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Brienne takes this opportunity to stare at him.

Jaime.

Not her Jaime.

Jaime as she’s only ever imagined him. Young, with dashing golden curls, not a hint of gray. His lips are a bit poutier than she’s ever seen them. His skin is a bit more golden, more like how it was when she first met him. He has grown more pale, recently, since they have been up north.

The panic hasn’t set in yet. She’s too fascinated for panic. Jaime’s hair is falling in his face; he’s slumped over, his head lolling to the side. She didn’t want to fight him, but he had left her little choice, in the end. He hadn’t recognized her. He tried to flee.

So she fought him. He had apparently not expected her to be as strong as she is, and so she overpowered him quickly enough. He was probably trying to go gently on her. But Jaime is no fool, so she tied him up, after.

He is not the type to make the same mistake twice, so she won’t make it once.

Brienne has always been good at tying things. Perhaps that is an odd thing to be proud of, but she is. Tarth is an island, after all, with plenty of boats, and her brother Galladon was the sort of brother whose gallantry was easy even for a younger sister to want to mimic. She remembers chasing after him, early, when she was young, and had not yet given up on dresses, still believing that she would grow into them one day, look less awkward and less gangly. Galladon was patient with her, and he showed her how to stand on the deck of ships so she would not get sick, and he showed her how to tie knots so that they would not come undone even in the worst of the weather. Brienne practiced until her hands bled from the coarseness of the ropes, forming calluses that her septa clucked over, chiding and disappointed but not, of course, terribly surprised.

The knots she used to tie Jaime bring back memories of that younger girl and her dedication to learning something that her older brother only thought to teach her in passing, indulging her in her youthful curiosity. Probably trying to make sure she was occupied so she would not be so underfoot. It’s funny that she’s thinking of that now.

Jaime’s younger face is becoming less alien the longer she looks at it, but she cannot get a full picture with his hair in the way. She wants to reach out and touch it, brush it aside. She’s not sure why she hesitates so much. His chest rises and falls evenly, slowly. He is still fast asleep. She recognizes the cadence of it when he’s deeply under. They have been so long together now, on the road north. She has gotten used to it.

Finally, she gives in. Her fingers, callused still from old ropes and swordplay both, brush along his cheekbone quite by accident, and twitch as they try for gentleness. It’s not completely foreign to her. She has always been as much gentle as she is rough. It’s just that the roughness is more obvious, and so it’s what people notice first. People don’t often get close enough to see the gentler parts.

When Jaime’s curls are tucked securely behind his ear, she sits back on her heels, crouched where she is in front of him. She has tied him securely, his hands bound behind his back, the ropes looped over his chest. His legs, too, are bound, and he is secured to the frame of the bed. It is a sturdy bed, made well. The farmers who must have carved it did a fine job. She thinks it will hold. She has tied him so that he should not be able to get enough momentum to break free. He’s a very strong man, even younger and slenderer like this. She won’t underestimate him.

His face looks less sharply angled than it usually does. He still carries traces of his youth in his cheeks, and they have both spent some hungry days at Winterfell, where there never seems to be enough to eat. His jaw is straight as ever, his nose still has that bump along the ridge. His eyelashes are long, fluttering against his cheeks as he breathes in sleep. He looks…softer. Perhaps more feminine. She doesn’t dislike it. He looks more like his twin this way, but he is not his twin. She knows that well.

She has always known that Jaime is beautiful, but she is more willing to notice it now, when he is asleep here in front of her. She feels like a hulking beast beside him; she always does, especially when people never tire of pointing it out, somehow knowing the exact right ways to dig their claws into her heart. But it is especially obvious now, with all of his scars and rough edges erased, blunted, made hazy and beautiful.

How young…she isn’t sure. She has her guesses, but they haven’t exactly had a chance to talk.

The red witch, Melisandre, that woman who is protecting Stannis, she had said something cryptic as Brienne and Jaime were leaving the castle about showing the Kingslayer the truth, but neither Jaime nor Brienne had paid much attention to it. Melisandre said so many cryptic things, and Jaime had lost patience with them quickly.

