Two months after Jon's Army Liberated King's Landing- Part Two

….

"How?" Brienne asks, her back pressed up against the wall, her armor discarded in a pile at the entryway her left hand still gripping Jamie's upper arm, her eyes never leaving the uneven rise and fall of his chest.

"He was in a mission house in Dunksondale. No idea how he got there." Davos rubs at his face. "The best guess is some Dothraki or UnSullied that had be separated from the main group and didn't know what the hell was happening found him half dead on the street, recognized him from Winterfell and took him along.

"He was probably forgotten when they heard about Daenerys." Davos sighs. "Thankfully he was too beaten up for anyone there to recognize. The more he came around the more he started talking. The less he made sense that he was some unfortunate smithy from the Street of Steel. One of Bronn's new girls arrived with a story about a one handed war victim who cried out in his sleep. Your name came up and Bronn thought he'd better go check it out."

"I guess that's what he meant by 'you're welcome.'" Brienne rubs her shoulder with her free hand. "He always did have a soft spot for Jamie, right up until he threatened to kill me."

Davos makes a snorting sound.

"Have you gotten word to Tyrion?"

"No one can know right now." He shook his head slowly. "He can't head south right now anyhow, not with the snow queen so close to her time. He'll find out in the spring."

"If he lives." Samwell Tarly interjects from his makeshift desk. "He still has to live."

"He's going to live." Brienne snaps, her face sharp. "I haven't gone through all seven hells to let him die."

"As you Command it Ser Brienne." The Grand Maester breaths.

"Speaking of people who are close to their time. Shouldn't you go home to your wife and child?"

"You'll find Lord Commander, that just because we are now allowed to have families while in service to our new king doesn't mean we have time to have them." He raises an eyebrow.

Brienne lays her head back against the wall again, her fingertips sliding up and down Jamie's stunted arm.

"Can he be moved?" She asks quietly. "Will it hurt him?"

"What do you mean? Just in the ways I showed you earlier."

"No. Not.. physically turned. Can we move him, to the Keep?"

"My Lady-." Sam is shaking his head.

"I don't think that that's in anyone's best-." Davos talks over him.

"I'm not asking your input for security matters." She puts her hand up to the onion knight. "Either of you, that is of my concern as granted to me by King Jon. I'm asking you as a wife to a Maester. Can he be moved?"

"He can." Tarly tells her, his wide eyes taking in hers. Brienne nods soundly.

"Thank you Maester Tarly." She looks at Jamie, his face relaxed from whatever herbal haze Samwell has concocted for him. "If the two of you don't mind I'd like to be alone with my husband."

…..

"Brienne?" She wakes with a start and finds his cat green eyes unblinking, inches from her face. She sucks in a quick breath before letting her own sink back shut.

"Jamie." She answers him once her body has calmed.

"Why are you on the floor?"

"The bed is small and you're badly bruised." She blinked at him, he wrinkles his forehead, but accepts her information.

"Where the hell are we?"" His usual disdain for the unfamiliar floods his voice and she can't help but click her cheek at his arrogance, even though it makes her body feel lighter.

"The West Watch." She tells him, reaching out her hand and laying it lightly on his cheek. He's clammy, but his skin is cool, she glides her thumb across it. No signs of infection. That's number two on Sam's list of concerns. She's written them down, along with how to prevent them, detect them and how best to treat them.

"Why?" He grimaces, and she knows it out of confusion and not pain. That is a different grimace. She's held him dehydrated, feverish and dying. He's none of those things now.

"Where would you rather be?" She asks him, tiring of explaining all the pieces only to have him forget them the next time he wakes.

"Anywhere but King's Landing." He sounds disgusted. "I hate it here."

"You've always seemed in a pretty big hurry to rush back." She sighs, hauling her tired body up off the floor before gingerly sitting on the edge of the bed.

"Yes." He squints. "Why was that again?"

To fuck your sister, my love. She thinks in her head, but Cersei is too large of a topic for them to broach now. The stab of anger that his sister's name brings her is so quick and unexpected she feels guilty afterward, she leans towards his hand that has started to weakly rub at her arm and kisses his fingers. Jamie grips the nape of her neck and she lets him kiss her before pressing her forehead against his chin and closing her eyes.

"You should lie down." He tells her with such gentleness it makes her want to cry.

"You're hurt." She reminds him, her hands easing gently over his battered body.

"I'm very confused." He announces, his voice full of concern. He is, and it scares her too, but he's never once woken up and not whispered her name, so he obviously knows she's come. Unless he's been doing that for the last two months unanswered. That makes her throat feel tight. Bronn's girl had spoken her name.

"It'll pass." She forces the words out.

"Are you sure?" He asks her, studying her face. She nods. He moves uncomfortably on the bed and her hands flutter to him.

