The Value of Perception
He was known as the most beautiful man in the Seven Kingdoms.
She just didn't see it.
From the moment he had opened his mouth ("Is that a woman?!") she had thought him a bottom-dweller and every horrible rumor about him true, but he was neither especially ugly nor pretty to her. Yet the masses kept singing about the indisputable beauty and desirability of even this unkempt, dirty and scraggly bearded version of Jaime Lannister.
Well, Brienne disputed it alright.
"Are you sure you don't have a cock and balls, wench? Want me to check?"
She kicked him behind the knee to get him to walk faster and to stop turning his face to her. She didn't know what he thought he could achieve by always thrusting his not-quite-ugly mug under her nose.
She was aware that she was considered hideous, but with all the bad mannered and non-descript, if not downright unattractive, men she had encountered in her life of which nobody else ever thought as such, she didn't understand how beauty was even supposed to work anymore. Just that this starved idiot didn't seem the least bit tantalizing to her as he swayed up a hill.
Low light drifted from the bonfire to their place of captivity. None of her would-have-been rapists in sight, she took the time to study his face while he ate the stale bread.
Her eyes traced the bloody stump of his hand, his bobbing Adam's apple, the sweet lines of his mouth, to the green of his eyes. He was still dirty and now also disfigured, by society's standards. But for the first time she could at least fathom why anyone would consider him good looking.
He had saved thousands of people. And had condemned himself in the process.
The knights of legend couldn't have done a finer deed.
The dirt dripped slowly from his face and hair while his handless arm, swathed in grimy bandages, was held above the water's surface.
He looked half a god.
Her fingers slid over the blue metal. Not even the wetness of her sweaty hand could tarnish the shine of her new armor. The sword, already fastened around her hips, clanked against her knee and, in the same moment, reminded her that what now followed would mean goodbye.
Riding away, her new squire next to her, and the only worthwhile gifts she had ever received strapped to her body, she looked back for the last time.
She could see it now.
The most beautiful man in the Seven Kingdoms, indeed.