It was something that they joked about often: Jaime would often imitate the red woman, speaking in a low, melodious voice, humming thoughtfully as if he was thinking many grand, important things. He did it more often once he realized that it made Brienne laugh.

They have not been very long in the north. Sansa Stark has been delivered to her brother, and Brienne has wondered about what to do next. There is a Stark girl still missing, and she supposes she will try and follow what trail she can find. Jaime argued with her fiercely when she mentioned her intentions, telling her that she did not need to martyr herself for a dead woman, especially not after what happened before they went to the Vale.

It was not a very difficult argument. Jaime has never been very good at persuading gently, and said many cutting things before admitting that he was worried about her. Brienne has gotten better in these recent weeks at recognizing his moods, though, and she knew already that his most puffed-up prickliness often hides an unease that is more gentle than it would seem.

Still. She regrets the argument now.

They had still been cold with each other when they set out on this patrol, and so they weren’t even in the sort of mood that lent itself to mocking the red woman’s gravitas and incomprehensible nonsense. Jaime had waved her off with his golden hand, scowling without turning around, and Brienne hadn’t bothered to listen at all, and has retained so little memory of what she had said.

Kingslayer. She remembers that Melisandre said his title.  

Kingslayer.

Brienne had been annoyed to hear it, but now she wonders. It has always been difficult to tell Jaime’s age just from looking at him, because Jaime wears his age incredibly well, still beautiful and boyish even with his hair and beard going more gray the longer they freeze up here in the cold. But he was seventeen when he killed Aerys, wasn’t he? Seventeen, and it would explain his youthful appearance.

It might even explain how angry, how ready to strike out, he had been when he first saw Brienne.

Then again, if she had gone to sleep in Kings Landing and woke up freezing cold in a run-down cabin with only her own face for company, she might have assumed the worst, too.

She settles back down. She folds her legs in front of her, and she rests her chin on her knees. She watches Jaime breathe. She waits for him to wake up. There is nothing else she can do until she figures out why.

When Jaime does wake, it is slowly, groaning, stretching his neck to one side and then the other, like it pains him. Brienne feels sorry for not having moved a pillow between his head and the rough wooden post of the bed, but it is too late now. She stands with her back against the wall, beside the door, her arms folded across her chest. She hopes that she looks less intimidating this way, but she doubts it. Jaime has not been intimidated by her in a long time, not unless she puts in the effort to remind him of her strength, but they are starting over now.

She is not looking forward to it. They had a very rough beginning.

Jaime’s first impulse is always to wound. 

Defensive words, and she has heard them before. But she has grown used to his softer side. The kindness and regard with which he has treated her since Pennytree, even after…

She stops herself. She breathes out slowly. She will not think about that. It is past, and they survived, and she is lucky that Jaime has forgiven her. That’s all.

The Jaime in front of her doesn’t know about her betrayal, anyway. He doesn’t know her at all.

She had assumed that already, given that he attacked her on sight, but she has it confirmed again when he looks her over, a sneer at one corner of his lips.

“You,” he says simply.

“Me,” Brienne agrees. Maybe her quiet, resigned exhaustion is too obvious. Jaime watches her with wariness. She can tell by the way his muscles bunch and move beneath the ropes that he is testing her knots. Seeing if there’s any way for him to get out. “Save your energy,” she says. “The knots will hold.”

“Apparently,” Jaime replies. He is watching her with a kind of hunched, helpless rage that is curious. “Why have you taken me here? Who sent you?”

“I haven’t taken you anywhere,” Brienne says. Jaime barks out a mad little laugh. He is clearly on the edge of panic, but holding it back.

“Not for lack of trying, apparently. I was in armor when you attacked me. Is this where you have your wicked way with me? Are you a Wildling come to steal me away to be your husband? I’ve heard the songs.”

“Jaime, shut up,” Brienne sighs.

“So you know who I am, then. Did you think the Kingslayer would be such a valuable prize? They won’t pay a ransom for me. They can’t wait to get rid of me.” He laughs again. She hates to hear it. Edgy. Desperate. Hiding his very real fear. He was like this when they took his hand, too. Feverish, at first. Sick and weak and just afraid. But as he regained his strength, it was more and more like this. Trying to cling to the persona he had worn like a mask for years and years after they branded him honorless oathbreaker, traitor, Kingslayer.

