Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Brienne has been out since she was a teenager. By the time she went off to college she’d been doing the whole openly trans thing for years, so it’s not uncommon for people to come and talk to her like she’s got everything all figured out.

And to be fair, Brienne has weathered high school while trans. College while trans. Navigating the medical system while trans. Living while trans. She’s had more than a few people ask her out for coffee, or set the homework they were working on aside to sprawl across their dorm room bed so they can question their way through their gender and/or sexual orientation in her presence. She’s got the gender thing under control in a very visible way so people figure they can talk to her about it.

So people talk to her about it.

Brienne has had people come and question their gender in front of her like some sort of all-seeing wise-women on the top of a gender mountain. She’s had people question their sexual orientation to her like she can make better sense of their own feelings. She’s had people question both their gender and their sexual orientation while not knowing that they aren’t the same thing. She’s had people pull her aside after class to quietly come out to her. She’s already fielded more TRANS 101 and QUEER 101 questions than tenured gender studies professors get in their whole lifetime. It’s normal. She’s used to it.

All of this is to say that no one has ever passed out and nearly drowned in the process of coming out to her.

*

“Jaime,” she keeps saying his name. He’s sitting on the edge of the hot tub with his face in his hands. He’s curled into himself, but he’s much steadier than he was. Which is not saying much.

She’s sitting beside him. Wait. She should confirm.

“Jaime,” she asks, “what are your pronouns?”

Jaime lifts his (she’s almost positive those are the right pronouns, but she will switch if Jaime corrects her) head out of his hands to look over at her. It’s clear no one has ever asked Jaime this before.

His voice is small when he answers, “He.”

*

She offers to call for medical assistance of whatever type he is comfortable with one last time. Offers to go with him to the emergency room, if that’s what he needs. He shakes his head. Says he’s fine. Which he’s obviously not. But he is more fine than he was ten minutes ago.

Maybe more fine than he’s been in a long time.

Jaime, she thinks as she looks at him, Jaime Lannister.

She wonders if anyone else knows.

*

“Do you have a room?” she asks. “Somewhere I can take you back to?”

He almost nods but shakes his head and then tries to brush off every part of his devastating gesture as nothing in the span of three terrible seconds.

“There are two beds in my room,” Brienne offers without thinking. She’s not even sure if this is appropriate to offer, but she’s going to anyway. She doesn’t want him wandering the streets. “If you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“I… You mean it? I don’t want to…”

Impose is probably where he’s going with that sentence but Brienne shakes her head, not needing him to finish.

Jaime nods and then gets shakily to his feet.

Brienne cloaks him in her towel and leads them away from the hot tub.

*

“Would you rather wait out here? Or do you want to stay with me?”

She watches him look at the sign on the door Brienne is standing in front of. Watches him put it together.

Obviously no one has let him make this choice either.

“I’ll wait here,” Jaime says.

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

*

It’s not a nice enough hotel for there to be a stack of spare towels in the women’s change room so she makes do as she changes back into her clothes. She allows herself a moment of disbelief at the turn her night has taken. All she expected from this little half-getaway was a couple of days to herself. A couple of days without roommates in a hotel where no-one knew or cared who she was. Maybe a chance to use a swimming pool in the middle of the night when no one would be around to see her.

Instead she’s got a guy mid-gender crisis wrapped in her towel waiting for her outside the women’s change room. She can hear her roommates teasing her about this already.

When she exits a few minutes later she finds Jaime sitting on a bench outside the door. His clothes are still soaked, but at least most of the dripping seems to have subsided.

He looks up at her as if surprised she came back for him.

“C’mon,” she says as she leads him towards the elevator.

*

Brienne digs through her suitcase for something Jaime can wear. His jeans are dry but everything else he is wearing is wet from the hot tub and she’s very aware that she doesn’t want to give him anything gendered… Not that she dresses super feminine or anything, but she figures the last thing he needs right now is to put on clothes that feel wrong.

She finds pyjama bottoms and a band t-shirt and holds them out to him. “Here,” she says. “They might not fit perfectly, but they’ll be dry.”

“I… Thank you,” Jaime says to the floor as he takes the clothes. After a beat he looks at the faded logo on the shirt she has given him and adds, “I love Hootie and the Blackfish.”

*

When Jaime retreats to the bathroom to change, Brienne tries to conjure up concrete memories of the person Jaime was in high school. She’d been aware of him, but only because of his twin sister. He and Cersei were identical twins but exactly no one had trouble telling them apart. Cersei was the self-appointed queen of the school and Jaime was the one slouching along in her shadow. Cersei had her decorative hairstyles and elaborate fashion and was nothing at all like the kid who went only by J and wore jeans and a t-shirt, his long golden hair pulled back into a simple ponytail every single day.

*

Jaime comes out of the bathroom wearing Brienne’s pyjamas. He’s tall, but not as tall as her. The pyjama pants are bunching around his ankles. He’s got his arms held securely over his chest and Brienne doesn’t need to ask to know why.

Her suitcase is on the bed closest to the window but he still just stands there until she tells him to take the other bed. He does, getting under the covers as he says, “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know,” she says as she gathers her change of clothes and toothbrush and walks over to the bathroom. “It’s okay.”

*

She’s relieved when she sees two sports bras hanging over the shower curtain. When he passed out she feared he was using ace bandages to bind. And Brienne, who has zero experience binding, still knows that you shouldn’t use ace bandages to bind. Much less in a hot tub. His shirt and boxers are also draped over the shower curtain and she adds her bathing suit to the collection before brushing her teeth.

When she emerges from the bathroom Jaime is lying on his back with the covers pulled up to his chin. It is past four in the morning. Brienne is tired, but he’s clearly beyond exhausted. Shame is setting in, forcefully taking the place of his shocking vulnerability. She can feel it radiating off him as she crosses back to her bed wearing her running clothes, but it’s four in the morning and she doesn’t have the energy to unpack a lifetime of gender trauma on no sleep.

He’s here and in one piece and he was able to tell her his name. His actual name. She does not doubt for a second how big a step that was for him.

“Try and get some sleep. If you want to talk about anything we can talk in the morning,” she tells him. “Goodnight Jaime.”

She pretends to fall asleep fast enough not to notice him wiping his eyes.

*

When Brienne wakes up Jaime is stepping out the bathroom wearing one of the hotel provided bathrobes, obviously trying to be quiet to not disturb her. He apologizes and she tells him he has no reason to and he nods without quite looking at her, still standing near the door.

“I need to shower,” Brienne yawns, “but if you want to grab breakfast after we can.”

“I need to uh….” he says, glancing towards the door. “My clothes are still damp.”

Brienne glances at the clock on the bedside table, unable to judge what time it is based on her level of alertness, wondering if Jaime is safe to return to whatever room he didn’t go back to last night to get dry clothes.

Jaime seems to be wondering the same thing.

*

Jaime goes to the front desk to ask about the room he was originally staying in while Brienne showers. She leaves the door to the room unlocked and when she returns Jaime is back, his bag on the bed he slept in.

He’s changed out of her pyjamas, which he has folded imperfectly and placed on her bed.

*

They missed the hotel breakfast by a margin of at least three hours so they set off down the street in search of a suitable place. Brienne draws the usual amount of curious gazes and lingering glances in her wake; Jaime slouches along beside her until they find an all day breakfast place that’s mostly empty and go inside.

*

Brienne spends most of breakfast wondering what she will say when he asks for advice.

Normally if someone comes to her in the early stages of exploring their gender she suggests changing a few little things and seeing how that feels. A new shirt. Some underwear. Start experimenting with binding or tucking. Maybe a haircut or start growing out their hair. Experiment with makeup if that’s something they’re into. Buy some gendered soap. Start with the stuff they can do on their own before it becomes all of the social parts of transitioning. Before they have to pick a name and come out to people and be ready to ask for the right pronouns and all of the stuff you can’t do privately. But his boxers spent the night hanging in her bathroom, along with his makeshift binding solution, so even if he wasn’t able to talk about any of it, he’s already been doing what he can. He has a name. He has his pronouns.

Jaime isn’t questioning his gender.

Jaime, she finds herself thinking as she looks at the man in front of her, how long have you known?

*

“How?” Jaime asks, after their meals have been placed in front of them, after Brienne has eaten two of her four pancakes and they’ve talked about not much of anything for a long while. “How do I…?” He pushes a piece of waffle across his plate with his fork before losing his nerve, the question trailing off into the space between them.

“However you want to,” Brienne says. “Anyone who says there’s only one way to be trans is wrong. You get to decide how you do this. Name, pronouns, hormones, surgery, all of it, any of it. It’s all optional. And you get to decide.”

She tells him that transitioning isn’t magic, that it doesn’t happen overnight, that it won’t make him a different person. In short, she tells him all the things she’s been told a million times since she came out.

Across the table he’s staring right at her, like he’s trying to absorb everything she’s saying.

It doesn’t occur to her until she’s already most of the way through the main spiel how obvious it is that Jaime has never been told any of this before.

*

Jaime doesn’t seem to know what to ask to get her to keep talking about trans stuff, but it’s clear he wants to hear anything she’s willing to tell him by the way he keeps looking at her.

So he eats his waffles and she tells him about trans stuff as he listens like his life depends on it.

*

Brienne almost invites him to stay with her the second night, but that feels like eight steps too far. But as he goes into the bathroom to grab the clothes he wore in the hot tub and then returns to the main room to shove them into his bag she says, “Let me give you my number. Text me if you need to talk. Or if you want to come visit sometime, I could take you to a place that sells chest binders if you want.”

She’s not sure he’s ready to do anything so rash as actually hang out with an obviously trans person, or go buy a real binder, but she wants him to have the option.

