A/N: I sat down intending to write a scene in which Brienne removes the armour Jaime gave her for the final time, but this is what came out instead. Maybe the armour scene will form a Brienne-reflecting follow-up.

Bad at the Bone

He'd known the moment he woke that he had made a monumental mistake. Still, he could not quite bring himself to regret it. Not then, anyway. At that point he'd still had hope, he supposes, a tiny un-mined nugget of it gleaming in the almost-tapped seam of his heart. As if Jaime Lannister hadn't already been aware that hope is the cruellest fool's gold of all. As if he shouldn't have known better than to think that even here, in the cursed cold of the North, he could ever be free to find peace.

What had surprised him most – or if not quite the most (because to be frank the entire evening had been rather unexpected) then close to it – was how delicately she moved. Devoid of armour, naked in the firelight, Brienne of Tarth had arranged her giant's limbs with a precise grace that had awed him into silence. It should have been impossible, given the brute strength he knew existed in the strong planes of her body, for her to sweep an arm with anything approaching femininity. Yet he'd found himself transfixed by the way she moved her hands, her fingers. By how her bare shoulders had dipped as she'd turned her face to look at him over her shoulder. By how her neck had arched as he'd traced a thumb down the hidden iron line of her spine, and then followed it with his tongue.

He had been fascinated by her for years: repulsed, at first, or so he'd thought at the time. It hadn't taken long for that to transmute into something else, something he could not name and was not sure, even as he'd lain between her legs, he could accurately quantify. There had been a moment, as he'd stood looking down at her from the battlements of Winterfell, not expecting to last the night, when he'd thought he loved her. The word had bloomed in his mind, a sudden, unexpected flare that had shocked his heart into skipping a beat. And who was to say that he didn't? How did you know, that was the question, how did you ever really know that what you were feeling wasn't just something passing strange, born of (seven years) the approach of assumed death?

Maybe it is love, he thinks now, hitching the stirrup tighter, the fingers of his one good hand tingling with the bitter cold. This lump of rock where my heart should be. Maybe this is how it feels.

Once he had stopped being repulsed, what had arisen next was the unassailably certain knowledge that she was good. He'd never before met anyone so utterly without moral taint as Brienne of Tarth. Her sense of honour was so absolute that her big bones may as well have been cast from it, and for all he knew they were. He'd been stunned by the realisation that such people existed in this world. His own life had been steeping in corruption and malice for so long that he could no longer remember if there had ever been a time before. Had he ever been good? As a toddler, perhaps? As an infant, surely? He doubted it. If there was something of which Jaime Lannister was convinced, now, it was that he had been born with something essential missing; with some vital element of humanity removed. Cersei shared his lack: perhaps that was what had first bound them together and set them on the path to their colossal ignominy.

Cersei understood him. That was the truth. She knew what he was, because they were the same. Whereas Brienne…

When he was with her, it was so easy to persuade himself that he could be other than he was. Better. Good. Hadn't he come North because a voice in his head – her voice, in truth – had told him it was the right thing to do? He'd left Cersei and told himself he would never go back. That he would leave her to her fate, whatever that turned out to be. Tyrion had pronounced him happy. And he was. He was.

Maybe it could have lasted, too. Maybe he could have pretended long enough for the good to take root properly, to grow in him honestly, like spring blooming from beneath the snow. That had been half his thoughts, even in the aftermath of that awful, waking knowledge that he shouldn't have gone to her bed, that he shouldn't have risked laying open her goodness to his innate lack of it, not to mention those hateful, inevitable whispers. Kingslayer's Whore. Ser Brienne of Lannister Cock.

He'd been told he could stay, and he had intended to do just that. Because of the hope, of course. Because of that treacherous glimmer. Because beside her, when he pushed away the doubts, he felt more good than bad. Because the North, as she'd promised, had grown on him, not least because it was so far away from King's Landing. It was so very, very far away.

If he hadn't heard Cersei's name without being told she was dead first, maybe he would have been able to forget. Maybe he could have thought of himself as this new Jaime, this veritable hero who had come North to fight a battle just because it was the right thing to do. He who had loved a woman that most dismissed as a beast without even trying to see her as anything else. He who had seen past the armour she encased herself in to the grace beneath and who treasured her goodness precisely because he had long ago flayed his own from his soul. But Cersei wasn't dead. Hearing her name, thinking of her trapped in the Red Keep: it had reminded him of everything he was and had always been. Would always, deep down, be.

Yes, he'd known the moment he'd woken that first night that he had made a mistake. Brienne of Tarth was too good for him, in the very real sense of the word. Still, he'd hoped. And he did love her. He did. He was sure of that, now, as he pulled closed the pannier, as he tightened the strap. But love couldn't make him good. It couldn't make him worthy. It would never erase what he had done for lust. Cersei was where he belonged. If he could save her, then maybe there was hope for them both. After all, if Jaime Lannister could be a better man, then so could his twin. So could his unborn child.

If not – well. Death was the best he deserved, really.

He heard the sound of her footsteps crunching on snow and could barely bring himself to look at her. Yes, he thought. Here at the end, this is what you have learned. This is what it feels like.

He loved her. He did. He loved her goodness, her strength, her honour. He loved the freckle he had found on the inside of her thigh. He loved the way her hair spread across the furs they had shared for too short a time. He loved how awkward she became when he smiled at her in company. He loved her. He did, and she could never know it.

It had been a mistake to go to her bed. Yet he couldn't quite bring himself to regret it. He was a bad man, after all. He always had been.

He always would be.

[END]