Chapter Text
Brienne took a couple deep, calming breaths as she stood in front of Margaery’s small bungalow. Her eyes burned, all her limbs felt heavy, and her knuckles ached.
Despite the rage and sadness that was clawing at her periphery, Brienne was pretty proud of herself. She was proud of the fact that she hadn’t just decided to cancel, hadn’t just decided to crawl back home, hadn’t just decided to curl up under her blanket, and hadn’t just decided to cry until her eyes swelled up to the point where they would add on to the plethora of already mismatched features on her face.
It didn’t mean that she didn’t want to do all those things, that her body wasn’t screaming at her to just turn around and find some solitude where she could just wallow in her misery before going back to pretending like the world didn’t affect her; that she didn’t hurt like a knife was lancing again and again through her heart.
But she knew solitude wasn’t what she needed right now.
When she pressed the doorbell and heard the familiar tinkling chime, she knew with certainty that this was what she needed. She needed her friends, her family, and people she trusted more than anything.
The front door slowly opened and Margaery stared out at Brienne with a surprised look on her pretty face, “We weren’t expecting you until later, I thought you had plans—”
“No. No plans,” Brienne said as she pushed past Margaery, avoiding eye contact, and into her home. She tried to ignore the startled look that Margaery threw Sansa at Brienne’s decidedly uncharacteristic rudeness and instead dropped her groceries on the nearest flat surface. She was already feeling bad enough as it was and it was causing her to do things that were making her feel even worse, so why was she doing them? But she couldn’t just stand out there either with her lie-not-a-lie, not being able to even so much as look the beautiful, desirable, Margaery in the face, so she had pushed and now regretted her actions. Brienne bit down harshly on her bottom lip, recognizing she was spiralling, and so sputtered meekly, “I got us ice cream.”
Sansa carefully and slowly pattered over to the table where Brienne stood, the redhead already dressed in her pink flannel pajamas and teddy wolf slippers, and tried to peer into the bags. However, Brienne was already pulling the contents out with military-like fervour. “Please, tell me you got more than just that low fat, fruity, frozen yogurt stuff you force yourself to eat.”
Brienne shook her head, “I got…” she slammed down several one liter tubs of ice cream, “double cream, full fat, chocolatey chunk ice cream with the caramel swirls.”
“What?” Margaery exclaimed as she also sidled up to the table.
Brienne took a deep breath in and wrung the cloth handles of the bags around her too big hands, “And I want to watch Gone Girl.”
Margaery and Sansa’s heads snapped up from staring at the five giant tubs of ice cream as suddenly context was given to Brienne’s behaviour. There was only ever one reason that any of them demanded to watch Gone Girl. It was the one good thing about Brienne’s brief and quite frankly disappointing relationship with Hyle Hunt the cunt; he had started one hell of a tradition. “Oh, Brienne…”
Brienne waved her friends away, keeping her gaze on the ground. “Movie first. Talk later.” She was only just holding back her tears now.
Sansa nodded, took Brienne’s arm gently in her hands and led her over to the couch in front of the large flat screen TV in Margaery’s living room. She then pulled Margaery’s old rose patterned quilt off the back of her couch and swung it over her and Brienne’s shoulders before she tucked herself into Brienne’s side and pulled her to sit down. “Time to watch Amerei wreck Nicol’s life,” Sansa murmured soothingly, as she gave Brienne a tight squeeze around the waist. Brienne nuzzled into her friend’s hair and nodded, letting one tear slip from the corner of her eye.
“Fuck the cool girl,” Margaery declared as she appeared before them with three of the tubs of ice cream, three spoons, and three very full glasses of red wine at the ready. Brienne grabbed a tub and a spoon and tried to look up at Margaery’s concerned face, but found that she still couldn’t. She knew she was being absurd but couldn’t help herself. Sansa grabbed the controller and navigated through Margaery’s saved movies until she found the old film. Margaery found her place on Brienne’s other side and tucked herself under Brienne’s arm before she ripped open her tub of ice cream. “Cheers girls.”