It’s a new mantle on him now. A mask that does not quite fit yet. It has not been hammered into place by all the years he has spent wearing it. She can see the heartbreak around the edges of it, and her own heart gives an empathetic squeeze 

“Jaime,” she says softly. “I am going to tell you something you might have difficulty believing. Will you listen?”

“I have difficulty believing you’re working alone. There’s no way you could get into the castle looking like that. What did you do, dress as a maid? Or did you try to pass yourself off as a man? I suppose they would have believed that, though I think the new king would have sniffed you out anyway. They say he’ll fuck anything.”

“Are you done?” Brienne asks. Jaime glares at her. His chest is heaving, his eyes narrowed. He looks every inch the insulted maiden. Brienne does not quite think about it, but it does scratch something unpleasantly within her, to think of what this looks like from the outside. Of course he would assume her some beastly Wildling who broke into Kings Landing to steal him away. He would present quite a tempting prize, if she was.

He should stop listening to so many bedtime stories, and she should stop thinking about this.

“That depends on what you plan to do to me,” Jaime says.

“Nothing,” Brienne says. Her voice is steady, her tone exhausted. Her fists are clenched at her sides. “As you said yourself: you were armored when you first came to. You attacked me.”

“You stole me,” Jaime fires back.

He is so much like himself. It’s almost unsettling how little he has changed. Like a man frozen in time. Defensive, angry, ready to fight for every inch of respect. She understands better why he is this way, but still it is disheartening to see him so young and so jaded already.

“When did you kill the king, Jaime?” she asks.

That takes the wind out of his sails at least. He stops pulling at the ropes, and instead just blinks up at her with those pretty green eyes. His curls are in his face again, but she would not dare to fix them again.

“What?” he asks.

“When was it? A month ago? Two?”

“Why are you asking? Do they not have news of King’s Landing beyond the Wall?”

“Humor me,” Brienne says. Jaime swallows.

“Longer,” he says.

“But not much?”

“N…no.” The fear is more obvious on his face, then. Confronted with her lack of reaction…men like Jaime thrive on reaction. She learned that about him early. She has learned it about many men, too. Jaime wears it differently most times, at least now that she knows him better, but he is not so different from most men.

He would probably seethe if she told him that. It’s a barb she has not felt the need to use yet.

“You will not believe me when I tell you,” she tells him patiently. “But Jaime, Aerys has been dead for years.”

He narrows his eyes at her.

“You’re right. I don’t believe you. Is this where you try to convince me that I’m your husband, and that I hit my head doing something stupid like puttering around the cabin, and I’ve just invented myself into a Kingsguard? Because it’s cleverer than you seem like you’re capable of, but it still isn’t going to work.”

“No,” Brienne says. She grins despite herself. “Its an imaginative idea, though.”

“Hm.”

To Brienne’s surprise, there is some humor in his expression. Almost as if her smile has put him more at ease. She thinks about the world he came from, the world he was living in until Melisandre did whatever she did and brought him here.

People hated him, didn’t they? They scorned him?

Was it that surprising to receive a smile? Surely not. He is such a beautiful man.

“I confess I might be out of inventive ideas,” he says. “So you’re not a Wildling? You look like a Wildling.”

“I’m from Tarth.”

“The island? Are you all so bloody tall there?”

“Not all of us. My father is a tall man. My mother was tall too, I’m told. I don’t really remember.”

“She must have been, to produce a child like you,” Jaime says. He visibly fights back several meaner words before he lands on child, but Brienne isn’t surprised. She supposes the surprise is that he bothered to fight those words back at all.

It strikes her then how odd this whole thing is. Just yesterday, Jaime was himself. Kind, courteous, still a bit prickly, but in a way that no longer stings her the way it used to. How did they end up here? She spent most of the morning tying him to the bedframe so he wouldn’t try to attack her again.

She laughs. She cannot help it. She assumes it is unsightly, and there is a part of her that has not quite grown out of wishing that she could look nicer when she laughs and smiles at Jaime. But this is not her Jaime. What does she care what he thinks about her laugh? The only thing she cares about is getting hers back.