*

That night Brienne enjoys having no roommates. She reads some of a book she bought for fun that has nothing to do with the social work program she’s taking. She goes for a walk around the unfamiliar city. She watches something mindless on TV.

She doesn’t go back to the hot tub.

*

Brienne checks out of the hotel early Sunday morning to catch the train back to her place. She’s got her book out on her lap with good intentions to try and finish it, but she stares out the window and loses herself in her thoughts instead.

*

“It will be hard,” her dad said, as they discussed the idea of her starting high school as Brienne. With the right name and pronouns. Her dad was worried about her. He was always worried about her.

“It will be easier than the other way.” Brienne was thirteen and she knew this beyond a doubt.

“Nobody will hate you,” her dad says instinctively, but they both knew he was lying.

*

So many people had tried to convince her not to transition when she told them that’s what she was doing. She was too tall. Too ugly. Not feminine enough. People were full of rude suggestions for how she could avoid being trans if she just tried a little harder to be a boy. It would be so much easier, they said, if she was a boy. Or if she was more feminine. A gay boy. A soft boy. A drag queen on weekends. Anything to avoid being a trans woman. “You’ll never be pretty,” more than one person told her, “so you shouldn’t even try.”

As if being a tall, ugly, manish woman was somehow the worst possible fate (and whatever they said, what they really meant was trans. She’ll look trans.) But right from the start, when all she had was her name and her pronouns and the audacity to demand people use them, being hated for being herself was a million times better than before, back when she played at being a boy because she was told that was inevitable.

The first therapist her dad took her to didn’t think she was trans enough because she didn’t like to wear dresses. Fuck that guy. As if the fact that female pronouns felt like truth and male pronouns felt like a horrible lie weren’t proof enough. Like the fact that she, at the tender age of thirteen, was in a therapist's office declaring herself trans wasn’t proof enough. She would never be trans enough for some people. And she would always be too trans for others. Brienne didn’t owe any of them answers. Was she happy? Was she living her life the way she wanted to? The way that made her feel honest and seen? Yes. Fuck everyone else.

Her second therapist didn’t treat transness like a tragedy to be avoided at all costs. That was a notable improvement.

She didn’t need correcting. Not then, not now.

Jaime doesn’t need correcting either.

But it’s clear someone has spent a lot of time telling him he does.

She feels like she’s failed Jaime already. That she didn’t answer his questions well enough. That she didn’t give him enough resources or hope or anything. He had been in bad shape that night. She should have taken him to the hospital. She should have invited him to stay the second night. She should have said something different, something more, to make sure he understood before he left that hotel and her life.

That being trans is hard. That transitioning is hard. There’s no denying that. It’s hard. But if transitioning is what he wants, what he needs, it’s worth it.

She hopes he knows.

That it’s worth it.

*

“Did you meet anyone?” Alleras asks as Brienne puts her bag down in the front hall of the house they share.

“I…”

“You DID!” Alleras exclaims. “Were they cute? Did you hook up? Tell me everything!”

“It wasn’t like that,” Brienne says, because really, it wasn’t like that at all. “I just ran into a guy I went to high school with. He came out to me. That’s all.”

“Can’t escape the genders,” Alleras says wisely. “Once I was overseas and someone from my past STILL found me to come talk about their gender feelings.”

Brienne smiles a little at that and agrees, “Can’t escape the genders.”

*

Brienne can’t wait to get back to her gym.

An hour at the gym training with Goodwin is better than any therapy Brienne’s ever had. Gods, everyone should have a middle-aged lesbian trainer in their life. Goodwin who can punch better than anyone Brienne has ever met. Goodwin, whose wife is trans so Brienne never had to explain anything to her. Goodwin who lets Brienne stay later and work out until her muscles shake with fatigue. Goodwin who has lived through stuff Brienne can’t even imagine and survived them all.

Tomorrow. Thank god she has a training session scheduled tomorrow.

*

Brienne doesn’t hate her body. Other people hate her body. She doesn’t always love her body, but it is hers, and she does her best to appreciate it, even when she doesn’t love it.

But when she’s beating the crap out of a punching bag while Goodwin compliments her on her form, Brienne likes her body quite a bit.

*

There’s a message waiting for her when she finishes her workout:

Can I come visit next weekend?

It doesn’t occur to Brienne until after she’s said yes and they’ve arranged it that she doesn’t actually know Jaime very well and now she’s committed herself to spending two days with him.

She’s a little worried it’s going to be unbearably awkward until she sees him wandering through the train station and he lights up when he sees her. He’s wearing the same outfit he was wearing when he crashed into the hot tub without even noticing her there. Jeans and a black t-shirt. She wonders if he wears anything else.

*

They stop at a place for food on their way back to her place and the person taking their orders at the counter calls them “ladies” and she feels Jaime tense beside her. He tries to push past it, but he loses his train of thought about the program he’s taking which he hates and trails off into silence as they make their way to an empty booth in the far corner of the restaurant.

Brienne’s torn between wanting to acknowledge how much getting misgendered sucks and to reassure him that he passes better than he thinks, that it won’t take much to have him passing all the time if that’s what he wants (and so far it seems like that’s exactly what he wants).

She starts by acknowledging how much getting misgendered sucks. Because it fucking sucks.

He shrugs and says, “It’s okay,” in a way that makes it clear that it is not as he turns away from her to look out the window at the people walking by on the street. “It happens all the time.”

I’m sorry is what she wants to say, but it gets lost and comes out as “Have you told anyone…”

He shrugs again and then picks up the cutlery to have something to do with his hands. Their food isn’t here yet. “Just you.”

She doesn’t ask why. The answers to that sort of question probably aren’t the kind of thing he wants to get into sitting in a place half a step above fast food.

*

Before they turn down the street she lives on Brienne asks him how she should introduce him to her roommates. What name. What pronouns. She doesn’t want to out him if he’s not ready for anyone else to know.

“Jaime,” he says. The way he says ‘please’ after that makes her heart clench. Like he’s not expecting her to actually do it.

*

“This is my friend Jaime,” Brienne says as she leads him into the little house she shares with two others. “He’s going to be staying in The Garden tonight.”

Brienne makes quick work of introducing Jaime to her roommates Lyn and Alleras, determined to not let either of them make a big deal of this. She doesn’t bring a lot of people over, but she doesn’t need Jaime to know that at this moment.

“The Garden?” Jaime asks.

“It’s where we grow our baby queers,” Lyn replies with a knowing glance at Brienne that she pointedly ignores.

“Makeshift guest room,” Brienne explains, before deciding just to show him instead. Partly because it’s easier and partly because she doesn’t want Lyn to hijack this conversation any further. She leads him left, down a small hallway to a den at the back of the house. There’s a large bay window that overlooks the backyard, covered in houseplants. There’s two large bookshelves overflowing with more queer books than any mainstream bookstore will ever stock on either side of a daybed.

“Ah,” he says.

“There are room dividers there,” she says, pointing them out where they are tucked in behind the closest bookshelf. “So if other people are up before you you won’t feel like you’re sleeping in the kitchen.”

Jaime, however, has leaned into a framed list of rules sitting on the bookshelf between a collection of individually wrapped toothbrushes and a bowl of condoms and packets of lube.

“Welcome to The Garden,” Jaime reads aloud.

Brienne hasn’t read the sign since she first moved in. The Garden’s existence in this household predates her living here, so she never gave it much thought. She’s also never been the one bringing a guest to sleep there, but the guide was mostly simple stuff like feel free to read the books, respect the space and the people who live in the house, and where to find a toothbrush if you need one. That sort of thing.

“If you are here on Sunday or Thursday, please water the plants.” Jaime continues. “Thank goodness it’s Friday. I’m not sure I can handle the responsibility.”

Brienne rolls her eyes. but Jaime is too busy reading the rest of the list.

“If you fuck in The Garden you are responsible for cleaning the sheets,” Jaime says. Then he reads the detailed instructions on how to use the washing machine in the basement, sounding amused. “I must say I’m curious as to why that rule got added.”

“I’ve never asked,” Brienne says honestly.

Jaime doesn’t look any less amused.

*

They opt to go for a walk to get out of the house and when she and Jaime return it is late enough that Brienne is cautiously optimistic that Alleras and Lyn will have gone to bed or else gone out. Either way, she doesn’t want them interrogating Jaime tonight.

Brienne is in luck. There’s no sign of her roommates as she sets Jaime up in The Garden and then climbs the stairs to her own bedroom.

*

Brienne is awake early the next day. There’s no way Jaime is up yet, so she showers and brings a few things she has to read for class down to the kitchen table. She’s halfway through the second article when Jaime peers around from the other side of the room dividers and then emerges fully dressed though still looking mostly asleep.

“Coffee?” Brienne asks.

“Please.”

*

“We can go to that store I mentioned,” Brienne says after he’s had a few sips of coffee and a piece of toast. “The store closes at six I think, so there’s no rush—“

“Can we go now?” Jaime says. “After breakfast?”

*

Brienne doesn’t have a car because she’s a student for fuck’s sake so they take the bus most of the way there and then walk the rest of the way because it’s a nice day and the second bus was taking too long to show up.

They’re just over a block away when it occurs to Brienne that she should give Jaime a heads up about the store they’re about to walk into. “I should probably mention… this store. It sells chest binders and gender stuff, but it’s primarily a sex toy store.” He looks over at her. “Just so you’re prepared.” Brienne adds, determined not to make it awkward by blushing. She wishes there was a store that sold chest binders that wasn’t also full of dildos and vibrators and butt plugs but life’s not fair so she’s about to take the guy she’s talked to for a few hours to a store full of sex toys and that’s just how it is.

