Work Text:
Mint chocolate chip. Death by chocolate. Black raspberry. Coffee and donuts. Peppermint stick. Egg nog.
Brienne leans on the handlebar of her cart as she reads the ice cream cartons. Her feet ache, her hands are chapped from cold and frequent washing, and she can smell a hint of vomit under the strong detergent scent clinging to her clean snowman-patterned scrub top.
French vanilla. Vanilla bean. Homemade vanilla. Original vanilla.
"What's the difference?" she mutters, opening the freezer door to get a closer look.
Something brushes her sleeve. A hand, swiftly withdrawn. "Brienne?"
Damn. She runs into patients' families outside of the hospital occasionally, and tries to keep their encounters brief.
When she turns, the man standing there is familiar, but she can’t place him. He’s tall, wearing a grey, modern-cut suit and overcoat, gold curls escaping under the edges of a knit cap. The silver-dusted stubble covering his jaw looks deliberate rather than lazy. Mirielle’s father? She had those curls, before treatment. His brilliant green eyes remind her of that teenager last year, the soccer player with the bone infection.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” he says, eyes raking over her, taking her in.
And her heart lurches. He did belong to a patient, a little boy with leukemia. And then he belonged to her. He leaned against the door frame, fastening his cufflinks, watching her button her shirt. “Blue is a good color on you.”
Her breath is caught in her chest, a trapped bird struggling to break free. “Jaime.”
He smiles, slow, uncertain, but undeniably pleased. “It’s been a long time.”
Five years, almost six, since she ran from Jaime’s apartment, half dressed and blinded by tears. “I’m not a bloody white knight, Brienne. Stop fucking trying to fix me.” She blocked him from her phone after two days and sixteen increasingly desperate voicemails. They had no friends in common, moved in vastly different circles. It was easy to pretend she was fine, as long as she ignored the feeling that her heart had been ripped from her chest, a gaping wound that never quite healed.
She heard him on the radio now and then, couldn’t avoid it as the years passed and Jaime became more and more popular. Still, she managed to avoid seeing more than a glimpse of him until he performed at the Oscars. His song was nominated, and Brienne was at an Oscar party trapped making small talk with a woman who turned out to be a huge fan of his. Jaime sat perched on a stool, spotlit as he played his guitar, words of love and loss falling from his lips before a stunning young actress joined him to sing the other part of the duet. Even through the television Jaime’s brilliant green eyes burned right into Brienne, and she barely made it through the song before she escaped to the bathroom to cry.
“I was sorry to hear about your father,” Brienne offers. She almost sent a condolence card, but Jaime’s relationship with his father was tense at best.
Jaime’s smile falters. “No, you weren’t.” Tywin Lannister never liked Brienne, and the feeling was mutual.
“I was sorry for you.” She regrets the words the second they leave her mouth, the second she sees his flash of irritation. He never wanted pity, was deeply suspicious of empathy.
“It’s good to see you,” Brienne blurts out, desperate to change the subject. And it is good. On instinct, she moves to embrace him, the way they did so easily when they were first friends. Even when they fought Jaime would accept her touch, physical affection reaching him when words failed.
Her hands brush his shoulders, and something hits her leg. Too late, Brienne remembers that her purse was resting in the cart’s seat, its strap still looped around her shoulder.
A tube of lip balm rolls under the shelves of bread opposite the freezers, coins skitter across the linoleum, and crumpled receipts fall in drifts around her wallet.
“Still as graceful as ever?” Jaime asks, laughter already beginning to overwhelm him.
Brienne jerks back, burning with embarrassment, her patterned cotton bag hanging upside down against her hip. She looks up to growl a retort at him, but the laughter in his eyes isn’t cruel, and suddenly a laugh bubbles up in her throat.
She tries to contain it, crouches down to pick up her things, but the ridiculousness of this moment keeps making her giggle. Almost six years living in the same city and they never saw each other, but tonight of all nights she sees him? It’s crazy.