Brienne and Sansa held up their own open tubs of ice cream and tapped it against Margaery’s, “Cheers.”
“I will never get over how good Dany was in that role,” Sansa grinned around the spoon in her mouth as the credits began to play. She hit the stop button on the remote and Margaery’s screen went back to the main menu.
“Every single time I see that fucking look on Daario’s face I am transported back in time to the sweet, sweet memory of you breaking up with Hyle Hunt,” Margaery grinned as she rested her chin on Brienne’s shoulder and fluffed at Brienne’s lightly curled hair.
Brienne snorted, halfway to laughter, and tried to give her friends a smile - but she wasn’t able to muster the effort to even pretend to be happy enough to lift the corners of her lips. At least she was able to look at them again.
“Do you want to tell us what happened?” Sansa asked softly as she took one of Brienne’s hands in both of hers, “We’re here for you Brienne.”
“Take your time if you need,” Margaery said as she turned her head to rest her temple on Brienne’s shoulder, “After one and a half tubs of ice cream, I’m not going anywhere for a while, and I am always willing to trash on Hyle after watching Gone Girl.”
Brienne shifted at the warmth that surrounded her and squeezed Sansa’s hand back, reaching for Margaery’s to do the same. “Thanks.”
“If only you had been able to destroy Hyle the way Amerei nearly destroyed Nicol,” Margaery said wistfully and not for the first time, “I wish you had let me destroy Hyle. Nana would have gladly helped. She would have ground him into rose fertilizer.”
“I was close,” Brienne sighed as she tilted her head to rest it on Margaery’s.
“’I thought you were cool’,” Sansa mocked, trying to throw her voice low.
“If I had been you, I would have decked him.”
“If you had been me, you would have told him off when he turned off the lights the first time… not the tenth time.”
Margaery huffed and pinched Brienne’s thigh and she shot into Sansa with a squeal. Sansa tried to catch her, but Brienne ended up catching Sansa and saving her from toppling off the couch from her own momentum. Margaery ignored the fact that she had just caused a ruckus and brandished her hands in irritation. “I know where you’re going with this and I’m going to stop you in your tracks. If you were into girls, I would fuck you. I would fuck you right here, right now, on the couch, with Sansa watching and all of the lights as they are or brighter. I would make you scream in pleasure Brienne, twice. More! Hyle was a dick who didn’t know how good he had it and took advantage of the fact that he was your first. You, like a lot of us, liked sex and you wanted to enjoy it with him. Once you realized what he was doing, you stood against his treatment of you and you can’t discount that.”
“I’d join in,” Sansa airily laughed, mostly serious, as Brienne righted her on the couch and flushed just the barest coral. Margaery gave Sansa the eye for basically swooning and Sansa waved her friend away.
“I remember how much use you got out of that rabbit I gave you, too, so not only was he an asshole, but he was a selfish fucker in the sack, so never be sad about that cunt! If anything he spared you from having to look at his fucking face.”
“Okay, Margaery, okay,” Brienne placated as she clasped her hands in front of her.
“What happened tonight, Brienne?” Sansa asked gently again.
Brienne looked up at the adorable Sansa and then at the gorgeous Margaery, the former giving her a sweet supportive gaze and the later burning still with righteous fury. She sighed as she started picking at her nails, “You know how I said I had a date with Red?”
Her friends nodded supportively. “You were telling us he was being really nice to you.”
“Well, it was a date and it started off well,” Brienne huffed as tears gathered in her eyes, “We actually got to his place and started making out and we were just about to… to…”
“Fuck.”
Brienne winced at Margaery’s crassness, but nodded, “When he laughed and told me I was being ‘pretty forward for a virgin’…”
“But you’re not a—“
“And then when he found out that he wasn’t going to be ‘devirginizing’ me—“
Margaery blazed, “Did the bastard actually—“
“He admitted that it was all… everything… was part of a bet. Mark and Harry and a bunch of the other guys who were nice to me were in on it too. They all assumed I was a virgin because…” Brienne paused before Margaery could interrupt and just waved generally at her whole self.
