Epilogue

Two Years Later

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After a lengthy journey from White Harbor, Brienne stepped onto Tarth's dock with her usual firm stride and walked right into her father's embrace.

"Glad I am you're returned at last," Selwyn told her. "Can't tell you how proud I am of my girl. You're certain you're home to stay?"

She nodded thanks to a sailor who deposited her trunk on the dock. Selwyn gestured to a servant, who took the trunk to a waiting cart, to be carried up to the castle where it perched atop a craggy cliff overlooking Shipbreaker Bay.

"Yes," Brienne replied, and they began walking together up the winding path. She breathed deeply as they went, inhaling the fresh salt air and admiring the water's highly improbable shades of blue. "Has… our guest… given you any trouble?"

"None at all, none at all," her father replied. It was unnerving to see him so aged; he'd been hale and hearty yet, when she'd left Tarth, but it had been years since then, and worry for her, and the usual deprivations of war, had made him more stooped and gray than she'd expected. "He's a fine boy, actually, a pleasure to spend time with. We read to each other, of an evening, and play chess. He swims. We ride. He even pens letters for me, when my poor old hand can't hold the quill."

He held up his hand, rendered claw-like by arthritis.

"Jaime does?" she said, with a disbelieving laugh. "But his penmanship is atrocious." And she had dozens of letters from him, exchanged during her last year of distant service to the crowns of Westeros, to prove it.

"Says he needs the practice if he's to get any better," said Selwyn with a smile.

Once in the castle, Selwyn excused himself for a nap, and Brienne had to make her way through all the servants, delighted to have her back safely. By the time they'd all expressed their welcome, and their pride at having one of Tarth's own rise to such a position of prominence, fame, and renown— for songs about the Maiden Warrior of Tarth had begun to be sung even over in Essos by this point— she was red as a beet and desperate to get away.

Finally, she peeled herself from the last clinger and escaped to the western veranda. More egalitarian than most noble families, they did not deprive their people the usage of the rest of Evenfall Hall, but the veranda and the family's solar were inviolable; only Tarths and their closest were allowed to use them.

As she stumbled through the door, hastily shutting it behind her, she saw Jaime standing at the wall, staring down over the dock. The ship upon which she had arrived was clearly visible below, and she knew he'd been watching as she arrived. He held a glass tumbler with care in the articulated fingers of his new prosthesis; by the look of its orange contents, he was drinking juice.

He turned to her, staring at her for a long moment in that way he had, his eyes moving over her face as if studying it, memorizing it. There was always something… incredulous about the way he stared at her, as if disbelieving a woman could be so homely. It always made her uncomfortable to have him scrutinize her so. She knew she was ugly. There was no need for him to catalog each poorly formed feature so closely, every single time.

A faint smile teased at the edges of his mouth. "You're home."

"So it would seem."

"Good voyage?"

"Long." She'd left a weeping Sansa and rather-more-stoic Clegane in Winterfell, her duty to the Starks at long last complete with the marriage of the family's second daughter to her beloved, and long-suffering, blacksmith. When Jaime had written to her of her father's delicate health, she had known it was time to leave behind her political and martial involvements, and return to Tarth.

"How goes everything in the elevated circles of our fair continent's ruling class? You never answered my last letter."

"Figured I might as well just tell you myself, since I would return faster than a letter would arrive." She unbuckled Oathkeeper and plunked it, belt and all, on the sideboard before gesturing to the table. "Any juice left?"

Jaime waved his flesh hand at the pitcher and used his false one to nudge an empty glass toward her. "All yours."

He sat opposite her, watching as she poured herself a measure and then drank it.

"So?" he prodded when she'd set down the empty glass and leaned back in the chair, trying to release the tension she'd felt from the moment she'd seen the rocky heights of her island home rise from the sea mists in the distance, knowing she'd have to face him for the first time since the date of Cersei's surrender and death.

"Construction continues apace on the new capital," she told him. "Everyone was relieved to put King's Landing behind them and start fresh at Moat Cailin, even if it does require extensive renovations."

"And our new king and queen? Still making the entire court sick with their cow-eyes and mooning?"

"Yes." No need to sugar-coat it, Brienne felt; Daenerys and Jon were nauseatingly in love and unashamed to let the world know it. "They are expecting in the new year. They seem… agitated. Worried that the child will be wrong, somehow."

