Work Text:
Catelyn
A lesser man than Catelyn’s husband might, upon finding his wife alone in their bedchamber with a strange man, have turned immediately to suspicion of her honour. She, certainly, would have turned to suspicion were their positions reverse, if only for the fact that he had violated such a compact before, and the evidence of it still haunted the halls of Winterfell.
Ned, however, only turned to regard the Kingslayer with both suspicion and dislike. “Ser Jaime.”
“He was here when I entered,” Catelyn told him, “and has not explained himself.”
“I was looking for you,” the Kingslayer advised Ned, leaning back against the wall cockily, though Catelyn could have sworn she caught a glimpse of fear in his eyes. “Then I thought it was best to have this conversation with the one of you who has more wits than my brother did at the age of five.”
“And what conversation, precisely, is that? And why is it taking place here?”
“Because the walls of Winterfell sprout ears just as easily as those of the Red Keep. Particularly when the royal party comes to call. But you already know that.” His smile was like that of a cat with a mouse between its paws, and it made him look even more like his sister than usual.
“I doubt you have anything to say that I would wish to keep from the King.”
“Don’t I?” The edge to that smile sharpened. “I am going to commit an act of treason tonight, and the oh-so-honourable Ned Stark is going to help me. Do you know why?” Hardly waiting for a reply, he asked, “any guesses, Lady Catelyn?”
She thought it was best not to dignify him with a response, and in truth, he did not seem to need one, for he turned again on Ned and said,
“We both have a secret we would rather Robert never know. I’ll keep yours, if you help me to protect mine.”
It was nonsense, of course it was, and yet as she looked at Ned, she saw fear etch itself across his face, a rare sort of terror she had never known him to show.
“Lannister,” he said forewarningly, a tone that would have made any man in the North wary, but the Kingslayer was not cowed.
“I did wonder if you had told her,” he said, looking to Catelyn. “She certainly never acted as if she knew – and all due respect, Lady Stark, I have never thought any of your family would have made excellent mummers – but it isn’t as if I’ve conducted interrogations on the subject.”
She found herself afraid too, more of Ned’s reaction than of the Kingslayer’s strange words. “Told me what, Ned?”
But he did not speak, and in the end it was Jaime Lannister who said, “the bastard is Lyanna’s son. A Targaryen.”
It was a ludicrous, improbable story, and yet the second she heard it spoken, Catelyn knew it to be true. The name of some whore – even the name of a noble lady – was something that did not need to be hidden with the obsessive secrecy with which Ned had always guarded the name of Jon’s mother, even from the boy himself. Even from her. But this name, in its absence, concealed a far worse, deeper secret: the name of Jon’s father.
If the King found out – Robert, who she had found an unsettling guest in his drunkenness – there was no certainty what he would do. Even his oldest friend had feared him so well he kept this secret, and Catelyn had no reason to expect more mercy, even though she had not known. Even though her children did not know.
And now Jaime Lannister held this secret. “Who else knows?” She asked him.
She could hardly stand to look at Ned. It was easier to focus on the problem of Lannister without diverting herself into ‘how dare you bring such danger here?’ and ‘how dare you keep the truth from me?’ Ned had not betrayed their vows the very day after their wedding feast. She had feared Jon all his life and he had never been a threat, not to her children and not to her marriage. It had been Ned who threatened those things, with this single, reckless, loving, choice. But these were things that could not be spoken of before Lannister.
“No one, yet. Though there are records at… somewhere. I may tell you, if you do as I say.”
She needed something, some piece of leverage to raise her head back above water. “And your secret? What spurs you to treason, Jaime Lannister?”
“Oh, plenty,” he said, with a laugh. “Have you not heard the moniker?
“But in this instance, well, I suppose, my reasons are much the same as yours Lord Stark, just in the reverse. Your bastard is a prince. The princes – and princess – are my bastards.”
This made even less sense than the last revelation, with the dancing way he worded himself, and was much more revolting when at last she understood, “with your sister?”
