#they go on death-defying missions to rescue rare books or something

[mvshortcut]

Crack mbs spinoff where Mr. Oshiro and Ms. Perumal's mother are vigilantes together

[sapphires-and-gold-fics]

“He’s not my friend.”

Let me start by saying this: When we meet him, Show!Jaime has no friends. There’s no evidence that he’s ever had any friends. And, when we meet her, Show!Brienne also has no friends - these are two incredibly solitary people. Brienne is more self-sufficient. And Jaime winds up learning a lot of self-sufficiency from her. But neither of them are social creatures. 

When Jaime and Brienne were taken by Locke, captor and captive silently allied - he stopped her rape and lost his hand for it, she in turn kept him alive and attempted to defend him when Locke’s men were kicking him into the mud. You can see him chipping away at her, but neither of them knows how to have friends, so even when it seems to be building to friendship, neither would see it that way. They only see it as subject to their circumstances. Or, to coin a phrase:

It wasn’t about loyalty it was about survival. 

Between them, Jaime has always been the one to take the first step. In the baths he calls a truce. Tells her that he trusts her. Divulges a secret that no one else in the world knows, and it’s as if he’s finally cut through that thick armor of hers - we see it begin to dissolve - but when he falls and she catches him she still shouts for help calling him the Kingslayer. Because they may have each other’s trust now, but they’re still not friends - desperate as Jaime seems to be for one. She still sees him as a means to an end. Jaime being alive means there’s a chance to save the Stark girls. 

When, at lunch with Roose Bolton, she reaches over and stabs the meat so he can cut it, it’s not friendship for her, it’s a mix of pity and annoyance. But Jaime’s never had anyone do something like that for him. Bolton sees them evolving right before his eyes, and we the audience identify it as a mutual friendship but these two idiots have no concept of what that means!

When Jaime reaches over and stops her from raising the knife, he’s returning her gesture in a way. When Bolton says he’ll allow Jaime to leave and Jaime tries to toast with Brienne over their impending departure, there’s a camaradarie there that Jaime is embracing even though Brienne is four steps behind him. But when Bolton pulls the rug from under them and says Brienne won’t be going... well that’s when things start to peek around a corner for these two.

Until that moment, Brienne assumes that Jaime still sees her as as much of a burden as she had seen him - as another fetter to be rid of - that his gestures are empty. Even if Jaime is of a mind to fulfill his oath to Catelyn, he doesn’t need Brienne to carry that out. Brienne isn’t the lynchpin, he is. She needs him to get back to King’s Landing in order for the girls to be safe, but she’s expendable. But here she finds the truth is that, while he doesn’t need her, he wants her as his ally and comrade and, yes, friend. 

She’s realizing that she may be expendable to the mission, but she is less expendable to him.

Watch her. When Bolton calls her out for treason, she’s upset - it’s about her mission. When Jaime says he insists that she come with, she’s startled; she’s never heard him speak of her as if he has a personal stake in her well-being.

She’s realizing in that moment that the layout of their relationship has begun to shift beneath her - it’s now something that neither would have dreamt of. Their final meeting before his departure is a perfect snapshot of that. He regrets that he cannot take her, his former captor, with him - that he’s leaving her behind with his torturer, a man who had expressed a wish to harm her. She knows that he needs to get to King’s Landing, that’s it’s the only way for the oath to be fulfilled. But now she also knows what he is, and that he wants to do right by her - and she uses that to forward her mission; because Brienne hasn’t yet learned to put her own good into the equation. And as we’ve discussed, she’s already gotten pretty good at accepting the prospect of her own death.

When Jaime rides out of Harrenhal, Locke taunts him and suggests that they’ll “take good care” of Brienne, calling her his “friend.” Jaime considers a retort, but it doesn’t leave his mouth. No point in denying someone’s friendship when you don’t have a better word for what it is you have, and no point in claiming it when you’re leaving them behind. From the book-reader’s perspective, “friend” is just about the closest thing we’re going to get to Brienne being known as the Kingslayer’s whore; Jaime not denying it is therefore layered in subtext. This the second instance of someone seeing them more for what they are (though not on the mark) and not for what they themselves have perceived of their relationship. 

I could sit here and wax rhapsodic about Jaime defying Steelshanks and leading the charge back to Harrenhal and running as fast as he could in his weakened state to recover her, but I won’t. We already know what that is - not since Aerys, and not until Brienne, would Jaime have ever done something like that for someone so wholly unrelated to him. Call it guilt, call it honor, I call it friendship. I call it love. It’s a small beginning, but Jaime was always the first to leap. 

When he jumps into the pit and puts himself between her and the bear, he has no plan. There is no motivation there save for saving her. His goal is not to earn glory or even pay the debt he owes, it’s to see her live. This is obvious from the moment he pulls her, knocked down and injured, behind him so that he is confronting the bear, to when he boosts her out of the pit leaving himself - with one hand and no weapon - behind. He trusts himself to get her out with no evidence whatsoever that he will succeed, and he trusts her to get him out - if only because of her vow, though I think he flatters himself believing that she might actually prefer him to be alive, even without the vow. But he knows that, like MANY things in his life, that feeling could be one-sided, and he dives in anyway because he cares for her and does prefer she stay alive.

Once they’re out and Locke confronts them, Brienne stands behind Jaime, knowing - understanding - now that Jaime isn’t about to let Locke take her from him. She also knows that Jaime could not have returned and made the same show of WHATEVER THIS IS if Bolton hadn’t also left. (Though, our knowing Jaime, he might have tried.) The bear fight aside, this moment is an emotional continuation of the Bolton lunch - before she was surprised by his insistence, now she’s realizing that she can rely on it and can stand proud behind this man who has inserted himself as her friend. If Locke and his men had attacked, she was prepared to fight for their lives at Jaime’s back. Suddenly, mayyyyybe, the friendship is a little less one-sided. 