"Be careful." Brienne helps him hold himself off of the pillows as he moves ever so slightly towards the wall. "What are you doing? You can't get up."

"I'm not." He swats at her hands. "Help me."

"Help you do what?" Jamie winces at her and her hands ghost over him.

"Turn." She braces his body as he moves and adjusts his legs accordingly. He grits his teeth, but still manages to sound satisfied. "There."

"Better?" She asks running one hand down his body while the other stroked his long hair. He takes slow short breaths, like he's talked her through a dozen times and she wonders where it ever came from. She tries to file it away in things she'll ask him when he's more himself. She won't let herself think that their won't be a time when he's more himself. She can't think that way.

"I'm fine." He says softly. "Lie down."

Her shoulders soften, and he looks at her like if she doesn't obey he'll figure out how to make her, so she slips carefully against the blankets.

"I'm fine too." She tells him. His eyebrow slants down towards the bridge of his nose.

"You're not a good liar." He blinks at her. "You need to be held."

"What?" Her voice is spills out of her in a high soft murmur.

"I know that look." His hand comes out and grips her upper arm, giving it a tug.

"Jamie."

"I can't move to you. You're going to have to come to me." He tells her breathlessly.

"I-." She shakes her head but he keeps pulling until she relents and inches closer to him until there isn't any space between them, but she can't bring herself to put any weight on his battered torso at all. His thumb is on her cheek, stroking slowly. "Jamie."

"I'm confused." He repeats. "But I know something big's happened. I can see it in your eyes."

"Something big's happened." She tells him, feeling the first pricks of new tears start.

"And you're very worried." She lets her eyelids lower moving her face forward until their foreheads meet and she can feel his nose against her own. "And tired. And you need me to hold you."

She huffs at him, sniffing back at fresh onslaught of tears.

"I still can't believe your here." She whispers.

"Where did I go?" He asks softly and she decides she'll say Dunstondale but before she can his breath hitches just a little and he mutters out the word. "South." She meets his eyes. "Tell me."

"I don't think that's a good idea. You're properly injured." She reminds him. "If you were any other man you'd be dead."

"Thankfully then, I'm not any other man." She is unbelievably thankful. "We were in Winterfell." He squints. "To fight the dead. And we.." He looks at her his eyes soft. "Married." He has a level of amazement in his voice, like he knows it's true but still can't quite believe it. "I went south." He's piecing things together, slowly, carefully. "And you-." He blinks at her. "You slapped me! Why did you-?"

"Because I love you." She told him.

"I love you too." He says like it's an involuntary response when she says it that he must repeat it. Then he leers at her. "I showed you that, at the Dragon Crypt and-. And then.."

"And then." She stills, she doesn't want to to think about what came next.

"The baby?" She can feel his heartbeat increase against the hand she has sprawled against his chest. "Is it-?" She smiles then, a real spontaneous smile.

"He's glorious." She tells him, tears rushing back into her eyes so quickly he blurs in her site. His left hand comes up and brushes them away. "My little Brightstar."

"A boy?" She sees his wonder and nods again.

"You didn't know?" His head shakes.

"I don't think so. I just remember grabbing him up and rushing him to you. I don't think-." He stops and she watches a stream of emotions slip over his emerald green eyes.

"She's gone." Brienne supplies for him. "The Hound. I don't know more, Tyrion might."

He clasped his hand around hers.

"I don't want more." He told her softly, bringing her fingers quickly to his lips then back to his chest.

"What happened after you left the Hound? Do you remember?" She's forgotten she was being soft with him now. She's forgotten his confusion; the head injury Sam's worried about, how his body looks like a thunderstorm sprawled out across his torso and that he's been dead for two months.

"I.." He pauses and she pushes her fingers up to lock between his. "I rang the bell, and then the tower came down." He looks at her with a raised eyebrow. "A tower fucking fell on me.. i think."

"Only half a tower." She shrugs. "The other half is still standing."

"Well that's slightly less impressive." He japes and her face lights up.

"Only slightly."

"That's it." He says softly. "That's all I remember. Till Bronn was yelling, shouting out orders and then the fat little chainless Maester was all over me and then you." He looks at her softly. "Then you."

"That's Master Of Whispers Bronn and Grand Maester Tarly to you, My Lord."

"What idiot did that and still remained on the Iron Throne?"

"That rellic is long gone. Jon is king." She smiles.

"Not as Aegon Targaryen?" He raises an eyebrow.

"No. Just Jon." She sighs. "King Jon. He's doing quite well."

"Long gone.." He wrinkled his brow. "How long?"

"A while." She smiles at him sympathetically. "They called off the official search a month ago."

"A month?" He looks at her in disbelief.