Most days… most days Brienne was able to forget about it . Her face, her figure… the fact that she would never be one of those beautiful princesses in those fairy tales she was still afraid to admit she loved. Most days she could wake up and look in the mirror and not feel like the Seven had dealt her a bad hand by giving her such an unusual… such an ugly face. Some days she could forget that she was well over six feet and that her feet were huge and that her hands seemed even bigger. Some days she could forget that all her dad, babysitters, and counsellors could only tell her had been that ‘it would get better with puberty’. Because it hadn’t. It hadn’t and she had instead shot up more and thickened rather than curved. No breasts, barely any hips… she was just lucky that a flat butt could be fixed by gaining a lot of muscle.
But today wasn’t one of those days. Today all of her had been thrown back into her face and deemed inadequate. She wouldn’t have minded being called a virgin. She even maybe would have preferred being one if she could hang the memory of Hyle feeling compelled to turn off the lights whenever they had sex. But she did care that the only reason that Red… that Will and Ed and the others had assumed she was a virgin was because she was just too hideous for anyone to have sex with her.
Today was just one of those days where she felt like she couldn’t trust a single good thing anyone ever said about her, because she had trusted Hyle and had trusted Red and had trusted Ben and Robin and Raymond… and they had all lied to her.
Sansa grabbed Brienne’s hand and squeezed so hard that her knuckles creaked, “Please tell me you decked him. ”
Brienne gave a sad half smile to Sansa and flexed her sweetly sore knuckles, “I did.”
“Good riddance!” Margaery snarled, “The next time I see him, though, I’m going to grab his fucking balls and dig my nails—“
“I would just prefer never to see him again,” Brienne declared as she slumped back on the sofa.
Sansa reached out and brushed the tips of her fingers against Brienne’s cheek and that’s when Brienne realized she was crying. “Let it all out,” Sansa murmured and leaned onto Brienne’s chest to give her a big hug.
Brienne felt the sobs bubble out of her chest and her whole body heave as the dam broke and tears cascaded down her surely ruddy cheeks. She wrapped her arms around Sansa and cried into her hair as Margaery fluttered around the two of them trying to collect tissues and make three mugs of hot chamomile tea.
Catharsis.
It felt freeing to let all of the sadness out.
To let all of the sadness out with people she knew she could be vulnerable with.
When it had all been in her head, when she had been standing in that ice cream isle dumping tubs of ice cream into her basket, it had felt like it was all her. It had felt like she had been the one that was hideous, that she had been lucky to have anyone want to sleep with her, that she should have just slept with Red anyways after finding out. That she was the one that was stupid enough to trust anything but what the mirror showed her. But now that it was out, now that her friends were there beside her, staring at her as though she was the one that was wronged instead of him, the rage of it all just set in.
“I don’t give a shit—“ Both Margaery and Sansa’s eyes widened at her cussing, “about being in a relationship anymore. Fuck dating. Fuck romance. I just want to have sex with someone who I can trust. Someone who I can trust not to hurt me, someone who I can trust not to make fun of me for wanting a wild and fun romp in the sack despite the fact that I’m—“
Sansa shook her head fiercely, “None of that.”
“Someone who I can trust to take care of me even if they can’t love me,” Brienne whimpered, “I just want someone who cares about me even if I’m ugly.”
“Brienne…”
Brienne waved at Sansa, “I know. I know. You care about me and I’m not...” Brienne couldn’t say it a second time, even as the word whirled in her head.
An uncharacteristic beat of silence followed.
“So you are okay with someone who just wants to care for you… sexually,” Margaery said slowly as though she was tonguing the word around her mouth. Suddenly her eyes flickered and Brienne noted a look that she exchanged with Sansa. They seemed to have a conversation in the void of silence right in front of her and then Sansa sighed and nodded. Margaery grinned, “Give me your phone Brienne.”
“My phone?”
“I’m just going to write a note for you.”