“If you want an excuse,” he said, spreading his hands, “there isn’t a particularly good one. When is there, for love? But… I do not think either of us have a particular desire to see our royal bastards’ skulls spread across the paving stones. Which is why you are going to see to it that Tommen, Myrcella and I are on the fastest ship out of White Harbour, bound for… Myr, or some such.”
“But not Joffrey?”
“He wouldn’t hold his tongue in keeping with the plan. Try to have him sent to the Wall if you can, I suppose, but… I won’t risk Tommen and Myrcella both for the hope he might be better as a dispossessed fugitive than he is as a Prince. And whatever happens, under no circumstances do you let that boy anywhere near Sansa. Do you understand?”
Something terrible burned in his face, and the thought of Sansa, so young and sweet, in the company of a boy who provoked such a reaction in his own father, was enough to send a chill through her.
“Kingslayer,” Ned said, warily.
“I was talking to the sensible one. The fish. Is there such a thing as a clever fish? Aside from present company, of course.”
“We help you leave with your bastards before Robert can uncover your treason, you keep silent on Jon’s… parentage, and tell us how you uncovered the information so we can ensure no other does the same.”
It would be better if Lannister was dead, to keep the secret, but they could not be certain he was the only one who knew, and anyhow, they would have had to kill him without any sort of trial or public confrontation, and that would surely ignite another war and give Cersei the perfect opportunity to deny the truth of the incestuous claims as slander by murderous violators of guest right.
Lannister laughed. “Oh, I will assure you no other will do the same as I did. But I shall tell you where another might find it. Sounds fair enough, does it not?”
The lives of two children for the life of one. “Why now? Has it to do with Jon Arryn’s death?” Her sister’s letter came to life again in her mind. “Did you kill him?”
“Do I look like a poisoner to you?”
“You look like a Kingslayer.”
“And a queenfucker,” he concurred vulgerly. “No, I didn’t kill Arryn, though he had figured it out. I think Stannis probably already knows too by this point, since he got out of King’s Landing as fast as the stick up his ass would let him. San- Somebody told me that Petyr Baelish was the one who really orchestrated Arryn’s death. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was true, weasly little bastard he is.”
As if the Kingslayer was any better. “Petyr Baelish is a friend of my family.”
“Petyr Baelish is a whoremonger with aspirations. Don’t leave your daughter alone with him either. But I cannot stress to you how much that is not my problem. Do we have a deal, or do I need to go tell that drunken fuck who Lyanna really preferred opening her legs for?” In the face of their silence, he added, “how likely to do you think it is, really, that Robert will believe the rest of you didn’t know? How likely do you think it is that your other brats will stand back and hold their tongues when he sends their cousin and their parents to face Ilyn Payne? It’ll be easier to take care of the entire family here than it was for Stannis at Dragonstone. No inconvenient storms or ships to slip away under cover of darkness.”
Catelyn looked to her husband, who had been so quiet, ever since the revelation of Jon’s parentage. He met her eyes in turn, cautiously anticipating her anger, as if he had somehow known that she would be angry to learn that he had been faithful. And he was right. She was angry, in spite of all her best sense.
“Ned?”
As though the words pained him, he said, “Aye, Kingslayer. Take your bastards and never set foot on these shores again. Are you sure Joffrey cannot-”
“He is already torturing small animals,” the Kingslayer said. “It will be people soon. Whores. Prisoners. His siblings, if there is no one else left to torment. No. He cannot, but-”
“I will do what I can. And perhaps the discipline of the wall might-”
“I doubt it, but I should like to hope.”
They made a plan for the exit, one that would not reveal Ned and Catelyn’s enabling of it – and agreed where the Kingslayer would leave a description of the evidence that proved Jon’s parentage, along with a confession to be ‘found’ and given to Robert once he was far from these shores.
“He will kill your sister for this.”