“I didn’t say anything particularly funny,” he says. This sullen boy.

“No,” she agrees happily. “But it is all ridiculous. Jaime…I will tell you plainly. You can believe it or not: we are more than a decade removed from the war. When we went to sleep last night, you were a man in your thirties. When you woke up, you remembered nothing. I would think it some kind of malady, but your body has changed as well. Clearly, it is some kind of magic. We’re meant to be on a scouting mission, south of the Wall. We were arguing about our future plans.”

“It’s not far off my ‘husband who hit his head’ idea,” Jaime says. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

“I have never been clever like you in that way. Storytelling. You always tell me I have the worst stories.”

“That’s not very nice of me.”

“No.”

“And yet you married me anyway.”

Brienne laughs again.

“We aren’t married,” she says. Patient, warm. She can see a question behind his eyes, a thought that he doesn’t know how to ask her without giving himself away. The good thing about the fact that he has scarcely grown up from this overgrown boy is that he is still fairly easy for her to read. “You really think I’d still have my head if I married you?” she asks. “Your sister would never allow it.”

She says it meaningfully enough. She has never been very good at implying things with careful words. Not like he and his family. But she does enough, this time, and Jaime’s expression goes sharp and considering, and she knows that he understands.

“You know, then,” he says.

“Everyone knows.”

“Now I know you’re lying. Robert would never allow my head to remain on my shoulders if he…”

“Robert is dead. Your sister had him killed. She used a cousin, Lancel. Poisoned him during a hunt. A boar did the rest of the work for her. At least, that’s what you told me.”

Jaime frowns at her. She watches the way his muscles strain again at his shoulders. Testing the limits.

“A better fiction than the last,” he says. “But good for her, if it were true.”

“Mm,” Brienne hums quietly. “It sparked another war.”

“And Cersei?”

“Queen, last we heard. But news travels slowly to the Wall, and there are threats in every corner. Last we talked about it, you didn’t seem to think she would keep the throne for long.”

“I would be with her,” he says. Low, dangerous. Like Brienne is getting too close to a line she should not cross. She’s amused, briefly, that he thinks he can threaten her. That he thinks she will be afraid of him. She isn’t.

“You chose not to go back,” she says. There is some pleasure in saying this. She wonders at herself. She did not miss this part of Jaime. The man obsessively devoted to protecting his sister, excusing his sister’s faults. Constantly wrapped up in thinking about his sister. Even putting aside the wrongness of it, it was just so annoying.

“I would never,” Jaime says. Gaining confidence. More and more certain. Brienne laughs.

“You have no idea,” she says. “Everything has changed. Everything. You…” She shakes her head. She has no idea what else to say. What will make him see? Even yesterday, even when Jaime was himself, Brienne had trouble working up the courage to speak about his sister. Jaime at this age hadn’t yet experienced the worst of it.

“You’re lying,” he says.

“I’m not. She was so cruel to you.”

That part is quiet, and Jaime seems more disturbed by it than anything else she has said. It makes her sadder than ever for him. This young man who believes he will always love his twin, this young man who is already so used to her cruelty that Brienne’s comment about it seems to confuse him.

And? His expression seems to ask. So what if she’s cruel? That is not enough to make me stop loving her.

And maybe it isn’t. But he can’t know. He doesn’t remember the way those cruelties stacked up one after another, piling so high that they made the very foundations unsteady until the entire structure tumbled over into the dirt. How can he know? He is young, and he has both hands, and he is his sister’s mirror. Cersei is still able to convince both of them that she loves him. That every hurtful word is only because she loves him so much.

“You deserved a kinder love,” she says. It is something she has never said aloud to Jaime, but this doesn’t even feel like talking to Jaime, and she doesn’t mind saying it. “Someone who wanted to take care of you, rather than expecting you to be the only one taking care.”

“Is that why you’ve kidnapped me?” Jaime asks. “Because you think you’ll be able to take care of me?” Brienne sighs.

“No,” she says. “I was far too late for that. The damage had already been done by the time I met you. Sometimes I wish…” she hesitates, because the words she is about to say...

