Chapter Text
They’re drawn to it. This shell of a castle calls across leagues to them like the howl of a pack member lost in the night.
Sansa comes back first. Her broken brother, who sees time out of order and doesn’t hardly remind her of the little boy that once was her favorite sibling, beside her, carried over still frozen tundra by the strongest man Sansa could muster for the job. No coin left and loyalties scattered by the collapse of their system of law and fealty, all she can promise him in payment is a place in her household, whatever shape that might take.
Jon trusted him. That was assurance enough for the once Lady of Winterfell.
She asked her scarred, battle worn, and deeply mourning brother to join them. “Whoever your father, it’s as much yours as it is ours. Come home with us.”
He didn’t lift his gaze to answer. “Tormund will keep you safe.”
When he bid them goodbye, it felt like for forever.
…
Perhaps it is Arya that brings him back, overcoming his reluctance through her sheer force of will. It is equally possible that he can’t help himself any more than Sansa could. But when they pass through the broken gate, Arya dragging a sack of turnips behind her over the snow and the two of them with swords strapped to their backs, Sansa’s heart climbs in her throat. It almost feels like hope.
He doesn’t talk much. Neither does her sister. They’re as much a pair of ghosts as the ones that stalk the crumbling halls of their ancestral home. But they’re here: with everyone else gone to the ground, these wolves have survived long enough for the coming of spring.
You wouldn’t know winter was fading, when he finds her alone, sitting atop a half wall, staring out over the empty vastness of the North. Jon and Arya say the South is thawing. Life coming back with a determined flush of melting water and softening ground that will eventually reach their doorstep.
It’s still cold enough here that she should be wearing her gloves along with her furs and heavy woolen gown. She disposed of them to feel the stones. They’re jagged in places, cracked by the explosive interaction of ice and fire. Just as she and her siblings were shattered by the ravages of war. She runs her hands over them, fingers questing. There is comfort in feeling as if the bones of this broken place are in concert with her soul. Both relics of another time.
What she was trained for is not worth anything in the new world that replaces the old. What Winterfell was built to be and do is just as useless. They deserve each other.
He pushes up on the wall beside her and sits, breath fogging the air. A subtle shift and his pale hand covers hers. His touch is surprisingly warm. Jon bothers less about the cold than any of them. A true Northerner. She always maintained that, she hopes he remembers.
She can hear his swallow in the silence that blankets them. “I missed this.”
The North. Their home. Her company.
Sansa is sure he means all of that. It’s strange this companionship they share–that they’ve shared since their reunion at the Wall but not before. She is as grateful for it now as she was then, met with familial affection after so much horror. Maybe more so now with no wars to fight, nothing to reclaim, no one to save. This thing, these connections are all she has left.
If she provides him some comfort, then perchance she is not so useless after all.
She turns her palm up, threading their fingers together, an answer to his confession.
…
Words spoken are the intimacy they share, made all the greater for Jon’s natural reticence and hers learned. Things she balks at saying to her sister and knows better than to divulge to Bran in all his cool detachment, she tells Jon. His is an ear without judgment. She aims to be the same for him.
And yet, there are things she hopes he will never speak of to her. No, not things: people.
Her coolness after his first attempt to share his personal burden must be lesson enough. For though she apologized on the morrow for refusing to listen, it was not her best show of regret, perfectly hollow in its falseness. That oily feeling in her belly would not let her spin a convincing picture of contriteness for Jon, for fear that he would open up again and pick at the scab over her heart she didn’t realize was there. Until he spoke that name before the hearth with his head canted down.
Daenerys.
Sansa keeps Jon’s confidences locked in her chest, a safe repository for whatever he chooses to share with her. But she pours this particular poison into her sister’s breast, so that in not feeling it alone, she need not plumb the depth or cause of her discomfort upon his profession of love and loss.
Arya thinks of Jon as hers. Sansa reveals to her Jon’s thick-voiced sorrow at the loss of the Dragon Queen, hardly lessened by the passage of time, knowing her clannish little sister will scoff, knowing there will be an ample show of the jealousy Sansa hides behind tight smiles and folded hands.
