For the incomparable roqueamadi. She deserves way more reading material about her favorite pairing.
The '50s slang-terms I used in this story are kind of self-explanatory. They're in cursive. If you want to check up on their meaning, google 1950s Slang - FiftiesWeb, first result is the one I used.
The title is from the lyrics of Marina and the Diamonds' "Bubblegum Bitch".
Soda Pop, Soda Pop, Baby, Here I Come
"And I think it's clear your priorities lie not where they should."
"You mean with you. That you are not the center of my universe anymore is reason enough to kick me out of the family business?" Jaime's eyes raked over Cersei as he growled the question at her.
She didn't seem the least bit intimidated by his tone. "Not much of a familybusiness since it's only you and me now. Or have you forgotten the gnome's defection? Him spitting on father's legacy?" she hissed, her distaste for their little brother almost tangible.
Grabbing one of the laminated menus and waving it lazily in the air, Jaime sighed, quite fed up with his twin sister. "Tyrion went to Essos to get his degree in Business Economics from their university, not to betray us to the mafia." He thrust the bubblegum-pink menu card forward. "And what you call 'legacy' is a '50s style diner."
"Soda shop!" Cersei screeched as if it was an affront to her sensibilities to hear a place where they served burgers, fries and milkshakes getting called a diner. How stupid of him, of course it wasn't a diner. They also had a soda fountain and arranged Lindy Hop Fridays. His mistake.
"Just one more point in favor of you leaving the shop in my hands," she spat. Her black pantsuit seemed more out of place than Jaime's beige, monogrammed cardigan. But of course that wasn't as much a no-no to her as him falsely naming their shop a diner.
"We're running this place together. You're just trying to find reasons to get me out of it because I put a stop to our," he lowered his voice, "transgression and got me a girlfriend that's not you."
The intense heat of her stare could have melted the turquoise leather imitation off the bench he was sitting on. Despite her eyes promising him death, her tone was honeyed. "The girlfriend who chose a gymnastics scholarship in Winterfell over you, you mean? Yes, I heard the sad news, brother. How devastating it must be to know you couldn't even keep a virginal cow like her interested in you. One might wonder why," she trailed off while eying his prosthetic hand. The smile she bestowed on him after was brain-freeze and soda bubbles up his nose – painful, irritating and humiliating.
"Brienne got the chance to train with Catelyn Stark, Davos Seaworth and Barristan Selmy. You would have to be mad to decline such an offer. She could be sent to the next Nymeriac Games." His mumblings sounded pathetically sad, even to his own ears. Brienne leaving him for better and brighter shores had hurt, but he couldn't bring himself to be petty about it since he had urged her to accept it in the first place. She had been ready to stay with him. But if anyone deserved every great thing this world had to offer, it was her. He was sorry to say that didn't include him though.
"I give you until the end of the week to get into contact with your lawyer, either to transfer your share to me or to fight me on it. One of these options is fairly problem free, the other will ruin you. Your choice." With these last parting words, Cersei grabbed her purse, shimmied out of her seat, and left the shop.
Jaime slumped back and loudly exhaled with all his suffering evident in that little puff of air. Fuck his life, seriously.
"That looked painful," came in a gleefully smug voice from his right. It seemed like Bronn had popped in a bit earlier than usual to start his shift. Great, there had been a witness to his butchering that was not their mute cook Ilyn Payne.
"You cruisin' for a bruisin'?" he shot back.
Leaning against the bench, Bronn grinned down at a very disgruntled Jaime. "Don't be such a wet rag, boss."
Since Bronn Blackwater had started flipping burgers and also serving – he was a woefully underpaid handyman if you asked Bronn, his personal dogsbody if you asked Jaime – their little game of slinging slang at each other had escalated over the months. Although it was mandatory for every employee to learn the '50s lingo, with the exception of Ilyn, of course, Bronn and Jaime's time-appropriate bickering duels were becoming legendary. Jaime shouldn't have tried to get the other man to take his job more seriously, at least not with the words 'dignified' and 'respectable' thrown into his introduction speech while simultaneously trying to get him to wear a rosé striped soda jerk hat. At the time, Jaime had cackled about the perceived accuracy of the term. But nowadays, Bronn was less jerk and more coarse friend to him. He still refused to wear the hat.
"Shouldn't you be somewhere else? The kitchen, perhaps? Anywhere else than here would be appreciated," Jaime asked, righting his position to not look so defeated, now that he had company.