Jaime crouches down too, awkwardly gathering up her change, her wallet, the innumerable pens that seem to disappear from her pockets and multiply in her bag. Every time he catches her eye, they start laughing again, until her cheeks ache and a tear slips down her cheek. He brushes the tear away with his thumb, her laughter dying with the press of his warm, callused flesh against her skin.
A cart trundles past them, a harried-looking woman with flyaway hair jerks open the freezer case a bit farther on, begs the disgruntled toddler in her cart to stop ripping open packets they haven’t paid for yet.
“I can get this. You must need to be somewhere.” Brienne ignores the guilt that pricks at her. She should be somewhere too, but somehow she can’t seem to leave the store. She’s been wandering the aisles for close to an hour, tossing items in her cart. A sack of clementines, a box of powdered donuts, a bag of flavored coffee and a package of her favorite cookies, the little marshmallow pinwheels she can rarely justify buying.
Jaime stands, jams his hands in his pockets. “Not really. One of the guys from the label invited me over, but he’d understand if I didn’t show up.” He hesitates. “If you don’t have any plans, maybe we could get a drink, catch up?”
She should say no. She is already running very late, but she has no desire to mingle with a bunch of strangers tonight. “I’d like that.”
Jaime doesn’t buy anything, just follows as Brienne waits in line and checks out. Their painfully awkward small talk about the weather dies as they head toward her car.
Brienne has always thought the Long Night was a silly thing to celebrate, but the Dawn tomorrow will be beautiful with all the fresh snow sparkling on the ground. Children all over Westeros will come outside in their slippers and coats, banging pots and howling to dispel the darkness and its demons.
The first bar Jaime suggests is closed for the night, as is the second and the third. She would have thought they'd stay open, catering to the lonely and the loners. Finally Jaime disappears into a liquor store, leaving Brienne sitting in her idling car in the parking lot across the street. He returns with a six-pack of Arbor Gold hard cider. Brienne hasn’t drunk that since they were together. The taste brought back memories she needed to drink more to forget. That vicious cycle generally ended with her nursing a wretched headache the next day.
The snow dusting his hair and shoulders begins to melt as soon as he gets back in the car. Heat from the car’s vents chases away the burst of cold air he brought with him as they sit slowly sipping cold cider. The windows begin to fog, hiding their view of the road. Holiday music drones from the car stereo.
“New car?” Jaime asks when he’s finished his bottle.
“Not really.” Her phone beeps in her pocket, then again.
"Do you need to get that?"
Need? Probably. Want? No. She fishes out the phone, presses the button, huffs and types in her password when the phone fails to recognize her cracked thumbprint.
Hyle: Party in ten. Where are you?
Hyle: don't bother. I'll miss the whole thing if I wait for you to clean up nice.
"Boyfriend?" Jaime ventures, his voice suddenly tight. He reaches for another bottle.
"No." She jams the phone into her purse without answering the texts. "Husband." The wedding was a simple affair back home on Tarth, with a few friends and family in the courtyard of the old fortress at Evenfall, Brienne in a long white sundress carrying a bundle of lilies.
Jaime whistles, leans back against the passenger door. "I didn't—" He gestures at her. "You aren't wearing a ring."
"Not at work." She wore it on a chain around her neck at the hospital until a patient grabbed it while she was giving an injection. She rarely wears it at home anymore either. The band of fat diamonds wasn't her choice, but Hyle insisted.
Jaime hides behind his bottle for so long she’s not sure he will respond. He wasn’t much of a drinker when they were together, but he’s drunk about half the bottle in the last minute. Finally he asks, "How long?"
"Four years." She met Hyle at speed dating, dragged along by the girls in her department two months after she and Jaime broke up. Hyle was easy to talk to, steady, comfortable. At the time, he was what Brienne needed.
Jaime swallows hard, holds up his bottle. “That deserves a toast. To the man who was good enough for you.”
