Chapter Text
A moon into their marriage, Brienne knocked on the door of Jaime’s study before slipping in without waiting for his answer. At this hour, she should with their steward, making the rounds to the stables, kennels, armoury, kitchens, and everywhere else, ensuring things were in order as they should. It had not been long since Queen Daenerys liberated Tarth from pirates and returned it to Brienne, and the new steward of Evenfall Hall was young, perhaps scarce older than Brienne, and not fully trained to manage the keep. And indeed, she had been doing those duties before encountering the runner Jaime had sent to fetch the maester.
Jaime looked up from the parchment he had been labouring over. “My lady wife,” he greeted her with a grin. He had taken to call her many forms of ‘wife’, ‘my lady’, and ‘my love’, all to make her blush. She had no inkling why he found the sight to his liking. Many had called the blush blotchy and unseemly on her scarred, freckled face, but it seemed his life’s work to discompose her. “To what do I owe the pleasure, my love? Have you perhaps missed my company so? We barely parted an hour ago after breaking fast.”
“Maester Armen is looking after Lilley—the cook,” she added, for Jaime’s benefit, as he had not known the names of all her staff yet, “in her birthing bed.”
Jaime showed no disappointment. With a shrug, he said, “Well then, this could wait. Bolt the door and come here.” He put his quill back in the inkwell and shoved piles of parchments aside and tapped his ink-stained fingers on the vacated space, eyebrow raised.
Brienne flushed deeper when she realized his intentions, muttering, “Gods preserve me,” though she did as he bid all the same.
He sat her on the desk, his flesh hand on one thigh and his gold hand on her cheek. He kissed her then, and she hummed into his mouth. His fingertips wandered up her breeches, closer to the juncture of her legs. She dropped one hand to brace herself against the table—
—knocking down the inkwell, the spill blackening her fingers and creeping on the edges of the parchments.
Romantic pursuits promptly forgotten, Brienne leapt off the desk and set herself on the task of straightening the inkwell. Jaime handed her a kerchief, far too finely woven to be made in Tarth, and when her own hand faltered at the golden lion embroidery, he went ahead and mopped the ink himself. Her eye caught the topmost parchment on the pile, a missive to the harbourmaster about preparations for the incoming trade ships from Essos, and a longer letter addressed to Tyrion, his scribbles smudged and barely legible even to her eyes. It was then that she remembered why she had come personally to inform him of the maester’s unavailability.
He must have seen her face change because he averted his gaze and waited, as though waiting for a slap. She chewed on her lip, turning over words in her mind. The subject of his penmanship was, and had been for a while now, an issue, for he had to learn to write with his left hand, and he had never been much for the written word. The stupidest Lannister, Cersei had called him, all because the letters leapt and jumbled when he tried to read, though a conversation with him was all it took to know that he was no dullard. There had been many reasons he had thrown his inheritance in exchange of the white cloak, chief of them his sister and promises of glory and honour, but it had never been a great sacrifice for him.
In the end, though, Brienne chose to be straightforward. Anything less and Jaime would have bristled, accusing her of pity. “Jaime, you cannot ask the maester to write for you all the time. I understand if you require his aid for longer, more official letters, but in time, as Lord of Evenfall Hall, you have to be able to write your own missives.”
He looked like she had slapped him after all. Doubtless that these few sennights had been hard for him, adjusting as well as he could to this foreign island, and more than that, the role of a lord in times of peace. He took to managing the tradesmen and common folk well enough, especially when it pertained to coin, but the more scholarly aspects eluded him. “My left hand is useless,” he said.
She took his left hand, tracing the calluses left by swordplay, then the scars on his knuckles. He would never be as good a fighter as he once was, and yet he was still better than most. “Your left hand fought against the dead and saved countless lives.”
“That is less about the hand and more about the arm and the footwork, really,” he deflected, though he sounded tired, as if he had this argument before. Perhaps he had, with Maester Armen. Neither had mentioned any such argument to her if it had indeed happened.
The young maester, however, was no fighter. It might be that he saw no difference between swordplay and writing. A hand was a hand, and Lord Jaime’s left hand worked well enough with a sword, so why couldn’t he write his own missives? He was a Lannister before he took the Tarth name, and raised with a highborn’s education.
Brienne, on the other hand, saw the truth in Jaime’s excuse. Swordplay was about footwork and arm. The wrist did some, but the hand barely had to do much than grip, and nothing so fine as a pen stroke. She remembered the many times Septa Roelle had hit her wrist with a reed for writing crookedly, remembered the red mark it left on her skin and the sting that lasted for hours after. “I had a terrible hand, too,” she admitted. “But with enough practice—”
He wrenched his hand from her grasp. “It’s not only about the letters, wife. I can scarcely button my own tunic or lace my own breeches. You dress me every morning. Everyone watches me when we dine because my food keeps spilling from my spoon. This hand is good for killing, yes,” and he looked at it with so much loathing, and Brienne knew he was thinking of the time he strangled her sister to death, “but not much else. Death is what it delivers, and only death.”