"Nope," was the sardonic answer. Bronn even popped the P like an overblown bubble of gum. After that, he went to stand a lot closer, his stomach now parallel to Jaime's head. "Payne can manage the dinner rush for a bit longer on his own," he tacked on with a pointed look at the deserted dining area. Business couldn't get slower than on a Wednesday night around here. "So, scoot over and tell Uncle Bronn what's your tale, nightingale."
Rolling his eyes, Jaime moved a bit to the side, his pants making a funny little squeaky sound as they rubbed along the upholstery. "Get bent," he mumbled despite the fact that he had made quite readily space for the other man, who sat down with a satisfied hum.
Both stared for a while straight ahead, not saying a word. But whereas Jaime's silence was born out of reluctance, Bronn's was his attempt at giving his boss time to gather his thoughts.
Not a bad call, it seemed, when Jaime opened his mouth after a few minutes. "How much did you hear?" he asked in a small voice.
"More than you would like me to know, but less than I already heard through the grapevine." Bronn swept his arms in a grand gesture behind him and Jaime to stretch them over the backrest. In this position his wrist was almost touching Jaime's neck.
"As the scuttlebutt has it," he began, "your kitten left you to play on greener grass and the queen is trying to usurp you." At this, Bronn's hand actually made contact with Jaime's nape. His palm was flat against the back, his fingers curled around the sides of it. They, not quite accidentally, caressed the shorter hairs there.
The twitch Jaime couldn't suppress at the touch was so small, it was barely noticeable. After a few seconds, he decided to go with it and relaxed into the foreign hand on his person. Slanting a sideways glance at Bronn, he grumbled, "So now you know for sure that basically everything they trash-talk about me is true. Swell. And what's the part you heard from my bitching personnel that Cersei hasn't bleated out into the world with her charming hissy fit?"
Rubbing the pads of his fingers up and down the curled hairs under Jaime's ear, the server exaggeratedly pursed his lips. "That the owner of Greyjoy's theme-bar Seven Seas of Slurpee submitted an offer to buy your place to use it for his budding franchising plans."
With a groan Jaime let his head fall back, now squishing Bronn's hand between his occiput and the edge of the backrest. He stared at the baby-pink ceiling. "Which basically means that Cersei wants me to sign away my rights to the shop for free, or win it through a lawsuit, so she can later sell both halves under her name." Jaime covered his face with his hands, one real, one cold plastic, and heaved a loud groan.
Bronn wiggled his now slightly crushed hand to get Jaime's head back up. "Sounds like her," he stated callously. "Are you really that surprised she tried to trick you to get a shitload of dough?" He succeeded in getting the younger man's head upright again, but the blonde still kept his face hidden and moaned exaggeratedly.
"I'm not even surprised," he finally whispered, peering through his fingers as he dragged them down his face. "I should have known it wasn't about legacy, family or our relationship. It was never about that with her."
Bronn started the caressing of Jaime's neck anew. "You gonna just give up and serve her this place on a silver platter, or do you want to fight for it?" His thumb was now drawing little invisible circles on Jaime's skin.
"Not sure, yet," he answered, shaking his artfully styled mane and therefore dislodging a few strands of his perfect side-parted hairdo. "This place is my home, kind of. But it's not one I ever felt especially cozy in, counting the last ten years. Or thirty." Again, the menu found its way into his hand. Leafing through the meager four pages of sugary and savory snacks, Jaime continued his monologue about his choices. "If I sell to Cersei, the place my parents built from nothing will end up in the hands of Euron Greyjoy." His face contorted into a really hideous grimace at the name. Not even his incomparable beauty was able to balance his distaste for that fucker out. Two meetings with the nasty shit, after the man had taken the family business from his niece and nephew in a coup d'état that had shocked the neighborhood – because let's be serious, who goes to such lengths and plays a Machiavellian villain for a slushy bar – was enough to cement Jaime's opinion of Euron. The fact alone that it would be him owning the place where his family had been last happy was giving him acid regurgitation.
"What would your brother say about it?"
The question threw Jaime off. He hadn't featured Tyrion into the equation. He had left his, in comparison to his siblings' shares, unbelievably small percentage to Jaime the moment he had declared his intention to study abroad. "Probably the same he said when he rushed to get his plane. 'For all I care, burn it and cash the insurance.'" Tyrion had even less sweet memories of the shop than Jaime and no memento of their mom to tide him over. Jaime flipped the menu into the corner of the bench. "And that looks more promising than the alternatives right now. I'm beginning to see his point."
Bronn, at last, took his hand from Jaime's neck. "Want to hear what I have to say about your little diner?"
