Chapter Text
Brienne is five when it appears on her bed.
It’s the middle of the night, and she’s sleeping, but at some point the mattress becomes hot and she wakes up immediately, wondering what’s wrong with it -
And then she sees that at the bottom of her bed there’s something glowing.
Suddenly, the mattress’s heat doesn’t matter any more as she crawls out of the sheets and towards that light. For a moment it’s blinding, but then it lowers down a bit, and then some more, until it goes from white to a beautiful golden color -
And it beats.
It’s strange, because as it is it looks like a ball of light, large enough to fit in her cupped palms, but when she takes it, it pulses against her skin. It moves ever so slightly, in and out, in and out, and first it’s racing, beat after beat after beat, and then it becomes slower, more regular, and Brienne keeps on staring down at it in fascination, wondering what it could be -
And then it changes. The golden light stays, but as absurd as it seems, she starts seeing red cracks in it, not enough to break the entire thing apart but bleeding darker red light that merges with the golden hue on the outside. Brienne blinks, her thumb brushing over the surface of that pulsing gold, and then she understands at once what it is.
Oh.
Oh.
She’s heard the whispers behind her back - she’s young, but she’s not deaf, and Septa Roelle did give her that harsh lesson about looking in the mirror.
Poor girl, with that face she’ll never get anyone’s heart.
How sad.
Hey, better for the other guy - who’d want to give their heart to someone so ugly?
She - she knows that when you’re meant to be with someone, really meant to be, sometimes their heart makes its way to you and you’ll only give it back to them when you meet. It’s in all the songs. But she never thought she’d get one.
And now -
She thinks she does have one. What else can it be, since it’s beating inside her palms?
She immediately gets out of the bed, feeling thankful for the umpteenth time that her father stayed home and didn’t go to war, just sent soldiers, and knocks at his door frantically until he opens it.
“Brienne, it’s the middle of the - what the -” He says as he looks down at her and at the golden light in between her palms.
“I - I was sleeping and then my bed turned so hot I had to wake up and that was - that just appeared out of nowhere. I - I have a heart!” She says, unable to contain the excitement, even if the moment she says it, she feels a wave of sadness come over her. She doesn’t know from where, but it makes her face fall just as she says it.
“Hey,” Father asks, “what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, uh, I just… felt really sad for a moment.”
“You know what,” he says, “get in.”
Brienne walks into his room and gets on the bed, still carefully holding the heart. She holds it out for Father to look at better, but she doesn’t let it go. His eyes narrow as he inspects it, and he mutters something under his breath as he sees the cracks. He touches it for a second and then retreats his hand at once.
“It’s… not burning to you, is it?”
“No,” Brienne says. “It’s warm. Oh.” The moment she says it, she feels sadder than before, tears coming to her eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” she says as she wipes them with a hand, holding the heart with the other. “I’m not -”
“I think it’s not you,” Father says. “I think it’s the heart.”
“… How?”
He sighs. “I had your mother’s. And - I’m not, I mean, I’ve never seen that many, but hers was all bright. And light blue. And if I touched it I felt… either happy or, you know, worried, and I found out because we met at a ball at court and she wasn’t sure her father would accept my proposal. She told me later. And hers had stopped beating all the time I had it. Anyway, this one - isn’t looking too well.”
“It’s not?”
He shakes his head. “You see the cracks? The light is red. Unless it was red in the first place… it’s not normal.”
“Uh. When I got it first, it was racing. The beats, I mean.”
“Was it,” Father says. He looks back down at it, and that’s when he sees that the golden light dims a bit. It still stays there, though. There’s a bit more red now, but -
“I think,” Father finally says, “that whoever this belongs to, they - they aren’t doing very good right now. I mean, as far as hearts go, this looks… pretty battered. And I don’t like that it’s becoming redder by the moment.”
“But the golden light is so beautiful,” Brienne says. “It can’t belong to someone bad.”
“Oh, I can see that. I think it belongs to someone good. Someone who is really not doing well right now. And - it’s not my experience, but from what I know about hearts like this… well, you have to take really special care of it. I don’t know if it will make it better for sure… but you can’t just leave it there waiting for him to show up. You have to look after it.”
“I will,” Brienne says at once. “Of course I will. I swear it.”
“I knew you would,” her father smiles, and she sleeps there that night, keeping the heart curled against her chest.
— —
Her septa tries to convince her to keep it at least on the nightstand, but when it becomes redder and redder in the next few days, Brienne refuses and puts her foot down. She brings it under the covers, her fingertips brushing over the golden-red light, noticing that the more she does it the more the red retreats a bit.
It’s always back the next morning, though, but as Father would say, there hasn’t been a moment in Brienne’s life when she wasn’t stubborn, and so she doesn’t give up on it.
— —
The day she decides that she’d rather be a knight than a lady for good, because she’s done with people making fun of her whenever she shows up in dresses and she had already started seeing the appeal of a sword in her hands and the allure of being in songs singing of her brave deeds and not of her ugly face, it’s the day Ronnet Connington comes with his family for a visit on Tarth.
(Her father has never betrothed her and hasn’t tried - he knows she has the heart, and he said he would feel horrible promising her to anyone that’s not the owner. He also has seen that it’s been seven years and the red hasn’t retreated.)
She overhears him talking to someone, saying that no one would ever want her anyway, not when she looks like a sow in silk.
“You know,” she blurts, “I do have my intended’s heart. I just haven’t met him yet.” She probably shouldn’t have said it. But it just came out of her, hoping that it would shut him up.
“And I won’t believe it until I see it,” he sneers.
She goes back upstairs and takes it, and when he sees it he laughs.
“Oh, of course you got a broken one.”
“It’s not broken,” she protests.
“Please,” Ronnet goes on, “it’s all red. Red hearts like that are broken and their owners are either useless or more effort than they’re worth. ‘Course you would get a broken one, who else would want you?”
“It’s not,” Brienne hisses, and at that he stops talking. She realizes her voice had turned cold. Very cold. A coldness that doesn’t belong to her, she’s never sounded like that, but it seems to come from the pulsing warmth in her hands, again - “and the day I find him you’ll see he’s not broken or damaged or unworthy. And I sure as the seven hells hope no one got saddled with yours.”
That shuts him up.
She smiles as she goes back upstairs. No one sees her, but if they had, they’d have thought her grin was sharper than usual.
When she goes back into the room, she places it back on the nightstand, caressing it.
“I’m going to become a knight,” she swears to it, seeing the red retreating ever so slightly, “and I’ll find you, and I’ll give this back to you, and I’ll make sure no one calls you broken to your face. That’s what knights do, don’t they?”
It pulses under her hands, still glowing.
It’s such a lovely shade of gold, Brienne thinks.
A really, really lovely shade.