A/N: This was supposed to be one chapter, but I am nothing if not a predictable creature of habit, so I had to split it up. As promised / threatened, this is a little angstier than the previous chapter, but there's some H/C and the next chapter will have more talking whilst cuddling and, yes, more kissing.
I'm still experimenting with venturing bravely into unchartered territory, so please let me know if something works (or doesn't) so I know if I'm doing it right. (The rating has been increased because this also includes a canon-typical level of battle gore – don't get your hopes up...)
I had great intentions to include more of Jaime's perspective in this tale but – as ever – it's Brienne who keeps narrating!
He dies a hundred times, in a hundred different ways; every time she cannot save him, too slow, too late, too far away to reach him. He dies in her arms, at her feet, vanishes into the infinite dark, becomes interred beneath the bodies of the fallen. She relives the battle countless times, forever fighting off a never-ending tide of relentless wights, as she bleeds and aches and grieves all at once.
Sometimes, Podrick dies too, a blade through his back and betrayal in his face. She fails him, fails Sansa, fails Jaime, yet her own body stubbornly refuses to yield, continuing to draw breath and mocking her with her own resilience. Oathkeeper severs and hacks and stabs, its blade never dulling; her armour keeps her alive.
Every time Jaime falls she feels a sense a yearning helplessness, of words left unsaid, the memory of his first tentative kiss a ghost upon her lips and heart. She fights on, and on, the night extending for an eternity, losing those she loves repeatedly and the world turning slowly to ice.
Brienne wakes to a room that is darker and colder than she remembers, the fire almost dwindled to ashes and dusk already falling beyond her window. It feels like mere minutes since falling asleep, but it must be hours, with the nightmares ensuring that her sleep has not been restorative in the slightest. The chill is exacerbated by Jaime's absence; he has rolled away from her at some point, and although the expanse of bed between them is only slight, nonetheless it seems a mile after falling asleep so close in his arms.
Still only half-awake, the cold and the low light are disorientating enough that she cannot yet shake the final vestiges of her dreams; the image of him dying over and over again, in a myriad preventable ways, is imprinted on her mind. It merges with the reality until she can barely remember the true events, his lifeless body on the ground, his confession hanging incomplete in the air – these things are so familiar and so horrific that she can no longer separate them from the awful visions she has just endured.
When she looks across to him, his breathing is so shallow as to be almost non-existent, and her own hitches in panic. She shoots bolt upright in the bed, disturbing the furs that cover them both, and her gaze skims his frame; beneath his arm, his shirt is soaked with blood and clinging to his injured side. She lets out a startled cry and begins to shake him, calling his name repeatedly and jostling him more roughly than she would under any normal circumstances.
He startles awake and immediately tries to fend her off, as though he is being attacked, until he finally catches a glimpse of his would-be assailant and registers the open terror on her face.
"What?" he asks accusingly, muzzy from sleep.
"Jaime…" She breathes out in relief.
"Yes – I'm awake. What's the matter?"
"You… you're bleeding. I wasn't sure if you were breathing, and I dreamt… oh, Gods."
She presses her hands to her face in embarrassment, as Jaime's face softens in understanding. He attempts to roll over again to face her properly, to press a hand to her arm in comfort, but the stickiness of his now-ruined shirt makes him pause, grimacing at the sudden discomfort; he tries again but moves too quickly, the stitches pulling and sending a jolt of stinging agony down his side, and he hisses in pain and gives up.
Brienne regains her composure, Jaime's predicament giving her something more practical to focus on, and slides from the bed to first attend to the fire. She adds another log and the blaze flares hungrily, flooding the room with orange light. She finds a candle, lighting it with a flint, and hurries about the room collecting fresh bandages, a cloth and a bowl of water. She brings everything to the bed, placing down the supplies, and then moves to collect both chairs from beneath the table. One she places in front of Jaime, the other beside it, where she sets down the candle. She sits and drags the chair nearer.
"You don't have to—"
"Stop arguing," she admonishes him in a firm but concerned tone, before he can even start to debate with her. "Sit up so I can do this."
He falls silent and obeys. With an effort of energy, he manages to force himself upright and swing his legs off the bed to face her, a grunt of pain escaping through clenched teeth despite his best efforts. She shifts forward on the chair, her knees settling between his. She notes with relief that the sheets are unbesmirched; the bleeding must have started after he rolled away from her.