She keeps her bottle in her lap, lets her glare do the talking. That was never their problem, and she thought he knew that.
His mouth twists, his expression painfully familiar to her. “Come on, did you really expect me to take that news gracefully? Do you remember me at all?”
Brienne remembers, but this man is subtly different and she's still cataloging the changes. It's more than the suit and the hair. She wasn't sure he would care. "I didn't do it to hurt you."
"We never meant to hurt each other, except when we did, and we were damn good at it." Resignation and regret tinge his voice. Jaime always went for the jugular when they fought, mocking her faith in other people, turning her youth into a flaw. Brienne never fought dirty before him, but with Jaime she found herself throwing threw his darkest secrets back at him.
“Let’s not go back down that road, okay? If we start apologizing for every nasty thing we ever said or did, we’ll be here all night.” While it certainly wouldn’t be the first time they stayed up all night talking, that isn’t an option now. She's already earned at least a week of the cold shoulder from Hyle for missing dinner at his boss’s house.
Jaime scratches idly at his beard, nods his agreement. “Then let’s toast to better days, when we were young and innocent, or at least you were.”
Brienne touches the neck of her bottle to his, ignoring her instinct to correct him. She was never as innocent as Jaime seemed to think she was.
Jaime starts peeling the label off his bottle, staring at it intently. “What’s he like, your husband?”
She hears the question he doesn’t voice: why him and not me? Jaime proposed twice, once in bed and once during a fight. Neither time was she tempted to say yes. She loved Jaime, maybe always will, but his family was a nightmare and he sometimes took his frustration out on her.
“He’s an architect. He watches a lot of sports and plays guitar in a band on the weekends.” In the beginning, Hyle was solicitous, wooing her with long phone calls and thoughtful gifts. Now he is blunt in a way he thinks is charming and only kisses her when he wants sex.
Jaime seems unimpressed. Her bloodless description could be anyone. "Is he any good? At guitar, I mean?”
Brienne laughs, thinking how emasculated Hyle would feel if he knew who her ex actually was. He used to love Jaime’s music, but says that Jaime has gone soft his past few albums, too moody and introspective. Hyle is the least introspective person she’s ever known. “He’ll never play to sold-out concert venues, no.”
Jaime smirks a little at that, clearly pleased to best her husband at something. As if there was any comparison between them. Jaime has four Grammys and an Oscar. In his first Grammy speech he referred to Brienne as his lady, an archaic turn of phrase that somehow sounded chivalrous rather than silly coming from Jaime.
“Do you love him?" he asks abruptly.
Brienne avoids his gaze. She should just say ‘yes,’ but the lie won’t quite come out. "I thought I did."
Jaime looks like he's going to say something, but instead he drains his bottle, sets it back in the six-pack. He is studying her again, and she sips nervously, still nursing her first bottle, too aware of her festive, juvenile scrubs, supportive sneakers, and short, no-nonsense haircut. She didn’t fit into his world when he was just starting to get radio play and she still doesn’t now that he’s a star.
“I saw you on the Oscars,” she offers. I thought you were singing about me. “You really did it, Jaime.”
“It looks less glamorous when you’re sleeping on a tour bus,” he says with a shrug.
“Come on. Tell me it doesn’t get you right here,” she touches her fingertips to his chest, “every time you walk out on the stage.” She remembers the look he used to get at the end of a show, the adrenaline rush fading as he waved to the audience after the encore. Chest heaving, sweat on his brow, stars in his eyes. It didn’t matter if he was playing to 20 people or 1,000.
Jaime watches as she snatches her hand back. “It’s a rush, it is. The crowd, their energy, I can’t even explain it. But the rest… Sometimes I miss playing tiny clubs and coming home to my shitty little apartment.” He sighs heavily, plucks at her brightly colored sleeve. “How's your work? You’re still in pediatrics, right?”