What Arya wants is for them to be together forever. For things to be as they were when they were children as much as is possible in their altered world.
What Sansa wants is unspeakable.
…
Until he ventures to speak.
“You ought to marry.”
Her step stutters over a frozen row in a field Jon swears they’ll be able to plant in a few moon’s turn. This was to be an inexpert inspection of the land’s potential, not hers.
With a jerk, he grabs her arm to steady her. Thumb pressing into the soft give of her upper arm, it’s the sort of purposeful grip that would turn her blood to ice with any other man. There is no fear with Jon, however; not of that sort.
Nostrils flared at his unexpected assertion, she says nothing, save for nodding to indicate she’s found her footing again. He turns her loose and they continue at a slower pace with her heart skipping against her ribs.
“Have you not considered it?”
“Marriage?” she is forced to respond, her voice sounding thin and high.
“For the hope of an heir.”
“An heir to what?” she asks, and the validity of her question given their altered circumstances leaves him silenced for a space.
“For the pleasure of children then. You’d be a fine mother.”
Her lips part as she dares to turn her gaze on him. He wears that awkward, flat smile of his, when he meets her eye. “I had thought perhaps to find you wed to Tormund.”
Her brows lift. “Do you jest?”
“He would be a good husband.”
“He speaks of fucking bears.”
Jon’s laugh is real. It’s loud in the quiet of the fallow, long abandoned field, and it brings a soft smile to her face, as her chest swells with the joy of that sound. There is some mirth left, some joy to be found even in the absurd.
He looks at her and then away, eyes wrinkling at the corners before staring into the middle distance.
“Have you ever wondered if he means Maege Mormont with that bear business?” Sansa asks.
“The thought has crossed my mind.”
“The Mormont women were never fools.”
“No, aye, they weren’t.”
“He’s not a man I would care to wed, but I am as fond of him as you are. With good reason.”
Jon sniffs and pauses, boots crunching the hoarfrost as he stops. Sansa hesitates, waiting for some uninformed assessment of the ground beneath their feet, which he stares at with increasing intensity evinced by his gritted jawline.
He stamps his boot once and tilts his head to the left. “I was relieved though. That you weren’t married to Tormund. Not him specifically. Any man.”
She crosses her hands together over her middle and breathes the chill in through her nose. If she wasn’t already very awake, this would do the trick quite neatly. It does help sharpen her thoughts, which are otherwise scattered with panic.
“Why is that?”
“I thought you and I might try–”
“Yes?”
“I think we’d have a chance at happiness.”
“Do you?” She presses her lips together, wishing he would look up, so she could read something in his eyes, something more than what he gives voice to. But he doesn’t, so, she tests him with one of her private thoughts of self-accusation, prodding him. “Would that not make us Lannisters?”
If she wanted to be cruel, she would name his paternal family’s house with its tradition of marrying brother to sister. But she has no desire to cause him further pain.
“It’s awkward. I am… forever finding myself in awkward situations.”
Sansa’s mouth twitches. Daenerys was his aunt–awkward, but perhaps not as awkward as their match would be with the ties of kinship in childhood already in place.
“You hate the idea then?” he asks, and Sansa reaches out to draw her hand down the length of his arm, stopping just short of taking his hand in hers.
The knuckle of her curved finger grazes the tendons in his hand before she draws it back against the waist of her gown. “I don’t discount that we might be content, but Arya wouldn’t like it.”
“No,” he agrees with scuff of his boot over the ground and another stomp. “And Bran?”
Sansa shrugs. There’s never any telling how Bran will react. He’s as like to say nothing as he is something dreadful.
Their siblings aren’t the insurmountable problem, however. “And you haven’t really moved on.”
He would look up at her if he had. He would look her boldly in the face with that softness she knows he still has in him, but there is someone between them–a dead woman.
He gives the smallest shake of his head.
“Then we’ll speak on it again, when you have, Jon.”