"Soda shop," Jaime corrected intuitively and wanted to bite himself in the ass for turning into Cersei for a split second.
"Soda shop, malt shop, milk bar, diner – call it what you want, it's still sickeningly nostalgic. All that pastel is throttling my will to live. From your speech I guess yours too." Bronn raised both eyebrows, goading Jaime to disagree.
"A sip of soda will help your throat after such an assault," Jaime threw him a verbal curveball with a smile so nauseatingly sweet it would deserve a place on the menu.
"Whatever," Bronn waved aside. "Point is, you're not jazzed about how things are running here. So either stop altogether and build yourself a nice drama-free life with the bit of money you've squirreled away, or fight her on it and change the place to your taste after your win." He slapped the tabletop with his free hand for emphasis. "Which you will because – not sure if you remembered with all that moping going on – with the munchkin's share you own the bigger part of this dump and it's a nice testament to his trust in your business skills. The base line is: Do the fuck what makes you happy. Pro and contra lists won't help you if you're neglecting what you want for what you think is the right thing just because of your dead folks."
Jaime couldn't keep the cringe at bay. Hearing someone call his parents 'dead folks', with no respect for the mother he had loved and the father he had…fearspected – no existing words were accurate in describing the complicated relationship with his father – was disconcerting. The only reason he wasn't raising hell was that he could see Bronn's intentions crystal clear. He wasn't the most tactful, but telling Jaime that he should consider what he wanted and needed drove the point home. It wasn't a question he was accustomed to, so the effect was pretty staggering. Especially since he brought something to light he hadn't considered. If Jaime fought his sister on this, he could win. Like, really, genuinely have a chance to win. Against Cersei. That was unheard of.
Jaime put a nonchalant look on his face, transparent as hell. "You know that giving in to her would mean you'll end up jobless, right?" There wasn't the slightest chance Cersei would keep Bronn on after Jaime left, in the unrealistic case that she wouldn't sell, and Jaime was fairly sure he wouldn't just play turncoat and start working for Greyjoy.
Shrugging, Bronn slid out of the booth. "Yeah, well, wouldn't be as fun without your prissy ass around. So, that's your decision?"
The younger man dropped the façade, a wicked grin curling the corners of his mouth. "No. I think I'm done rolling onto my back and showing Cersei my vulnerable belly just to escape her wrath." His gaze drifted to the memorial photo of his mother that hung above the jukebox. "I have a few ideas how to make this place my own and honor my 'dead folks', as you put it."
"Care to share?"
Jaime just shook his head in a show of disbelief. "You want to help? It won't be pretty."
Pulling a familiar packet out of his trouser pockets, Bronn wiggled his shoulders. "Pretty's overrated." However, he looked up from flipping the lid of the carton open and stared meaningfully at Jaime. "But it's always a nice bonus."
Startled into a laugh he could only stop by biting the inside of his cheek, Jaime intoned, "Weak. That was just pitiful. You're getting rusty in your old days."
Bronn finally pulled a cigarette free. "Maybe," he mumbled as he lifted the cig to his mouth. "I need a weed. Are you coming too, to bitch a bit more about your sissy problems?"
After he stared a gratuitously long time at the other man's mouth, Jaime stood up and walked to his side.
"Why not. You can stop using the lingo, by the way. I think our stream of slang got broken ten minutes ago or so."
Bronn's eyes lighted up while he asked around the unlit cigarette, "Yeah, what do I get for winning?"
The unholy glee spreading over the older man's face was infectious, which led to Jaime mirroring him. "A drive to the passion pit, if you're up for it. Payne can man the place for a bit longer on his own. Can't you?" He threw the question over his shoulder in the vague direction of the kitchen's open service hatch and got a thumbs-up from a disembodied-looking arm shooting out of it.
Taking that as a vehement yes on Ilyn's part, Jaime trotted with Bronn to the door, which his employee opened for him absentmindedly. He was apparently occupied with something. "Which definition of passion pit are we talking here? Drive-in theater or innuendo?" Finally out of the place and on the street, Bronn lit the cigarette with his trusted Zippo.
"Does it matter?" Jaime couldn't stop himself from coquetting.
As he puffed a ring of smoke out – the old poser – Bronn inched his free hand closer to Jaime's, seemingly by chance bumping it with his own. "Not if there's going to be back seat bingo either way."
Rolling his eyes, Jaime thought about change. Changing life plans, family, diners, and apparently also possible partners. Making a split decision, he snatched the cigarette out of Bronn's mouth to put it between his own lips. He didn't need to say, "We'll see." His grin was telling enough.