he kept his hand on it, just in case. In case of what, exactly? Did he really think he could draw against Brienne?
Perhaps he could, if it came to it. He’d like at least to die with sword in hand, if only to spare the poor girl the trauma of striking down an unarmed man she once may have thought of fondly, despite all his many faults.
“And I told you that I hoped it wouldn’t,” he said softly. Brienne’s sword did not waver, but her expression did. He couldn’t look away from her eyes.
“It doesn’t have to,” she said. It was almost a whisper.
“My lady,” the Blackfish warned her gently, still close behind her. “We must go.”
“Uncle.”
Jaime’s eyes left Brienne’s for long enough to see the figure that appeared in the tunnel behind her. It was impossible, yet Jaime would know the boy anywhere. He spent a year chained up in the Stark camp, visited periodically by the King in the North with his great grey beast beside him. Jaime had done his best to comfort Brienne when they received word on the road that the idiot boy had died with his mother and wife at that cursed wedding, but he hadn’t exactly mourned the loss himself. He had heard tales from the Freys. Bragging, endless tales about cutting the boy’s head from his body and sewing his wolf’s on in its place. The idea made Joffrey laugh and Tywin and Cersei smile and Tyrion wince while Jaime tried to think of nicer things so he didn’t have to imagine it.
“No,” he said, forgetting to be calm or wry or amused or whatever it was he was trying to achieve here. “Brienne…”
He could almost hear the songs already. The Return of the Wolf. The Young Wolf Rises. Triumphant stories of the boy who never lost a battle but who lost the war for love, born again to take revenge. Sentiment was already firmly turned against the Lannisters. Cersei may not have wanted to hear it, but Tommen held to his throne only through what remained of the realm’s fear of their father. When the smallfolk heard that Robb Stark was still alive despite all the Lannisters had done…
“Get in the boat,” Brienne said over her shoulder.
“We can’t wait forever,” Robb warned her. Jaime couldn’t stop looking at him, hoping to see an illusion. A trick. This was some Tully cousin they hoped to use as a decoy. Some scheme to win favor in the war the Starks were fighting against the Boltons.
No. Stark turned his poisonous glare in Jaime’s direction, and it was him. He was so much his mother and father at once. Ned looking at him, judgement in his gaze, as Jaime sat on the throne with Aerys dead at his feet. Catelyn trembling with fury, staring down at him, after he told her that he had pushed her son from that tower. The hatred and the judgement and the disdain were nothing new, but it was perhaps more potent now, with Brienne standing between them.
“It won’t take long,” Brienne said, and both men vanished into the darkness behind her. Jaime had begun to advance again, but he stopped when she spoke the words. He wanted to feel betrayed. He wanted to say “Brienne” in a small, hurt voice, like a much younger man. A child asking for answers the Septon couldn’t give. “Why?”
“I must warn you I’ve been practicing,” he said instead. Brienne’s eyes closed for more than a blink, a half-second to center herself, but then they opened again, made glimmering and orange by the torchlight. He used to think it was funny that she could be so much a maiden in the body she had been given. A soft heart beneath all those muscles and her massive height. Some cruelty of the gods made her fall in love with poor, dead Renly, and they made her too much man for most but not man enough to secure the heart of the one she wanted. He didn’t think it was funny anymore.
“As have I,” she said. Her maiden’s heart is breaking. The thought came unbidden, and Jaime shoved it aside. He stepped closer. His left hand still held his sword, but still he did not draw it. She met his eyes, and her chin raised as she looked at him.
“You’d do it, wouldn’t you?” he asked. He could hear the Blackfish barking orders at someone down at the water’s edge. They meant to make their escape on a boat, then. He suddenly wanted her on it. Away from him. Take the bloody Stark boy and go, he wanted to sneer, but he didn’t. When he did speak, his voice was very quiet. He felt oddly short of breath. Removed. “For the Starks, you would strike me down. Kill me as you’re supposed to have killed Renly.”
If that was too close an acknowledgement of her care for him, Brienne didn’t show it. She didn’t get defensive as he thought she would. Her maiden’s heart might be breaking, but her warrior’s facade did not crack.
“I didn’t kill Renly,” she said. “Stannis did that. And I killed Stannis.”
A boast from anyone else. From her, it was a warning. A reminder, too, that he had struggled to fight her even when he was whole—the irons and the year of captivity had been bad, but they weren’t a missing sword hand. If he tried to fight her now, she would cut through him like wet sand. The best he could hope for would be delaying the inevitable until his men could come to his aid, but then he would have to take her in, and Cersei would…
No. He released the hilt of his sword, and he took a demonstrative step back.
“You would have done it,” he said. Brienne slid Oathkeeper back into place with a look that was mingled fear and relief at once.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good,” he replied. “Now go. Before my men realize you’ve taken my most valuable political prisoner and one we didn’t even know existed.”
There was still a glimmer in Brienne’s eyes as she nodded and turned to go. He also caught the slight edge of a smile. The smallest upturn of her lips. She thought he had done a good and honorable thing, of course. She used to think the worst of him beyond all rationality, and now it seemed to be the opposite. Despite all evidence, she was too quick to assume his honor and his good intentions. If only his sister’s affections were so easy to win over with a few gifts.
He followed her at a distance. Brienne settled into the boat. Her squire was there already, preparing to row. At least she had listened to Jaime about that. The Blackfish and Robb Stark were in the boat as well, camouflaged in Tully-blue cloaks that looked black in the darkness.
If Cersei knew what Jaime had let slip away…
He raised his golden hand when Brienne turned back to look, when they had already begun to melt away into the fog. Brienne hesitated, but then she raised her hand as well. He stood and watched until he could no longer see them.
Next time, he wouldn’t be so lucky. Cersei was always calling him a fool, and perhaps she was right. He was a fool to think he could simply meet Brienne of Tarth as friends. The honorable woman and her absurd fondness for the oathbreaker. As long as he continued to stand against the family she had sworn herself to, she would continue to stand against him.
It would have destroyed her to kill him, but she would have done it, and he would have deserved it. Perhaps she wouldn’t have felt honorable to do it, but the rest of the world would have cheered her. The Kingslayer slayed at last by a woman as virtuous as she was ugly. The songs would last for a thousand years, and the singers would never know how either of them truly felt for each other. How could they? He and Brienne hardly understood themselves.
He returned to his men. He said nothing of Brienne, nor of the Blackfish. He accepted the news of Tully’s apparent escape with an incline of his head and some distracted comment about Tully’s slyness. When they asked if they should go after him, Jaime shook his head and said something about not wanting to waste resources on one old knight. He sent for Bronn, instead, because Bronn was the only one he could trust, terrifying as that was. Brienne would need horses and provisions if she was going to make it back north in time to assist her lady.
In the morning, he and his army would begin the return trip towards Kings Landing. Towards Cersei. And Jaime would pretend that he was as eager to get back to her as he had been only hours ago.