Sometimes I wish I could have known you then. Sometimes I wish I could have helped you.

It is Jaime in front of her. Jaime tied up in ropes. Jaime bound to this bed. But it is not Jaime as she knows him. It’s Jaime as he was, when he was younger and more vulnerable. When the mortar between the bricks of the walls around his heart was still soft, could still be breached by enough kind words. He grew hard and brittle, and sometimes when Brienne speaks to him now, she feels that too many blows will break him. He used to bend and dodge them so easily, but not anymore. Like the winter cold has frozen his very blood, turned him to ice.

He is not ice now. He is not brittle, or broken. He is young, newly tested. She can see the defensiveness in his eyes. She can see that already he is scabbing over, wounds dug into him with every utterance of Kingslayer, but this is Jaime before the callus formed over his heart. He is Jaime, but he is Jaime as she sometimes wished to see him. He is the Jaime who should have been told…

“They hate you,” she says quietly. “Because you killed the king. But he was a horrible man, and he deserved to die. You saved millions.”

Jaime freezes. He stares at her. There is something, some quality about his gaze, or maybe it is just the light from the candles on the table. But his eyes look like they are glimmering already.

“How did you know about that?” he asks. His voice is choked, bitten off. Yes, already, he’s trying not to cry. She thinks about how little she has actually said. She thinks about how starved he must have been to hear it, to have such a strong reaction. She swallows back her own emotions to see him like this.

“You told me,” she says.

“I haven’t even told Cersei,” he says.

“Yes, because she never asked.”

He stares at her. That, too, is something that he told her once. Bitter in that purposely sunny way he has, where he pretends like he’s fooling anyone. Like it was an amusing anecdote, the fact that his sister, the woman he loved for most of his life, never asked him why he killed the king. Never seemed to care.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“My name is Brienne,” she says.

“Why would I tell you something like that? Why would I forget telling you something like that?”

“I told you the truth at the start. You’re the one who didn’t believe it.”

Jaime squirms again against the ropes. He looks discomfited, looks frightened. He looks like he thinks she is still lying, but he’s also frowning at her like he can’t find the lie at all. She waits for him. She no longer feels the creeping panic. He is here. The Jaime she has often wished she could have known.

She wonders briefly if she’s the one who did this. Did her most private thoughts bring him here? Was it her, and not Jaime, who was the target of the magic that Melisandre clearly performed? She can’t imagine what the point of it would be. Brienne is practical about most things, and she tends to believe that other people are practical as well. If she can’t imagine a point to doing something, she has trouble imagining what point anyone else would find in it.

“If you weren’t lying…what am I doing here?”

“I don’t know. The witch…she has her own reasons for doing things. I don’t understand them. Perhaps she heard us mocking her and has decided to take some petty revenge.”

“We mocked a witch?”

“Mostly you.”

“Hm,” Jaime says. There is a quiet smile on his face, muted behind the panic, but still there. “That doesn’t sound like me. “

Brienne considers offering to untie him, but she will not be lured in by false comfort. She knows how tricky Jaime can be, and she knows that she is vulnerable to it. She won’t make that mistake.

“It sounds exactly like you,” she says instead with a quiet sigh. “As you well know. But I should not have encouraged it. You always perform to your audience.”

Jaime makes an uncomfortable little noise at that, and shifts again. Still testing the strength of Brienne’s knots. She doesn’t mind. She has confidence in her own craft. Jaime clearly does not like to be observed like this. Brienne can tell. She sits down at the small table, closer to him. She does not take her eyes off of him.

“How do we change me back, if you aren’t lying?” Jaime asks.

“I don’t know,” Brienne answers. That hardly seems important now. She looks down at him. Watches his discomfort. It occurs to her suddenly that she’s older than him. Not by very many years, it’s true, but she is used to being very many years younger, and it’s odd and dizzying to suddenly be looking at him from his angle. He is young, and afraid. “Jaime, you are a good man.”

He looks up at her with wide eyes. He goes still, slack against the ropes.

“What?” he asks.

