At first, Brienne had thought it simply funny. A high-class man like Jaime, so focused on his career, with his rigorous training schedule and effortless good looks, buying the smallest dog in the whole pet shop? Amusing.
Naming the little runt of a Yorkshire terrier "Kingslayer"? Hilarious.
But since then a lot of time had passed and the novelty of her roommate and best friend of a demi-god carrying around a mini-dog and bombarding the poor thing with cutesy baby-talk had lost its appeal. It was just part of normal life at this point. Not that Brienne didn't love the sweet ankle biter. Kingslayer was pretty well-behaved as long as you weren't a police officer – for some reason he seemed to have a problem with the guardians of the law – or Baelish from next door. Brienne even allowed him to crawl all over her in a bid to wake her up each morning and to curl up in her lap when he felt cuddly. (Kingslayer, not Baelish.)
There was just the little fact that after some time dogs and their owners started to resemble each other, in behavior, likes and even looks. It was well-known. Dog owners and anyone who had ever associated with them were aware of it. So when Jaime, in the middle of a chat with Brienne, stood up to let the terrier out to do his business, although the dog hadn't even made a sound, and Kingslayer really peed his heart out, Brienne shrugged it off as some kind of paternal instinct. That would come in handy, should Jaime ever decide he wanted children. (She had no dreams or unrealistic hopes about that. Nope, not her, sir.)
When Kingslayer began to refuse eating his dog food and wrinkled his little black nose at everything that wasn't the dish Jaime put onto his own plate, she told herself the dog just had good taste (Who wanted to eat jellied mush if they could already smell fried chicken?) and Jaime was just mollycoddling him as always.
Despite all that, the thought that Jaime and Kingslayer were becoming a unit, some weird cross-bred version of twins, first entered her mind when she found them sleeping on the couch, one cold night in November. Both lay on their backs, with the terrier snuggled into the perfect V of Jaime's legs and copying his human's pose. Kingslayer's little legs flopped outwards and his furred belly was pointing up. (He should cut back on the fried chicken.) Brienne did a double take as she noticed both boys' right legs, hind leg in the dog's case, beginning to twitch as if electrified. Now, she could no longer ignore the lookalike-aspect of dogs and their owners' symbiosis.
But what really drove the point home for Brienne was the day she was the focus of two pairs of big, sad and soulful eyes because she had the gall to go on a business trip away from King's Landing for a whole week, leaving them behind. Kingslayer even jumped into her open suitcase, ready to get packed away with her bras and now crinkled blouses. Jaime looked like he might try the same tactic.
With a heavy heart, she plucked the fur ball out of her bag, deposited him in Jaime's lap and did her best to not cancel her flight while Jaime and Kingslayer whimpered at her not to go. In the end, her working morale won out and she rolled her stuff out the door. But not before she buried her face in the fur on top of Kingslayer's head and then turned, absentmindedly, to Jaime and did the very same thing to him. His hair smelled like citrus conditioner.
Seven miles in the air, she allowed herself a dignified little freak-out in one of the restrooms that ended with a stewardess rapping on the door to politely ask her if she was in need of an Imodium.
Seven days later, Brienne sat on a plane home and reviewed her plan how to tackle the surely impending discussion with Jaime about the head-smooching. She hoped she could butter him up a bit with the squeaky toy she'd bought for Kingslayer before delving into mumblings of automatic reactions and conditioning by proxy. She still had the scent of lemons in her nose, so Brienne wasn't sure if a stormtrooper replica that made wheezy noises when squished was diversion enough.
She shouldn't have worried. The second she stepped over the flat's threshold, six feet could be heard scrambling over tiles. By the time Jaime and Kingslayer skidded around the corner of the living room and barreled into her – one of them hugging the air out of her lungs, the other jumping up and down while pawing at her knee – any misstep she might have committed a week ago was gone from her mind.
As she hugged Jaime back and pulled the squeaky toy out of her blazer pocket, dangling it over Kingslayer's happily panting snout, she felt like she could breathe for the first time in a week. Home, sweet home.
The nose pressed into her temple and the curling blond tresses there, she hadn't anticipated.
"Finally." The sound of sniffing that accompanied Jaime's declaration didn't escape her.
So, when Kingslayer started to mouth at the trooper's head, overjoyed at its wheezes, Brienne was only marginally surprised that Jaime pressed his mouth against hers in turn, equally delighting in her gasp.
Because it was a universally known fact that dogs and their owners became more alike with time.