“What are you up to, Margaery Tyrell?” Brienne asked suspiciously even as she pulled her phone out of her pocket, wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, and handed her phone unlocked to her friend.
“You want sex and you want trust, right?” Margaery asked as she tapped away at Brienne’s screen. Sansa huffed from Brienne’s other side. “Well, then what’s better than some good old fashioned BDSM?”
“Excuse me?” Brienne demanded.
“Way to break it to her slowly,” Sansa growled.
“BDSM?” Brienne reiterated slowly once she had regained a sense of calm, “As in the stuff in Fifty Little Fingers.”
“Hell no! I mean well—” Margaery huffed with irritation and tugged at her hair, “That’s what now a lot of people think BDSM is like, but it’s really some of the worst of the worst parts of it. Like the guide on how not to approach a BDSM relationship. That stupid fucking book series opened up a lot of new avenues for creeps to try and take advantage of people who don’t understand that a fully consensual BDSM relationship is nothing like that. Like if someone tries to make you sign a binding contract, run.”
“A… fully… consensual… BDSM relationship…”
“It’s not all latex and hanging from the ceiling either,” and then Margaery grinned and wiggled her eyebrows, “Unless you want it to be.”
Sansa sighed, “You’re really not selling this Margaery.”
Brienne turned mechanically to Sansa. It felt like her brain was in outer space. How in all names had they ended up on this topic? Right. Margaery. “You too, Sansa?”
“After my break up with Joffery, Margaery sprung this on me with the same amount of grace that she sprung it on you,” Sansa explained as she patted Brienne’s thigh. “The core tenant of BDSM is trust. You trust the other person to take care of you or to tell you if something is wrong or right. There’s a lot of communication involved, and sometimes not even any sex. Although BDSM in itself wasn’t for me, I learnt a lot of good practices from looking into it.”
Brienne gapped a bit at Sansa, who gave her a sympathetic look, and then swiveled her gaze back to stare at Margaery, who was holding her phone back out to her, “I’m on this website. Check it out and explore it as little or as much as you want. If you meet someone you like you can always ask me if I know anything about them, and if for some reason I don’t, I will find out everything I can. It’s good to be cautious, but you don’t need to be scared Brienne.”
“Meet someone?” Brienne choked out as she grabbed her phone and saw the web address and referral code that Margaery had inputted as a note.
“They take some of your real information, but it’s for community safety and none of that is made public. The website and forum is run by the Martells.”
“As in, the Martells of Dorne ?”
“The very,” Margaery grinned, “So they are super serious about privacy and safe sex - fun sex, too. I go by PrincessofThorns on the forum.”
“Margaery… this is…”
“Take as little or as much time as you need,” Margaery said for the second time that evening. “Don’t even talk to anyone if you’re uncomfortable. Just learn a couple things, see if it interests you. Who know? You might find something you—” Margaery waggled her eyebrows again, “Like.”
“I think Brienne just blue screened.”
“Alright then,” Margaery clapped her hands together, then changed the topic, “Sansa, how is Lady doing?”
Sansa squealed and pulled out her phone, “She’s so cute! Look at her!”
They were all curled up together on the living room floor in a fortress of pillows later into the night when Brienne finally asked, “Did you two ever… try anything… meet anyone on this website?”
Sansa sleepily nuzzled her face into Brienne’s arm, “I didn’t. I just read through some of the resources they had and stopped there. It’s part of the culture and definitely part of the Martell policy not to push anyone. They don’t like… send you any spam either.”
“That isn’t to say that once you start talking to people, some of them won’t be pushy. The forum has a great blocking function and an even better reporting function, though, and Oberyn will often message you privately if you report on something that makes you feel unsafe. He and his partner Ellaria took a lot of counselor training and computer science courses before they opened the website and forum. It’s considered more safe and secure than some of the government websites in Westeros.”
“Please don’t tell me the reason why Dorne was able to avoid that huge data hack years ago was because…”
Margaery laughed, “It was!”
Brienne buried her face into her pillows. “This is too much.”
