#am also working on AMFAS promise I just had to get this out first

[dreadwulf]

In semi-quarantine, and I wrote a bit more of That Modern AU I’m Not Writing. Actually I have a lot of this, but not consecutively and really for my own amusement, but this bit is presentable and maybe someone else who is stuck in their house would like to be angsty with me.

Long passage of Drunk!Jaime behind the cut, if you are interested in such a thing.

Jaime takes his time going home after the restaurant. 

He’s ducked in out of the rain at two bars now. In the second bar he gets the best glass of cognac they can manage to find. While they rattle around on the shelves looking for the bottle the rain slows to a fine shimmer in the air and his fists finally uncurl a little. Anger drowns easily. He gets his glass and tosses a hundred dollar bill casually on the bar. As he nurses the golden liquid his body becomes heavier and heavier and the past and future both grow thin and hazy and eventually vanish. There is only now, a now with rounded edges and thick textures. It feels good.

Jaime stands at a corner of the bar and looks only at his glass and ignores everything else. There are only two kinds of bar, really. The hole in the wall and the kitch. You only need to look around long enough to know which one you’re in, a few seconds at most. Then you know and there’s no reason to look again. This bar is the second kind, with a vaguely sporting theme. There’s people in it, the same people who are always in this kind of bar, and they don’t matter.

Jaime knows that drunks are slow-witted and clumsy. He does not fool himself about that, reminds himself of it whenever he’s in a state. But truth be told, his mind feels clearer and sharper while he’s drinking. There is so much nonsense  he concerns himself with the rest of the time and all of that has been neatly tidied away. Put into boxes with careful labels and firm fastenings. He is probably a little slower from the outside, but from the inside it seems more like everything else is slower. More his speed. He lets the world slow down around him and get quieter and further away, and then he’s able to straighten up and plaster on something more like a smile as he signals the bartender for the rest of the bottle.

It didn’t take much this time. It’s been a long while since he had anything to drink, and it took only the second drink to put him into the golden state of mellow relaxation that it might have taken an entire bottle to get to before. He is out of practice. He’s become a lightweight. 

Though, given how it started this time, he did have that second drink pretty quickly, and all the ones after that to make extra sure. There was a lot of upset to clear away to get to the calm. 

His phone has stopped vibrating in his pocket, so maybe it’s safe to go home now. He tucks the bottle under his coat and slips outside.

The slick streets shine with the effervescent colorings of traffic lights and Don’t Walk signals, and he lets the glow lead him home. He could call an Uber easily, but he left his car at the restaurant because he wants to walk. He has the rest of the cognac to keep him company and make sure he doesn’t sober up too quickly on the walk. He is not ready to be sober yet. Not for a good long while.

Cognac is not one of his favorites, but it keeps him warm enough. He sips at it only twice, ducking into doorways along the way. That’s not a good look, drinking from a bottle outside. No more of that. He makes sure not to stumble on the sidewalk, stands up straight. Walks not too fast and not too slow. Eyes the infrequent traffic on the quiet street. This would be a very bad time for a police car to drive by. Evening Mr. Lannister. Long night? Want a ride home? On second thought, maybe we’ll bring you back to our place to sleep it off. They’d love that, the cops, not to mention the tabloids. They’ve never been able to get him for Drunk and Disorderly. Definitely drunk, and seldom disorderly, but never on the same occasion. He’d better be careful.

How much would his father gloat if he got himself arrested now? After storming out of dinner so dramatically, his father would probably say something about making his bed and lying in it. He would probably let him sit in lockup and Tyrion would have to bail him out once he scraped the money together. Well, he won’t give either of them the satisfaction. He is going to walk all the way home and he is going to lock himself in his apartment and finish drinking and then go back to work tomorrow and keep running his damn company and doing a damned good job of it, and without following any of dear old Dad’s “advice”. 

Then his building is rising up out of the concrete in front of him and nobody is standing outside waiting for him, thank god. The doorman lets him in and does not comment that he is soaked to the skin and weaving, and that’s why he gets the big tips. Jaime rides up the elevator to the penthouse and lets himself in without too much fumbling around with keys. Inside he goes straight for the 100 year whiskey, his favorite, pours a glass before he’s even got his coat off and lifts it straight to his lips like a man dying of thirst.

He gave a glass of this whiskey to Brienne that time. She liked it, he could tell. She took it a swallow at a time, savoring it, and that felt good to watch. He had a feeling she could appreciate a good 100 year whisky, and he had been right.

Gods. You have fucked this all the way up this time. Now it’s going to be a whole year --

No. Shut up. No.

He throws back his head and drains the rest of the glass, and things get quieter again.  

He drapes his sopping wet coat over a high chair and pours another glass, takes it and the cognac with him into the TV room. Formerly the drinking room. It has the best chairs. A nice soft recliner that he can sleep in sitting up, in case things get out of hand, and a big tv bolted to the wall to shine espn at him all night. It’s the only room in this place, aside from the bedroom, that he really spends any time in. 

He leaves the glass and the bottle there and turns back for more supplies. It’s good to be prepared. On the kitchen counter he stacks all of the items that he can remember from his old Good Time Drinking kit:

-water (hydration is key)

-red bull

-scotch

-leftover takeout

-mixers

-extra glass in case he breaks one

-2 bottles of the good vodka

All of that he piles into the soup pot and carries into the TV room and settles into his chair and finishes off the cognac one glass at a time. Then he eats the takeout, drinks a whole bottle of water, and then moves on to the scotch.

Six months. A whole six months out the window, you complete idiot. 