Brienne isn’t surprised at the change in subject. Jaime was always uneasy with fame, with the way the media and the fans created a persona that had very little to do with him.
Unfortunately her work is another subject best not delved into deeply. While she finds the long hours and time with patients rewarding, it can be brutal. "Mostly pediatric oncology. Is Tommen..." She trails off, unsure how to approach the subject of Jaime’s nephew.
"He's fine. Healthy, annoying his parents like any other 14-year-old," Jaime assures her.
Tommen was one of her earliest leukemia patients, when she was fresh out of nursing school. He cried a lot, mostly for his mother, who couldn't seem to handle making long visits. Jaime showed up about two weeks into Tommen's in-patient treatment, a guitar case slung on his back. It took her three days to figure out Jaime was sneaking in the boy's kitten. She put a stop to that, cats carried some nasty bacteria, but Jaime kept coming back, with his guitar, singing whatever Tommen requested, no matter how ridiculous.
"Do you have any kids?" Jaime asks suddenly.
After their first year together, they talked about kids several times. First Brienne wasn’t ready, then Jaime started talking about getting a vasectomy, not perpetuating the Lannister genes. She wonders if he went through with it.
"No, we tried for awhile, but it just never happened for us."
Hyle liked trying, at least until she got frustrated and began taking ovulation predictor kits. "Nothing sexy about a pee stick," he said the first time he noticed one in their bathroom. After a year, Brienne had some fertility tests, but Hyle just kept putting off his appointment until she stopped asking.
Jaime studies her face. "I'm sorry." He actually sounds like he means it, which she can't quite puzzle out.
“Don’t be." She lit a candle to the Mother in the hospital sept a few months ago, thanking her for not giving them a baby.
Her purse begins to shake, a muted siren rising from her phone. Her special tone for the hospital. "I have to take this," she says apologetically, digging out the phone.
Jaime nods, starts flipping through the CDs crammed haphazardly into her center console. Everyone she knows carries their music digitally on their phones, but she still prefers CDs. He won’t find any of his albums in there, if that’s what he’s wondering.
Brienne swipes a finger across her screen and holds it up to her ear. “Hello?”
“Hey, 328 is asking for you. His chart said to call you.” Brienne recognizes the slightly irritated voice, but can’t remember which of several older nurses it belongs to. One of the ones who roll their eyes at how hard Brienne works to normalize the hospital rooms for their long-term patients, getting them special blankets from a local knitting group and new stuffed animals that can be laundered, working with the Child Life specialists to keep the kids busy.
“Do you want to give Benji the phone or should I come in?” Brienne makes a point of using the patient’s name, rather than his room number. Now she knows which nurse she’s talking to, Unella, a sour-faced woman who sucks peppermints constantly and never uses the kids’ names. Not the nurse Brienne would have picked to tend to a six-year-old still scared of the dark.
“It’s the Long Night. You’d come back?” Unella is incredulous.
“Of course I would. He has chemo tomorrow, he needs his rest.”
Jaime looks up from a movie soundtrack CD, one of her favorites, his eyebrows raised at her tone. Brienne is not nearly so timid at work as she once was. Jaime encouraged her to stand up for herself and her patients, youth and lack of seniority be damned. It took awhile before she had the confidence to do that.
A heavy sigh comes through the phone. “You’re only coddling him, but you’re welcome to come take him off my hands. 324 is vomiting again, and her mother has pressed the call button six times in the last hour.”
Brienne weighs her options for a moment. Hyle is already pissed. If she goes home now, they will fight and she will end up sleeping in the guest bedroom. If she goes to the hospital, she will have an excuse for her absence, one that Hyle will find more palatable than Brienne ditching him to drink in her car with her ex-lover. She hasn’t even finished her first drink, she’s fine to work, and if she only has one patient (that won’t last), it won’t be so bad. Brienne can sleep in the on-call room once she settles Benji down and gets Amira’s mother a cup of tea and lets her vent for awhile.