He smiles slightly before he says, “I will consider myself prepared,” and their conversation meanders back towards concerts they’ve attended.

By the time they’re walking up the ramp to the store Jaime has fallen silent again.

*

The woman working there greets them and asks if they’d prefer to look around without interruption or if they’d like assistance.

Brienne looks to Jaime to answer. She doesn’t want to speak for him.

“Um,” he says. “I’m looking for a chest binder.”

“Sure. We’ve got a few styles to choose from. Do you know what size you need?”

Jaime shakes his head.

The person kindly explains the measurements they’ll need as they rummage through a drawer beside the register and pull out a measuring tape and place it on the counter. “There’s a change room over there you can use.”

Jaime takes the measuring tape and returns a couple of minutes later with required measurements.

*

After that it’s a painless process. Jaime buys one in his size and disappears back into the room to put it on and bursts back into the main room of the shop announcing he wants to buy at least five more of them. The sales associate smiles but advises him to stick with one until he’s sure that’s the size that works for him. After he’s worn it for a few days he’ll know if any adjustments to size or style would be beneficial.

Jaime agrees, but the moment they’re out of the store he turns to Brienne and announces, “I’m never taking this off. “Never.”

Brienne doesn’t point out to him that that’s not a good idea. Jaime had heard the woman at the store tell him not to sleep in it as she gave him a pamphlet about how to wear and take care of a binder as she was cashing him out. Jaime had tucked the pamphlet into his pocket, and Seven know the internet is full of binding safety tips for him. So instead she just grins at him and says how happy she is for him.

*

The rest of Jaime’s visit passes quickly. They stop for lunch. They wander part of the city. She watches him catch his reflection in the windows they pass. Before long they’re on their way back to her place so he can grab his stuff so she can walk him to the train.

As they travel they dance along the edge of bringing up the high school they both attended a few times, but never quite get there. Brienne doesn’t mind. She is never keen to talk about high school. High school was an endurance test of her will to survive. Every day another degrading comment or twenty, every day another person with an Opinion about her gender that she was forced to listen to. Every day.

Every goddamn day.

But Jaime was there too, enduring in his own way.

In ways Brienne couldn’t imagine surviving.

She glances at him again as they turn onto her street.

Jaime. Jaime Lannister.

Brienne smiles.

*

“Did you know?” Jaime asks when they’re almost at the train station. “About me I mean. Back in high school… Could you tell?”

She gives herself a moment to think about it, though the short answer is no.

No, she didn’t know he was trans. Honestly, she didn’t give him much thought. Not outside that time they found themselves alone in the girl’s restroom and he’d been staring at her and Brienne had been sure he was about to say something awful to her, just like his sister would hiss something cruel to her whenever she found the opportunity.

“No,” Brienne says after too many quiet steps. “I didn’t know. Did you?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “I knew… I think I sort of always knew something was wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she says instinctively, the same words her father said when she repeated what the world thought of her back to him like she couldn’t help but believe it.

He glances at her long enough to catch her eye and then looks away. “And then you showed up at school and you… and you…”

She was the first openly trans kid that high school had ever seen.

And she paid the price for it.

But it’s clear Jaime has paid a price too.

“I wanted to know,” he tells her shoulder. “Back then. I wanted to ask you how you knew you were trans.”

She’s suddenly sorry he didn’t. Sorry he didn’t ask. Sorry he didn’t say anything to her. Sorry she didn’t notice him suffering in a way she would have been able to help. Mostly she’s sorry he didn’t find anyone else he felt like he could talk to in the years since.

“Thanks,” he says, still not quite looking at her. “For today.”

“Yeah of course Jaime,” she says. “Any time.”

He looks at her then. Like he can’t believe that she would say that. But she means it, so she makes sure to tell him clearly that if he wants to visit again he’s more than welcome to. He smiles at that.

His train pulls into the station and they watch it slow to a stop with a screech. He says thanks again as the doors open to let people off.

“Bye Jaime,” she says as he moves towards the train. “Text me when you get home.”

*

Brienne goes to the gym after Jaime’s gone, works out for an hour, then goes home to make a dent in her homework.

She’s already in bed when she realizes she hasn’t heard from Jaime. The train ride isn’t that long. She grabs her phone.

Did you get home ok?

Yeah. Thanks again.

K good. And no problem. Text me if you want to talk about anything

*

They text back and forth all that week and most of the next. By Tuesday she asks if he wants to come visit again over the weekend.

He does.

*

The next time Brienne sees Jaime he’s wearing his binder and his chest looks so much flatter than it ever did with his makeshift binding solution but far more importantly Jaime looks happier. He’s standing straighter and he’s smiling when she opens the door to her place to welcome him the following weekend.

*

This time he stays in The Garden both Friday and Saturday night. Saturday they go back to the store to get him a couple more binders. (It’s the same woman working there, and she grins at them both when they walk in.)

When they get back they spread out in the living room and chip away at their readings until they’re hungry, so then it’s dinner and then watching a movie on her laptop. Sunday is an unplanned brunch with Lyn and Alleras that keeps evolving from breakfast to a feast as each person who walks into the kitchen craves a different breakfast food and feels inspired by the activity in the kitchen enough to volunteer to make something too. By the time the four of them sit down to eat there is enough food to feed ten people in front of them.

The brunch festivities linger until it’s time to get Jaime back to the train. Once again Brienne joins him for the walk (it’s right by her gym. She’s going that way anyway.)

Again Jaime thanks her. Again Brienne welcomes him to come back and tells him to text her when he gets home.

This time he remembers to text her when he gets home.

And she texts him back.

And then they both text a bunch after that…

*

It’s been days since she heard from Jaime and Brienne’s a little worried about him.

The first year of being out was the hardest. That’s how Brienne remembers it. It was hard. All the time. To know what she needed and have to fight for it all the time.

She was thirteen and her body was a timebomb to her worst nightmare. She remembers the panic, the urgency of needing to get on hormone blockers as soon as she could, every day her body one step closer to puberty. To changes she dreaded and could not control without the help of medication no one was keen to prescribe to her. She remembers having nightmares that summer about waking up with a full beard. She remembers being called ‘young man’ by strangers and it feeling like someone had struck her. She remembers socially transitioning against the tide of high schoolers mocking her every move, her every insistence that her name was Brienne. That her pronouns were she and her. Every day was a fight that she could not win, just endure and endure and endure.

Jaime’s first year won’t be the same as hers. He’s not socially transitioning at his school, that’s what he said last time he was visiting, which means he has to endure being deadnamed and misgendered with no hope of hearing the right words for half of every week. He’s older than she was, which means he won’t struggle as much to get on hormones. He passes better already than she did after months of hormones, but his family is so unsupportive he can’t tell them he’s transitioning at all. Brienne can’t imagine having to survive this without her dad.

But regardless, the first year is always hard. Even once the coming out part is over, everything that comes next is hard and constant. Even with all the joy of finally getting to be who you are, who you need to be, it’s hard.

It’s hard and she’s worried about him because she knows… she knows how hard it can be. And even though she’s seen him a few times since, she can’t shake the image of him in that hot tub out of her head, the feel of his dead weight in her arms when he dropped…

She texts him about something mundane about a movie she knows he wants to see, not obviously checking in on him, but she’s checking up on him.

Because she knows. She knows the first year is tough.

He replies a few minutes later and she relaxes.

*

Brienne’s walking out of class when she gets the text. The “I want to start testosterone, how do I do that?” text. She’s been wondering when it would come and she is ready, texting him back a few links to HRT resources and promising to take him to the clinic near her that most of the trans folks she knows recommend the next time he visits.

Can I come this weekend?

Of course.

His last class for the week is on Thursday afternoon. He’ll be on the train towards her after that. She has class on Friday, but not until the afternoon so they’ll have plenty of time to go to the clinic in the morning.

*

As promised Brienne has taken him to the health clinic. It’s Friday, so the window of drop-in hours are shorter than other days, but he’s on the list and now all they need to do is wait until it’s his turn.

Jaime is bouncing his leg. Eventually he stands to better read the flyers on the cork board.

“Alleras runs a couple workshops here,” Brienne says when she sees which poster he’s standing in front of.

Jaime nods but doesn’t reply as he skims over a few of the surrounding flyers as she watches his hands clench and unclench at his side. She wishes there was something she could say to him to make the wait a little more bearable, but she remembers the terror she felt as she sat in the waiting room for her own appointment like it was yesterday.

“They have therapists here?” he asks a little bit later.

“Yeah,” Brienne says. “Not for long term stuff, but they’ll see you and get you a referral.”

He nods as he sits back down in the chair beside her and rests his face on his fist and stares vacantly at the floor until someone holding a clipboard calls his name.

*

This clinic will prescribe hormones with informed consent. No need for therapists letters or whatever other bullshit systems people come up with to say no. Jaime’s not a minor. He doesn’t need parental consent or approval, and it takes about four seconds of talking to Jaime to know he knows what he wants and needs in terms of transitioning.

Still, Brienne is nervous on his behalf. She knows exactly how it feels to walk into a room and face a stranger with the power to say yes or no to something you desperately need and have to convince them to say yes. So she sits in the waiting room, trying not to worry how Jaime will take it if this doctor says “No” or “Not today” or “Go get a therapist’s letter” or any of the awful things she knows are a possibility.

She takes a deep breath and reminds herself that this clinic is the one pretty much all of the trans people she knows recommends. And if worst comes to worst and they can’t get Jaime a prescription for T at this clinic, they’ll figure out how to get him one somewhere else.