The scotch is not one of his favorites either, but it’s strong and it shuts up that voice in his head. He watches the Knicks lose again. After that there’s a hockey game on. After that they play a soccer match from south america and he doesn’t know either team and he mostly zones out for awhile and enjoys feeling nothing about anything. 

He probably sleeps a little. He’s starting to sober up and there’s light coming in the window that hurts his eyes and he gets out of his chair just long enough to close the blinds and go for a piss and then he opens up the good vodka and loads up Goodfellas on streaming for the 200th time. Clearly the best Scorsese by a mile. You could argue Taxi Driver but really mostly for De Niro’s performance, or Casino for pure spectacle but there are bits where it gets flabby around the edges and Goodfellas is flawless. There is not a single wrong second in Goodfellas. Impeccably structured from beginning to end. He makes it to the incredible tracking shot in the Copa and gets lost in thought about whether The Departed is a better film than The Irishman and if any of them are really a patch on Goodfellas or just revisions of the same thing, flourishes to show the old man’s still got it, and then the movie’s over and the bottle of vodka is empty and his head is starting to ring like a bell. 

Or maybe that’s his phone ringing. But he’s not sure where he left that and really doesn’t feel like looking for it, so he closes his eyes for a while instead. 

Later after he’s used the pot and run out of bottles of water he lurches in the direction of the kitchen. It’s a stupidly long way. He had to get the biggest apartment in Manhattan. Couldn’t have gotten one with a shorter hallway. Short-sighted of him. Now he has to keep the palm of his hand planted firmly against the wall and follow the wall to the kitchen and be satisfied that at least he isn’t falling over. He didn’t used to stumble around like this but he’s out of practice and fuck, he is going to pay for this in a few hours. When he goes to work he’s going to be sick as a dog. He’ll have to ask Pia to move his in-person meetings or switch them to conference calls.

In the kitchen he drops the pot un-looked-at into the sink and takes another one, and starts filling it with bottles of water and half-empty boxes of cereal. His coat is ringing from the high chair where he left it earlier. He fumbles around with it until he can figure out which pocket is making the noise and pull his vibrating phone out of it and squint at the screen. 16 messages. Well, that’s a problem for later. He puts the phone in the pocket of his pants and walks carefully back down the hall to his chair. 

The next morning is going to be painful. It’s like the sword of - the sword of whatdoyoucallit that hangs over someone’s head and will cut their head off but they don’t know exactly when so they just look up at it nervously waiting for it to fall. It’s definitely going to fall, but he can put it off a little longer. 

It takes longer to finish the vodka. He keeps falling asleep between sips. 

His phone plays a few notes of Queen (ooh, you’re making me live now honey) and he has to shift around in his seat to pull it out of his pocket. 

“Brienne?” he says into the phone, quietly because talking makes his head vibrate too much.  

“Hey - I thought we were on for tonight.”

The online game. They’re going to hunt down some legendary bounties in RDR2. But not today. Jaime rubs his right eye with his useless right hand. “No, that’s Thursday.”

“Uh, today is Thursday, Lannister.”

Jaime sits up sharply. “It is?”

That can’t be right. It’s Wednesday. Dinner with his father and Cersei and Tyrion was Wednesday. Wasn’t it?

“Well, now you’ve got me confused. No, it’s Thursday, just check your phone.”

He does. His phone says it’s Thursday too. Oh fuck. There was a morning in there somewhere, wasn’t there? The windows were sunny for awhile there. If it’s Thursday now then… fuck.

“What time’s it?” He just saw it on his phone but he didn’t quite believe it. A slow panic is building. He has fucked this up even worse than he thought. 

“The usual time. 9’o’clock.” Brienne is starting to sound concerned. “Are you all right?”

He missed work. He had… there were meetings. There were things to do. Oh god. He has to call Pia. He fucked up.

“Yes. Sorry, I gotta go. I can’t. Tomorrow?” Jaime hesitates. He has looked forward to it all week. He always does. Will he have to wait a whole other week to get a session with her? “Let’s do tomorrow. Please?”

“Sure,” she says. “Are you sure you’re all right? Are you drinking?”

“No. I have to go. Bye.”

He stabs his phone clumsily with his left index finger and misses the End button a few times. Locates Pia in his contacts list. Then he thinks on it, and stumbles towards the kitchen again.

He keeps most useful things in the kitchen. There’s a pen in the Miscellany drawer where most of that stuff ends up. He takes a scrap of paper and writes effortfully in big block letters:

SICK FEVER

MONDAY

REPORT WITH PECK

He stares hard at these words while he finds Pia’s name in his contacts again. 

“Pia?”

“Boss, oh my god. Where are you? I’ve been trying to call ---”

Jamie tries to make his voice steady and clear. It takes a lot of concentration. “Pia, I’ve been sick in bed all day. Slept right through everything. I have some kind of fever.”

She sounds strange. Skeptical or worried? Both? “Are you okay boss? You sound terrible.”

“I just need to sleep. Probably tomorrow too. Can you move everything to Monday?”

“Already done. I know the drill.”

Fuck. He winces. Pia used to cover for him a lot on mornings when he was especially hungover, and he told her that wouldn’t be happening anymore. 

PIA RAISE he adds to the scrap of paper. 

“Thank you, Pia. Did Bolton come looking for the annual report? I left it with Peck for touch-ups.”

“He did. We put him off to tomorrow. I think it still needs some --”

“Tell Peck to finish. He can do it. I showed him how.” He rubs his right eye again. The icepick headache is starting up there. Impending doom. “Give it to Bolton tomorrow. Better done wrong than late in this case.”