“I’m coming in. Tell Benji I’ll be there in half an hour and to keep his bear close.”
Unella hangs up without thanking Brienne for coming back, and Brienne knows the woman won’t say a word when she arrives.
Jaime sets her CD back in the console, watching her with sad eyes. “I’ll let you go,” he says, his voice thick.
She eyes the empty bottles he’s tucked back into the six-pack, the fancy suit he wears, the cultivated style put together by his publicist, his agent. For just a few minutes she could convince herself that Jaime was the same man she met eight years ago. He’s not the same person, and neither is she. All the scars they inflicted on each other were part of that, and really, she wouldn’t go back to those days if she could. Brienne couldn’t take that pain again. Losing Jaime was one of the hardest things she’s ever lived through.
“I’ll drop you off wherever you want,” she offers.
“I’m fine,” he huffs, but points down the street, toward the grocery store where they met. He points her through three more turns before she realizes where they’re going. To his “new” apartment, the one he moved into two months before they split, the apartment he wanted her to move into with him and the place where she broke up with him.
When she makes the next turn without prompting, Brienne can feel Jaime’s gaze heavy on her. But what is there to say? He lets her drive the rest of the way to his building in silence. It’s just on the far side of the maze of one-way streets Brienne remembers far too well.
Jaime forces a smile when they pull up to the curb, the engine idling. “I’m glad I ran into you,” he says quietly, reaching out to squeeze her hand where it rests on the steering wheel. “You look really good, Brienne. You always did.”
She shakes her head, warmed at the same time that she inwardly cringes. “And you always did know just what to say.” Brienne never really believed his compliments, and she doesn’t now, but it’s nice to hear the words anyway.
“I hope you’re happy, Brienne, whatever you do.” Jaime takes off his seatbelt and leans toward her, folding her into an awkward hug with the console and gearshift between them.
“I hope you’re happy, too, Jaime,” she echoes, her lips pressed into the curve of his neck. The spicy scent of his cologne fills her nose, and she remembers clinging to him in bed, remembers smelling him on her skin and clothes when they were apart.
Jaime hesitates before pulling away, just long enough for Brienne to lose what little sense she has left. She kisses him, soft and familiar without the hunger that once consumed them. His hand cups her cheek, his lips parting and his tongue brushing hers.
Brienne wants to laugh. She wants to cry. She wants to push him away. She wants to follow him upstairs and pretend the last six years never happened.
But she has a scared little boy waiting for her at the hospital. And an angry husband waiting for her at home.
Their lips part, and Jaime’s hand slips from her cheek.
“Goodnight, Jaime,” she says, her eyes still closed. She doesn’t want to see his expression, so she looks down at the steering wheel instead of at him.
“Thanks for the ride,” he says quietly. The door pops open and he climbs out.
Brienne only looks up when she puts the car into drive and pulls away from the curb. She sees him in the rearview mirror, snow collecting on his coat, watching her go.
She doesn’t look back. She drives straight to the hospital, spends half the night with patients and the other half tossing and turning, plagued by old dreams. She and Hyle barely fight about her absence. All he can manage are a few backhanded comments about her dedication to her patients, the implication obvious. Her dedication to him is lacking. She doesn’t fight back. He’s right.
A week later, Brienne finds a business card tucked into the CD case Jaime was looking at. It’s for a guitar repair shop, but his phone number is scrawled on the back. Brienne isn’t sure why he did that, but tucks the card into her wallet. It feels like an escape hatch, a secret weapon.
When she pulls the trigger two months later, she doesn’t mean to. It just slips out. “I saw my ex. On the Long Night. That’s why I didn’t come to the party.” She means to sound defiant, but it tumbles out awkwardly, like she's making it up as she goes along.
"Is that supposed to make me jealous? That you stood me up for some loser musician?" Hyle sneers. "If you fucked him, I want a free pass."
"No, I didn't fuck him. What do you mean a free pass?"
