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They meet at a funeral, of all places. Each assumes the other is an invited guest, rather than the truth of things which is that Jaime goes to strangers’ funerals like other people go to the gym and Brienne had stumbled onto the service whilst looking for the rector’s office and then been too embarrassed to leave.
The truth comes out over drinks in the pub later, after they’ve limped through half an hour of talking vaguely about the deceased - mostly echoing sentiments and memories heard during the service. Brienne is appalled when Jaime tells her about his pastime and then mortified when he laughs loud enough to turn heads after she confesses to her misadventure.
They stay in the pub until the landlord calls last orders. There’s a scattering of pint glasses between them and they’ve kept the table for so long that the landlord gave up on glaring at them sometime around eight o’clock. When they spill out the doors it’s almost midnight. It’s raining: the cobbles are slick and the street lights fuzzy behind a mizzling curtain. Around them other patrons stumble away - some alone, some huddled in besides loved ones or at the very least beside their partner for the night. The two of them stand there, not quite ready to part yet, but neither one brave enough to invite the other back to their place.
In the end, it’s Brienne who walks away. Jaime watches her go until the bright halo of her hair disappears around the corner and then he turns in the opposite direction and makes his way to the nearest tube station.
They meet again a month later, at a funeral Brienne is supposed to be at this time. She knows right away that Jaime is not. She scowls at him from the other side of the aisle and Jaime has to bow his head in a pantomime of solemn contemplation to avoid anyone seeing his grin.
She collars him as the mourners all depart and drags him round the side of the building. Crematoriums up and down the country are all the same: bland, square buildings with perfectly secular ornamentation and a small patch of tended garden where families can choose to inter the ashes. They run on tight schedules and Brienne has to navigate the flow of the next incoming river of the bereaved as she tugs Jaime along behind her. They wash up next to the groundskeeping equipment, a coiled hosepipe leaking onto the tarmac and moss crawling its way up the bricks.
“What are you doing here?”
“I told you, funerals are something of a hobby.”
“Why?”
They never had gotten around to that point last time. Somehow the conversation had veered off into football and uni and their school days (Eton for Jaime, the local secondary for Brienne).
And no one’s ever bothered to ask the question before, because nobody knows about how he spends his free time. Jaime had always imagined he’d say something pithy or achingly cynical. He thought he might emulate Fight Club and claim he was a tourist of other people’s pain. Instead, he tells Brienne, “because no-one cares if you're grieving at a funeral. You’re expected to be mourning. Out in the real world, after a year, they tell you to get over it.”
It’s been a year, they say. She wouldn’t want you to be this way. She’d want you to be happy.
Except she wouldn’t and she hadn’t. Cersei had hated Jaime as desperately as she had loved him and she’d meant for him to die with her, beside her, beside the children he’d never been allowed to claim. Except, when it was all over, when Jaime woke up in the hospital to learn Cersei had drowned her baby in a bathtub and smothered her eldest children with a pillow, and then drunk poisoned wine and assumed Jaime would drink his whole glass as well, he hadn’t wanted to die. He hadn’t wanted to follow Cersei down into whatever circle of hell was waiting for them. He wanted to live, even if it meant doing so without her.
That had been eight years ago.
And then his father had died and then Tyrion. And now Jaime was alone in the world in a house that was essentially a mausoleum, with fistfulls of money he had no interest in spending, and he had to pretend every moment of every day like the grief was behind him. Like he’d figured out how to live in this world without the people he’d loved with all his heart, right from the first. He didn’t have anyone left. All he had was his grieving. And he didn’t want to give it up.
“Fuck,” Brienne says and then, “Do you need therapy?”
Jaime shrugs, easily. “Probably.”
She eyes him for a long moment and then packs him into the nearest pub to get a drink. It’s the same pattern as last time. They close the place down, less glasses than last time arrayed between them, and at the end of things they step out into the frigid night and stare at one another.
Only this time, Brienne loops her arm through his and takes him home with her.
He wakes up in her bed, muscles well-used in a way that’s frankly alien to him after so long, and the long, pale line of her back glowing in the thin, grey light of the morning. He trails his fingertips down her spine and back up again. Her skin is littered with freckles and he traces shapes between them. Leo and Cetus and Corona Borealis. She twitches awake as he starts to trace Gemini and there’s meaning in that, he thinks.