“I don’t think I have said it enough. I have said it before, but you always find a way to deflect, and escape it. You never want to hear me talk about it for long. Perhaps I should have just said it louder. Made you listen somehow. You are a good man, and you made the right choice, and you deserve to be told.”

“You’re stupider than you appear, if you really believe that.”

“No, I simply know you well enough to see beyond your bluster. You are a good man.”

“You can say it as many times as you want. It doesn’t make it true.”

“You can deny it all you want. That won’t make me wrong. You are a good man.”

Jaime’s nose wrinkles a bit at her tone. Maybe it was a bit more teasing than she meant to be, but he seems amused by it, even through his discomfort. He is much less wary than her Jaime, even with all his defensiveness. It makes her sad to see it. She had thought at first that he was just as jaded as her Jaime is, but he isn’t. He trusts more easily. He bounces back more quickly. He is ready to believe better of people. They let him down over and over again until her Jaime was forged from it.

“I used to think you were an Oathbreaker,” she says quietly. “I hated you for it. I was naïve. I thought that this was a world where good things happen to those who deserved it unless dishonorable men interfered. I thought all knights were heroes. I thought you were a blight among the Kingsguard. I know better now.”

“So do I,” Jaime admits. It is heartbreaking, for a moment. Heartbreaking that he can look at her like that. Heartbreaking that he looks so tired and so old like this. She wonders what he was like before. She wonders if he was so different. He once described himself as a naïve fool when he entered the Kingsguard. She sees little of that foolishness now, but she supposes she can see the faintest outline of it. A shadow left behind. He was so young, wasn’t he? She often thinks that she was young when she left home, when she joined Renly. If she was young, then so was he. He looks like a man grown. Robb Stark declared himself king even younger than seventeen, and grown men followed him. Perhaps she is just being a sentimental maiden again, but he seems young, to her.

“You didn’t deserve to be scorned and hated by the world,” she says. “You deserved to be lauded as a true knight. The only true one among them. I have been proud to call you Ser Jaime.”

He draws in a deep breath, and it quivers. His eyes are definitely glimmering now. She wonders if she can get his tears to spill over, simply by being kind to him.  

“You deserved a kinder father, and I do not care if you hate me for saying it. You deserved a kinder sister, one who would love you as much as you loved her and would not trick you into serving a horrible king. You never allow me to say these things, or maybe I am afraid to continue at even the slightest hint of your discomfort. Maybe the fault lies with me. But you deserve to know of it.”

“Stop it,” Jaime says quietly. “Untie me.”

“So you can run away? No.”

“I’ll call you a beast again.”

“Go ahead. You’ve said it all before. And you haven’t said anything I haven’t heard a thousand times from other men. You were quite cruel to me, when we met.”

“And yet here you are.”

“You’ve changed. And so have I.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Yes, it is. But we are stuck here for now, and I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to tell you.”

“Is this where you confess your love for me?” Jaime asks. His voice is dripping with sarcasm, and Brienne laughs on instinct, because she is still rather skilled at protecting her own face, if not her heart.

But.

She has not thought about it.

She has not considered saying it, because she has not thought about it.

When she looks back at her feelings for Renly now, they seem dwarfed, childish, feelings that were born of loneliness and desperation. They feel like an echo of something, a shadow of something, and she knows that if she looks too closely, she will see what they are a shadow of, and she doesn’t want to.

“No,” she says. “This isn’t where I confess my love to you.”

“But you do,” Jaime says.

“No.”

“No? You’re not a very good liar.”

She does feel very briefly off balanced by this, like she is expecting him to mock her, to say something terrible to her. But he just tilts his head to the side, and he looks at her. “You haven’t told me?”

“No,” she admits, because lying seems pointless. “You never asked.”

He laughs at that. Shifts around in the ropes some more.

“I should have tried for seduction to get you to untie me, then?”

“It wouldn’t have worked,” Brienne says. She feels strangely light. Does that count as a confession? It feels like it does. She confessed, and nothing happened. The world did not end. Jaime did not expire from horror on the spot. Not even this new Jaime, this old Jaime, who does not know her.

It even feels…good. Like a weight lifted off her chest.

“Why not?” Jaime asks. “Am I hideous as an old man?”

