Chapter Text
Back in the North, she’d thought him dead for a moon. From exposure to execution, she’d ruminate on a dozen ways he would expire, and then her dreams would conjure up twice as many, driving her from bed. Come dawn, she’d rise from her seat by the cooling hearth to attend to the day’s duties, nauseous from lack of sleep until the afternoon drill got her blood moving.
Then, Jon Snow’s raven had reported how the city and its fates had fallen. King’s Landing half destroyed while its bells were tolling for mercy, a third or more of its population perished with as little as sooty silhouettes left behind. One mad queen detained after her supposed victory speech, the other surrendered alongside her twin brother when they emerged from the rubble beneath the Red Keep.
Jon had called for further assistance from across the continent to determine the future of the city – and that of the realm, by way of justice for Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen.
Brienne had left immediately.
A travelling guard for Sansa, their arms and armour had needed to be arranged. She’d needed to ask Podrick to pack their travel bags, and she’d needed to enquire about road provisions, and she’d needed to bring her spare boots to be resoled.
She’d needed to duck behind the broken tower and curl into the cold palms of her leather gloves, bent half to contain a keen crouched somewhere beyond her lungs.
***
Jon Snow, hollow and drawn, receives them in King’s Landing, laying out the conundrum of finding justice after a battle that had left only a reluctant coalition of survivors instead of triumphant victors. Northern looters and Southern heroes. City guard who have violated smallfolk women they were once sworn to protect. Smugglers who shielded a cave full of orphaned children. A regent who has held a city hostage and a liberating conqueror who has beat her to burning it to the ground.
Standing behind Sansa, Brienne hears about Jaime demanding punishment in kind with the two detained queens; punishment the impromptu council refused to dole out.
Lannister officers have reported that it was Jaime who ordered the bells be rung, and the smallfolk be evacuated wherever possible. He is also one of the few left who had lived at court during the past reign; an invaluable asset for rebuilding, which Jon is determined to do.
Sansa bristles.
“When a man wants punishment this badly, I’ve found it best not to give him what he wants.” Jon’s gaze slides over Sansa’s shoulder to Brienne, full of that aged compassion of his. She’s too tired to even be annoyed anymore.
Later that day, she sees Jaime herself, at a distance, across a shoal of debris. Perhaps a 20 second sprint across uneven ground in armour. He’s with his brother and Ser Davos, intent on supervising a slow but steady stream of soldiers emerging from a cellar to carefully place jars of wildfire in a flat wagon filled with sand. The sight pulls at her, like the chest-deep tide of the sea, beyond the breakers.
His back is turned – she cannot see the nape of his neck at this distance, not truly, but she can feel it under her fingertips – so it is Tyrion who marks her when a cloud blocks the sun in his eyes, and slowly, almost hesitantly, raises a hand to tap Jaime’s hip.
She shrinks back into the Northern ranks before he can turn around, and after a day of setting up their camp and arranging the necessary protections for Sansa, sleep rolls over her, sound and deep.
For a sennight, she rises each morning with the resolve to go find him alone, and returns each night to her cot not having found the time.
They find the back moat of Maegor’s holdfast turned into a body pit of servants. The smell of old decay transports her back to the battle in Winterfell.
She dreams of Tarth, likely some childish retreat reaction to the destruction that surrounds her during the day. The tide keeps pulling and pushing, low in her abdomen, gentle but persistent.
In councils, Jaime is laconically efficient whenever he’s called to task. Anytime she looks his way, he is already watching.
A note with news of the Stormlands is delivered to her one night by Ser Addam Marbrand of the Westerlands, who lingers until she raises a silent eyebrow at him.
“He knows where to find me,” she tells his retreating back.
Ser Addam halts, and turns back to her with some puzzled amusement tugging at his eyes. “Hm. The White Tower is likewise hard to miss, isn’t it?”
Ah. “Is that why you and yours have been guarding its only remaining exit from sundown to sunrise?”
He inclines his head. “Ser.”
Still, the following days are filled with duty, and accomplishing anything is further complicated by the realm‘s factions and delegations having had to appropriate whatever defensible and stable structures were left in the city, adding hours of travel between quarters to each day. She grows more weary with the end of each day, and aches in her back and hip that normally pass by the morning now remain lodged there.