He kisses her. And he doesn’t care about her morning breath, or his. She lets him press her back against the pillows for the type of lazy, languid sex he’s never before indulged in. It’s like being a virgin. That heady rush of new experiences, almost overwhelming.
Afterwards, she makes them coffee, feet bare on the kitchen floor, naked under her robe and him only in his trousers with no underwear.
It’s raining again but this is England: it’s always raining. It’s a Saturday, so neither of them has to go to work and when the coffee’s finished they go back to bed again. They stay there straight through to Sunday evening, picking at whatever food Brienne has in the cupboards when they get hungry, and working their way through her (meagre) stash of condoms until in a fit of mutual rashness they do away with them entirely.
The trains have stopped running by the time Jaime leaves her. He takes a taxi all the way to Kensington because he gives the cabbie the wrong address - Cersei’s old house, not his father’s - and then has to walk back to Belgravia again. He opens the door to his family’s tomb and climbs the stairs to a bedroom that feels like a grave. Standing in the shower, underneath the cascade of water that is the perfect pressure and the perfect heat, Jaime longs to be back in Brienne’s cramped bathtub, having to duck to fit beneath the showerhead and constantly having to adjust the temperature to compensate for someone else in the building running a tap or flushing the toilet.
He doesn’t see her again until the spring. He forgot to ask for her number; he doesn’t even know her last name. He tries to find her anyway. But height and a first name and a distant connection to one of London’s many deceased isn’t enough to go on. And the thought of writing to her or just turning up her address makes him feel like a stalker.
So it’s not until he’s browsing the obituaries and sees one for Selwyn Tarth - beloved father who’ll be dearly missed - and notes the striking family resemblance that he gets the answer to one of his questions. He’s on the next flight to Dublin.
From there it’s another train and a taxi and then he’s standing in front of Brienne saying, “tell me to leave and I will”, expecting to be told to get the fuck out, and hearing her say “stay” in a voice that’s so brittle it’s close to breaking. He takes her hand and holds it the whole way through the service, letting go only so she can stand and give the eulogy and when it’s done she sits back down beside him and clutches his fingers so tightly he can feel their knuckles grinding.
Her father’s house is nothing like his. It’s awash in yellow light and woollen blankets, muddy boots still piled beside a coatstand, and a stack of un-opened post blocking the front door. Brienne gathers up the letters and the bills and the flyers from local councillors begging for a vote in the next election and dumps the whole lot on the kitchen table. There’s a skittering of claws and then an elderly dog shuffles in, heading for its water bowl, utterly unconcerned about either Jaime or Brienne.
“He had a heart attack,” Brienne says, fiddling with the kettle, “died doing the weekly shop. Flat out in the middle of Tesco’s.”
Jaime takes the kettle out of her hands. Fills it. Picks two mugs off the tree and sets teabags down inside them. He flicks the kettle on and then wraps his arms around her, right there at the sink.
She crumples. Great heaving sobs that wrack her entire frame. Like she hasn’t allowed herself to cry since she got the news and now she can’t stop. The dog goes on lapping its water - it must be deaf as a post - and then starts scraping for the last of the biscuits in its food bowl.
The kettle stops boiling but Jaime doesn’t move. He just holds Brienne close and runs a hand through her hair and for the first time in eight years his own grief feels very distant. That’s good. He doesn’t want to hold onto his own pain for the moment; he needs his hands free to hold hers.
When they go to bed they climb into a single that must have been too small for Brienne even when she was a teenager. They’re stripped down to their underwear, pressed together toes to chin because there isn’t space for anything else.
“I’m pregnant,” Brienne whispers to him.
“I know,” Jaime says. Because he’d seen it, the slight curve to her belly in her sombre black dress - felt it, when he held her in the kitchen.
“I don’t even know your last name.”
“Lannister.”
“Tarth.” Jaime had known that. It doesn’t seem worth mentioning.
She takes a breath and Jaime knows there’s some sort of confession coming. Maybe she’s married. Maybe she doesn’t mean to keep it. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
“I’m going to stay,” Brienne tells him, “at least until I get things straight. Probably after that as well.”