*

Jaime walks out of the appointment with a stunned expression on his face, a piece of paper clutched in his hands and Brienne stands to greet him. He’s staring at the paper in his hands right until he looks up at her. “They gave me a prescription,” he says. “For testosterone.”

“Congratulations!” Brienne says, grateful this is the version of the post-appointment conversation they get to have.

“They said if I get it filled tonight I can come back tomorrow with it and they’ll show me how to do the first injection and—” He’s looking at the piece of paper with his name and the prescription on it like he can’t believe it. “I’m going to start testosterone.”

They walk back to the pharmacy nearest her house, Jaime holding the piece of paper in his hand the whole way.

*

Jaime doesn’t have an appointment the next day so they pick up his prescription first thing in the morning and get back to the clinic to sign up for the drop in hours again. They sit in the waiting room in the same chairs they waited in yesterday, but Jaime’s anticipation isn’t nervous this time.

When they call his name he jumps to his feet as Brienne wishes him luck.

When he comes back to join her ten minutes later, he is officially on testosterone.

Brienne’s happy for him of course, but Jaime is ecstatic, barely contained glee bouncing through him as he pushes the door open and leads them back outside.

*

They stop at the pharmacy again so he can buy a few things he didn’t know he needed so he can do his future injections himself and walk back to her place so he can drop it off.

“Can I keep it here?” he says.

“Keep what here?”

“The testosterone. My testosterone,” he grins at the possessive modifier before his face falls. “My sister could drop by my place and I…”

Brienne doesn’t press it. Doesn’t think for a second Jaime is being paranoid. He always says, “my sister” the same way he says, “my father”. If Jaime is worried about it, of course he can keep his hormones here.

“That means you’ll have to come visit every other week.”

“Is that okay?” he asks.

He’s here almost every weekend as it is. Seeing him every other week would be cutting back at this point.

*

That night after dinner Brienne presents him with a cupcake she bought for him. “Happy first day on testosterone,” she says as she places it on the coffee table in front of him and sits down on the couch beside him.

He looks between the cupcake and her. She’d opted for a simple chocolate cupcake. None of the gendered “It’s a boy!” options drowning in blue icing. He already knows he’s a guy. Today doesn’t change that one way or another, but she still wants to celebrate this moment with him. She knows… she knows he won’t get to celebrate with anyone once he gets back on the southbound train in a couple hours.

He’s looking at the cupcake like it’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for him.

“Don’t mention it,” she says. She knows how much it means to have these milestones acknowledged. She remembers the cake her dad made for her the day her new birth certificate came in the mail more fondly than any birthday she’s had.

He reaches for the cupcake but halfway he pauses as he strains to say, “I’m sorry I…”

Brienne was wondering if this would happen. She’d cried the whole way home after she’d gotten her first shot of hormone blockers. Just sobbed with all-consuming relief as she sat in the passenger seat and babbled her thanks at her dad as they inched their way home through rush hour traffic as he reassured her that she did not need to thank him for anything. But she did. He’d advocated for her to get on hormone blockers and Brienne was thirteen and there was no way the doctor would have done it if her dad hadn’t been so supportive, so insistent that this was what was right for his daughter and needed to happen right now. So she cried and he drove as he insisted he was just doing what dads did. That he was going to be there for her through this today and tomorrow and they would get her on estrogen soon because that was what Brienne wanted and Brienne had just sat there and sobbed because that was the first day she actually believed it when someone told her that maybe one day it would be okay.

“Thank you,” Jaime whispers. He says it to the cupcake, but she understands.

*

Her phone buzzes. It’s Jaime. (It’s usually Jaime.)

Important update: I’ve been on testosterone for THREE DAYS.

She texts him back a bunch of party emojis.

*

“Hey,” Lyn says on Thursday morning as Brienne is making coffee. “Is Jaime coming over tonight?”

“No. He’s not coming this weekend.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, he just has a school thing.”

“I’m going to have a few people over Saturday. They might stay over,” Lyn says.

“Okay. I’m just gonna be doing homework anyway,” Brienne says. “Coffee?”

“Thanks.”

“Does it bother you that I have Jaime over so much?” Brienne asks as she pours Lyn a mugful and passes it to her. She probably should have asked this when Jaime started being a more regular houseguest.

“No. Why would it?” Lyn replies, taking a sip of her coffee. Brienne has no idea how she can drink it black. “You ask every time if he can, he follows The Garden rules, he’s gorgeous…”

“Just checking,” Brienne says, determined to skim over Lyn’s final point. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to say yes when I ask if he can stay over.”

“He can stay over Bri. It’s not a big deal. I have people over all the time.”

Lyn has her girlfriend over all the time, but Brienne doesn’t want to start splitting that hair right now.

*

Jaime can’t come visit that weekend because of some lecture he doesn’t want to go to but Brienne texts him a “HAPPY ONE WEEK ON TESTOSTERONE” message first thing on Saturday morning. He celebrates the occasion with a series of enthusiastic text messages when he wakes up and then intermittently live-blogs his lecture to her.

*

It’s Wednesday and Brienne was done with today by 9am when a stranger told her she was in the wrong restroom at the coffee shop on campus that has a fucking rainbow flag in the window, and her day had not improved since then.

In her class they were discussing Trans Issues and everyone in her tutorial turned to her in unison like she’d have some insightful remarks on the basic-ass article they’d been assigned to read that week. And she certainly had some Thoughts but gods, she wasn’t in the fucking mood. Listening to her class proceed to debate her existence theoretically for an hour, as if she and millions of people like her were just a weird idea and not actual people, had drained her of every ounce of goodwill she’d been clinging to.

Brienne’s just glad it’s Wednesday. That means Jaime isn’t going to have to see her like this (but it also means his weekend visit is soon enough that she can look forward to it in a concrete way). She’ll see Jaime tomorrow. They’ll sit in The Garden and stay up too late talking and arguing the merits of The Blackfish’s solo album and if they’re lucky they’ll manage to forget that cis people exist for a few minutes in a row. She already knows it’s going to be the best part of her week.

A minute later she takes her phone out to text him.

*

He calls her after they’ve exchanged three messages between them and she lies in bed and rants about her day. About the person at the coffee shop. About her classmates. About the teacher who seemed to be expecting Brienne to bless them all with all sorts of Brave Trans Wisdom.

And it’s so hard to articulate why she’s so rattled today. Gods know she’s had plenty of experiences like this. Plenty of days much worse than this. But that doesn’t make this day any less awful right now.

She groans in frustration, at her day, at her life, at only being able to dump all her feelings in a tangled web of nonsense.

“Do you want me to skip class and come early?” he says.

She sighs, hating that she’s making Jaime worry. “I’m fine. I just… that class was awful.” It’s still weighing on her, the endless dehumanizing debate the teacher didn’t see a problem with. She sighs again, “I’m a person, not a concept, you know?”

Jaime is quiet for a few seconds before he says, “I know.”

And she knows he does.

*

Her Thursday is even shittier than her Wednesday but then she gets the text from Jaime that says he’s on the train and thank gods.

She walks into the gym still smiling at her phone as she texts him back:

Can’t wait.

*

The commiserate over their shitty weeks as they sit cross-legged on the daybed in The Garden for a while but before too long he’s laughing and she’s laughing and then she’s wondering when the last time she laughed out loud was. Gods know it didn’t happen at all over the last few days—

“What?” he says, still grinning as he looks at her. She must have a look on her face because he asks her again. “What is it?”

I feel like a person again, is on the tip of her tongue, but even in her head it sounds like too dramatic a thing to say out loud.

But it’s true. She feels like a person again.

*

Netflix is asking if they’re still watching when Brienne wakes up enough to realize she must have dozed off. Jaime is asleep beside her on the end of the daybed. He’s still in his clothes. Which means he’s still wearing his chest binder.

She doesn’t want to wake him. It would be so much easier to just slip away up to her room, but he’s still wearing his binder, and she knows enough trans guys to know you’re not supposed to sleep wearing a binder.

“Hey,” she says, her hand light on his arm. “We fell asleep. We should probably wake up enough to go to bed for real.”

It takes a few seconds for him to focus on her, his eyes dark as he takes in his surroundings, as he realizes he’s still in his clothes. “Right.”

“I’m going to go upstairs,” she says once he’s sat up and reached for his bag. “You need anything before I do?”

“No, I’m good.”

She’s still sitting beside him, “I’m sorry I had to wake you. I know you said you didn’t sleep much last night and...”

He stops digging through his bag to look at her, “Brienne. You don’t need to apologize.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to go upstairs,” she says again.

“I’m going to change and then go back to sleep.”

“Okay.”

“See you in the morning.”

“Yeah,” she says. “G’night.”

“Night.”

*

“I have to be up early Saturday morning,” Brienne says the following evening. “I have a session with my trainer. Do you want me to wake you up before I leave?”

“What time would that be at?” Jaime asks.

“The session is at 9.”

“Let me sleep. If that’s okay?”

“Of course it’s okay,” she says. “That’s why I asked. I’ll see you when I get back.”

*

When she gets back from the gym Jaime is sitting on the porch with Allaras and Lyn. He shifts over so that Brienne can sit on the steps beside him.

*

FIVE WEEKS ON TESTOSTERONE!

HAPPY FIVE WEEKS ON TESTOSTERONE!!!!!!!!

*

It is Thursday Brienne is watching TV. Or rather, Brienne is half watching TV and half-dozing off her workout while waiting for Jaime to arrive. He texted and said his train was running late half a movie ago and that she should go to bed if she was tired, but she wants to see him. She knows he is having a day. Several days really. She’d woken that morning to a series of texts sent throughout the night when he couldn’t sleep. He’d texted her since, swearing he was okay, but she won’t feel totally better until he’s here.