She grasped the hand again, half-afraid that he might get that one cut, too, and brought it to her lips, kissing the calluses, the scars, the veins, all the while keeping her eyes on his. “Not only death,” she whispered, mortified but certain that she needed to remind him of the many other virtues of his hand, including the husbandly ones.
He was stunned, silent, but soon he caught her meaning well enough, a rakish smirk on his face. He turned the hand to cup her face, thumb tracing her swollen lips. Her breath stuttered, her eyes glazed over, but she kept her gaze locked with his. Then, out of nowhere, he said, “There is a Myrish expression—I can’t quite pronounce it—that in the common tongue translates to ‘the little death’. Have you heard of it?”
She frowned a little. She had had a Myrish tutor, once, who had tried teaching her dances and music for a fortnight before declaring her hopeless. The tutor, however, had spoken to her in the common tongue, and the only Myrish words Brienne had learned in that fortnight were curses. “What does it mean?”
“It means—” and he leaned in to whisper in her ear.
A startled laugh escaped her, blood flushing to the tips of her ears, and she thumped none too gently at his chest. His shoulders shook in laughter, enjoying her reactions despite having shared her bed for many nights. There were crinkles at the edges of his eyes, eyes people described as emeralds. She thought they matched the verdant hills of Tarth, lush and warm, better than the cold glint of gemstones. Her mouth dry, she cleared her throat and asked, “Is that a promise, my Lord, or a threat?”
By way of an answer, he surged to kiss her again, marking the end of the argument—this time, at least. Her hands carded through his hair, now a longer mane of gold streaked with white that nearly fell to his shoulders. He crowded her, one leg between her firmly planted feet, pinning her to the desk. The warmth of his body suffused hers, a campfire in the night.
She broke free of the kiss, gasping, “You’ll knock over the ink again,” but he then licked and sucked her neck, just under her ear, and she found her willpower crumbling away, her protests stuck in her throat.
His lips went lower, to her throat, and when encountering the obstacle of her collar, he began tugging away at the buttons holding her tunic closed. For all his griping over the inability to dress himself, he was quite good at divesting her of her clothing, though he was all impatience, ripping apart the seam on one shoulder as he tried to peel off her sleeves. She made a half-hearted sound of dismay, and his laughter rumbled through the air caught in her throat, the vibration traveling into the hollow of her ribcage.
With the tunic out of the way, he pulled her sleeveless shift over her head before diving in again, his gold hand pressed to the side of her waist and his flesh hand cupped around a breast as he traced the raised scars on her collarbone with his lips. His touch was heated, but the chilly spring wind blew in through the open window behind him, causing gooseflesh to bloom on her skin. She could see, over his shoulders and out the window, the sapphire waters surrounding her island. She could almost taste the sea spray, even at this height.
It still shook her sometimes that fate allowed her to be back home, wedded to the man she loved, being both knight and lady, when she had once thought she would die chasing an oath to a dead woman.
By the time his lips reached the waistband of her breeches—he had paused, on the way, to dip his tongue teasingly into her navel and elicit a squeak from her—her breathing had become laboured, legs wrapped around his broad torso. He glared at her waist. “Laces,” he said vehemently, fingers tugging, tangling at the strings holding the front opening of the breeches, “fucking laces.”
Brienne felt a little guilty for tying the laces with a double knot. She reached down to help him.
He batted her hands away, grumbling, “No, I want to show your bloody laces I can fight my own fights.”
“It’s not a knight in a tourney, Jaime,” Brienne said, but she smiled nonetheless at his stubbornness. She preferred this infinitely to his self-pity.
It took almost an age, and Jaime’s teeth had, at one point, been involved in the untying of said laces, but he succeeded at last. With a triumphant “Hah!” he pulled her breeches off, smallclothes and all. His eyes greedily followed the exposure of every inch of pale muscled legs. She stepped out of her boots and at last, she was bare to him, entirely. He stepped back and admired her.
Under his gaze, she could almost feel like a beauty.
The wind blew again, harder this time, and Brienne shivered. It did nothing to dampen the lust—if anything, she felt wetness slowly dripping down her cunt. She took half a step back and raised herself to rest her buttocks on the edge of the desk, her legs open. An invitation.
Jaime knelt, ignoring his own burgeoning hardness. He kissed the skin just above her right knee, barely a whisper of a touch, slowly making his way up, taking his time. Brienne tried to urge him, tried to pull him by his hair, but it only made him more determined to take his time. He was finally at the inside of her thigh, beard brushing by the small expanse of skin between her leg and her nether lips, so, so close, when Brienne simply could take no more and moaned, “Your mouth, Jaime, now.”