"A month since they stopped looking. It's been two months." Her resolve is cracking before his eyes and he doesn't know if he should stop it, or push it along. In the end he has not his choice. Her words are hopping from her mouth and rolling down a hill. "Tyrion pushed them to keep searching." She shook her head and it all pours out of her. "But then they found your sword and he felt it was time. He brought it to me in Tarth and just like that you were dead." She took a quick staggered breath. "You were dead and I held our baby and our swords and I tried to-." He grunts as he raises his lips to her forehead and presses them hard, his lame arm pressing against the back of skull. "I tried not to-." She gulped and he moved his lips between her eyes. "Not to throw myself out of the damn tower window and Jon sends me a raven and makes me Lord. Fucking. Commander." He closes his eyes and listens to her rage. "And I just wanted you. I'd become some stupid widowed highborn lady afraid to face the world without her husband."

"What have I done to you?" He sighed deeply. "My poor darling." He plants kisses on her face, making sweet coo's like she does to the baby when he whines. "My brave protector. What did I do to you?"

"You lived." She whimpers softly. "You lived for me. "

…

"-something for the pain." She awakens slowly, his hand is still holding hers.

"And I have told you no." Jamie sighs.

"You cannot be comfo-." He cuts the maester off.

"It makes me cloudy." He tells him. "I don't want to be cloudy anymore. Besides it says here in the Lord Commander's notes, in each of her well outlined doomsday scenarios, that increased pain is a very important warning sign. How am I to know what is increased if I don't even know what it's increasing from."

"Ser Jamie-."

"It's no use arguing with him when he's like this." Brienne says sleepily from where her head is pressed against his thigh. She glances up at him, propped against the wall looking miserably uncomfortable and alive.

"You should listen to my wife." He says pointedly.

"You should also listen to your Lord Commander. We're going back to the Keep." She decides, pulling back the blankets. "You need to be with your bride Maester Tarly and I need my son and a bigger damn bed."

Sam nods at her and she turns back to Jamie.

"But My Love, I will suggest you take his pain elixir because the safest way to get you out right now is in a pine box." Jamie winced. "Until I have a handle on how you will be received in this city it's best no one knows you aren't a pile of bones long promised to Tormund the Giantsbane for his gnawing pleasure."

His mouth slipped into a smile as she stretched.

"I'll make preparations." She pulled the door open and the Gold Cloak at the door turned to her at once. "I'll need someone to ride ahead and let damn Master of Whispers know I'll be needing his counsel." She left it open, pulled her cloak from where Sam had hung it three days earlier and cast a glance at her armor before leaning in and pressing her mouth to Jamie's. "And someone needs to get me a bloody squire."

He listened to her yell as she shut the door behind her. Sam looked properly startled.

"She used to be quite shy in public." Jamie grinned. "I can't put my finger on when that changed."

"Winterfell." Samwell shrugged. "When you arrived at Winterfell."

He sees her in the great hall, defending his honor as he had guarded hers years before. He looks at Sam who smiles back the smile of a man who knows what it's like to be steadily loved.

…..

He's looking at the box like it's maybe the worst thing he's ever seen and it makes her think maybe she's been too brash.

"You don't have to." She tells him softly and hates it when she uses that voice all armored up. It doesn't make sense, that voice is for when she's naked and wrapped soundly in his arms. "We can change the plan."

Sam sets down the elixir he's making and takes a step back out of the room.

"I can do it." He says hauntedly before clearing his throat. "I'll be fine, it's a twenty minute thing. The fat little maester is going to drug me."

She can't sit comfortably on the bed in all her metal, so she kneels before him as he perches on the end of the bed.

"You've had a very long few days." She tells him, taking his hand in hers and running her thumb across his jaw. He leans in and she realizes just how hard it is for him to stay upright like this. She puts her hands against his torso carefully providing him some balance as he leans his head against hers.

"You've had a very long few months." He tells her, raising an eyebrow over one sad eye. "It's twenty minutes."

"Still."

"I want to meet my son." He sighs, watching a flicker of a smile cross his features. "I'd like to bend the knee to my new king and I'm going to need you there to help me get back up afterward."

"If there was another way to get you out safely.."

"You'd have found it." He breathed heavily, and she could feel his chest ripple with spasm. "I trust you." He grunts.

"Lie back." She told him softly, cupping his head with her hand and trying to help him brace himself as she lowered him to the mattress.

"You weren't kidding about being properly wounded." He winced. "Sitting up feels like a battle itself."

"It will get better." She told him, her palms pressing against the cramped muscles of his chest and sides.

"Are you sure?" He cracks a tightly shut eye to see her nod.

"I'm going to get Sam, you take the drink and then we'll do this when your sleeping."

He nods back at her but as she starts to stand his hand grips at hers and she's right back at his side for a few more minutes until his fingers unclench.

"Okay now?" He opens his palm and she stands and fetches the Maester. "Let's go home."