Work Text:
He woke in darkness.
He did not recognize the feel of the mattress under him, the weight of the covers, the various pangs in his limbs or the figure sleeping scrunched up in an armchair by the door. The light from a streetlamp slanted across the figure, the half-open blinds cut it into strips of yellow and shadow, revealing a bulky frame which barely fit in the nondescript chair. Such a large person sleeping like that would be all cramped and in pain when they woke up.
He fumbled for the light switch, reached for it by instinct more than conscious thought.
His stump knocked against the bedside table. The hollow ring of a glass vessel. A smell of flowers: a vase. His fingers touched nothing.
He looked at his right arm and found that his hand was gone.
He must have made a sound, for the person sleeping in the armchair shifted, and stretched, and spoke. A woman’s voice.
“Jaime?”
He was still staring at the stump where he knew his hand should be, wondered who Jaime was.
He barely heard the woman approach, flinched away from her touch on his shoulder. A light touch, terrifying in its intimacy. He would have rolled out of bed and into a defensive crouch, but his stump would not give him leverage to push himself off the mattress. He was stuck, half in and half out of bed, his back to the woman, cold air fanning over his skin.
“Jaime?” She switched on a light.
He squeezed his eyes shut against the soft overhead illumination before he glanced warily over his shoulder.
She was even taller and broader than she’d seemed sleeping in the chair. She had an ugly face, pale blond hair, and wide blue eyes trained on him with a ferocious intensity. Her left cheek was bandaged.
She reached out to touch him again, and he pulled abruptly away from her, nearly fell out of bed.
The woman fell back a step and withdrew her hand, cringing, her face twisting. It felt odd to see such a large person act so scared.
He worked his dry mouth before he could speak. “Who in seven hells are you?”
The woman’s broad, pale, freckled face (his eyes had adjusted to the light sufficiently to notice the thick wash of freckles on her skin) underwent another one of its astonishingly quick transformations. Her mouth hung open, her eyes stared blankly. “Jaime…”
“Stop calling me that! Who are you?” He was angry, but his voice sounded reedy with hysteria in his ears.
The woman’s blank face scrunched up, turned red in an instant. She hesitated a moment, seemed about to speak, before she rushed out of the room, ungraceful in her hurry. A different voice cried out in astonishment just outside the door, then a slight, grey-haired man entered, glancing between the departing woman and the occupied bed. The man wore a white coat.
“Mr. Lannister.” The man’s voice was very soft. “It is very good to see you awake. Is your wife feeling unwell?” The man glanced again at the open door through which the woman had left.
Wife? Lannister? He leaned back against the pillow, something relatively solid to support him, and tried to control the tremor in his voice and hand. The stump at the end of his right arm was seamed with pale pink scars.
“What’s happened to my hand?”
The man in the white coat came close enough that he could read the nameplate attached to the coat’s breast pocket: Dr. Qyburn. The doctor cocked his head and blinked in a way which did not come across as reassuring, though his voice remained soft.
“Ah. Interesting.”
*
The police detective introduced himself as Walton. It was the detective’s idea to have that woman (his wife) Brienne in the room while they gave their statements.
Jaime – the name was a grain of sand lodged in his brain, a constant irritant, he had to remind himself to respond to it – had not remembered anything since waking up, so Brienne did the talking for both of them. She was singularly ill-suited to it, staring at the floor or out of the window more often than she looked Walton in the eye.
Road rage. The phrase meant nothing to Jaime, yet he understood what had happened well enough. A man driving a dark Biter model muscle car had forced them off the road after Brienne had cut him off, causing their car to flip over. Jaime had suffered a concussion, a broken window had slashed Brienne’s cheek. Jaime’s hand had been gone for years, another accident caused by a different person’s malicious intent.
Dr. Qyburn came in toward the end of the interview and opined that Jaime’s memory loss was likely temporary. The soft-spoken little man’s assurance did not fill Jaime with confidence.