Tamping down any remaining bashfulness, Brienne helps him out of the ruined shirt, lifting it carefully away from his injured side. The bandages are thoroughly stained and she is almost too afraid to remove them, terrified of what she might find beneath. She takes a breath, steadying herself, finding the securing knot and cautiously releasing it, unwinding the lengths of linen and dropping them to the floor. She bites her lip in concentration and sympathy, almost drawing blood. As she reaches the final layer, she pauses for a moment, pressing her hand reassuringly against his arm as she peels the bandages away from the stitches beneath.
It's difficult to see in the low light, but under the dressings his chest and back are mottled with bruises, spattered with blisters and cuts, much the same as her own. She reaches out almost unconsciously towards a particularly angry-looking contusion near his right shoulder, drawing short at the last second. Jaime is watching her, a smirk rising on his face when he catches her staring, and she averts her gaze self-consciously and returns to the task at hand.
She lifts his arm out of the way, and he grips onto his opposite shoulder to hold it in position whilst Brienne assesses the damage. To her abject relief, she finds that the stitches are still intact, and she tells him so. They are uneven, clearly undertaken in a hurry by someone with an inexperienced hand, but they have held. His unconscious movements have merely aggravated the wound. She can see now that the cut itself is not too deep, but its sheer size is horrendous – as though someone (or something) had tried to slice him open, finding the weak point of his armour with eerie precision. That it missed his internal organs is nothing short of a miracle.
Wetting the cloth, Brienne works diligently to clean away the dried and fresh blood from around the rough edges of the injury and the surrounding area. Jaime hisses from the frigid temperature of the water – poured from the ewer by her window – and she shoots him a silent apology. Goosebumps rise up in the wake of the cloth, travelling quickly across his torso, over his shoulder and down his arm; she tries to concentrate on tending to the injury rather than allowing her gaze to wander elsewhere. She is overcome by a temporary insanity, as the notion occurs of pressing a kiss to the bruises, each in turn, to discover what the warmth of him would feel like beneath her mouth, what his skin would taste like if she tried to soothe the cold away with her tongue.
The fire spits in the hearth, snapping her out of her reverie, and she hopes that her blush is not too obvious in the candlelight, and that Jaime is not capable of reading her thoughts.
Within a few minutes, the water in the bowl is red-tinged and of no further use, but Jaime's injury is clean, and she carefully pats it dry with a fresh cloth. She needs more room to apply the bandages, so she instructs him to lift his arms out of the way. He does as she bids him, though it clearly causes him discomfort, and she works as quickly as she dares. Within only moments, his left arm in particular is shaking from the effort, slowly dropping lower as it succumbs to gravity. Brienne pauses in the task, lifting his forearms to rest against her shoulders, taking the weight he cannot bear himself.
She can feel his gaze on her as she works, wrapping him up methodically, ensuring that the bandages are tight enough to keep the stitches in place, but not so tight as to cause him further discomfort. It's not an ideal solution, but hopefully it will suffice until he can get himself to a Maester. She secures the ends as best she can, and Jaime releases a breath she was unaware he was holding.
"Thank you," he says, and Brienne nods to suggest it was nothing of consequence, though her heart is thumping against her ribs as if she has been sparring.
She reaches for his arms, with the intention of removing them from around her neck so she can rise from the chair, but Jaime's hand releases its grip around his right wrist and instead flattens against her nape, his fingers toying with the short ends of her hair, causing her breath to catch in her throat. His gaze locks to her, silently communicating his intention, the look on his face as familiar as breathing. She moistens her lips almost unintentionally, in anticipation, as Jaime's hand moves up to gently cup the back of head and he leans forward to capture her mouth with his.
A relieved, satisfied hum escapes her, his closeness and the press of his lips to hers finally chasing away the lingering images of her nightmare. Her hands slide up his arms to rest upon his shoulders, thumbs gently caressing the edge of his jaw.
The kiss is part gratitude for her gentle ministrations, part indulgence in the temptation that has been plaguing him for the past few minutes, her close proximity and her hands upon his skin becoming too much to bear without being able to touch her in return. He deepens the kiss, his tongue sliding languorously against hers, savouring the moment. Brienne allows herself to be lost, just for a short while, her fraught anxiety slowly melting away.
Jaime's knees tighten around hers, and it brings her back to reality, the hard wooden chair beneath her becoming increasingly uncomfortable. She breaks away and he lets her go, a little reluctantly, lifting his arms from her shoulders. He drops them down to his sides again cautiously, wincing slightly.
"I didn't hurt you, did I?" she asks in concern.
"No. It just stings, that's all."
With a relieved nod, she sets to tidying everything away: extinguishing the candle, replacing the chairs beneath the table and clearing up the mess of bloodied bandages from the floor. She washes her hands in the same icy water from the pitcher, rubbing them together and blowing on them as she returns, trying to restore some warmth.