"With her family's legacy of inbreeding, one can hardly blame them," Jaime said mildly, but his jaw spoke of tension. There was an entire language of angles and tics and flexure of muscles that Brienne had learned to translate, just by looking at his jaw; she could tell when he was stubborn, or moody, or hurt, or angry, or frustrated, or any number of emotions. At that moment, he was guilty, and remembering, and not fondly. Thinking of Joffrey, then.

"No," she agreed, and looked at their surroundings to avoid eye contact with him. This was one of her favorite places in Evenfall Hall. The pergola over this open veranda was thickly clustered with bougainvillea in a particularly lurid shade of fuchsia that she would die before admitting she loved. There was the perfect balance of dappled sunlight and cool shade.

"And how fares the North? Still disgruntled that their king married the Queen of Everything Else?"

For that was what those not fond of Daenerys had taken to calling her. It aggravated her, but not more than it did Tormund, who loudly protested each time he heard it that she didn't rule anything over the Wall, and he'd thrash any man who said she did.

"It is well. Flourishing under Lady Sansa. She does well, running the day-to-day when Jon is occupied with Everything Else."

"Lady Sansa… Clegane." Jaime shook his head in amazement.

"Clegane does well, too, marshaling and training the Northern army. They're in peak form and scared spitless of him, just as he intends."

"And their son?"

"Enormous. Lady Sansa has to employ two wet nurses to keep him fed. Clegane is almost insufferable with how protective he is of the child, and Lady Sansa too, of course. I hate to think what he'll be like when she has their second."

"Is that event on the horizon already?"

"Not yet, but she keeps talking about expanding the Winterfell nursery so all of their potential brood will fit."

"Never thought I'd say this, but… poor Clegane. Doomed to a life surrounded by Starks and more snow than anyone ever wanted."

"There are worse fates," Brienne scolded mildly. "Do not begrudge them their joy. They have earned it."

"A more unlikely couple never existed." He glanced at her then, and something in his eyes flickered. "Well, they're at least in the top three most unlikely couples."

"I supposed you refer to Lady Arya, then?" Brienne was aware that there had been a peculiar tension between him and the younger Stark daughter, but neither would reveal the source of said tension. "Yes, I suppose no one ever dreamed she'd take up with one of Robert's bastards."

"He must have the patience of all the saints to put up with her," Jaime muttered. His jaw did not like Arya. She reminded him of bad things. Cersei-related things.

Brienne only snorted. "I hear the same thing about you," she said, and it was true. As soon as his sentence had been passed, and his lifetime exile to the Isle of Tarth pronounced, she'd endured a relentless parade of amazed courtiers pretending to sympathize with her new role as the jail warden of Jaime, nameless prisoner.

For he had been stripped of his knighthood, of heirdom to both the Westerlands and Casterly Rock, of even his name. Lannisters were forbidden in Westeros, now, with all remaining family members being required to take their mothers' families' names. Jaime and Tyrion's mother having been a Lannister too, they had become Jaime and Tyrion Prester, after their maternal grandmother. Tyrion was not best pleased by this development, but could deny his queen nothing.

Brienne and Jaime sat in companionable silence for a while, sipping juice and gazing out over the water. But his jaw was not relaxed; it was burgeoning with things to say, she knew. She also knew that delaying the inevitable just prolonged the agony of anticipation, so like always, she charged first into the breach.

"We'll need to talk about it some time, you know."

"I know. I was just pretending we… didn't."

Despite enjoying a frequent exchange of letters since the ascension of Daenerys and Jon to all the thrones of Westeros (excepting the area beyond the Wall, yes, Tormund, Brienne mentally added) she and Jaime had managed to avoid discussing anything of substance, anything that delved deeper into the events of that fateful day when Cersei had surrendered to the dragon queen, and lost her head.

Brienne had many, many questions she wanted to ask Jaime. She'd spent many an hour, over the last few years, turning all the issues over in her mind, filtering and sifting them until she arrived at the question she most wanted to know the answer to.

"Why did Arya Stark say it was a hell of a time for you to try being unselfish?"

It still made her indignant, that slanderous comment; Jaime had been unselfish many, many times, often risking his life to do the right thing, and in view of his upbringing, the fact that he had any conscience at all was miraculous. He'd fought so hard to retain that bit of goodness in himself, and no one had any right to—

"Because the queen gave me a choice of my fate," Jaime answered, interrupting her outraged train of thought, "and I didn't pick the one I wanted the most. I didn't even pick second-best, because that would have been too easy. No, I chose the last, worst option."

He stood and wandered over to the wall to look out over the dock once more.

"But why?" She stood and joined him.