“Okay boss.” Pia hesitates, starts a few different sentences in succession. Then she settles on: “Take it easy, okay?”

“Thank you Pia,” he says, and hangs up the phone. 

He pours another glass of his favorite whiskey, leaning heavily against the counter. You fucking idiot. You fucking -- why? Why didn’t you notice it was morning? Did you just not want to notice? Do you want to wreck your life again?

Shut up, he tells himself again, and drinks down the glass. 

Then he walks straight over to his most uncomfortable couch, the one he never uses in the spotless living room he never uses, and falls face-down on it. 

His doorbell rings.

Some time’s gone by again. Jaime sits up slowly. Rubs the heel of his hand into his right eye. A few steps towards sober, but only a few. So not too long. Who is ringing his bell? He gets himself standing. Not many people come to his door. If it’s one of his siblings, he’s not home.

It’s on the third step towards the door that he realizes it will be Brienne. He doesn’t know how he knows it but he knows it absolutely, as if he can see her through the door. But how is she here? He never gave her his address. It couldn’t be her. 

But it is her. He looks through the peephole in his door and he can see her. Tarth. Absurdly tall, with that strange hunched-over stance of hers. A coat wrapped closely around her, her sandy hair mussed up from the hat she’s taken off already. She looks nervous and worried. She frowns, takes out her phone and glares at it. Her shoulders are up around her ears like they had been at the barcade all those months ago, when they had been friendly for the first time. 

Gods. What is she doing here? He brought her back here once, that’s how she knows how to get here. She remembered the building. He should have thought of that. He shouldn’t have answered the phone. He must have sounded drunk. She thinks he needs rescuing. Fuck.

She reaches over and knocks. He can feel it against his hands, her knuckles rapping against the door. It’s strange, hearing the sound and feeling it in his hands. Then she looks at her phone again and pushes some buttons. 

His phone vibrates where he left it on the floor, over by the couch. At least he turned the ringer off. 

She holds the phone at her ear and frowns some more. His phone vibrates two, three, four times. Then she takes it down and ends the call.

Brienne paces in front of his door a little. She walks away from his sight and he thinks that’s it, she’s gone and then she reappears. Looks at the door some more and then walks away in the other generation, comes back. Knocks on the door again. Who let her in the building? One of the doormen? One of his neighbors? No tip for security this year. She looks up and down the hall and then folds her arms in front of her and leans her back against the wall opposite. 

Maybe she thinks she caught him at the bar. When she called earlier. She’s waiting for him to come home. What time is it now? It was 9 before, but that was awhile ago. His head hurts, and his nerves are starting to spark and hum. He’s getting too sober. He wants to go back to his liquor cabinet and find that Jamaican Rum that his aunt sent him from her second honeymoon. But he wants to look at her too. Looking at Brienne feels like his favorite 100-year whiskey. Warming, soothing. Like everything will be all right.

He doesn’t want her to see him drunk. She saw that just once, and that was not good. He hated that. He didn’t even know her then but something about being around her made him want to be… not like this. 

Maybe he can call her from his phone, tell her he’s at his brother’s place. She’ll go home.

Brienne checks her phone again and sighs. She slides down along the wall so that she’s sitting on the floor, her long legs folded in front of her, and she leans her head back and closes her eyes.

Jaime keeps his hands on the door, still feeling the vibration of her knocks quivering against his fingertips, and closes his eyes too. She’s so close. He wants to… he wants a lot more than he can ask of her. He shouldn’t have answered his phone. He wasn’t thinking.

How long is she going to sit there? 

He lets a few more minutes go by in utter quiet, resting his forehead against the door. Then he unlocks the door and yanks it open.

“You might as well come in,” he says.

She looks up with a mildly betrayed expression, though she could not know how long he watched her through the peephole. He’s ready to tell her some lie about why it took so long for him to answer the door, but Brienne doesn’t ask. She just unfolds herself, all six and a half feet of her, and breezes past him. 

Brienne takes a long and appraising look at his apartment while he locks the door behind her, taking in the disarray in the kitchen, his coat fallen on the floor. One of his kitchen chairs is on its side. How it had gotten there is a mystery he is not interested in investigating. He must have gotten up for a while and knocked it over and not remembered it. Hopefully he hasn’t broken anything important.

“You weren’t in your office,” she says mildly. Not accusatory, just explaining. “And you weren’t answering your phone.”

Jaime rakes a hand through his hair quickly, tucking it behind his ears. He’s still wearing a dress shirt and trousers from dinner with the family, but they’re looking decidedly rumpled now. He’s a mess. He should jump in the shower and change.

“I was asleep.” 

He can usually hold a conversation when he’s drinking with no one the wiser, but he’s also half-awake and hungover right now. He trips over the “S”s lazily, knowing there’s no point in pretending by now.

Brienne settles herself a good six feet away from him, and takes another step back when he takes one towards her. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” He shrugs. “I slipped up. It’s not a big deal.”

She’s standing so far away from him it’s almost funny. He ought to call her on his cell phone to underline the point. Maybe they would actually be able to talk then.

It’s strange. For all they have spoken to each other, they have rarely spent time together in person. Since that time they met, which hardly counts, and when they reconnected at his birthday, he’s only been face to face with her one other time. That was here at this apartment, and it had been strange then too. She had slept on his couch in the front room, and he had lain awake on his bed all night long.

She had been nervous then too, but not this nervous. Brienne’s always awkward, she has the presence of someone who’s been alone much too often and it’s made them strange. Now she’s worried on top of it, which is worse. 

