m_findlow

Title: Friends and allies
Fandom: Game of Thrones
Author: m_findlow
Rating: M (language). Spoilers for Seasons 3
Length: 1,000 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 62 - Transformation at fandomweekly
Summary: It takes a fall from grace to realise your true friends are not always the most powerful.

Bronn pinched his brow as he leaned an elbow on the table. 'You're doing it again.'

Jaime looked up from the bloody red depths of the wine in front of him. 'What?'

'Thumping that great worthless hunk of metal.' Bronn nodded down at his forearm.

Jaime spared a glance down at the end of his wrist where he'd been absently tapping it against the table. He barely felt the vibration traveling from the metal hand strapped to his arm. 'That hand is solid gold. I'd hardly call it worthless. Even a sellsword like you wouldn't turn their nose down at that.'

Bronn leaned forward over the table. 'And even a dumb cunt sellsword like me can tell you that thing is not solid gold. If it was, it'd be a dented bloody mess by now. Gold is soft. You can sink your teeth down into a dragon and know if it's real coin. I don't know how much Cersei loves you, but that thing is just steel dipped in that stuff your daddy shits.'

'I spent years kissing that arse, now you're telling me my hand is covered in it?'

'She'd have been better off giving you a whore to sort you out. You can't rub your cock with that thing.' He chuckled. 'You can't even wipe your arse with it. Or can you?'

Jaime stared at the golden hand replacing the one Amory Locke had removed. This is what he got for trying to worry about someone other than himself. He should have just let Locke's men fuck that ugly woman. Brienne was nothing to him. That's what he tried to tell himself. He didn't do selflessness. No one was worth losing a hand over.

That he'd stopped feeling the ghost pains from the fingers that were no longer there disturbed him. For weeks he'd stared at the ragged bandages as they seeped blood and smelled foul, imagining his hand was trying to grow itself back. How else to explain he could still feel his fingertips afire with agony, trying to flex the pain out of them only to discover he couldn't. There'd been days atop his saddle as they marched the long, slow ride to Harrenhall that he almost begged for them to cut it off, such was the pain. Only there was nothing to cut. It was already gone and all that remained was a hideous stump, brutally stitched up and steeped in wine he'd rather have drunk until he was unconscious than had wasted trying to cleanse the wound.

Suddenly angry at his situation, he tugged at the leather straps that were holding his new prosthetic in place. He left hand struggled to loosen the buckles, his thick fingers not dexterous enough to undo them. Frustrated, he began slamming the thing on the table top until finally he wrenched it free.

'You'll be taking tips on how to fight from the Mountain at this rate,' Bronn observed, calmly sipping from his goblet. 'Do you have the maids do up your trousers in the morning for you as well? I hope you at least get them to give you a hand job before, or is your left hand okay to sort that out? Seven hells, you didn't let that woman knight pull up your pants, did you? Brienne of fucking Tarth tending you like a Silent Sister! Now that would be a fucking embarrassment.'

'All she did was cut my meat,' Jaime replied, and even that irked him. He could hardly have held down the haunch of meat with his stump and attempted to carve it with his left hand.

'Carved your meat for you, eh? Closest she'll ever get to a bloke's cock.'

On another day, in another time, Jaime would have cut the throat of someone as offensive as Bronn was being now, yet he couldn't find it in himself to be enraged. He'd once been something, a Lannister, the head of the Kingsguard. But he'd also been the Kingslayer, the traitor, the man who fucked his own sister but looked down his nose at the Targaryens who'd done the same for centuries, and the man captured by that boy king Robb Stark and dragged southward in a wooden cage like a beast. All of that before he'd fallen even further, losing his hand, losing his position as the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.

He still had his name, for what it was worth, and a claim to his family stronghold at Casterly Rock, but it felt hollow and worthless. Even Cersei reviled him now. The hand was a gift only to spare her from being constantly reminded of how he was no longer a man. If he couldn't loosen a buckle, how would he ever wield a sword again? He couldn't ask Brienne to follow him around for the rest of his life, tending to him like an invalid.

Bronn set a foot up on the table and leaned back in his chair. 'Are you going to sit there all day feeling sorry for yourself?'

'Tell me what else I should do?' A one-armed man with no family needs all the help he can get. Isn't that what his father had said to him before being disowned?

Bronn nodded at the sword that lay upright in its sheath against the wall. It was a terribly ironic gift from Jaime's father, having Ned Stark's valyrian steel sword smelted down and fashioned into two, one for him and one for Joffrey. 'You've got a fancy fucking sword. You'd better learn how to use it, unless of course you plan spending the rest of your life prancing around like that git nephew of yours.'

Son, Jaime felt like saying. Joffrey was his, for what little it meant. He hadn't even been a good uncle to the boy.

Bronn grinned over his wine. 'Maybe Brienne could help you get your sword up.'

Jaime grimaced. He'd rather die than admit Brienne was the only person he'd accept help from.