By the time they get back to King’s Landing, their friendship has grown on both ends. We’ve missed so much by not getting to see them at all between Harrenhal and King’s Landing, and yet when they arrive, she’s dressed as suits her rather than still in the pink abomination, and when he’s pushed out of the way by the merchant at the gates, she shows him empathy. 

That tiny little scene - and that tiny little gesture in her expression speaks volumes about the difference between these two people, now vs. their former selves, ESPECIALLY when it becomes a companion piece to Cersei’s response to Jaime’s arrival: that selfish wind-taken-out-of-her look she gives him when she sees his arm - pity - the kind of look that Brienne would never abuse him with. 

The next time we see Jaime & Brienne together is one of my favorite microcosm micromoments - when she peers at him with that sardonic glare:

“Look me in the eye and tell me that you think she’ll be safe in King’s Landing.”

These two are a WORLD away from when he left her behind at Harrenhal and a UNIVERSE away from where they began, and it’s all in the subtleties. Because to an outsider - perhaps to everyone except Cersei - they are the same as they ever were - the cow and the Kingslayer. But in these close quarters they are new - they are Brienne and Jaime.

And I hate it because we don’t earn that friendship. We don’t see it growing, we only see the turning point and the end result. We didn’t get to see him forcing Steelshanks to buy her appropriate clothes on the road to King’s Landing (but you know he had to have) nor gifting the blue and tan Tarth-emblazoned clothes she wears once in King’s Landing; we didn’t get to see them huddling together armorless and wounded in the night on the road to King’s Landing while Qyburn tended to them. We only see the before and after. We don’t earn Cersei’s assessment of Brienne’s feelings, but we know it to be true only because we see the truth of it hit Brienne in the face.

And then comes the escape from King’s Landing, which I shan’t bore you with a second time - but it is the moment that solidifies for us what these two people have come to mean to each other, and how forcibly both of them are pushing down the stomach-flipping regard (it’s love) that they both have for one another. And now he’s sending her away. She used to see him as a means to an end, and now she thinks he’s doing the same to her. Brienne goes into the wilderness believing that the one person she’s ever let in anywhere near her heart is dismissing her. She does not comprehend what he’s risking for her, and therefore questions the strength of his regard, while he has literally given her his heart and is struggling not to follow it. She honest to god believes that their feelings for each other are too dissimilar to be mutual, while he’s over here knowing that their feelings for each other are too similar to be sustainable in the world they currently live in.

Those feelings are reintroduced the next time we see them together, two long years later at Riverrun. As far as we know, Jaime has had rare occasion to call her to his mind - almost exclusively when he’s rushing off to do something he sees as honorable like rescue his brother or retrieve his daughter. Brienne has had occasion to call him to her mind daily whenever she dons her studded jerkin and armor, whenever she buckles her lion and sunburst sword belt across her hips, whenever she wields the sword he gave her and which she named for him. And despite their (to our knowledge) dissimilar strengths of regard, they fall right back into their old routines - he says something nice, she blushes; he’s sarcastic with her, she slips into defense mode; they bicker - like friends do. But a deeper affection boils beneath the surface. And seeing her again reinvigorates Jaime, only to see him crushed almost immediately when she goes to leave. 

When they part, they both know that their next meeting could very well be fatal. Jaime gives her the time he promised, and then he acts - not to lay siege to the castle, not to claim it for the Freys, and not to save his own men, but for Brienne he fulfills an unspoken promise to take the castle without bloodshed. He does what he’s already proven himself capable of - what he needs to in order for her, his one friend, the one person he truly trusts, the only person he has ever loved without coercion, to live

Because he knows that when it comes down to it, she will put the mission first, and possibly die for it.

I’ve beaten around the bush enough, let’s talk about Brienne and the Blackfish.

Brienne crosses the siege line and enters the castle - without seeing her, the Blackfish would have formed an opinion of her relationship with the Lannister army. Then he sees her and the lion pommel and the lion and sunburst sword belt, and his opinion is translated to assessment - in his mind there is only one reason that she would be carrying Lannister gold. He calls Jaime her friend. This is a callback to Locke and Jaime at Harrenhal. Again - calling Brienne Jaime’s friend at Harrenhal was the closest we ever got to her being referred to as the Kingslayer’s whore. In the show universe, that’s the implication, and THAT is what Brienne is balking against.

“He’s not my friend” is not disloyalty, it’s not disownership, it’s not ambivalence or apathy. “He’s not my friend” is actually an embrace of their mutual regard - acknowledging that yes she vouches for him, but she did not come by the sword through sordid means, the Lannisters hold nothing over her (Jaime wouldn’t have it any other way), and he respects her free agency. As she told Cersei, she does not serve Jaime - she does love him, she does vouch for him, and she would fight beside him for the greater good, regardless of sworn loyalty and houses and oaths. Because their regard for one another is not born out of sexual favor or blackmail or underhanded political maneuvering, it has developed from shared experiences, sacrifice and love. They are two people who care for one another privately, and who do not require nor deserve the labels of others.

“He’s not my friend” is a veritable banner of #BraimeRights.

And that’s the tea.

[sophieswundergarten]

#they go on death-defying missions to rescue rare books or something#Mrs. Perumal does three backflips in a row to dodge gunfire and then goes 'oh dear... this damp weather makes my poor knees ache a bit...#on the weekends Ms. Perumal joins them when she's not tutoring Reynie#they have a mysterious pair of rivals clad in yellow and pink always trying to swipe the same rare books they're after#but that's never addressed or followed up upon

@mvshortcut Get peer reviewed!!!

Crack mbs spinoff where Mr. Oshiro and Ms. Perumal's mother are vigilantes together