Brienne slips her long coat off her shoulders and drapes it over one arm, and looks grateful for something to do with herself. When she looks down at him again her brow furrows painfully. “You look awful.”

“Thanks,” he says shortly, and takes the coat out of her hands. He hangs it up in the hall closet and when he turns back to her she has her arms folded in front of her.

Over the phone they have been relaxed with each other, but now it seems they’re back to square one. 

And now he feels awkward too. “Do you want something? I have a little bit left of that whisky you liked.”

Her eyes narrow just a little. “No. Have you been drinking since Wednesday?”

Jaime shrugs. “I guess. Not the whole time. I slept some.” Wednesday. She said Wednesday, and not yesterday, and that means today is… he glances at the oven clock. 10:13am. He should probably open the blinds now so that time doesn’t get away from him again. It’s Friday morning. And he just offered her a whiskey. Smooth. 

It’s Friday morning and Peck is fixing his report right now, and Brienne should be writing her next piece from that bric-a-brac nest she calls an office.

“Shouldn’t you be working?” he asks her suddenly.

“You weren’t answering your phone,” she says again, like that explains anything.

“You came out of your cave for that? I should never pick up the phone again.” He’s got his own arms crossed in defense against her now. “As you can see, I’m completely fine.”

“You’re not fine.” Her arms crossed in front of her like a scolding teacher. Next she’ll send him to the principal’s office.

Abruptly he decides to busy himself, first with setting his chair upright and pushing it under the counter. He puts some empty takeout containers in the trash. Puts some empty glasses in the sink. 

Brienne just watches all of this silently, lets her words hang in the air between them like an accusation. You’re not fine. 

“Did you come here to stare at me?” he snaps. “Or do you want something?”

Her eyebrows wrinkle in a way that he usually finds kind of cute. “I want to know what’s happened.”

He opens the refrigerator and withdraws a water bottle that is not actually filled with water. Sometime yesterday/last night/this morning he’d put it there, and now he congratulates himself on his prescience. 

“Come on,” he says.

He takes her back to the TV room and sits in his chair and she sits on the one comfortable couch he owns, looking around the room. “This looks more like you,” she says. “This room.”

“Because it’s a mess?”

“It looks like someone actually lives here. The other rooms look like a catalogue.”

She’s sitting like a comma on his couch, some stiff and simple sort of punctuation mark that doesn’t take up much space. Her hands in her lap and her shoulders up by her ears. Brienne never looks especially comfortable but this is tense even for her. She’s worried. What does she think he’s going to do?

He feels he should explain. He’s giving her the wrong impression. He isn’t normally like this.

“This isn’t bad,” he tries to reassure her. “I mean, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad. You should see my brother and sister, they put me to shame. Tyrion’s half my size and he can put this away in a single night. And Cersei can drink a truly legendary amount of Tequila. This is an average night in the Lannister household, believe me.”

Her eyebrows raise. She is not finding this reassuring.

“College parties, that’s where the real drinking was. The blackouts and passing out on the floor and that kind of thing. Kid stuff. And when I first joined the business, there were some heavy nights. Mostly coke, but drinking too. It’s pretty normal, at this level. VPs, CFOs, we all party pretty hard. When you’re in charge, you do things to unwind. But I don’t do that anymore. I haven’t done coke in years. I never really liked it, it made me too paranoid.”

The most reasonable part of his brain, the one he has been trying to shut up, is absolutely screaming at him now to stop fucking talking. Don’t tell her these things! Shut up! 

He keeps babbling anyway. “So it’s just this now, and I don’t really do it much anymore. For a while I was doing it all the time -- at night, anyway, after work -- but I didn’t let it get out of hand. I do my job and I pay my bills and was never a big deal. I decided to cut back and it didn’t really work so I cut it out all together for awhile. I got a sponsor and that whole thing, so it’s really under control.”

“A sponsor? You went to AA?” She looks startled. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“Yeah, well. It’s just as cliche as you’d think. Church basement, meetings, bad coffee, all that.”  

“Did it help?”

Yes and no. There was something weirdly soothing about it. Like a movie he’s seen a bunch of times before, except now he’s in it. Now he’s the one sitting in a semicircle saying “My name is Jaime and I’m an alcoholic.” A person knows pretty much what’s expected of them there, what your lines are. It fills time. But it doesn’t really stop the pain, or smooth out all of the minutes of the day scraping by like sandpaper against your jagged nerves. The only thing that really helps that is booze, and that’s the one thing you’re not supposed to do.

“Jaime?” Brienne is staring at him and her eyebrows are knitted together again with that furrow in the middle. He has to say something back now. He says the first thing to come into his head.

“You don’t have to worry, ok? When I sober up I’ll be fine. Getting started usually isn’t a problem. If I need to not do it I can just not have any. I don’t get myself into trouble, fights, falling over in public, nothing like that. It’s not like… my grandfather, he was a real drunk. He’d pass out in some alley somewhere. Police used to haul him into the station, let him sleep it off in the drunk tank.  My father would tell me stories… but I do this at home, and I don’t get arrested and I don’t bother anyone and no one sees. I go back to my job and everything’s fine.”

“If it’s not a problem,” she says slowly, “why did you need to quit? You told me you were quitting.”

“Well. It is a little problem,” he admits. “It’s… stopping is hard. When I’m drinking it feels good, and sobering up feels real bad.”

He can feel it sneaking up on him right now, actually, and it fills him with dread. The sword of Damocles. When he’s not drunk anymore he’ll feel shitty all the time. He’ll have to go back to being Jaime Lannister, and that feels pretty terrible.  