Brienne wants to see him. However late his train is tonight, she’s going to be awake to see him.

*

Brienne must have slid further into sleep than she realized because Jaime is there, asking if he can sit on the other side of the couch. She yawns and nods, bending her legs until her feet are by her ass to make room for him.

“You can rest your legs on me,” Jaime says after he’s sat down. “If you want.”

“Do you want me to?” she says through a yawn.

“Yes.”

She lifts her legs and rests them across his lap. She feels him relax under her.

“Long week?”

“Mhmm,” he hums as he tilts his head back onto the back of the couch.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Nah,” he yawns, and then turns back to look at her with a sleepy smile. “It’s better now.”

His hands are on her shin as they both turn their attention back to the underwhelming movie she was sort of watching before he arrived.

*

That Sunday when Brienne comes downstairs she glances towards The Garden assuming Jaime will be asleep for at least another hour but the room dividers she and Jaime put up last night have been taken down and Jaime is definitely awake.

Jaime is watering the plants on the windowsill.

When he notices her watching he turns around to grin at her.

*

“I could come visit you sometime,” Brienne offers as he puts on his shoes to go catch the train. It doesn’t seem fair that Jaime is always the one braving transit to come see her. “I don’t mind.”

Jaime just looks confused. “I hate my apartment. I hate my school. Why on earth would you want to go there?”

The obvious answer is to see him, but she doesn’t point that out because he follows that up with, “I like coming here. Is that okay?”

“It’s very okay.”

*

Jaime doesn’t shave his face when he stays with her. Not that he needs to yet, but he makes a point to not bring a razor with him. When his facial hair starts coming in, he’s not going to shave it when he’s visiting her. That’s what he keeps telling her, with a wistful smile that makes Brienne’s heart swell because Jaime is thinking about his future. Jaime is able to conceptualize his future with hope and enthusiasm and that wasn’t the case when they first started hanging out. Not at all.

In the meantime Jaime inspects his reflection in the hallway mirror at the end of his three day stay, looking for signs of progress as Brienne tries not to dwell on the way every time he talks about what he’s looking forward to he’s also talking about being near her.

*

“Someone’s claimed The Garden for tonight already,” Alleras says when he sees Jaime and Brienne come in the front door the following Thursday.

“Oh,” Jaime says.

“It’s fine,” Brienne says, determined to sound absolutely nonchalant about this, even as the corner of Alleras’ mouth turns up. “Jaime can stay in my room.”

*

Brienne has a large bed. Almost ludicrously large, given when she bought it she never thought she’d be sharing it with anyone. But after a year of squeezing herself onto the single bed provided by her dorm room she had splurged on a queen-sized monstrosity because she couldn’t bear the thought of having to sleep in a bed that her feet would hang off the end of for another night.

She’d had no other furniture in her room for months. Not even a dresser or a desk. Just a giant island of a bed. Worth it. She could lie in bed and not have to worry about her feet being exposed to the elements. She could starfish. She could indulge in luxurious activities like sleeping in any position she wished.

And now Brienne has room in her bed for Jaime. It’s not a big deal.

*

Her bed is so huge that she and Jaime are barely sharing a bed at all. That is how much space they have.

And if Brienne is aware that she’s found herself sharing her bed with the most beautiful guy she’s ever seen, she puts considerable effort into not thinking about it.

*

There’s nobody staying in The Garden the following weekend but Brienne asks if Jaime wants to sleep in her room anyway.

He does.

So he does.

*

That Friday after her class Brienne knocks on the door to her bedroom and waits until Jaime replies, “Come in?” before she opens the door.

He’s sitting on her bed looking perplexed when she comes into the room. “Why’d you knock?” he says. “It’s your room.”

“And you’re staying here,” Brienne replies as she puts her bag down in the corner by her desk. “What if you were changing? What if you needed privacy for a bit?”

Jaime is still looking at her like he’s never considered himself worthy of such a thing, but he nods and asks her how her day has been.

*

There’s a calendar on the wall of her bedroom that Jaime has started using to mark the days until he’s done school in addition to his T-shot days. He’s only got a few classes left. Two this semester, and only one next semester. (He says this a lot, with the weary determination of someone who is reminding themselves that they can survive what is coming).

It’s Tuesday, which means Jaime hasn’t been here for a couple days, but Brienne likes that there are signs of him here still. His testosterone is in her bathroom. His marks are on her calendar. The shirt he forgot here is in her dresser…

*

How many days on T is it today?

Oh shit I lost track?!

Brienne grins when he texts her back a minute later with the number of days it’s been, knowing he had to look it up. He’s going to stop counting in days altogether before long. Soon it will only be weeks. Then years.

Her chest aches a little at that thought. At the image of Jaime who’s been on testosterone for years. Jaime with the beard he’s so excited to grow the second he can. Jaime with his voice low and his chest flat. She can picture that version of Jaime smiling at her so clearly. Gods, she’s so excited for him to get there. He’s going to be so happy.

Jaime is already happier than she’s ever seen him. Every time she sees him she notices how much more okay he is. Granted, she’s comparing to that night in the hot tub, when he was so far from okay she still thinks of him like that when she hasn’t heard from him in a few days.

But then he texts her or she texts him. And even on the bad days, he’s so much better than he was.

*

From the bathroom Brienne hears the telltale sounds of Jaime rinsing his binder and hanging it up to dry overnight, and sure enough when he shuffles back into the bedroom he’s wearing the same t-shirt (her Hootie and the Blackfish shirt) that he went into the bathroom wearing but now his arms are crossed tightly over his chest and his shoulders are pulled forward as he makes a beeline for the bed.

She makes a point to look the other way when he gets into bed. She doesn’t turn back until he’s settled under the covers and he asks what she wants to do tomorrow.

Then she rolls back over and they talk for another hour before she falls asleep.

*

It’s raining and Jaime doesn’t have an umbrella because why would he. He only ever brings his backpack with what he needs to survive the weekend he comes to stay with her.

For the record, Brienne also does not have an umbrella, so she borrows one from Al and walks him to the train station. They’re a little early so she stands with him on the platform waiting for the train. The sky is grey and dismal, and beside her under their shared umbrella Jaime is just as gloomy.

Jaime’s got three classes to get through to finish his degree. That’s what he keeps saying. He doesn’t care about his degree but he’s so close it doesn’t make sense to stop now. It’s already paid for. He just needs to show up for three more classes. Just take the degree and run, Brienne had suggested to him when he mused about dropping out early one Sunday night much like this one when he was delaying going to catch his train.

And Jaime had sighed but agreed with her.

Still, she knows it’s hard for him to have to go back there during the week. This semester he only has class on Monday and Thursday, but he doesn’t feel he is able to come out there, so no one uses his name or pronouns. His voice is on the cusp of starting to drop and he sometimes jokes about the eternal cold his professors will think he’s nursing, about how thoroughly he’s going to have to shave when his facial hair starts coming in. He says it like a joke but she can hear the devastation, the fatigue of still having to pretend. She wishes she could do more for him.

“You’re coming next weekend, right?” Brienne asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “Unless you don’t want me to.”

“No I do,” she says. “Come stay next weekend.”

“Okay,” he says, looking a little more cheerful at the thought.

The speaker above them announces the imminent arrival of the southbound train through an undercurrent of static and Jaime frowns.

“And the one after that?” he asks.

“Well you have to take your shot that weekend,” Brienne says with a little smile. “We wouldn’t want you to miss that.”

The train pulls into the station and he sighs as she reaches to take the umbrella back from him. Their hands brush as the umbrella changes hands and she pointedly ignores the warmth of his fingers against her own.

“I’ll see you in four days,” Brienne says.

He nods.

“Jaime?”

He turns back to her.

“Text me when you get there.”

*

They text back and forth his whole train ride and then most of the night.

(He makes a point to say “Made it back!” in the middle of the conversation.)

*

“What are you so pleased about?” Brienne asks. Jaime has all but waltzed up the front porch where Brienne is sitting and doing her readings for the night.

“They changed the train schedule,” Jaime says, pulling out a little booklet from his pocket and handing it to her. “Take a look.”

It’s a terrible booklet with far more pages of tiny timetables filled with even tinier text, “Can you tell me which of these is most exciting?”

He takes the booklet out of her hand, flips through it and then hands it back to her open. “Monday morning. Southbound.”

She looks at the tiny chart. The train is two hours earlier. Which means.

“I can take the Monday morning train and still be back in time for my class,” he says.

“Think about how much more majestic your facial hair will be with that extra 12 hours of growth,” Brienne says.

“I hadn’t even thought of that!” he exclaims as he rubs his palms against his cheek. His facial hair progress is still theoretical, but he’s barely been on testosterone for two and a half months. But it’s coming, and Brienne knows he can’t wait for when it starts to grow in earnest.

*

Jaime launches himself down the stairs first thing Monday morning and slides into the kitchen to say goodbye to Brienne before going to catch his train.

“Text me when you get there,” Brienne says as she holds out a slice of toast for him.

“Of course,” Jaime says after thanking her for the toast and checking the time on the microwave before heading towards the door. He jams his feet into his shoes and looks over his shoulder as he runs out the door saying, “I’ll see you in four days!”

It’s been a while since either of them referred to the place he lives by his school as his home.

*

Brienne and Jaime are on the train heading home together for winter break. Because Brienne is taking Jaime home over the winter break. He’d mentioned that he wasn’t going back to his father’s for the holidays. That he’d made some excuse about having to study or something that his father had bought without protest and she’d invited him home with her a sentence later. She’d later cleared it with her dad, but it’s not like they really celebrated anything. She was just going home for a few days to visit really, if Jaime wanted to come with, that was good with her.