“Most likely,” Lannister agreed. In the dim light of the hearth, his features seemed strangely softened, and Catelyn thought he looked older than he had when he first arrived at Winterfell days before, more touched and wearied by the world. “Don’t think I feel nothing for the fact. She’s my other half. We came into the world together, and meant to leave it in much the same way. But she’s no more capable of living a small life well than she is of taming a dragon. If my sister went, you would have two exile princes selling their sisters to Dothraki savages to buy armies instead of one, and then where would we be? I suppose, if Robert is rational, my father may find a way to save her, but if he does, you should not trust her either. You would be better off persuading Robert to spare my brother. If he is- if he is truly set against him, remind him that my father would find Tyrion’s survival an insult. You can trust Tyrion in ways you cannot, and must not trust Cersei.”
This time, at least, the warning was not solely fixed on Sansa.
“Have you any other words of wisdom, Lannister?” The words bit at him, a thin guise over all the fear and anger of the evening.
To her surprise, he said, “Keep a firmer hand on the Night’s Watch. There’s a wildling army massing and nobody is taking it seriously.” And, as he stood to leave them, he added suddenly, “there’s a woman in the stormlands. A girl. Name of Brienne of Tarth, the Evenstar’s daughter. She’s shaping up to be one of the best swords in Westeros. Ugly as the seven hells, but… she could do better than she is. A bit old for a fostering, maybe, but as a companion for your daughters… think about it. Both of them would benefit by her company, I think.”
He left before Catelyn or Ned could make any sort of reply to this, and at last she turned to her husband and, in violation of all wifely duty, despite all her better sense, demanded, “did I never earn your trust, Eddard Stark?”
“He is my son. In every way that matters. Rhaegar-”
“Not in the way that mattered most to me!” The words hung horribly in the air between them. “Our vows mattered to me. Robb mattered to me.”
“They matter to me too, but if you had seen Lyanna that day, Cat, if you had seen the way she begged-”
Catelyn loved her siblings, usually in spite of themselves. And she loved her children, more than anything in the world. She would have lied to protect them too. “I know.”
--
Jaime
For the first year or so they moved constantly – or, at least, that was what reports back to Westeros said. Some, no doubt, knew the truth. Ned and Catelyn Stark probably knew who had sent a Water Dancing master looking for teaching work in Winterfell, and Varys, rat that he was, had probably sniffed out some crumb of reality in the garbled nonsense it was seen that he received. In truth, Westeros was in so much chaos that first year after the Lannister Betrayal that no decisions were being made the with calm, rational sense that would have been required to suss out the real location of the Kingslayer and his bastards. By the time the smoke cleared, the other Westerosi exile princess was of much more interest than Myrcella Waters and her brother were.
They had gone further east for a time at the beginning, which was what anybody sensible hiding from the Iron Throne would do, but Jaime had slunk back to Braavos after one look at Meereen, unable to explain to Myrcella, who was old enough to be inquisitive, why. In his first life, at least, Daenarys had never gone to Braavos, had never realized – as Tywin Lannister might have told her – where the axel upon which the wheel turned was headquartered. He could only pray that she would not turn her eye there, and that nobody would notice a young, dark-haired widower with two children. He was certain, at the least, that his sellsword work would draw no eyes. The left-handed Arthur Storm was better than many men, but worse than plenty of others. He got them through another year, in which there was little fighting in Westeros but some skirmishes in the westerlands when Gregor Clegane was finally brought to heel, and a tussle in King’s Landing over what Queen Margaery was going to call her eldest son – Steffon. Storm won some fights, and lost others, but never fatally, which most who knew him agreed was good. He had a mouth on him, but what sellsword didn’t, and his children were as sweet as he could be sour. Best that a man like that win and live, where so many others didn’t.
He might not have won a fight against the woman currently standing on his doorstep, hand on a wolf’s-head hilt.
“Arthur Storm?” She asked, with a tone as if it was the why of the name she was really asking about.
“Should I take it Honourable Ed has reneged on our deal after all? I warn you, I won’t come quietly. Not even for a pretty face.”
She furrowed her brows. “Do you really want to do this on your doorstep?”
“Fight or fuck?” But still he let her in. In truth, he wasn’t sure which of them would win if he drew steel on her. He was stronger than he had been, but he was now, embarrassingly, out of practice with his right hand. By the toned strength of her, from her shoulders to her glorious thighs, she wasn’t out of practice with anything.