“Very unsightly,” Brienne agrees, deadpan. Jaime laughs.

“No,” he says. “I refuse to believe that.”

“You’re in love with your sister,” Brienne reminds him. “And I am…” She cannot bring herself to say all the things she wants to say. There is a lot. A lot of baggage that piles up behind her tongue. She swallows it back. “I am not her,” she says. Really, though, that does appear to settle it. She could be beautiful, she could look like anyone else, and it would not matter. She is still not Cersei.

“Yes,” Jaime agrees thoughtfully. He looks a little sorry. It makes her want to laugh again, but she doesn’t.

“I hope she does tell you sometimes,” she says. “That…that you are good. That you did the right thing. That you’re honorable.”

A dirty truck, maybe; she knows that Cersei never told him any such thing.  

“She does,” Jaime lies. His eyes are stubbornly still glimmering with something. Some want he will not express.

“Good,” she says. “Because you deserve that. You deserve to have that. And I could be…content. As long as I knew that.”

He closes his eyes, and he swallows. He nods. He seems a bit lost, a bit confused, now. When he opens his eyes, he stares at her, simply.

“Yes,” he says.

Brienne doesn’t say anything for a long while. She thinks about what they’re going to have to do. She thinks about dragging Jaime back to Melisandre and demanding that she change him back. She wonders if Jaime would still run away if she untied him now, and she decides that it isn’t worth the risk. She busies about by the fire while Jaime sits there in silence with his head lowered. She cooks him some of their scant meat, and she brings it back over.

Jaime looks up at her, and he is…

Not crying. He’s not crying, but only because he’s obviously trying not to cry. She makes a sound before she can stop herself. Soft, almost cooing. The kind of noise she used to make to Podrick when he was afraid.

“Jaime,” she says softly. She brushes his hair back from his face. She is gentle. Her heart aches for him. She feels sad, sorry.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “Why she…” He trails off, and he doesn’t finish, shaking his head. Brienne nods. She wipes his face when a tear stubbornly rolls down his cheek. She pretends that she did not see it.

“I don’t understand either,” she says. “I don’t know how anyone could know you and not love you. I don’t know how she could look at you and not want to take care of you. I don’t know.”

“Who are you?” he asks again, more desperate.

“Your friend,” she answers, because she is.

“I doubt I am a very good friend.”

“The best I have ever had, Jaime.”

“Now I just feel sorry for both of us.”

Whatever desperate sadness seized Jaime seems to have left him. Brienne, following an impulse she would rather not examine ever again, leans forward, and she kisses him on the forehead.

Jaime makes a quiet little noise, and when she pulls back, for a moment, she is sure that he will not let her. His head means to follow her, stopped by the ropes.

Affection, she thinks, is something that neither of them have had enough of. She thinks of all those times that they made mutual excuses to stick together in the cold, to sleep beside one another, to hold one another. An excuse on her part, and she knew that even before she was willing to look any deeper into the feelings for Jaime that have plagued her like a ghost that resides at the corner of her vision. But she rarely considered that it might be an excuse for him, too.

She leans in again, and she kisses him again, on the cheek this time. She does not try to get more intimate than that. He is looking at her with dark, uncertain eyes. She pets his hair, and she brushes it back. She helps him eat. She is gentle with him. He seems to crave it. She remembers that he seldom must have had it, growing up. Not with his father being the man he was.

Jaime asks her questions, eventually, and so she tells him about their journeys together. She tells him about his lost hand, and about the bear pit. She tells him about Pennytree. She even tells him about Stoneheart.

Jaime listens.

When the sun sets, he falls asleep like that, his head on her shoulder, and she does not think it would be right to move him.

He kisses her awake.

He kisses her awake, his lips an insistent press against hers, sloppy. Trying to get her attention.

She reacts by jolting away and immediately rubbing the back of her hand over her mouth.

Jaime laughs at her. There are deep crinkles at the corners of his eyes. His hair has gray streaks again. He is pale, cold, the winter Jaime she remembers.

“Untie me,” he needles. “I can’t feel my hand.”

“Someone cut it off,” she returns without thinking. “You’re back.”

“Yes,” he agrees blithely. “Yes, I’m back, and I remember everything.”