Jaime kept glancing at Brienne where she sat with her back to the window, the sun backlighting her hair in a halo of pale fire. She had astonishing eyes, while the rest of her was spectacularly ugly and ungainly. When he stopped and thought about it, she was astonishing all over: her size, her hesitant speech and shyness in front of Walton, the way she kept darting glances at Jaime when she thought he wasn’t looking. How could he possibly be married to her? How could he be married to her and not remember her at all?
Walton pressed him to try and remember anything at all about the crash. Jaime chalked up his response to how the inside of his head felt, stripped clean and scoured. Nothing there to prevent the acid in his words from leaking out, absorb some of it and hold it back.
“If I could remember anything, do you think I’d just be lying here, playing the wounded hero?”
Walton did not react, but Brienne winced, her face twisting again into an agonized expression. A fierce blush rushed up her neck. Her eyes were brilliant and not filled with kindness when she looked at Jaime while Walton thanked them both for their time, gave Brienne his card, and took his leave.
Qyburn watched Jaime closely in a manner Jaime was coming rapidly to resent.
“It will take time,” the doctor offered before he too departed. Leaving Jaime alone with his wife.
They did not look at each other as Brienne got up and Jaime stared at the ceiling. She moved with exaggerated care, as though worried that noise might set him off. She was at the door before she spoke without looking at him.
“Do you need anything?”
Jaime could not reconcile her size with her voice just then, so young and small. He kept his eyes trained on the yellowish tiled ceiling.
“How long have we been married?”
He saw her shoulders hunch out of the corner of his eye, without turning his head.
“Three years.”
“Children?”
She turned and stared at him, so finally he had to return her look. Her expression bewildered him.
“Not with me.” She grasped the door handle and yanked the door open while Jaime frowned. “Your brother is here,” Brienne hastened to add, a wild tangle of words. “I think he’d better fill you in on your family.”
She was gone before Jaime could voice his astonishment. He was tired of everything anyone said striking him as new and incredible.
*
Tyrion was a dwarf and sported the shrewdest expression of anyone Jaime had ever seen – which wasn’t saying much, since the only people he could remember seeing were Brienne, Qyburn, Walton, and assorted nurses. And now this man, his younger brother.
Jaime closed his eyes against the noonday light and tried to process everything Tyrion had told him: his past laid out before him in terse, concise terms.
“So.” Jaime grasped after the least contentious fact he’d learned. “I’m not rich.”
“Our father is rich. You are disinherited.”
“Because of…”
Tyrion’s voice sounded both rueful and sharp. “Take your pick. Years of insubordination to the old man’s wishes. Your injury. That business with Aerys Targaryen. That other business with Cersei.”
Jaime had really hoped that last one would prove untrue if only it were not spoken out loud again. He opened his eyes, looked his brother (the man didn’t feel like his brother) in the eye.
“That’s not funny, Tyrion.”
Tyrion grinned. “I’m laughing on the inside only, Jaime.”
Still his own name sounded strange to him, an ill fit.
“How can I be married to… Brienne,” her name was a rhomboid in his mouth, something angular and boxy, something which took up space, “and have done… what you say I did with my own sister?”
Tyrion raised his forefinger solemnly. “Your twin sister who looks exactly like you, but with tits. Your three children, officially nephews and niece, look like you too. But you did not know Brienne then.”
Jaime covered his eyes with his remaining hand, groaned. After his initial confusion upon waking in the hospital, he’d discovered that his body knew things he didn’t and grasped after objects with his left hand without his needing to think about it.
“How…?” Jaime began again, furious with himself for the repetition. “Brienne…”
Tyrion took pity, didn’t force him to complete the tortured inquiry. “Opinions differ. Father thinks you’re being stubborn. Cersei contends you’re overcompensating and in denial. I am unclear how those two things go together, but that’s our sister for you. My pet theory is that you lost your hand and grew a brain, Scarecrow.”
Jaime uncovered his face, frowned at Tyrion. The nickname made no sense. Tyrion didn’t seem to notice.
“All that is academic. How do you feel when Brienne is around?”
Why did his brother sound more comfortable pronouncing his wife’s name than he did himself? Jaime tried to focus.