Of course, she and Jaime lived close enough to have gone to the same high school, but Jaime’s family home was a sprawling mansion on the west side of town. Brienne lived way over on the east side. As long as they don’t venture down his actual street, the odds of running into any of the people Jaime is keen to avoid at all costs is extremely low. Which reminds her—

“Jaime,” she says. “Do you want my dad to know we went to high school together?”

He turns his attention from the landscape blurring by outside the window to her, thinking over the extent of the question she just asked before he says, “No.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust him or—”

“Jaime I understand,” she says. “That’s why I asked.”

Jaime nods, more to himself than to her. “My family can’t know I’m in town.”

“They won’t.”

Not for the first time Brienne wonders why he was so quick to say yes to her offer to come with her. It seems like more of a risk than he wants to take. But then he looks at her and smiles and she’s so happy he’s here with her that she’s more than happy to spend the next three days making sure they’re nowhere near the west side of town.

*

Her dad meets them at the train station and she rushes forward to hug him hello before she introduces him to Jaime, making sure to use his pronouns in a sentence. She’d told her dad Jaime was coming to make sure it was okay with him, but all the same, she wants to make sure her dad knows exactly what pronouns to use.

Her dad shakes Jaime’s hand and welcomes him to the town, taking great care to point out not-so-exciting landmarks as they drive. Jaime takes this in stride, shooting little relieved smiles in Brienne’s directions every time another place he must have been to a thousand times is introduced to him.

When they pull up to the house Brienne is struck by how much it simultaneously feels like home, but also not quite. Both at the same time.

She leaves her dad to be the one to do the quick tour of the main floor with Jaime (which takes about thirty seconds. It’s not a big house) before Brienne steps in before her dad can work their way upstairs.

It’s not that Brienne doesn’t want Jaime to stay in her room with her. It’s that she doesn’t want her dad to ask her in front of Jaime if he’ll be sleeping in her room with her. Or even worse, ask if he’s her boyfriend in the process of asking if they’ll be sharing a bed. Because their bed sharing history has nothing to do with whether he’s her boyfriend. And he’s not her boyfriend. So she doesn’t want the scrutiny. Or to have Jaime also facing the scrutiny. Because college doesn’t count. And queer college definitely doesn’t count. Everyone’s just sleeping where they can, when they can. And The Garden in her house has been occupied by overflow guests of her roommates for the last few weeks.

There’s also a part of her that feels like sharing her childhood bedroom is on a different level of intimacy than sharing her room at school. For one, the bed is a lot smaller here. Back home the two of them can sprawl out on her giant bed on opposite sides and never come in contact. But upstairs… that’s her room where she was the most fragile versions of herself. She’s worried what he might be able to read from the walls if she were to bring him there.

So she sets Jaime up in the basement. The couch down there doesn’t pull out or anything but is ridiculously comfortable. She’s had many accidental naps on that couch. She tells Jaime this as she grabs a stack of pillows and blankets so they’re handy for later and Jaime grins before they go back upstairs to join her dad for dinner.

After a late dinner they talk, well, mostly Brienne and her dad talk while Jaime listens. Her dad asks him some simple questions, but doesn’t pry too hard into Jaime’s background. Jaime talks a little, but seems far more content to listen until her dad yawns a few times in a row and announces he needs to go to bed.

“You’ll be okay if I disappear?” he asks. “Do you need any sheets or blankets?”

“I’ve got it covered. We’re probably just going to watch a bit of a movie or something before going to bed.”

The TV is in the basement, so Brienne makes up the couch for Jaime while he goes to brush his teeth and change out of his binder and into the sports bra he often sleeps in. They settle side by side on the couch and pick a shitty movie and the routine is familiar even if the location is not.

*

Brienne wakes up on the couch with Jaime. Well, more accurately she wakes up mostly on top of Jaime. She’s lying on her stomach, her body between his spread legs, with her head on his chest near his shoulder. She blinks against the darkness and the haze of sleep as she tries to lift her head to see the time. Based on how heavy her eyelids feel, it’s either very early or very late.

Beneath her he stirs a little. He must be nearly crushed under her. She has vague memories of them shifting to lie down somewhere in the middle of the movie…

He seems to be working very hard to pull himself awake enough to speak, which eventually he does, his voice low in a way that makes her wonder how far it will drop over the next year as he asks, “You leaving?”

Her body is sleep-heavy and her brain is slow and she’s not looking forward to extracting herself from him and waking up enough to climb two flights of stairs.

“Stay here instead.” His hand finds her back. His hand is warm through her t-shirt. His body is solid and welcoming beneath her.

She’s too tired to think about this logically, “You sure?” He’s mostly asleep but he can’t be comfortable, wedged beneath her as he is.

“Very,” he says, tugging the blanket up to better cover them.

“Okay,” she says, letting her weight rest back down against him again. She feels him relax under her, dropping back to sleep almost as soon as her head rests against him and she doesn’t think about it any more for the moment.

*

Brienne wakes up again in the morning, the actual morning. She extracts herself from Jaime and the couch, telling him to sleep for longer when he wakes enough to roll his head towards her before tossing the blanket back over him. She climbs the stairs and opens the door, peering into the empty kitchen. Her dad isn’t awake yet, thank the seven, so she goes upstairs and showers.

By the time she comes back downstairs her dad is sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee in front of him. He stands to get her a mug as well but she waves him off, going for the cupboard herself and sitting across from him with her own coffee.

“So how’ve you been?” her dad asks.

“Good,” she replies. “Really good.”

He asks her about her classes even though she’s told him about most of them. She tells him about training with Goodwin, about the trans youth group she helps out with. None of it is drastically new information, but her dad enjoys getting to hear about her life in person. In turn she asks him about work. About his life. About his garden.

Jaime emerges from the basement looking sleep-tousled when her dad is on his second cup of coffee. Brienne directs Jaime towards the shower upstairs and he nods appreciatively.

“You know I don’t care if you and Jaime sleep in your room while you’re here,” her dad says after Brienne has watched Jaime climb the stairs.

“The bed’s pretty small,” Brienne deflects, expertly brushing his comment aside without dwelling or eye contact.

“It’s bigger than the couch in the basement,” her dad counters lightly.

Damn.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Brienne says and regrets it immediately.

“I didn’t ask if he was,” her dad says with another little sip of coffee and an expression that says her reaction is not dampening his curiosity. “All I’m saying is that the two of you should feel free to sleep wherever you choose to.”

*

Their second day is mostly uneventful. She and her dad continue to catch up. The three of them go for a walk in the afternoon when the sun manages to come out. Her dad suggests the three of them go out for dinner, mentioning a restaurant on the west side of town.

Jaime catches her eye and Brienne says she’d rather cook something here, so that’s what they do.

And again, that night her dad goes to bed at a reasonable hour because he is on human time, not college time.

Again, she and Jaime retreat to the basement together and again Brienne does not bother to go upstairs before she falls asleep.

*

They get through the rest of their visit without her dad bringing up that Brienne is obviously sleeping in the basement with Jaime every night. Or that maybe she brought him home for reasons that extend beyond the fact that Jaime didn’t have anywhere to go for the holidays. Or that outside of the context of her place at school it’s getting harder to pretend that the way they are isn’t… isn’t… Well it doesn’t matter. Because they’re not. Even if she knows how it looks.

Anyway, her dad doesn’t bring any of that up.

Not even on the last morning when Brienne utterly fails at waking up early and she and Jaime both come stumbling up the stairs together after her dad politely knocks on the door and tells them if they don’t get up soon they won’t make it to their train in time.

*

“I’m so glad you came to visit and I’m so glad you brought Jaime along,” her dad says to her as she gives him a goodbye hug at the train station. “I like him.”

“So do I,” Brienne quietly admits before she steps back out of the hug.

*

Jaime is beautiful and becoming more so every fucking day. Even in the midst of second puberty he is beautiful. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous he can be so beautiful and just wander around looking like that. As in people literally stop and stare as he goes by. And not in the way they stop and watch her go by. As in, agents come up to him when he’s out in public to give him their card, asking if he wants to do any modelling.

And there is a part of Brienne that envies him. Jaime who passes almost flawlessly after a few months on hormones. Jaime whose experiences with being visibly trans are already starting to fade into memory. Jaime who will have top surgery soon enough and not have to look back. He has so many more choices than Brienne has. He’ll be able to go entirely stealth if he wants to. Choose who he comes out to and how he comes out in ways Brienne will never be allowed to. And she’s mostly happy for him. Really. She doesn’t know all of what he went through to get to this point, but she knows it was bad. She can see it in his body, can feel it in his relief every time he beams when a stranger calls him “man” or “sir”. And she is happy for him. Beyond happy for him. Really.

But sometimes it’s hard not to focus on the parts that are so easy for him in ways they will never be for her. And it’s not quite jealousy she feels. It’s more like grief. Grief for the things that will never be easy for her. Grief for the version of her that doesn’t have her identity questioned at every turn her whole life. She can’t… she can’t even imagine that version of herself. If being openly trans was a choice and not the price she has to pay.

And she knows it’s normal. To find herself comparing her transition to someone else’s. Even though she knows she shouldn’t. It’s normal and her therapist says it is normal and Brienne is doing her best.

But then she’ll hang up the phone after talking with her dad about whatever and Jaime will ask who she was talking to because she was laughing so much and she’ll tell him and remember that Jaime doesn’t talk to his family at all anymore and feel all sorts of things she can’t quite put into words because there are so many things that are so much easier for her than they ever were for Jaime. Than they will ever be for Jaime. A thousand things she takes for granted that Jaime will never have.