Today, she has taken Podrick to call at a number of smaller command centres across the Red Keep to round up a few men for food distribution near the ruined sept, when a fragment of a sentence drifts down the corridor to what used to be Margaery Tyrell‘s chambers.
„– never fucked a queen before.“
Brienne freezes in her tracks, and realises they’ve not come across any additional men in this wing. She signals for Pod to follow quietly, and heads towards the voice.
In private, Sansa has outright forbidden her from involving herself in any aspect of guarding Cersei Lannister. At the time, the order had felt like warm shame trickling down her collar.
“My Lady, we are desperately short of capable men, and I can assure you I am more than capable to do my part in this task, as well.” Brienne had steeled herself against Sansa’s flinty resolve, fixing her with her eyes across the impromptu desk. However, her lady had slackened, and reached for her hand.
“I don’t want you anywhere near her. Please.”
Disobeying Sansa’s orders will be bad enough; ignoring her fears puts a knot in Brienne’s stomach.
A lone guard comes into view, pressed up against the hastily forged iron gate set into the hall when the once luxurious guest chambers were turned into a holding cell. Brienne slides along, keeping close to the wall.
„’course you’re not the queen anymore, are you?” He is fumbling for the keys at his belt. Gyrates obscenely against the bars as he inserts them into the lock. “But don’t you worry, you bitch. Memory will serve.”
The gate opens an inch before Brienne knocks him into it from behind, and the lock slams back into place. In the bare room beyond, Cersei stands ramrod straight, shoulders tense, one hand fisted into her skirt. Brienne presses the man’s face in between the bars to grasp and discard his blade.
The clatter seems to have roused Cersei and she inches closer, smoothly. The tilt of her head is idle, but her eyes are hungry on Brienne’s arm across the erstwhile guard’s nape, on the dagger she has pulled from his belt and poised against his kidney. Brienne shoves the man into Pod’s hold. Cersei’s eyes go to the keys still in the lock, but Brienne wedges the gate shut with her boot, bars and locks it, then steps back swiftly to gather, seething at the negligence.
“Take him to the cells by the holdfast, get his name, and tell them I demand two immediate replacements. People who hail from outside the city. I’ll hold until you’re back.”
Brienne takes another step back, and turns her back to Cersei’s cell. Pod throws one more look down the corridor towards her and then hustles his charge down the stairs.
She can feel Cersei’s eyes roving over her; wonders for a moment whether she’s positioned herself well out of reach. Which is ridiculous. The woman is the height of two turnip sacks and the weight of one. There is absolutely nothing Cersei Lannister can do to harm her. Not anymore.
“I was wondering when you would be coming to gloat.”
It’s a very weak opening to engage her. Insulting, almost.
“I suppose you want me to thank you. Supplicate over your heroic intervention.”
Clipped consonants leap across a nasal base note of condescension.
“So noble of you. I’m afraid you’re two decades late to protecting my gentle maiden’s heart. Force is how heirs are made. Every day, all over the realm, fists and strangleholds part thighs to make way for the next great lord.”
It’s a queer family habit. They all wield cynicism like a dagger to divine weaknesses from revulsion. A sharp blade that keeps everybody well out of range. The move becomes transparent once you’ve made yourself look closer instead of away, and seen it two or three times.
“Of course, you wouldn’t know about those particular womanly ways, would you? Couldn’t give you away for a whole island.”
By the undulating sound of her voice, she's started moving about her cell, prowling the shrunken expanse of what remains of her kingdom, singed bare.
“There was a big scramble over whose heirs I would bring forward, oh yes. I saw them sometimes, come to survey the goods. They never spent that much time with me before retreating to father’s solars over the details, thank the gods.”
She recalls the simmering terror of awaiting Ronnet Connington’s arrival. Tarth had had trade ties with house Caron for generations, it was a name she’d heard over and over growing up. As a girl, there was at least some continuity in her life heading that way.
She’d had to read up on the Conningtons in the library. She was to be entirely removed from what was familiar, her only duty to please a stranger when she’d already become aware there was little people found pleasing about herself. Her scalp had hurt so badly from the tight braids the chamber maids had put her in.