"I didn't have a right to the best choice. Didn't deserve it. Will never deserve it, really." He glanced briefly at her before returning his gaze to the water.

"What was it?"

He just shook his head, and she could see by the set of his jaw that he was not going to tell her. Stubborn.

She drew in a frustrated breath. "What was the second-best choice, then? The easy way?"

"Death."

"Exile was worse than death?"

"I told you, death would have been too easy. Plus, I thought they were sending me to the arse-end of Essos or to go live with the goat-fuckers of Qohor or something equally dire. Imagine my surprise when I learned I'd just be confined to Tarth for the rest of my days." He slanted her a glance. "Can't imagine how that came to pass."

Brienne felt the heat of a scalding blush creeping up her throat.

"I apologize for my presumption," she said stiffly. "I appeared to have earned some level of faith from Their Graces, and thought that she would trust me to guarantee your security here. And… I thought that, since we had become… friends, over the years, you would find it preferable to be here. Closer to your brother, so he could visit."

"And to you."

She nodded. "And to— no, I mean—" Oh, she hated when he tricked her into admitting things. She hated that he was able to lull her into a place of comfort, in their conversations, enough to get her to say things she never intended to let see the light of day.

"Brienne," he said, and turned to face her, leaning his elbow against the wall, slouching in a way that should have made him look disreputable but only succeeded in making him look, to her unpracticed eye, rakish. "It's alright to say it aloud. That we're friends. That we enjoy each other's company. Because we are, and we do."

She nodded jerkily. He continued to examine her, this time taking in not only her unfortunate face but the rest of her, those green eyes raking down over her shoulders, chest, hips, and legs before leisurely sauntering back up again.

"Why are you so tense?" he asked. "We've hardly been strangers since I came here. I know it's been a year, but we've corresponded. I thought when you finally came home, now that everything is finally over, you'd be…"

"I'd be what?" She hadn't meant it to come out so aggressively, but if there were anything she excelled at, it was awkwardly mangling her intentions to end up the opposite way.

"Happy," he finished. "But you seem very unhappy to be here. With me."

Now the language of his jaw was telling her that he was apprehensive and sad. She felt a corresponding pang in her chest, as usual; Jaime's moods seemed connected to her own, somehow, as if there were a string tying them together and where one led, the other followed.

"Not unhappy. Uncomfortable."

"You're never comfortable. I've never once seen you anything less than wound up. Bowstrings can only wish they were as tightly strung as you."

She narrowed her eyes at him. He would have his little jokes, even (especially?) when the situation did not call for them. "I am wishing I had proposed another place for you to be exiled. Somewhere else, but still close enough that Lord Tyrion could see you easily."

He flinched, just a little. His jaw told her he felt hurt. Rejected.

She hastened to clarify, "Not that I don't wish you here. I'm just not comfortable being your… jailer."

He turned back toward the sea, leaving her with his profile. The hurt faded, his jaw said, replaced by a sort of sad resignation, and… courage? As if he were steeling himself to say something dangerous.

"Is it really a jail if I want to be here, Brienne?" he replied at last.

She squinted at him, trying to tell if he were, yet again, making one of his poorly timed jokes.

"Why in the world would you want to be here?"

One side of his mouth curled in amusement, in a way that could be condescending but which she knew, because the angle of his jaw was just a shade too obtuse, wasn't.

"Well," he drawled, "in spite of having to endure this inhospitable shithole—"

Jaime turned in an exaggerated fashion to look to his left, toward the sun-splashed, flower-laden terrace, and then the other, toward the long stretch of white crystalline strand, against which crashed the crystalline waters of Shipbreaker Bay. Balmy wind made the golden strands of hair dance on his forehead.

"—you're here, Brienne, so where else would I want to be?"

She went utterly still, and a wave of shock and terror and desperate, agonizing hope crashed over her. She knew not to wish for anything like love, she knew better, but that he would esteem her this much— even if only as a friend— and want her company to this extent…

"Brienne," he said hoarsely. "Would you mind very much if I were to be a selfish arse, one last time?"

She opened her eyes. Hadn't realized she'd closed them. Licked her lips nervously, then shifted from foot to foot. Wondered what he meant, then understood he meant to reveal the first choice to her, the choice he'd wanted but didn't feel he deserved.

So she said, "I sincerely doubt this will be the last time, Jaime, but no, I would not mind too much at all."

The angle of his jaw shifted to apprehension, but also… just like her… maybe hope, as well? And also, perhaps, fear? Just a little. She might be mistaken. But no, she was not. His jaw would not lie to her. Nor would his eyes… oh, his eyes. They were a deep, lambent emerald, as if lit from behind by a hundred candles.