Hyle pours himself a drink, his fourth since Brienne came home. She didn't do anything to upset him; he was already spoiling for a fight. "You're not fucking me, and I have needs, Brienne. It's not like I don't get offers."
She hasn't loved his smug face in years, but just like that she's done. Brienne can't stand to look at him a minute longer. "Fuck whoever you want, Hyle."
Brienne grabs her coat from the hook by the door, grateful her keys are already in the pocket. He doesn't say a word as she zips her coat, grabs her purse, opens the door.
She almost leaves it at that, she'll sleep at the hospital and come back tomorrow when he's at work, but he smirks at her like he's won, and Brienne snaps. "He's not a loser. My ex, the guy I saw that night, is Jaime Lannister."
Hyle laughs so hard he has to wipe away tears. "If you wanted to lie, you should have picked someone more likely. Jaime Lannister may be a moody little bitch these days, but he'd never fuck you."
Brienne's face burns, and she whips out her phone. She doesn't need the card, she's looked at it enough to memorize the number. As it starts to ring, Brienne puts it on speaker phone.
"Hello?"
"Hey, it's Brienne."
"That could be anyone," Hyle scoffs.
"Brienne, who is that?" Jaime sounds confused, and she already hates herself for dragging him into this, but it's too late now.
"No one. Are you home right now?"
Hyle is smirking, sipping that stupid expensive bourbon he only started drinking because his boss does. "This is pathetic, Bri. That's not Jaime Lannister."
"I am Jaime Lannister and I don't like whatever the fuck this is. Brienne, if that is you, I'm home. You're welcome to come over and tell me what’s going on."
Hyle snorts derisively. “Nice try, but you know what, Brienne? You could blow this guy in front of me and I wouldn’t care. I’ve got five girls’ numbers in my phone right now. All I have to do is call and one of them will be here in ten minutes. You’re a shitty wife, and you never appreciated what I did for you.”
“Is that your—” Brienne ends the call as Jaime’s voice rises, furious through the tinny connection.
She slams the door behind her, doesn’t slow down until she’s driving away from her building, wondering why she’s always the one who runs. Her phone rings, goes to voicemail, rings again, and finally falls silent as she approaches the hospital.
She brakes at the entrance, but finds herself driving past, into the maze of downtown streets. Calling Jaime was a mistake. She should have thrown away the card, should have forgotten seeing him again. But she didn’t, and she owes him an explanation, an apology.
The building is easy to find, but Brienne circles the block three times before she finds a parking space. The sidewalk is salted, gritty under her boots as she walks slowly up to the front door. His name isn’t on the buzzer list, and it takes her a minute to remember which unit he’s in.
But the front door buzzes almost immediately when she presses his button. Brienne trudges up the stairs to the fourth floor, unpleasant memories crowding her mind. She hated these stairs, fell down several and landed on her ass the last time she was here.
This time Brienne isn’t crying. Her marriage is over, but her eyes are dry. Any passion she felt for Hyle died a long time ago. Meanwhile she still can’t hear Jaime’s voice on the radio without choking up. Maybe if they’d lasted, they would have withered away like her marriage did, roommates sharing a bed and going through the motions of fucking once or twice a month.
Jaime is waiting in the open doorway when she reaches his floor. He’s barefoot, wearing sweatpants and a flannel shirt, a pencil tucked behind his ear, and her heart clenches at the confusion and anger on his face. Concern replaces anger when she blurts out, “I’m sorry.”
Jaime pulls her into his arms, his shirt soft against her cheek, and that’s when the tears finally come. “We need to talk,” Brienne says between sniffles.
He walks them back into the apartment, strokes her tangled hair. “Yeah, I think we do.”
Inside, the couch and the gold and platinum records leaning against the wall are new, but the scribbled sheet music spread across the coffee table is the same, as is his battered old guitar.
She’s been here before, crying in Jaime’s arms in this apartment. This time Brienne hopes that she won’t have to run.