Jaime shrugs - or he tries too. The bed really is too small. “There’s nothing for me in London. I’ll go where you are.”
It’s too much, too soon. But he’s lost three children already; he doesn’t want to lose another.
“Okay,” Brienne says and Jaime thinks maybe he should tell her about the tens of millions of pounds swimming around in his bank accounts. The house that’s worth twice as much again. Maybe he should tell her about the blackbook operation that passes for above-board military contracting and that his father made the family wealth by toppling dictators and setting up puppets in their place at the behest of various democratic (and not so democratic) nations. Maybe he should tell her that the Board keeps close to two dozen lawyers on stand-by, waiting for the day the Hague decides that some of what Casterly Rock’s been doing likely constitutes a war crime.
But then Brienne starts telling him about growing up in this house, this town - that was barely more than a village when Brienne was born but which now spirals out in concentric rings of new development. And Jaime wants to hear about that a hell of a lot more than he wants to talk about himself, so he asks about her friends, the scrapes she got into growing up. And then he asks about Selwyn and holds Brienne as she cries through telling him all the bits she’d loved and all the bits she’d hated and all the bits that were endlessly frustrating in the moment but which she’s now going to miss with a desperate, burning ache.
The dog comes in and heaves itself onto the bed, settling over their legs as if it has every right to be there. Jaime’s left foot is numb within minutes.
They sleep. And when they wake Brienne takes them both downstairs again, sits Jaime down at the kitchen table and asks him about Cersei. She must have Googled him some time whilst he was sleeping because she knows enough to ask the right questions.
Jaime tells her everything. All the bits he never bothered to tell the police, hiding behind his name and his family’s money and the fact that the Met hated scandal more than they hated leaving things unfinished. He tells her how he’s fairly certain Cersei killed her husband, before she tried killing him and that he thinks Tyrion might have done for their father before his alcoholism caught up with him - payment for the decades of emotional abuse Tyrion had endured and which Jaime hadn’t done enough to shield him from. He tells her how he wants to live (and sometimes hates himself for it) and how he prays to a god he doesn’t believe in that whatever afterlife Tyrion ended up in, it was well away from the rest of their family. Because even if he had been a murderer, he didn’t deserve that.
He doesn’t cry as he tells her. He’s not sure he remembers how. But Brienne listens, solemn and (startlingly) without any judgement and then tells him, frankly, “you’re going to need therapy if you want to be around the baby.”
That’s fair, Jaime thinks. He’ll also need to stop by an estate agent before he heads for the airport. He needs to find somewhere to live.
“Therapy,” Jaime agrees, “any other requirements?”
“You don’t drink; you don’t do drugs.” Jaime’s not sure how Brienne can be so certain but she’s right in any event. “Do you have a job?”
“I’m the figurehead of a company that doesn’t need me and wouldn’t notice if I resigned tomorrow. I wouldn’t mind being a full-time dad, actually.”
Brienne hums thoughtfully. Jaime tells her about the money. Her eyes go wide. Then he tells her about the company and how he hates every inch of it. Has, ever since he was old enough to understand what it meant. That he’d served his country to try and pay for his father’s sins and that all he’d succeeded in doing was heaping another ton of his own atop his head.
Brienne strokes a hand through his hair and presses her forehead against his. “Therapy,” she says again, “and quit your job if you hate it that much.”
“I can do that.”
“Good.”
They make breakfast: eggs and toast and a can of baked beans several months past the best before date. The dog makes another appearance and stares mournfully at them when it realises there’s no sausage on either plate.
Brienne takes the beast for a walk and Jaime wonders whether it’s worth mentioning he’s really more of a cat person. He washes the dishes and takes a shower, climbing back into yesterday’s clothes when he’s finished. His bags are still at the bed and breakfast. He changes the water in the dog’s bowl and scoops out more biscuits. He should probably make himself scarce but he still doesn’t have her number and he doesn’t particularly want to leave her. When Brienne walks back in the door, Jaime kisses her - because he’s missed her, for all it’s barely been an hour - and then one of the neighbours knocks on the door to check on how Brienne is doing and Jaime finally takes his leave.