“I didn’t mean to start again. It was an accident. I was at dinner with my father and Cersei and Tyrion. And we started arguing and I just… as a reflex, you know. There was a glass in front of me and I drank it. I wasn’t thinking. By the time I realized it was too late.”

He takes a swig from the bottle, several quick swallows.

“So the first drink was an accident. The others weren’t.”

“Well, by then I’m already off the wagon. I might as well enjoy it.”

“Why did you have a glass in front of you, anyway? Haven’t you told them yet? Jaime, I’ve been telling you --”

“I did tell them. I did.” He shrugs again. “I think Father’s exact words were, ‘Nonsense’ and ‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ And Cersei just laughed and ordered drinks for all of us, me included.”

She looks furious. “Your family is horrible.”

He leans his head back heavily. “I did tell them all to fuck off, this time. After I realized. I was pretty angry. I was doing really well there for awhile, really I was. I had six months last Sunday.”

That awful moment of realization. That was what did it more than anything, that moment holding the glass and looking down and realizing what he had done. He had taken a drink and ruined everything and it was already too late to stop. He could not take it back. He had tried so hard and it was all for nothing. You don’t get to call it A Year of Sobriety Except for That One Time. If you drink again you have to start the clock over. He’d have to tell Arthur he slipped up and talk about it in a stupid fucking meeting and do the ridiculous steps again and it’s all so stupid and useless to go to the trouble when all of that miserable time and effort could be wiped out in ten seconds.

And Cersei, and Father, and even Tyrion… they thought it was funny, they laughed about how gobsmacked he looked, and that had made it worse. Because it had meant something to him, and maybe that was stupid of him but shouldn’t they care? Shouldn’t that matter? But it doesn’t.

“I know…” Brienne sounds properly sorrowful now, more like he would have wanted his own fucking family to feel. “You were doing really great.”

“He was calling me a fuck-up. A stupid, useless fuck-up. Just like his father was, my grandfather. And of course I went and proved him right. Right on the spot. Just because I wouldn’t -- he doesn’t like me calling my own shots, on the job. I’m supposed to just do what he tells me. But I actually had a better idea this time. We wouldn’t have to lay off half my department with the cost savings if we did it my way. And I knew he wouldn’t listen so I just did it. That made him pretty mad.”

He drinks a little more from the water bottle, several long swallows. He has to hold it with both hands. His left hand is a little shaky.

“You were arguing about work?” Brienne asks. She sounds a little farther away.

“Well, it started about work. But then he gets mad and brings out all this old stuff. He brings up the Stark kid. He’s still paying that family off you know. Did I tell you that?”

Her expression darkens immediately. “A little.”

“The kid that I hit with my car. Couple years ago. Cersei was there, and we were drinking, and she was distracting me. Doing things. And she said we had to drive away. Because we’d get caught. She was… it would have been obvious. So I drove off. But their mom saw the car and Father has been paying them off ever since. When he gets mad he brings it up like he’s going to… I don’t know. He wouldn’t actually let it go public, it would embarrass the family. But he might stop paying them. That kid’s still in a wheelchair. They need that money.”

His hand’s still shaking. This is… that’s a new one. It won’t stop.

“That was an accident too. But it was still my fault. Like this is my fault. A whole lot of things are my fault.”

Jaime sets the water bottle on the floor next to the chair and glares at his left hand. This hand needs to behave itself. The right one is down to three fingers and now the good one won’t stop shaking. But he can’t worry about it now, Brienne will see. He shoves it under the armrest where he won’t have to look at it. 

He’s so tired suddenly. Every part of his body is so heavy. He would really like to just curl up and be unconscious for a while. Be nowhere. He could easily just turn over and go to sleep, but he is intensely aware that Brienne is here and she is watching and Brienne notices things, unlike most of the people he knows who never seem to notice a damned thing.  

Right at that moment, she stands up decisively. “I’ll get you some more water. Do you need anything else? Maybe you could pick out a movie for us to watch. But no horror films, you are not springing something like Hereditary on me again. I didn’t sleep for days.”

She’s bending over and taking his water bottle and he’s tempted to snatch it back, but it was over half-empty anyway. He’s not sure he could follow a movie right now. Maybe there’s a game they could watch. He can’t remember if Brienne likes any sports. She thinks e-sports are stupid, when you aren’t playing them there’s no point in watching, but does that apply to espn? He’s filing through his memories to see if she’s ever mentioned basketball. A woman as tall as her almost certainly played some basketball. But does she watch it on tv?

Brienne sputters suddenly, startling him out of his thoughts, and he glances over to see her recoiling from the plastic bottle in her hand with a sour look on her face. “This isn’t water.”

Oh. Right. She would have assumed that. A reasonable person would have switched to water by now. But reasonable people would not have been drunk for… 2 days now.

“You’re still drinking?” she says incredulously. “After all this?”

He grabs at the bottle with what he hopes is a graceful maneuver. “There’s real water in the fridge. This one’s mine.”

She holds fast to the bottle, her expression suddenly hardening. “No. You have to stop.”

Brienne spins on her heel and strides out of the room purposefully.

He jumps up and follows her down the hall. Slams his shoulder into the doorframe making the turn and somehow manages to knock his head against the wall. Brienne takes no pity on him for that. She doesn’t even look back, beats him into the kitchen by a mile, carrying that bottle. When he makes it there she’s letting the last bit of vodka empty out of the bottle into the sink.