It had taken the yard for her to find the fury, to funnel it into the meeting with her third and final betrothal.
“So easily led by their cocks. All of them.”
It shifts something inside of her, sets her ears ringing and her temples prickling.
A beautiful girl. Fierce, and brilliant, Jaime had said, one night in the belly of a blizzard.
Cersei’s father, her suitors, had wanted the beauty, and to get at it they’d buffed and braided away that brilliance. Laughed at the fierceness. Pressed embroidery needles into the clenched fists, forced smiles onto the clenched jaw.
“That’s why you grasped the sword hilt, wasn’t it? Because no one cared for you to grasp their cock?”
She flinches at hearing her own thoughts thrown back at her, the same but vastly different. Cersei mistakes it for an opening. A leer creeps into her performance.
“I can picture it quite well. A huge, ugly little thing, covered in dirt, slapping boys around with a sword instead of smiles, hair gone to absolute abandon and disaster under helms that those same boys liked to piss in, most like.”
There’s too much bravado. The blade is twirled too much, distracting from a weakness.
She turns to look at Jaime’s sister. “You sound quite jealous.”
Cersei scoffs. One sardonic corner of her mouth rises, and so do the hairs on Brienne’s wrist, because there is a flash of Jaime, brilliant and forceful and identical.
“I’m not you,” Cersei hisses, disdainful. “Not a big brute unfavoured by the gods who needs to carve her way through the world.”
“But you wanted to be.”
And there’s the fury, hot across her beautiful face.
“Who would want to be like you–” snarling, but Brienne reaches out her hand towards the fangs, regardless. Not for the first time.
“I could teach you.” Oh, it’s ridiculous. She can’t. She couldn’t have, not in this world. But in another, perhaps. “True, not a longsword – your proportions. But a dagger. A mallet and a shield.”
“You are mad. Daft and mad.”
It’s fun. It is so fun, a duell, twirling, dodging, exposing openings. A game.
“Perhaps. But I am free.”
It’s Cersei’s turn to flinch, and the momentum is gone. It is no longer fun, sudden and final. It could have been fun. In a different world.
Cersei straightens, her hands braced against the gate.
“Free. And strong. And all alone.” Each word is placed between them with great deliberation. “I’ve never been alone, not for a single heartbeat.”
She imagines she hasn’t been, between her family and bed mates and court. Not alone. Certainly lonely. She knows the texture of it.
“But you love him.” Triumph blossoms across Cersei’s face. There is no question where the conversation has pivoted. It is exactly like it was at the wedding, years ago.
So much has changed.
“Yes.”
“Oh, you poor, pathe–”
“And he loves me.” He does.
“You are nothing,” Cersei smiles. “We shared a womb. We are one flesh. He is mine, heart and body, he always has been. He was made for me. He lives and breathes and fights and kills. For me. There is no one else. No one else matters.”
The words fill her with sorrow. For Jaime, who had reached out for a hand and met a shackle coming around his wrist. Perhaps even for Cersei, who had seen everything the world had taken from her in her brother, and decided to claw it back by all means necessary. It must show, that sorrow, because Cersei recoils and lashes out.
“He’ll die without me. He’ll die with me”
She thinks of Jaime, on his own.
Working to rebuild the city. Drinking with his brother in Wintertown. How his face would go through fifteen different expressions in conversation with Tormund Giantsbane. The incredulous and ecstatic laughter that burst forth one morning when he’d got his hand caught clearing debris and Bran Stark, in passing, had told him to “Walk it off, Ser Jaime”.
Jaime, knighting her. Jaime, taking Riverrun without bloodshed. Jaime, reforging the blade of his father’s ambition as a tool for the Stark girls’ salvation. Jaime, in the bear pit. Jaime, in Harrenhall. Jaime, in their bed, warm and heavy, asking her to tell him about Tarth.
“No, Cersei.”
Footsteps on the stairs, a group. Podrick returned with the two fresh guards. Brienne turns towards the sound, just in time to see Sansa and Jaime, abreast and bickering, spilling onto the landing.