Fast forward a week and he’s living with Brienne, camped out in her childhood bedroom because neither of them want to sleep in Selwyn’s. He’s on gardening leave, nominally serving out his notice, just to keep the rumour mill quiet and she’s taking advantage of her company’s generous bereavement policy to try and deal with the probate.
They have a midwife appointment in the morning, and the fact that Brienne’s transferred her care says better than anything else that they’re not going back to London. Jaime’s fine with that. He was serious when he said there was nothing for him there. All the city has for him are ghosts.
In the afternoon they need to start thinking about houses. Brienne’s not ready to sell her father’s but she doesn’t want to live there. The dog’s going to have to come with them but Jaime’s getting used to waking up with pins and needles from the knees down.
He and Brienne make love at odd times - not bothering to limit themselves to last thing at night or first thing in the morning. Sometimes the dog is an audience, sometimes not. One time they forget to close the curtains and have to deal with an irate matron who ended up getting an eyeful.
And then they’re a month on beyond that and Jaime can feel the baby kick. He’s in therapy and it’s awful but not as bad as he expected and Brienne’s in therapy too, still trying to process her own grief.
They buy a house. Three roads over from Selwyn’s but more spacious, with room enough for all new memories. They buy themselves a bed and furniture for the nursery. Jaime spends his days painting the walls a soft, pastel green and pays a master carpenter to recreate the cradle Brienne had once slept in - preserved only in a triptych of family photographs after the fire took everything else.
And then they’re in the hospital and Brienne is swearing at him, face contorted in pain, and Jaime’s terrified because this is how his mother died - even with all of modern medicine to save her - and then Brienne gives a final sob and there’s a moment of ringing silence and then a baby, wailing because he’s cold and wet and doesn’t understand what is happening.
The nurse places the baby into Brienne’s arms and Jaime’s in love. It’s a love so all-encompassing he doesn’t know how to feel it. Ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes and a scrunched up face with a scrunched up nose. The rest of the world simply fades away. He’s vaguely aware of various medical necessities still happening but all he can see is Brienne and their baby (they haven’t yet decided on a name) and he’s swallowed by a sudden wave a grief, a crippling sort of longing, because this child will never know his siblings, the aunt and uncle who may or may not have loved him, and the grandfather who would have thought he did even when the reality was something different. But like a wave running off the shore again the grief recedes, as quickly as it came. And Jaime strokes a finger down the back of his son’s head as Brienne helps him latch onto her breast.
He’s perfect.
When the room is cleared and it’s just them, just their family, Jaime holds his son as he drifts to sleep, one hand tangled with Brienne’s.
“How about Leo?” Brienne says and she’s clearly teasing, laughing when Jaime pulls a face. She’s exhausted, she needs to sleep too, but she wants to choose a name first.
“We agreed nothing family related. That includes lions.”
Brienne grins. “Okay. What about Niall then?”
Jaime repeats it to himself quietly. It’s not a name connected with either of their families. Jaime’s never known a Niall, though maybe Brienne has. It suits him, Jaime thinks, rocking his son gently in the crook of his arm. Niall.
“Niall Tarth,” Jaime agrees.
“We’ll hyphenate,” Brienne counters.
“Bit of a mouthful, but alright.” Regretfully, Jaime places Niall down into his bassinet and tucks a blanket over him. Always on his back. No loose blankets. Nothing near the face. Jaime runs through the checklist twice and then does it a third time before he’s satisfied.
Brienne’s half asleep herself by the time he’s finished. Jaime strokes her hair back and presses a kiss to her forehead. “Get some rest.” He loves her. He loves their son. God knows what the future holds for them but they’re going to make the best of it.
“He’ll need to feed in a couple of hours,” Brienne murmurs, “don’t let him sleep through it.”
“I won’t,” Jaime promises. He parks himself in a chair between Brienne’s bed and the bassinet and settles in to watch the two most important people in the world sleep for the next two hours.
Tomorrow he might be grieving again. Or next week. Or the month after. But for now, Jaime’s content to just let himself be happy.
At his left hand, Niall snuffles softly.
Yes, Jaime’s happy.
The End