And on days like this more often than not they find themselves cuddled on the couch in the living room or on the daybed in The Garden together, watching some shit movie they both not-so-secretly love, pretending it's not an excuse to be close to each other for two unexamined hours.

*

They’re on the couch in the living room one rainy Sunday afternoon. Jaime has to catch an evening train back in a few hours but they’re ignoring that fact as aggressively as they can. Alleras is upstairs in his room but he’s either asleep or studying and either way he hasn’t surfaced for hours and no one else is home.

Jaime is half-asleep with his head resting on her thigh as she absentmindedly plays with his hair with one hand while she holds the article she’s reading for class in the other when Lyn comes home. Lyn hangs up her coat in the front hall as she looks over at Brienne and there’s a long moment where Brienne feels very seen, here on the couch with Jaime.

Brienne’s suddenly terrified Lyn is going to say something and Jaime is nearly asleep but he’s definitely awake enough to notice if Lyn points out what she looks like she’s on the verge of pointing out. But Lyn holds her tongue and goes upstairs without saying anything.

Yet.

*

“So,” Lyn says when she and Brienne are alone in the house a few days later. “Jaime.”

“What about him?” Brienne is aiming for nonchalant and she’s worried she’s already coming across as defensive and cagey right off the bat.

“Okay,” Lyn says without pushing it, turning back the mug of tea she’s making. “If you ever want to talk about it, I’m here.”

Brienne doesn’t want to talk about it.

This thing between her and Jaime still feels fragile. Not their friendship. That is solid enough. It’s been months since they met properly in that hot tub. She is confident in saying they are friends. Because they are. She and Jaime are friends. Just friends. That’s what she tells people. And it’s true. They are friends.

But if she talks about the stuff that stretches at the boundaries of being his friend, about the feelings she is working very hard not to feel, she fears that it might break. That all of what they are might not be there anymore. If she even lets herself admit that she might maybe sort of have some kind of feelings beyond friendship for him suddenly it won’t be okay that he visits almost every weekend and sleeps in her bed and comes home with her for holidays sometimes and keeps his testosterone in her bathroom and sprawls across her on the couch when she’s doing her homework and a thousand other things that are things she and Jaime do.

She can’t untangle her friendship with him from all of that and she doesn’t want to.

So she does her best not to think about it.

*

Brienne wakes up to find Jaime sitting on the edge of her bed. She watches him as the fogginess of sleep starts to fade. He’s wearing his binder and boxers and nothing else and he’s holding band-aids up to the light coming through the blinds, trying to see the pattern on them before he opens one.

She feels herself smiling.

Brienne’s been on hormones for almost seven years now. The routine of taking her pills is as unremarkable as showering or putting on deodorant at this point. Jaime still gets excited about injection day. She finds this painfully endearing. He’s so much happier than he ever was, so much more himself than he ever was. She’s so proud of him. (She tries to ignore the other feelings that threaten to consume her as she watches him in the morning light).

He looks over his shoulder at her and she says good morning and he says, “Knights or castles?”

“Knights.”

“Good choice.”

He sets his chosen bandaid aside and starts preparing his injection.

*

The kitchen table is more crowded than usual, six of them squeezed around it. Brienne was barely awake when they did the round of introductions so two of the unfamiliar faces sipping coffee to her left have names she knows she knows, but can’t quite place. She’ll have to beg forgiveness and ask for them again once she’s woken up a bit more. Lyn is to her right. And Alleras’ friend Leo is sitting across from her. Everyone at the table seems to be at wildly different levels of awake. (Brienne suspects the two people whose name she does not know have not yet gone to sleep).

Jaime comes barreling down the stairs. He’s on the verge of being late for his train and he knows it, so he doesn’t swing by the kitchen to steal some of Brienne’s toast or to say goodbye. He’ll be back next weekend, and he’ll be texting her about how bored he is on the train within the hour. Jaime is not a morning person. Lyn and Alleras are used to him rushing out first thing in the morning trying to put on his jacket and shoes at the same time as he stumbles out the door.

Leo, however, had not witnessed this frequent performance and turns to look at the noise and watches the performance of Jaime tumbling out the door in its entirety before he turns back to the table and mouths ‘WOW’. Then he says, “Whoever that was, is he into guys?”

Brienne shrugs. She honestly doesn’t know. Jaime seems strangely unaware how stupidly attractive he is, never seeming to engage with the attention he receives from people of all genders.

“Seriously,” Leo presses. “Is he into guys? Preferably slightly chubby guys with dark eyes and luscious hair?” He tosses his (admittedly luscious) hair as he says this.

“Jaime’s into Brienne,” Lyn replies over her mug of coffee. Like it’s so fucking obvious. Which it is not. Because he’s not.

“He isn’t,” Brienne protests.

Lyn scoffs. “If you say so.” But then she adds, “But he so is.”

But Brienne does say so. Jaime is Jaime. And she is Brienne.

The front door opens again and Jaime jogs back into the house and up the stairs saying “Forgot something!” with a slightly sheepish smile.

A moment later he runs back down the stairs towards the door, but he pauses in the front hall. He runs a lap around the kitchen table until he is beside Brienne. He puts his hand on her shoulder as he leans in to say, “See you next weekend, right?”

Brienne nods, very aware of their audience as Jaime smiles at her for a very long few seconds before she reminds him about the train he’s trying to catch.

Leo watches Jaime rush towards the door once again before he turns back to her, his mouth agape.

“Are you not into guys?” Leo asks. “Is this one of the tragic cases of incompatible sexual orientations?”

Brienne doesn’t answer. She likes men. She likes men in that deeply inconvenient way that will never happen. That’s her type. Men who are so far out of her league they’re not even playing the same sport. Jaime is staggeringly beautiful. So it’s best she not even consider it. Because it will never happen. Because he doesn’t like her that way. They’re friends. She’s the person he can be himself around. The first person he could ever be himself around. Whatever vibe Lyn swears she’s catching from him is just that. The ‘I had no idea I could be myself until I met you’ vibe. Which is powerful, but it’s not that Jaime is into her the way Leo is into Jaime.

Across the table Leo seems to have guessed her answer. At least he has the wherewithal to keep his mouth shut.

*

Even if Jaime is into women, Brienne finds herself rationalizing as she walks to class later that day, Brienne is certain she isn’t his type. She is very few people’s type, to the point where she’s spent considerable amounts of time over the last years being told how unlovable she is on a near constant basis. Unloveable and unfuckable. Except to the creepy guys who treat her like their favourite porn search come to life. Their favourite fetish walking around just waiting for their attention (which is much worse than the people who want to make sure she knows she’s unfuckable). To those guys she’s not even a person, just a chance for their fantasy to happen irl. Never an actual person. Just a chick with a dick. A trap or a tranny or whatever else they search for when they want to get off.

Jaime is immensely loveable and immensely fuckable, though he seems not to notice or care about the attention he gets from people of all genders. Maybe he’s seeing someone back at his school, though that seems unlikely. He’s almost never there. Even so, they don’t really talk about dating. Brienne just kind of doesn’t, and Jaime never mentions it.

*

Brienne hates that she catches herself thinking about Jaime dating someone over the next few days. She knows it’s going to happen sooner or later. Sooner probably. If it isn’t happening already. Sooner or later he’s going to find someone. Or someone is going to find him. Either way, the result for her will be the same.

She’s really trying not to think about it.

*

Brienne hates even more that she’s thinking about the last time people showed interest in her that way. She didn’t know for sure that the sudden influx of attention from guys that one spring in first year was the result of a bet, but she knew it had to be something like that.

Few people like her at all.

And exactly no one likes her like that.

*

It’s been two weeks since she saw Jaime and it’s been months since they’ve gone that long without seeing each other and it’s wearing on them both. They text frequently during the part of the week when he is at school but the last few days it’s been almost constant. She misses him. So what. Big deal. She’s allowed to miss Jaime. (She tells herself this when she catches herself missing him rather a lot all at once).

But like, she really misses Jaime.

And if Jaime is currently on a train heading in her direction and if she timed her going to the gym so she’d have an excuse to walk by the train station on her way home to pick him up it doesn’t mean anything other than that she missed him. A normal amount.

And if his face lights up when he sees her and then runs towards her as fast as the crowds will allow as her heart skips a beat, that also happens a normal amount.

*

“It’s Alleras and Lyn’s party tonight,” Brienne reminds him, after they’ve stopped for groceries which Jaime buys every week on his way to her and are heading back to her place. Their birthdays are within range of each other and fall near reading week. They’ve been throwing a raging party annually since they were in first year (legends of their party in their dorm were still in heavy rotation when Brienne moved in several years after the fact). Neither of them are particularly prone to parties the rest of the year, but once a year they go all out. “So the basement and main floor of the house will be occupied.”

“Okay.”

“We’re invited but we don’t have to go. Or stay long.”

“Do you want to go?” Jaime asks her.

“I’ll put in a short appearance,” Brienne says, thinking of last year when she walked into the party just as it was getting started and then quietly made her escape. “But I don’t really want to linger. We’ll go as soon as you want to, all right?”

“Sounds good to me.”

*

Neither of them are prepared for how much of a party they are walking into. Brienne doesn’t even know as many people as are packed into her house, much less know that many people well enough to invite them to a party. Brienne recognizes a few of the people who frequent their house on non-party days, as well a bunch of queers she knows by sight from various functions. Alleras always calls people like that “queers once removed” because it doesn’t take long before you’re at least tangentially connected to what feels like every other queer and trans person in the city.

