“Goodbye, Ser Jaime,” she says, but he has not the heart to leave.
“I’ve left something behind,” he vaguely reasons, but it’s more than something, something that pricks, sometimes aches, something that goes so deep that he’s emptied of all but thoughts of her.
“I dreamed of you,” he says, just one gaze into those astonishing eyes pushing away the nastiness that twirls within him. Would such insults ever touch his lips again? Would they even dare enter his mind again?
“You could be a Lannister, too,” he barks, not to taunt her, not to ridicule, but because he’s irked by the power she has on him. An outburst, it is, but masked beneath his frustration, is there a secret wish he harbours?
“I hope I got your measurements right,” he murmurs, his mind wandering off to another day, another age, a bath where more than truths were uncovered. Is he blushing at the tender flash of pink on her cheeks?
“Goodbye, Brienne,” it is now his turn to say. She blinks, not once, but twice, and maybe another time after that, but not before searching his soul with a softness that rips out his heart.
She walks away without another word, walks out of his life.
When she starts to ride away, there’s the same feeling again—something’s leaving him behind, this time, to be gone for good, lost, forever, and never to be sought again.
Just look at me one last time, he sighs, hoping for his unsaid words to sail the few feet between them to make it to her, pleading with any force that would listen to grant him this wish.
And when she turns, when she ties him to her enchanting gaze, he knows.
His sword, she carries, and along with it, his heart.