She opens the chest in the corner and roots around, eventually emerging with a clean shirt, before handing it to him. Jaime accepts it with barely a hesitation and pulls it over his head. The fit on him is better – of course it is, she ponders ironically – and she briefly wonders if anyone will notice later on, that he's wearing her shirt. It's non-descript enough that nobody would even recognise it as hers, but she fears she will give the game away without intending to: with a misplaced blush or lingering stare. She's not even certain, yet, if Jaime wants their new-found status to become public knowledge, quite regardless of the fact that everyone will probably work it out within moments. Gods, Podrick had figured it out even before they did themselves, and she hasn't missed the sly glances from Lord Tyrion either.
She is distracted by Jaime lifting the fabric of the shirt to his nose and taking a deep breath, exhaling with a satisfied smile.
"This smells of you," he says.
She flushes, not sure whether to be embarrassed or affronted. "It's clean!"
"I'm not complaining," he clarifies, the look in his eyes sending a shiver down her spine, before he adopts a more jovial tone. "May I keep it? I'll gladly return the favour. You can steal anything you like from my admittedly meagre wardrobe."
He is utterly incorrigible, and she resigns herself to the fact she has seen the last of her shirt. There is no point in arguing, so she returns to her side of the bed, sliding back beneath the furs. Jaime resettles himself, grimacing slightly, and twists his upper body experimentally. Satisfied that the new bandages will hold, he rolls over to face her.
"You should have that looked at properly in the morning," she suggests. "I'm no Maester, and those stitches probably need to be replaced."
"They'll hold for now," he reassures her. "In fact, I feel better already. It must be the healing nature of your touch."
She snorts in amusement. "Maybe ask them to check you're not delirious, too," she adds, and brushes his hair back from his forehead, surprised when he flinches away from her.
"Gods, your hands are freezing," he explains, and she considers that they probably are, to him, though they have definitely improved since she washed them. He gestures towards his chest and she takes him up on the silent offer, sliding her hands beneath the borrowed – well, stolen – shirt and resting them against his heart. The bandages offer him some protection from her chilled fingers, the heat from his body more than adequate to help thaw them. His arm finds its way around her waist once more, settling comfortably with his stump against her back.
For a moment, they enjoy the silence and each other's closeness, waiting quietly for sleep to reclaim them. Brienne feels a little guilty for spending an entire day resting – there is so much still to do after the battle – but the lack of activity in Winterfell suggests that everyone else is taking the same opportunity to recuperate. Tomorrow there will be pyres to build, a funeral to be held for the many who were lost, and then the real work begins: rebuilding the castle, drilling the troops, preparing for the journey south.
Her heart jolts at that realisation, at the thought of Jaime returning to the capital, with or without her. Despite all they have shared in the short time since the battle, she wonders if Cersei's hold is still too strong; a wave of bitter jealousy washes over her, and she hates herself for it. Jaime has made his intentions more than clear; she trusts his words, his kiss, his arms around her, even as she marvels that she has them at all. She was hesitant, at first, even sceptical, to accept that Jaime could truly love her; she believes it now, a little more with every passing second, but she is not so naïve as to dismiss his past. She can never hope to understand his history with his twin, and all she can do is hold onto the fact that, for the immediate future at least, they are here together in the North, far from the Queen's lethal grasp.
Any journey southwards could be weeks, even months away. Brienne will savour whatever time they can have before the final manoeuvre in this war inevitably forces them apart.
Jaime's eyes suddenly snap open on a surprised gasp, startling her from her thoughts. He answers her silent question immediately, in an urgent whisper.
"I… I think I remember. How it happened."
Brienne is not sure she wants to know how he sustained such a gruesome injury, but from the look on his face it is clear he needs some way of ridding himself of the images in his head, so she nods for him to continue.
With a pile of corpses growing ever larger at his feet, Jaime does not realise that they are separated from each other until he finds a blessed second of reprieve. Only moments ago they had been fighting back-to-back, Brienne's presence firm and reassuring, and now he suddenly finds himself alone. It sounds insane even to his own frenzied mind, but the wights seem almost deliberately organised in how they can so effectively distract attention, as though the separation had been intentional.
In the next second, the turret in front of him erupts in orange flame as one of the dragons – moving too fast to determine which – aims a pillar of fire towards it, decimating the remaining wights as they scuttle and spiral up its interior staircase. Jaime shields his face from the blast of heat, the impact shuddering the ramparts beneath him, and as the turret crumbles he turns away to return to Brienne.