Once they were inside, Jaime thankful for the fact that Braavos had a good system of education for young boys of sufficient means, and for the fact that Myrcella liked to do her mending out in the sun, Brienne said, “Lord Stark is in Braavos meeting with the Iron Bank to discuss the Watch’s finances.”
That was something that certainly had never happened in his first life. He hoped someone with more sense than honour was watching over his shoulder to see they didn’t get scammed within an inch of their lives. “And he wants to hire a sellsword from the Stormlands? Not likely.”
She glared at him as if she wasn’t finding the ruse particularly funny. “And he mentioned that the man who recommended he take me on lives in Braavos now. And so I looked for a Westerosi sellsword until somebody told me there was an alright left-handed fellow who mostly took safer jobs with worse pay because he had two children at home and his wife was dead.”
Left-handed. It turned over in his head. She stared at him impatiently, and there was something about the way she looked at him, the anger in her, that brought him at last to the too-slow realization, “you’re my Brienne.”
“Am I? Am I your Brienne?”
He had said awful things to her, when last they parted. “I thought I could end it. I thought if she died, and they surrendered, Daenarys might enter the city unopposed. And it would be awful, because sacking cities is always a fucking nightmare, but at least there would be no more needless loss of life.”
“And you didn’t trust me to come with you.”
“I said I didn’t want any more needless loss of life.”
“And I was stupid enough to fall for it. You always try to rile people up, and say the cruelest things to try to make them do what you want, and I know that, but I still fell for it!”
“They were cruel.”
“And I should have known they were lies! You bastard.”
And then just like that she was kissing him, pressing him back against the table, all strength and power and the very best of honour. He thought of going to his knees before her, a strange mirror of her knighting, and wondered if she would like it.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I only wanted you to be safe.”
She leant in and confessed against his ear. “Yes, and I was perfectly safe until well after the Dragon Queen fired King’s Landing, at which point it occurred to me that I should remember certain lessons learned at Harrenhal about the honour to be found in tyrannicide.”
“Aerys didn’t have any dragons, Brienne!”
“Yes, because you’re so well known for your common sense in the face of dragonfire. And I did learn that lesson the hard way.”
Jaime had wanted nothing more than to keep her far from it, but she had burned anyhow.
He had undone the lower fastenings of her jerkin, and he slid his hands underneath to run across the skin of her stomach, unmarred by dragonfire. “And then you woke up here in this time.” She nodded. “I’m sorry for your terrible, terrible taste in role models.”
“I’m not,” she said, and kissed him again, cruelly ignoring the hardness growing in his breeches. “I thought about going and killing her again, when I realized that we woke before she had the dragons, but I couldn’t bear to. Perhaps that was foolish, now that she begins her march of terror across Slaver’s Bay, and yet-”
“I wondered the same. Perhaps I ought to have ridden from Winterfell, blade in hand, and done the deed. I wouldn’t have needed Valyrian steel for it; she was a defenseless child. Nobody would have seen it coming. Hells, Robert might have let me fuck Cersei for giving him the heads of the last Targaryens.”
“But instead you decided to save the Starks, and Tommen and Myrcella, and to take pity on an awkward girl in the Stormlands who’d just been declared an old maid in waiting.”
“Westeros would have been even more of a shithole if no great mission had ever called you from Tarth.”
“You didn’t offer me to Westeros. You let me go back to Lady Catelyn. Do you have any idea what that meant to me? Do you have any idea what that would have meant for the girl you thought you were sending to Winterfell?”
“Perhaps I’ve just become very invested in seeing that Arya Stark grows to be the most capable swordswoman possible. All our lives depend on it, wench.”
“Oh shut up and let me forgive you,” she said, and she had managed to undo his breeches before they heard the sound of thumping feet, and the pair of them leapt apart to hurriedly arrange themselves before Tommen burst in to announce, “I made a friend on the way home from school and she has a pet wolf!”
“That’s very nice, son,” Jaime said, and was treated to the eternal delight of Brienne honking with laughter.