Okay, fine. He won’t be bothered by it. Jaime has plenty more where that came from, and if it makes her feel better, that’s worth its weight in Carbonadi.

But Brienne isn’t done quite yet. She walks over to the liquor cabinet and takes up a bottle in each hand, heading back to the sink. In a few quick motions she’s untwisted the tops of both bottles and is pouring those out too, overturning them completely over the drain with an expression of grim determination. 

Jaime watches this every bit as disbelievingly as she had been to discover vodka instead of water in his plastic bottle. Wasting liquor is not something that would ever be done in the Lannister household. He would have been scolded for that as surely as another son would be shouted at for wrecking the car. That is, if one of his siblings didn’t lay themselves down under the bottle to catch every last drop before it could hit the drain. 

Not to mention how expensive that particular liquor is. “Do you have any idea how much that costs?” he says, still not quite believing what he’s seeing.

“Send me a bill.” Brienne wastes no time - as soon as the bottles are empty she lets them drop into the sink and is heading back over to the liquor cabinet all in a rush.

He stirs at last, gets between her and the sink. He has to put up his hands like a basketball player to hold her off. “Okay, okay, I get that you want me to sober up. But don’t ruin a thousand dollars worth of good booze just to make a point.”

“I’m not -- a thousand dollars?” She looks down at the crystal decanter in her left hand, startled. “What the hell is it made out of, gold?”

He grins at her. “That one’s from Zurich, bottled in 1958. I’ve been sipping from that for about 2 years, making it last.”

“Well not anymore. You have to get rid of all of this.” She gestures at the assortment of bottles still gathered together in the rosewood box. “You can’t keep this around anymore.”

“Okay.” He holds up his hands placatingly. “I’ll give it to my brother, he’ll take care of it.”

She regards him suspiciously. “Not good enough.” She tries to push past him, and he stops her.

“Cut it out, Brienne.”

“No. I should have done this when I was here the time before. I was going to insist that you get rid of the liquor and I didn’t do it. If I had you might not be in this state right now.”

“Not true. I wasn’t even home when this started, and I can always buy more. I can go buy more right now.” Her nostrils flare, and she’s clenching her jaw stubbornly, unconvinced. “Listen, I’m going to stop now, for real. But you can’t just dump out this stuff, okay? It’s valuable.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“You don’t have the money.”

“I will in a few paychecks.” 

Now he’s getting frustrated. “Look, it’s sweet that you wanted to check on me, but destroying my things is too far. I’m going to be angry with you about this, Brienne.”

Brienne looks at him levelly. “I can live with that.”

She could, of course. She doesn’t need him for anything. She can always just leave and never talk to him again. 

“I think you should go,” he says, even as internally he is screaming in protest at the thought.

For just a moment, she looks hurt. Her blue eyes go wide and shimmery. But then she clenches her jaw stubbornly. 

“I care about you, you asshole. I’m not leaving you here with all this. With these same bottles you’ve been haunting yourself with all this time. You can go and get more tomorrow if you really want to and If you hate me for it, then you hate me for it. But I’m getting rid of these.”

“No. You’re not,” he tells her firmly.

She turns her head to one side and another, looking for options, as though she might run to another room and upturn the bottles there. But that would mean abandoning the liquor cabinet, and he would surely rescue the rest of his stash while she did that.

Instead she hefts the heavy decanter in one hand and hurls it at the wall.

The bottle detonates in a spray of amber liquid and shards of glass, making a truly startling crash.

Jaime’s mouth falls open. 

Brienne pants as though she has just run a marathon, grabs the next bottle and hurls it like a shotput. It explodes against the wall in almost the same spot, loud as a gunshot and culminating in a shower of glass.

Somehow the shock of it has fixed him in place. He just stands there stock-still as she lifts another bottle and throws it overhand like a wild pitch, like he’s admiring her form. 

The third bottle, however, does not produce the same satisfying explosion. It bounces firmly off the wall with a resounding clunk, sails a few feet back, skids on the kitchen tile and slides into the island where it comes to a stop.

The two of them stare in silence, both frozen, at the errant, completely full and intact bottle. 

Jaime recovers first. He bends over and picks it up. It’s another vodka, a grey goose, in a stiff  plastic bottle that wouldn’t break no matter how hard you threw it. Garbage vodka, for when you’re too drunk to care about anything but staying drunk. 

He hands it back to Brienne. His hand shakes only a little.

“Just pour it out,” he tells her, without looking her in the face. “No need to smash it. The others too.”

He turns his back on it, unable to watch, and leaves the kitchen. He sinks down on the terrible couch, leans back his head, and closes his eyes. Some small part of him is hopeful that she won’t take him up on it, that she made her point and will let the rest of his liquor cabinet live. But she doesn’t. Very methodically, she pours out every one of the bottles letting each one glug glug glug the wonderful liquid away until it’s completely dry before starting the next one. 

It takes awhile.

He had his last swig from the bottle about ten minutes ago now. He can already feel himself starting to sober up again. He won’t have anything to soften that blow. Thirty minutes from now he’ll have a crushing headache, and the vomiting will start up after that. 

And he’ll start feeling things. Probably a lot of things about what’s happening right now - about Brienne in his kitchen pouring out all his alcohol, and all the things he told her, and Brienne seeing him dead drunk, and -- how is he going to get rid of her before he starts puking? She is showing no inclination to leave anytime soon. What is he going to do?

When the sound of expensive booze pouring down the drain dies down he hears Brienne sweeping up the broken glass with a broom. He didn’t even know he had a broom.