A girl who lived on Brienne’s floor in the dorms last year pulls her aside and suddenly Jaime is gone, lost in the mass of bodies in the low light. Brienne exchanges a few words with her before continuing to make her way towards the kitchen. She has a bag of groceries in her hand and wants to put them away, which is far more of a challenge than she is expecting. She’s stopped at least four times on her way, people pulling her in different directions to introduce her to their friends, or else to ask her if she’s seen Lyn or Alleras recently or to ask her how she’s been or whatever.

It takes her over ten minutes to get to the kitchen and she doesn’t see Jaime once that whole time, but she makes it to the kitchen and manages to shimmy around the three people pouring drinks at the table and the couple making out against the wall to get to the counter beside the fridge. After the groceries are safely where they belong she looks around, wondering where Jaime ended up as Lyn materializes beside her.

“Happy Birthday,” Brienne offers over the pounding music, looking over Lyn’s shoulder into the makeshift dance floor in the next room for any signs of Jaime.

“Thanks,” Lyn replies with a lift of her glass.

Someone touches her wrist and she instinctively pulls her arm away and turns to look. It’s Jaime.

She puts her arm back in range and he takes her by the hand, leading her back through the crowd towards the front of the house.

No one stops her this time, though she’s aware some people do turn to watch them pass as Jaime guides them to the stairs. He doesn’t let go of her hand as they climb the stairs in single file. He doesn’t look back when someone whistles and someone else shouts that upstairs is out of bounds and a third person adds that Brienne lives here and someone else yells “Have fun then!” as they disappear out of sight of the party. Brienne fights the urge to correct them. Obviously they aren’t going upstairs to fuck. Look at them. As if that’s what’s going on here. But she follows Jaime’s lead and ignores everything but the stairs and the feel of his hand in hers as he leads her to her bedroom.

When the door closes behind him Jaime exhales like he’d been holding his breath. “I haven’t seen you in two weeks,” he says. “I don’t want to be at a party. I want to be with you.”

If her chest aches a little at the way he says it, obviously he has no idea what it sounds like, what it could be if she wasn’t her and he wasn’t him, it’s happening a normal amount that she has totally under control.

And if after they’ve ended up in bed Jaime asks if maybe they can watch a movie or something and when she says yes and pulls out her laptop he shifts closer to her, asking if this is okay (and it is) and before she’s even got laptop open he rolls onto his back and she follows him because he asks her to so she’s kind of almost mostly lying on top of him while he runs his hands up and down her back and they aren’t watching a movie they aren’t even pretending to pick a movie to watch they’re just kind of holding on to each other because they haven’t seen each other in two weeks while the bass line from the music downstairs throbs around them…

Well that’s also happening a normal amount.

*

When Brienne wakes up the next morning Jaime is curled up beside her. Her bed is as big as it ever was, plenty of room for them both, but right now all of the extra space is around them.

The blankets are warm and he is warmer and he is very asleep and part of her wants to stay here. To fall back asleep just to stay here in the middle of her bed with Jaime for as long as the universe will allow.

But she is awake and she can’t stay here. She can’t stay here so she inches away from him as smoothly as she can so as not to wake him.

Brienne is once again grateful to have the bedroom in the house with its own bathroom attached to it. It means she doesn’t have to brave the hallway where Alleras and Lyn’s bedrooms are or the party carnage downstairs just yet.

She brushes her teeth. She takes her pills. She tries not to think about Jaime.

Jaime won’t be awake for another hour at least. Maybe two. She could try and go downstairs to get coffee or breakfast, but she’s sure she’d have to tip-toe through Seven knows how many people ended up crashing here. And gods, the last thing she wants right now is to have to face anyone who saw her and Jaime going upstairs last night.

She doesn’t want to go downstairs and she feels weird about crawling back into bed with Jaime.

After another minute of deliberation Brienne draws herself a bath.

*

Brienne sits in the bath and lets the hot water do its thing and tries not to think about how doomed she is.

But she is doomed.

It’s becoming challenging to pretend she’s not in love with Jaime.

She suspects it will only become exponentially more challenging to pretend she’s not in love with Jaime.

So she sits in the bath and thinks about how much worse this will get until she hears Jaime start to stir in the other room.

Then she grabs a towel and drains the water before Jaime is anywhere near conscious enough to be thinking about a shower.

*

When Jaime is awake they agree to go out for breakfast. He doesn’t seem any more excited about the prospect of facing the people sleeping downstairs or the inevitable mess in the kitchen so they creep down the stairs as quietly as possible and make their escape.

*

She and Jaime go out for what ends up to be more like lunch and then go see a movie and then wander around some more. He buys them ice cream and then they go to a vintage record shop and flip through albums together for a long time. Eventually Brienne texts Al to ask about the state of the house.

Lyn and I are cleaning up now. We’ll be done and gone before 6 tho. If you want some alone time with Jaime.

She tilts her phone away from Jaime even though she knows he’s not trying to read her phone before she gives him the update. That the house will be empty by six that is. Not that Brienne now knows that because Al’s assuming she wants some alone time with Jaime.

They agree to pick up what they need to make dinner and then they stroll back into the empty house at half-past six.

*

The kitchen is recognizable as a kitchen and not a makeshift bar and they haven’t eaten since whenever brunch was so they put the grocery bags on the counter and get to work.

Brienne gets out a cutting board while Jaime turns on the oven and then starts washing vegetables and Brienne is determined to get through this without thinking about how much she loves him at all.

But then he looks over his shoulder and smiles at her and says how glad he is there isn’t another party tonight and fuck.

Fuck.

*

Brienne mostly gets through dinner prep without thinking about how much worse this will get for her. Being in love with Jaime that is. (She thought she’d thoroughly examined that topic in the bath this morning but no, she still has many thoughts and feelings on that topic. Unfortunately.)

Jaime opens the oven door and she puts their carefully crafted dish in and he sets the timer.

At least tidying up is something to do to stop Brienne from staring at the way Jaime is leaning casually against the kitchen counter.

*

The dishes they used for prep are washed and dried and put away (Jaime washed, Brienne dried and put away). The table is set. There is nothing to do but wait for the timer to go off.

Jaime is standing beside her in front of the oven. She’s trying not to think about how good he looks with his sleeves rolled up. She’s trying not to think about how good it felt to wrap herself around him last night. She’s trying not to think about—

“Can I kiss you?” he asks.

“What?” She must have misheard him. Too rattled by her own thoughts to process what he said. Because there is no way he said what she thought he said. They’re just making dinner and he can’t possibly have said what she thought he said so she looks over at him, waiting for him to clarify.

Jaime looks stricken. “Never mind. It’s nothing. Forget it.”

“No, Jaime, no.” Oh fuck oh fuck he definitely said what she thought he said. “Jaime.”

“It’s nothing,” he says, putting great effort into not meeting her eyes as he makes a show of checking how much longer before the timer on the oven is done.

“Ask me again,” she says, stopping and turning to him where they stand in the kitchen. “Ask me again. Or I’ll ask you if you want.”

He turns to face her. Slowly. “You’re sure?”

She nods. “Very sure.”

He takes a breath. Holds it. Exhales. “Can I kiss you?”

“Yes.”

He smiles as he takes a step forward and then he does. Kiss her that is. Tilting his chin up and standing on his toes to close the distance between them. His lips are soft when they meet hers and then he pulls back just far enough to ask, “Can I kiss you again?”

She can’t believe this is happening, but it is. “Yes.”

The second kiss lasts longer than the first, giving her more time to respond to his touch, to kiss him back, to revel in the feel of him kissing her and kissing him back and—

“Can I—” he asks, his voice low and soft and just for her as his thumb traces her jaw. His face is so close to hers she barely needs to speak her encouragement, just breathe his name and yes and they’re kissing again.

Kissing. So much kissing. She’s never kissed anybody like this in her life, like no matter what it will never be enough, like it will never be enough to satisfy the ache she’s tried to ignore for months. She’s wanted to kiss him for so long. So fucking long. And now she is.

When they separate enough to grin at each other she’s the one to ask, “Can I kiss you?”

“Yes,” Jaime replies with a smile that makes her knees weak as she leans down to do so. “Gods, yes.”

This continues until the timer on the oven beeps. They step away from each other and Jaime looks dazed in the best way. Brienne’s afraid to catch her reflection in the microwave because she knows she looks at least as pleased with this development as he does.

“Can I kiss you again after we eat?” he asks, still a little breathless.

“Yes,” she says. “Please.”

*

They sit down to dinner as they have about a hundred times before, but Brienne is all tingly, her body a flood of feelings she’s not capable of doing more than just feeling at the moment. Across from her Jaime is Jaime. He is grinning at her and looking at her and she can’t believe it, she cannot believe they were just kissing. But they were. And they’re going to be kissing again. Soon. A lot. If he wants to. Which he does. He’s told her as much.

And as much as she’s looking forward to it, there’s a conversation they should have while they aren’t kissing before much more kissing (and related activities) occurs. Because she wants to kiss him and she wants to touch him, but before she does she wants to make sure she doesn’t accidentally do it wrong.

*

Brienne lets almost two weeks pass before she takes a deep breath and announces to her roommates that she’s seeing someone. The phrase “my boyfriend” is deeply unfamiliar on her tongue and she trips over it despite having been practising in her head all morning, which is ridiculous, but here she is, blushing at the fucking kitchen table over having a boyfriend.

“You mean Jaime?” Lyn asks flatly. “The guy who’s been here almost every weekend since September and has been obviously in love with you like, the whole time? That you were equally obviously in love with? That boyfriend?”

She feels her blush deepen and she takes a long fake drink of coffee to avoid answering for as long as she can before she says, “Yes.”