He only allows her to fret for a moment, but it is more than enough time to panic. There is too much white noise in her head. An echoing emptiness of shit shit shit.

“Ah, Brienne, don’t look at me like that. It’s not my fault the witch thought it would be funny to play a prank. Or maybe she was trying to kill me. Who knows? I really was myself at seventeen, you know.” He gives a mock shudder and waves his stump in the air; he has managed to free one arm, since she tied him when he still had two hands.

“It is your fault,” she says.

“Don’t be stubborn. Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“Come closer and I’ll tell you again.”

“Jaime, do not…”

“Mock you? I wasn’t. it’s always your first impulse though, isn’t it? I hate that about you. Even now. You trust me so little. I’ll remain tied, if you wish. I don’t mind it so much. Neither did he.”

“He?” her head is spinning. Jaime is too cheerful, and she is too confused.

“He. Me. The me I was yesterday. I remember.”

“You said that.”

“And yet you still think that I’m mocking you. That idiot still had the disadvantage of being in love with his sister and still he had several interesting thoughts about your size and your muscles and the fact that you’re very good at knots. We’re quite alike, he and I, but I don’t have his flaws.”

“Since when?”

“Since when? Can you really ask me? I told you I burned her letter. I told you. I chose you instead of her, I followed you here, north, where it’s cold and everyone hates me.”

“That isn’t…telling me. That isn’t telling me anything.”

“Perhaps I could get better at using my words, but I told you in the ways I could bear to. You kissed me.”

“On the forehead.”

“Yes, and you said you loved me.”

“I didn’t think you would remember.”

“Ah, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Tell me again and I’ll kiss you again.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” Jaime asks, and he laughs, and he pulls again at the ropes.

Her Jaime. Hers.

“I have no idea.”

“Yes, well, you’ve never had very much imagination. It’s fine. I love you anyway.” His gaze softens when he sees the way she reacts to that. She’s not sure what she must look like. Her expression feels frozen, blank on her face. But he reacts as if she is showing him so much. “Did you hear me that time? I said it with words, Brienne. It would be a shame if you missed it. I don’t know if I can do it again.”

“I heard you. It wasn’t a lie?”

“Now I’m just insulted.”

“You’re not. You’re delighted.”

“Lots of new discoveries have been made today, and I’m back. It was worth it to lose the hand, you know. I do wish my hair would stop bleeding color.”

“I prefer you like this,” Brienne finds herself saying. Gradually, she is warming. The coldness in her chest, the fear, is abating. What reason would he have to lie? He wouldn’t.

“Good. Because this is what you’ve won for yourself,” Jaime says. “Are you ever going to untie me? Not that I’m not intrigued…”

“Do you ever shut up?” Brienne asks, and finally she reaches for the ropes with shaking fingers. The knots come apart easily in her skilled hands. Jaime laughs.

“Not when there’s someone with me worth talking to,” he says in her ear, and the ropes fall away from his arms, from his legs, from his shoulders. He grimaces when she helps him up. “Now, let me tell you again. Properly, this time. Oh, and we must thank the witch when we get back.”

“Jaime. She could have killed you.”

“Yes, but instead she gave me something very precious. Maybe you could promise her you won’t try to kill Stannis for a week, at least. Or…”

The rest is lost under the pressure of Brienne’s lips against his. He grins against her mouth, victorious. Finally quiet. His arm is around her. She can feel his stump pressing against her back, reassuring.

He is back. He is her Jaime. And now he knows.

“You are a good man,” she tells him. Here is where he would normally laugh and turn away, refusing to look at her. He would ready for the day, pack his things, say many flippant things until she would give up on trying to make him listen.

Today, he only smiles at her. Perhaps he still doesn’t believe it, but he does not act the way he would have in the past, and she feels that she knows him better than she knew him only a few days ago.

“You are going to be insufferable about this, I think,” he says.

“It’s only fair. You have been insufferable enough for the both of us for so long.”

“You really are a beast.”  

But there is no heat in their words, only warmth, and Brienne allows it to soak into her, to spread into her chest, to warm up her heart. Driving away the winter chill at last.