He can’t believe she did that. Threw a bottle at the wall. Two bottles! Now who’s dramatic?

He can’t believe he’s missing another day of work. He’s never missed two days in a row. Before yesterday he had never missed even one. Even when he was drinking every night, he reported to the office no matter what. He might have felt like hell but by god he had gotten there. Now he has had a weekend bender in the middle of the week and left his team scrambling to cover for him and he is going to feel like shit about that sometime very soon. 

A hand on his shoulder startles him, and he jerks up his head. Brienne is crouching down at his side. “Is there any more?”

He is quiet a long moment, then answers. 

“In the bedroom. Bedside table. Maybe the bathroom too. Don’t remember.”

“Okay.” She squeezes his shoulder and disappears.

Jaime closes his eyes again. Was that it? He doesn’t think there’s any more. He never really hid booze - only a real drunk would do that. Maybe he should have gotten rid of the flask in the bedside table. He never intended to use it. He just liked knowing it was there, for some reason. He left something in the medicine cabinet as a dark joke. It’s the only medicine that has ever done anything for him.

Goddamn, his head is heavy. 

Then she’s touching his shoulder again. “You said something about a sponsor? What’s his name? Is he in your phone?”

His head is too heavy to look. Does she have his phone? “His name’s Arthur. Something. D. Arthur something with a D.”

“Thanks.” She definitely has his phone. He can hear her dialing. She’s calling his sponsor? What is this, grade school? She’s tattling on him? He is going to be mad about that later, when he has the energy for it. 

“Hi. Um, you don’t know me but… my name’s Brienne, and I’m a friend of Jaime Lannister. I have his phone. Well, there’s a bit of a problem… Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Then Brienne is asking Arthur sensible questions about ambulances and alcohol poisoning. She could have asked him about that, but maybe she’s not too inclined to listen to him right now. She says “uh-huh” a lot, and then is quiet for awhile.

“His awful family. He went to dinner with them and he came back like this- yes, apparently they didn’t take him seriously, or didn’t care. They put a drink in front of him and pretty much dared him to take it.”

She’s quiet again for a long while.  

Then she’s putting the phone to his ear, and he can hear Arthur’s low and musical voice. “Hello Jaime. Gone on a bit of a bender, have we?”

Jaime doesn’t say anything. He is in no way ready for this conversation. He likes Arthur. He hates letting Arthur down.

Arthur goes on anyway. “Let me guess. You made a little unintentional mistake, and you decided you might as well make it a giant mistake while you’re at it. If you’re going to fall down the ladder you’re going to hit every rung on the way down.”

“Pretty much.” Jaime rubs his aching head.

“You should have called after the first one. That’s what a sponsor’s for.”

Yes, that’s what they tell you to do. But he didn’t want to tell Arthur he fucked it all up. He had just gotten to six months and Arthur had actually praised him for it, and Jaime had felt pretty good about that, and he didn’t want to tell Arthur about it at all. 

“I fucked up,” he admits.

Arthur goes on. “Everybody slips up. It happens. One swallow doesn’t have to mean you’re off the wagon, Jaime. You could have stopped it there.”

“Really?” Could have kept his six month chip though? Maybe that shouldn’t matter to him, but he does so like his prizes.

“Look, don’t beat yourself up about it. You were doing really well until you saw your family. It may be that you can’t see them right now. We’re going to talk about that when you’re 100%, all right?”

He swallows. At least Arthur doesn’t sound too mad. Disappointed, maybe. Or concerned. He isn’t so good at telling what concerned is supposed to sound like. 

“You’ve got somebody there with you? You never mentioned this Brienne.”

“Yeah. She’s…” He’s not sure how to explain Brienne. “She’s a friend.”

“She sounds like a good friend who is very worried about you. I’m glad she’s there. So sleep it off and call me when you wake up. And get yourself to a meeting." 

Ugh. He hates AA meetings. A club for losers full of other losers. He especially hates knowing how many more meetings he's going to have to sit through now. Arthur will probably want him to go to a daily meeting for at least a few weeks, then twice weekly after that, then…. when will it ever be finished? Does he really have to keep doing it forever? Sitting around in a room full of drunks talking about alcohol on a regular basis is really not something he wants to be doing for the rest of his life. 

"Okay Jaime? I know you hate them, but it was actually helping you. Maybe your friend could come with you."

"Absolutely not," he says quickly. It's bad enough that she's seeing him now. 

"Sooner or later, son, you're going to have to let somebody see you hurting. You can’t keep doing this wounded animal bullshit, or it will kill you one way or another.”

"She's seen it." He laughs bitterly. "I hate it, but she has."

"Well, she didn’t run screaming yet, right? So maybe It's not such an awful thing, kiddo."

"I'm 38 years old, Arthur."

"You're a kid to me. Get some sleep. And stop beating yourself up. Tomorrow I’ll tell you how many tries it took me to get sober."

Jaime hangs up the phone feeling actually marginally better. 

Brienne, meanwhile, is scanning her own phone, pacing in the kitchen. She looks up when he goes quiet, and then comes over.

“I’m looking up the symptoms of alcohol poisoning,” she tells him. Reading off her phone, she goes down the list. “Mental confusion, difficulty remaining conscious…”

“Not so different from normal, then,” Jaime cuts in. He’s read the list before. 

“Seizures, slow breathing, slow heart rate, low body temperature, blue skin, clammy skin…”

He finishes for her. “Dulled responses, reduced gag reflex. It’s why I sleep it off in a chair, so I won’t choke. I know how much is too much, Brienne. All Emergency would do is give me fluids and wait for me to sober up. I can do that here.”