Frozen, Brienne could only stand there as Jaime severely encroached upon her personal space and gently, tenderly, placed his lips against hers.

So this is a kiss.

It felt much as she had imagined, but was somehow so much more. Jaime's lips were warm against hers, and soft. The slightest bit moist, which she had thought would be disgusting. Perhaps it would be disgusting with someone else. With Jaime, however, it was anything but disgusting. It might be, she considered, the best feeling she'd ever experienced.

"Brienne," he said against her mouth, his breath feathering against her lips, warm and orangey from the juice, his voice a bit hoarse. "This usually goes better if the person being kissed doesn't act as if she's enduring torture."

"I am scared," she whispered, unable to muster the strength to speak louder than that.

She hadn't meant to state it that baldly, and seeing his wince, wished she'd not said anything at all.

"Not of you," she continued softly. "Never of you." She averted her face. "I don't know what to do. I don't know what you're doing."

"I'm trying to kiss you. You're not cooperating."

"I told you, I don't know what to do."

"I thought you meant it in a general sense." He tilted his head to the side in that curious way he had sometimes. His jaw said he was confused. "You've never kissed anyone before?"

She shook her head, unable to say anything anymore, and it made her hair break free of the severe brushing she'd given it on board the ship that morning. Pale curls fell about her face, to her annoyance, but Jaime just swiped one out of her eyes, smiling.

"Well," he said, "better late than never, no time like the present, and all those other trite sayings."

Brienne scowled at him. "Will you never take anything serio—"

He kissed her again, this time taking advantage of her half-open mouth to use his tongue in a way that shocked her. She'd seen this sort of kissing, of course, but had always suspected it would feel slimy, and invasive, and all-around bad.

It felt none of those things.

It felt wonderful.

It felt wonderful enough to get past all her inhibitions and insecurities. It felt wonderful enough that she forgot about denying herself, forgot about how hideous she was and how repelled she was sure Jaime would be if she responded. It felt wonderful enough that she, always a quick learner, brought her hands up to frame his face and kiss him back, mimicking his motions and actions until he drew back, panting.

"I should have known," he said, smiling and disbelieving and happy, so happy he didn't realize how his words sent her stomach plummeting like a stone. Should have known she wanted him? Had she been that pathetically obvious? "I should have known you'd take to it like a natural."

What?

He came at her again, deftly avoiding the hand she put out to stop him, slipping by her defenses as he had always done. And once again, her traitorous body surrendered itself to him, slipping the leash of her fears and worries and giving her the strength and freedom not just to kiss him back, but to touch him, to explore his face the way she'd yearned to for so long.

She trailed her fingertips over the stubble on that jaw, the cut-glass cheekbones, the thick golden eyebrows and the faint lines beginning to appear over them, her lips and tongue moving against his until, suddenly, they were wrenched away. She saw, to her shock, that he was crying. Just a little. Just a single tear pooling in each eye, rendering them glassy, but no less beautiful. Jaime couldn't be less beautiful if he tried. Not to her.

"What is it?" she asked numbly. It couldn't have been that bad, could it?

"You touch me like you love me," he said roughly.

"Because I do," she blurted, because there were no other words she could think to say in response, no possible way to hold them back, not when her heart was full to overflowing with love for him.

Jaime dropped his head to her shoulder, her big wide shoulder that she had always felt was repellent on a woman, pointless unless covered with plate and used to fight. But now that big shoulder seemed the perfect height for Jaime's head, the perfect width to support him. She put her arms, her big brawny arms, around him as well, and this time they felt like if they'd been shorter, or less solid, they wouldn't have been long enough to reach around him, or strong enough to hold him as tightly as he needed.

"The best choice they gave me was marriage," he whispered against her neck. "To you. I turned it down because you should have better than me. You should have the best man in Westeros."

"He married Queen Daenerys," Brienne said, feeling terrified and ecstatic all at once. "I'll have to settle for you."

He laughed at that, right in her ear, a breathy caress that had her trembling.

"Ah, wench, you deserve far better than me," he told her.

"Then you'll have to try very hard to be worthy," she replied. Her heart was thrumming crazily. Surely he could feel it. She could practically hear it, pounding like those mad Dothraki drums.

"I'll fail."

"Then you'll try again."

Jaime's face transformed when he looked at her, this time, years and lines falling away, joyful.

"Yes," he said tenderly. "For you, I'll always try again."