Through the smoke and the blizzard, he can barely see her at the end of the walkway, if not for the glint of Oathkeeper slicing through the air. He presses onwards towards her, taking out another undead creature to his right as it vaults over the wall, barely dodging a hail of arrows from the archers higher up. Podrick is valiantly defending the walkway behind Brienne, so she can deal with the wights climbing up the tower and pouring through the door; the squire's face shows a flicker of relief as Jaime approaches and it seems to provoke a burst of energy in the lad, as he swings the sword harder and emits a grunt of determination.
Halfway back, a Godsawful noise rends the air, a rumbling clatter from down below which grows closer, moving higher; Jaime tries to identify its source, coming to a dead stop as his gaze is drawn to the roof of the tower. At first he thinks he is hallucinating; it looks as though the roof is moving; then the horrible reality dawns as he recognises the shape: an ocean of long-dead rats, all decaying flesh and gnashing teeth, vicious claws and matted fur, as they rush up, up, up and over.
"Brienne! Above your head! Watch out!"
He shouts as he moves forward, but she cannot hear him over the fray; his only option is to run as fast as his heavy armour and exhausted limbs will allow. Another wight grabs hold of his ankle and he kicks it into the wall, its skull exploding and bones shattering apart on impact, viscera splattering against the stones; several hundred bodies ago the sight and sound would have made him retch, but he's numb to everything except the need to reach Brienne.
The rats are slip-sliding down the tiled roof of the tower, piling on top of each other in the gutter, forming a larger whole that looks ready to drop at any moment. Jaime rushes onwards, Brienne still distracted by the once-human monsters within the tower and unaware of the danger. He lifts his sword in some vague plan of stopping the rats from raining down on their heads, though he's sure it will not achieve much. Podrick is staring at him in confusion, before following the line of Jaime's gaze, acknowledging the situation and heading towards Brienne with the same intention.
Jaime only realises the absolute stupidity of what he's doing when the dagger pierces him beneath his left arm.
He's left himself wide open, sword arm raised, his back turned to the enemy. He staggers under the impact before reacting, swiping at the half-dead thing still clutching the dagger with his golden hand. Half of its face breaks off with the collision of metal against flesh, but it doesn't let go, twisting the dagger deeper and dragging it downwards, finding the weak point of his borrowed Northern armour. Jaime strikes it again, and again, until its head is a mess of bone shards and gristle and it collapses, lifeless once more, its twitching hand still clenched around the hilt of the dagger.
It's probably a mistake on Jaime's part to yank the blade from his side, an error he realises too late as blood gushes from the wound, but he can't feel anything any more, pain and cold and delirium all merging into a sense of numb acceptance. Brienne and Podrick are nothing but a blur up ahead as he forces himself onwards, remembering his purpose, but before he can get any closer the tower's roof explodes from a blast of bright blue fire, the rats disintegrating on impact, and Podrick yanks Brienne backwards and yells something about moving to lower ground as the battlements rumble ominously beneath their feet, and all Jaime can do is follow them as they all move down, down, down, swords slashing at enemies which appear from impossible places, pulling them off each other, until they reach the courtyard and find themselves in a dead end as the wights press in from all directions and their only option is to keep on fighting, until they win or they die.
A/N: This story is ending up much longer than I expected, which is what I get for not properly planning, I guess. I really didn't want to split this chapter into two, because there's a counterpoint of comfort vs. angst vs. feelings that I wanted to come through as a whole entity, with the emotional journey Brienne goes through in relation to Jaime's injury and its circumstances. (The manner in which he sustains it may well be implausible but I stick by my usual excuse of atmosphere-over-accuracy.) Unfortunately this is growing words beyond what I anticipated, so I will post the rest of this sequence later, which deals with Brienne's reaction and the aftermath.
In regards to the rat!wights: I've been playing a game on X-Box called "A Plague Tale: Innocence" which is set in 14th century France in the middle of a plague, where one of the objectives is to avoid rats that move in massive, intelligent groups and can literally chew flesh from bone in a matter of seconds. I just really liked the idea of the Night King being able to control animals as well as former humans (he reanimated a dragon FFS), and a castle as huge as Winterfell probably has its fair share of dead vermin! If he can control human zombies en masse then rats would be no problem whatsoever.
I am also trying (and hopefully not failing horribly) to include a vague undercurrent of tension in the lead up to what would be TBTWP in this 'verse (even if I'm not yet brave enough to write it, but never say never!) - in both this section and the next one - so hopefully that's coming across!
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed. =)