She leans over and brushes the hair back from his face. “Not too clammy. I guess you’re not dying. Your head is bleeding though.” 

He feels at the spot next to his right eyebrow where she’s poking him with her finger. He’s cut himself somehow. Not too much blood, but fresh, bright red.

“Bandages?” she asks, before he can get up.

“Bathroom. Medicine cabinet.”

She’s back right away, with the little drugstore box kit that he keeps for this kind of situation, and the rubbing alcohol. Sitting on the couch next to him she starts dabbing at his head with a cotton ball. It stings.

Even sitting down she’s taller than him. He thought her height was mostly in her legs, but her torso is long and broad and he still has to tilt back his head to look into her face. It’s a strange sensation. 

Brienne doesn’t usually come so close to him, and certainly hasn’t touched him before. Not since his hand. Now she’s tending to him again, and again he notices how careful she is, how considerate. She has one hand steady under his chin while the other gently cleans out his ridiculous wound. Her hands are cool and soft and her voice is calm. 

“You’re pretty used to looking after yourself,” she says. “This kit’s been used.”

“Not so much. I’m not usually this clumsy.” He watches as she unpeels the medical tape a lot more gracefully than he would be able to now, with his claw hand. “I was an athlete for a long time, believe it or not. All through school, even after college. Before I went soft.”

Brienne doesn’t seem interested in that detail. She frowns in concentration as she applies a square of gauze to his forehead. “You said you looked after your sister and your brother after your mother died. So who looked after you?”

“Me I guess. That’s how we’re all so healthy and well-adjusted now.” He chuckles humorlessly. “Meanwhile you’re shockingly good at tending wounds for an only child.”

“Lots of time in hospitals,” she reminds him. Applies a second piece of tape and presses it down. “Do you feel like going back to the other room? We could still watch a movie.”

Jaime doesn’t feel like it, but he doesn’t feel like doing anything really, and the back room has his favorite chair. So he may as well. He pushes up to his feet and wobbles there, light-headed, until Brienne’s hand on his back steadies him. There is open concern on her face, standing over him.

He doesn’t like that. Being stood up like an invalid. If there’s one thing he is good at, it is drinking a hell of a lot of booze and keeping himself going anyway. He is an expert at it. So he can take being bandaged and letting her sort out his kitchen, but like hell will he get across his own damned apartment not under his own power. 

He takes off determinedly down the hall, not feeling along the walls for balance. He is not doing so well now at pretending not to be drunk, and he doesn’t walk so straight, but he makes it the whole long length without crashing again. Points to him. He pulls the first DVD he can properly read off the shelf and hands it to Brienne where she is trailing behind him, and is satisfied to see her brighten a little. 

“Oh good, I haven’t seen the third one yet!” She cracks open the box and starts poking at his entertainment system and he lets her sort it out while he settles down in the recliner. He wants to sit next to her on the couch but he has a feeling he is going to feel like fresh hell before the film is over and the chances of a cuddle under these circumstances are approximately zero.

He barely notices the credits. He’s seen this one before anyway. The first two were better. But it feels better with the lights out, and he won’t have to keep up conversation. He lets Brienne enjoy the movie. He sinks down lower and lower in the chair and as the minutes slip by he’s starting to be dizzy, and his throat is getting tighter and tighter with the knowledge of how badly he has fucked up.

Arthur made it sound not so bad. Like it isn’t a big deal. But it is for him. He hasn’t gone so long without a drink since he was, what, fourteen? He didn’t know he could go without. Six months sober. He was sleeping better, he had more energy, he started running again. And then this. Maybe he can’t cut it. One dinner with his father and he’s a disaster again.

Ugh. The flicking light of the screen makes everything look blurry and unreal. The room is starting to sway like a ship’s deck and he’s beginning to be seasick. 

Brienne seems pretty engrossed in the movie. If he keeps looking at her it helps the room not to be spinning. But it also kind of makes him want to cry. Embarassingly so. 

Six months. A few days ago he had half a year left until he hit the year mark. 

Arthur told him in no uncertain terms not to start a new relationship in your first year of sobriety. 

For six months he’s had phone calls and texts only, and just a couple face to face meetings, and it had been enough. He could live on that for a little while. But now he has to start it all over again and it’s going to be an entire year before he can ask Brienne to be his girlfriend. Six months of no drinking had been a Herculean task and now it has to be a whole year again. And if he slips up again, even longer than that. 

What if he can’t do this sobriety thing? Could he go back to managed-drinking, the way he had been before? He pulled that off for a long time. He could go back to that, maybe, but he couldn’t be with Brienne that way. He had wanted to be better for her. He has to keep trying. And so what if he doesn't wait a year? It's not a law, he doesn't have to wait. 

He just wants to do it right this time. If it would hurt his chances with her, make it more likely that he'll ruin everything, he will wait instead. It's bad enough all of the other baggage he has, that he should add "struggling to stay sober" on top of it. It's too much. He should get his head together first. 

A whole year.

She could meet someone else in a year. She could get that surgery she was talking about, go out and get a better job, make friends, start dating. She won’t want to stay in and play stupid games with him when she can have a real life. She's going to realize she can do a lot better than him. He’s going to lose her. 

“Excuse me,” he mumbles, and pushes out of his chair before his watery eyes become too visible. Rushes into the bathroom and sits on the toilet with his head in his hands. 

Brienne is knocking on the door. “Are you all right?”

No.

“Yes,” he calls out. Then he has to get off the toilet seat and yank it upwards so he can start vomiting.