“As my lady wife commands,” was his reply before he put his mouth on her.
She bit back a moan, but Jaime pulled back, growling, “Let the whole island hear you if you must. You’re their lady,” before bringing his mouth back to her cunt.
So she did, panting and moaning his name, his mouth on her, three of his fingers inside her, pumping and stroking. She threw her right leg over his shoulder while her other leg tried to hold her weight by its tiptoes. The desk creaked under her, a rhythm almost like a song. Her voice rose with every stroke of his fingers, with every lick over her nub, and it was not long before she heard herself scream. He eased her through it, slowing his ministrations but not stopping entirely, until it was over, and she pushed him away.
She was weightless, but her limbs felt leaden.
He stood, wiping her fluids off his chin with a sleeve. Before he could kiss her, she took his hand, the one that was just between her legs, and she put one finger after another in her mouth, tasting her own salt. He had said, once, that she smelled like the ocean, and she supposed she could now tell why. She held his gaze as she sucked his fingers, and from the look of his face as he released the last finger with a pop, she knew there would be little chance of her leaving the study anytime soon.
He took her twice, after: bent over the table, rough as he pleased, then in the chair with her riding him until he came undone.
“The Myrish might have the right of it,” he admitted, later. “I should be lucky if you haven’t milked me dry before the next winter.”
She shot him a dirty look, as though it was her fault that he had to take her so many times a day. His age streaked his hair and lined his face, but he still reminded her of the terrible stories Septa Roelle had told her about the appetite of young men. Except, perhaps, that it was not so terrible as the Septa had said. Her womanhood was sore, her legs were weak, but nothing felt as good as thorough fucking by Jaime.
He languished on the chair, comfortable in his nudity, while she wiped her legs clean of his seed with the inked kerchief. She pulled on her smallclothes and breeches, next, unharmed but for the teeth marks on a part of the laces, then frowned at her torn tunic. “You must stop ruining every item of my clothing.”
“Oh, don’t be so cross. It’s not ruined,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Jaime, the sleeve is nearly completely detached from the rest of it.” Brienne was glad that since he had started taking her outside their chambers without care, she had hidden small caches of needle and thread in various cupboards, cabinets, shelves, and even behind a loose brick in a hallway. This, of course, did nothing to dissuade Jaime from damaging her clothing—if anything, he was encouraged by her preparedness. She had one such cache in this study, too, in the drawer of the desk on which he had taken her.
“It’s an improvement,” he said in that tone of his. “You really should show more skin, you know. It’s spring, the weather is getting warm, Dornish fashion is all the rage.”
“More scars for them to see,” she said, threading the needle. “More for them to laugh and point at.”
He sighed. “That isn’t what I meant.”
She, too, sighed, resignation clear in the lines of her face. “I know, Jaime.”
When she began stitching, he finally relented and said, “Oh, very well, I’ll mend your shirt,” snatching the needle and thread from her. “Come hold these together. I only have one hand.”
She held the edges of the fabric together and he stitched them closed with his left hand. It was slow, clumsy, and crooked, but not much worse than her own needlework. “That is—rather good,” she begrudgingly said. “Thank you.”
He shrugged. “Anyone been to a battle knows how to mend a tear. It’s not fancy, but we were all not hopeless without our wives.”
Brienne knew this, of course, but she had known him first as a belligerent, spoiled, foul-mouthed Lannister scion and so, somehow, she could not align her perception of him exactly with common soldiers.
This, too, must have been writ on her face, or maybe he was just well-versed in her expressions, as he exclaimed with mock offense, “You doubt me.”
“I do not,” she said, though she did.
He scoffed. “My lady, I stitched half as much better than most common men, and with my left hand, too. I should think I deserve some praise.”
“Maybe when your stitches stop being so crooked,” she shot back, though her mind was stuck on his statement. It was true that he had used his left hand to stitch, and though she had had to help him hold the fabrics together, he had done quite well. And needlework—it was delicate, wasn’t it? It was no swinging sword, no footwork or power. Merely diligence and caution.
Not, it dawned on her, unlike penmanship.
Eyes narrowing, Jaime said, “Is that a wager, wife?”
She wondered if Jaime knew her thoughts. He often did. Mind set on a course, she raised her chin and said, “If it were, my lord, would you take it?”
“A wager must have a prize, something more than a measly praise.”
“Sew straight and I promise you a prize, husband,” she said, straightening her back so her breasts were displayed to him as she slowly buttoned up her tunic, “unless you doubt my honour.” She did the last button, just under her throat, though her nipples were still hard against the fabric. For once, she was not shy. She meant to tempt him.
His eyes glinted as he flashed a smile at her, a lion baring his fangs. “Doubt your honour, Ser? Never.”