“Do you not want me to answer your question, then?” Margaery grinned as she poked Brienne’s side.
Brienne flushed and kept her face buried in the pillow, “Just talk.”
“Well, to start with - Oberyn and Ellaria always have an open invitation to try some BDSM techniques and scenes with them…”
Brienne’s head popped up as Sansa snorted, “You didn’t!”
“I did!” Margaery laughed, “And it was great! They started off slow, and by the end of the week I felt comfortable enough to be suspended upside down from the ceiling with wax being dripped on me, which, by the way, is not the standard. Oberyn and Ellaria are masters and I’m, well. I know I was interested. They even had me try some simple things on Ellaria, since I told them I was more into domming… or topping, whichever term you prefer.”
“By the Seven,” Brienne gapped, “Is that… oh my gods, was that what you were doing in Dorne three years ago?”
Margaery grinned.
“Oh my gods.”
“I’ve also met up with some other people on the forum. Some of them just for a coffee, and then we figured out the other wasn’t who we were looking for in a BDSM relationship -and some of them I spent time with for months.”
“Are you with… with someone now?”
Margaery nodded her head, “I am, and we meet up just for scenes. But those relationships have a line of trust, which is why I thought…” Margaery didn’t complete her sentence but nodded at Brienne.
“Meet up just for… scenes?” Brienne asked, with what she thought was morbid curiosity.
“There are different types of BDSM relationships. It kind of falls on two axes: sexual to non-sexual and scenes to life. You can fall anywhere in those four quadrants. You’re probably going to be on the far sexual side and then it’s up to you whether you want to keep it to defined scenes or times, or to extend it out to life.”
“Oh…”
“You can read all about it on the website. Along with their own material, the Martell’s also have tons of external resources available, so not everything will agree, but they believe in you informing yourself,” Sansa provided.
“Oh…” Brienne was trying her hardest not to blue screen again.
“I can try to answer any more questions you have, but maybe… give the website a try?”
Brienne bit her lip and nuzzled back into her pillow, “Maybe.”
Brienne didn’t look at the note in her phone for three days.
But she didn’t delete it either.
The web address, the referral code, and everything Margaery and Sansa had told her stayed in the back of her mind when she went to work and made her blush at random intervals throughout the day, which always made her assistant, Podrick, worry over her. Evenstar Architects was a small company that she had only just managed to get off the ground and stressing out beyond measure was something that Podrick had to always look out for in her. Too bad her sweet assistant had no way of knowing it wasn’t just stress that was making her flush and sweat.
God she hoped there was no way of him knowing.
Both Margaery and Sansa didn’t mention the website again, probably so that she wouldn’t feel pressured one way or the other, but the idea of it all didn’t leave her mind.
Late one night, after a particularly trying day at work, where a collaboration fell through due to Brienne’s client not liking the portfolio of the company they were going to bring in to handle interior design, the note was finally reopened. Brienne slowly keyed in the web address into an incognito window of her browser and blinked at the oddly colourful and almost… tasteful page that sprung up.
A lot of information was already available on the main page of the website without having to make an account. Brienne found herself scrolling through pages upon pages on safety and felt herself settle in as she clicked more and more links detailing the role of trust in BDSM.
When Brienne looked at the clock again, she was surprised to realize that an hour had passed since she had ventured onto the website and she hadn’t even read anything that directly pertained to bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, or masochism. It wasn’t that the opportunity hadn’t been there for her to explore those pages, it was just that, although those were the core concepts of BDSM, the tenants of safety and trust were constantly reiterated everywhere .
Brienne stood up and retrieved a glass of water before she clicked on her first non-safety related page. There she found an extensive, though it was emphasized, not comprehensive, list of acts that were associated with BDSM. Brienne felt herself heat up. She gulped down one-third of her glass of water before she clicked on the first search that caught her interest and didn’t seem too risqué: blindfolds.