“Confused,” he confessed at last. He took a deep breath, his hand twitching, wanting to tear his pillow into pieces in a rage of frustration.
Tyrion nodded, like that was exactly the answer he’d expected, and climbed off the armchair in which Brienne had slept the night before.
“Father is a lost cause, but I’ll remind Cersei it is considered polite to visit sick relatives,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll bet you ten dragons confusion will be the least of your feelings after you meet her.”
*
After his sister left, Jaime had to admit, despite his inclination to the contrary, that Tyrion had been right.
Cersei was beautiful. Heart-stoppingly, mouth-wateringly beautiful, proud, sleek, and poised. She also radiated a cool indifference which had deeply unsettled Jaime. Even when she’d shown him – after much demanding and near pleading on his part, for she had seemed disinclined to believe Jaime was suffering from memory loss, had even accused him of only doing it for attention – the pictures of her (their) children, there had been a proprietary gleam in Cersei’s green eyes which Jaime hadn’t liked.
He was decidedly confused in the aftermath of her visit. Also discomfited, worried, and nervous in a general, directionless sort of way. He kept plucking at his bedcovers, his lack of composure in no way aided by the conviction that the fingers of his missing right hand were likewise reaching for something just out of their grasp.
Brienne came in, tall, broad, unpretty. She tried to keep her expression blank so hard she practically twitched with the effort. Jaime could see her hand wanted to reach out and touch him, but she kept it down by her side. A woman her size should have loomed over him in his hospital bed, but Brienne was merely there, beside him.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, her voice quavering.
Jaime didn’t care how he felt. His head hurt a little, and his hand was still missing, but he suspected that wasn’t what Brienne wanted to know. She was curious if he remembered more than before Cersei had visited him.
“Where were you?” he demanded.
Brienne’s eyes darted to the door, back to Jaime’s face. “In the visitors’ lounge. Waiting.”
She knew all about Jaime’s past, of course. Yet she’d let Tyrion fill in the blanks, hid herself from Cersei.
Brienne’s jaw clenched, she reached out to take Jaime’s hand. “Jaime…”
He jerked his hand away. “How can you be my wife? How can this be my life?”
Brienne stared at him with those impossibly blue eyes, her hand still hovering near his. Jaime felt a powerful urge to make her avert her eyes from him.
“What kind of person are you, to be married to me? What kind of man am I?”
Brienne drew herself up, and Jaime suppressed the sudden urge to reach for her before she pulled away completely. He was adrift, tossed around, and she was a solidity receding from him.
“A better man than you think,” Brienne said fiercely. “Though right now you’re not showing it very well.”
Jaime squeezed his hand into a fist on top of the covers. “Oh, I do beg your pardon, your ladyship. I am getting a crash course in myself at the moment. And I still don’t know who you are, wife.”
Brienne threw him such a wounded look before she turned away, Jaime wondered whether a better man wouldn’t have called her back, found the words to make her stay.
She ought to have been blowing him kisses instead of acting like a beaten cow. He was doing her a favor, keeping her away from him.
*
Despite the sedative he had received, Jaime could not sleep. He was due to be discharged in the morning. He had not seen Brienne since she had left him following his sharp words to her that afternoon, was unsure whether he wanted to leave the hospital and go wherever it was the two of them lived. Jaime decided to ask Tyrion to pick him up in the morning and take him to a hotel. The impersonal surroundings would do as well as a hospital room for a man uncoupled from his sense of self.
His empty head would not let him rest. Deep in the night, the hospital as quiet as it ever got, Jaime struggled out from under the covers. His hospital gown was open down the back, more drafty than embarrassing. He found a robe in the tiny bathroom, put on the tatty hospital slippers rather than waste time looking for his shoes. He needed to get out or the emptiness inside his head (the weight of all he’d learned about himself) would crush him.
He waited for a moment when the nurses’ station was empty, then hurried down the corridor and found an emergency exit. His slippered feet sounded thunderous in the cool stairwell smelling of cement dust. One floor down, two, then he was out, the night smelling of grass, exhaust fumes, cooling concrete.