Brienne pursed her lips as she read about: the purpose of blindfolds, which she found pretty self explanatory; the sensual nature of blindfolds, which she wasn’t completely convinced of; the different materials that could be used for blindfolds, there were a lot of them; and safety regarding blindfolds, she hadn’t really thought about the fact that blindfolds could even be unsafe. Brienne bit down hard on her lower lip as she read about how something as simple as a blindfold required a lot of trust and then clicked back when she realized that for her a blindfold would actually require a cosmic eon of trust.
She wasn’t just uncomfortable with her partner being blindfolded, it would be the same as turning off the lights after all -she was also wary of being blindfolded herself. To not see if the other person was mocking her, to not know the disgust they may be feeling… it had everything to do with the dark.
It was through exploring these pages that Brienne began to understand what some of the benefits of making an account would be, other than being able to chat with other users on the website. Everything on the front end of the website was very informational and none of it was personal.
And maybe for some people reading on it was enough, but for her… it wasn’t. However, once it finally got personal, was also when it got scary. It was when she had to be vulnerable, expose herself to the people of that world, or at least that’s what Brienne felt as she stared at the Sign Up page.
Signing up boasted not just the chance to find someone to actually… try some of the listed things out with and a more personal and personalized look into the world of BDSM, but it also guaranteed having one of the Martell’s being available at all times for questions and for ‘personal training lessons’, which is what Brienne guessed was what Margaery had taken advantage of when she had gone to Dorne.
She chewed on her lip again as she thought back to the dom/sub page she had spent a good chunk of her time on. A couple of the things listed on the website could be done alone, but most of the core tenants of BDSM? The things she was interested in? Not really. To really get the benefit of most things, there had to be another.
Brienne read through all of the terms and conditions until it felt like her eyes were going to fall out, then entered the necessary details and hit submit. The first page that popped up asked for her to create a username and Brienne’s brain quickly latched onto her favourite historical fairytale.
BlueKnight wasn’t taken.
Brienne closed the incognito page and threw herself into bed and buried her whole self beneath the covers in an effort to prevent her inevitable combustion. She could feel the heat radiating from her cheeks.
The website hadn’t been pornographic in any way. But what that had done instead was allow Brienne to conjure up her own images when she read through all of the different pages.
As she laid in the dark, her hands crept under the waistbands of her pajama pants and her underwear. Brienne wondered what it would be like to submit to someone. To be vulnerable with someone. To trust someone to take care of her and bring her pleasure.
Once puberty had passed and it was apparent that she was never going to be ‘conventionally’ pretty, the supportive comments had changed. They had told her she could now easily excel at sports, be an athlete, which she had and still did enjoy doing. They had told her that she would have to learn to get by in the world without society’s expectation of good looks, grow a backbone to get through - and she had, even if sometimes it internally faltered. They had told her that she would have to carve a place for herself as a strong, independent woman, which she had by starting Evenstar Architects all on her own.
But…
But she was a woman who didn’t want to feel like she had to be in charge all of the time.
One of Brienne’s hands went to spread her heated and wet folds while the fingers of the other slowly slicked through her building arousal and began to methodically massage at the small, aching bundle of nerves.
She wondered what it would be like for her to seem like she had no control when she, in actuality, had all of the control.
Two of the fingers that had been swirling around her clit traced down from the apex of her sex and she slowly buried them inside herself to the first knuckle, biting down a moan.
What would it be like to not have sex in the dark? What would it be like to see someone take pleasure in pleasuring her? What would it be like to take pleasure in giving pleasure to someone else?
What would it be like to feel pleasure during sex?
What would it feel like to trust someone during sex?
Brienne trembled at her own touch as her toes curled and the muscles in her thighs tightened.
What would it be like to trust someone enough to have them slip a blindfold over her eyes and for her not to be afraid? Not to fear that somehow it meant they didn’t want to see her.
Euphoria washed over Brienne like a tidal wave and she felt all of her muscles relax at once. Her chest heaved with panting breaths while she saw stars and trembled in the aftermath. She slipped her fingers back out from under her pajamas before she turned to her side, closed her eyes and laid to rest.