Jaime wandered along the wall of his hospital wing in the dark until he turned a corner and found himself facing the hospital’s brightly lit main entrance, the circular drive, and beyond it a busy street. He could just keep going. Step into that traffic and walk on until…
“Jaime.”
He was startled but not really surprised to hear Brienne’s voice behind him. When he turned to face her, her hands didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. She shuffled her feet, an utterly ridiculous gesture in someone of her stature.
“What are you doing here?” Jaime asked. Visiting hours had ended long ago.
“They let me sleep in the visitors’ lounge. What are you doing? Where were you going to go?”
“I don’t know.”
Jaime realized that this time of all times he hadn’t needed to think before he answered. He started to laugh, a jagged, broken, maniacal sound, startling to his ears, startling for Brienne to hear judging from the expression on her face, yet she didn’t recoil from him. She approached, her hands reached out warily.
“Jaime.”
Jaime inhaled sharply, swallowed his laugh, a mouthful of glass. “Say that again,” he panted, breathless as though he’d just run thrice around the hospital.
Brienne was staring at him, her mouth open.
“My name. Will you say my name again?”
She shut her mouth and stepped close enough to touch him, her hand daring to reach out to him and stay, a solid presence on his shoulder. Jaime shivered: he could feel her warmth through his thin robe and gown. He noticed for the first time she was taller than him.
“Jaime,” Brienne said, her voice even warmer than her hand, and Jaime knew they’d been here before.
“You were there,” his mouth said while his brain scrambled to catch up. He felt that he might sway on his feet, did not mind, certain Brienne would catch him. “When I…” He lifted his stump. “You pulled me out of my car, tied off my arm. You stayed with me in the hospital. You said my name like that when I shouted at that prosthetist. I threw something at him…”
Brienne opened her mouth, her unbandaged cheek turning pink.
“Don’t tell me!” Jaime didn’t even have to close his eyes to remember. “My lunch tray.”
“Yes.” Brienne breathed warmly on Jaime’s nose. Her voice was small, shivering to life. “Your aim was off. You missed him, hit the doorjamb. There were mashed potatoes and green Jell-O all over the floor.”
“The nurses glared at me all day.”
Brienne’s face shifted minutely, barely a flicker of change, yet it altered her whole countenance, a breeze on still waters. Her chin trembled, yet she didn’t look hurt or sad. Certain she would cry, Jaime stiffened from head to toe. If she did cry, he would have to comfort her, and he didn’t know how to do that. He didn’t know his own name, not really, but she was his wife and he owed her that small kindness.
He owed her quite a lot, it seemed. Brienne. His wife. The words were still strange in his mind, but not rough or chafing.
Jaime moved while Brienne’s eyes followed him and her hand didn’t know whether to stay on his shoulder. He shifted in place, only as far as he needed to take her hand in his, have a close look at the injured half of her face.
Brienne turned her head away, but not her body. The bandage filled Jaime’s field of vision, so close were they. “I don’t know how bad the damage is yet,” she whispered, her spine straight, her limbs stiff.
“Brienne, you know me. I don’t know myself, and most of what I’ve found out I don’t much like. But you know who I am. If you’ll have me, I’ll have you, cheek or no cheek.”
She seemed about to laugh or maybe sniffle, swallowed it, biting her lip in a gesture Jaime recognized, though he couldn’t remember ever seeing it before. He dared to lay a peck on her bandaged cheek, the lightest brush of lips lest he caused her pain. When Brienne faced him again, Jaime braced himself and bestowed a proper kiss to Brienne’s lips, an even deeper kiss to her long, thick neck as she embraced him, held him flush with her.
A deep sigh escaped Brienne at his touch, and Jaime felt a stirring, his blood coursing faster in recognition, his body recognizing hers even though he felt like he was kissing her for the first time ever.
Jaime still couldn’t remember anything about her, about them, but Brienne was holding him close, and Jaime knew how he felt – reassured, wanted, safe – in her hands.