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She sees him again for the first time in years across a field of corpses and melting snow, ice turning to steam beneath the feet of dragons, the Wall cracked and weeping at their backs.
The Queen makes her way towards him, treading over pools of bloody slush, and Arya trails a step behind, steel in hand, trying to remember who she is now – one of the Queensguard, sworn sword of Daenerys Stormborn – while it falls away from her with every step like the melting ice, leaving the dripping core of Arya Stark laid bare. Faintly, she hears her Queen addressing him, calling him first Lord Commander and then my nephew, but all she sees is Jon Snow; a man who, it turns out, was never her brother, but has always been her heart.
He bows to Daenerys, but it's Arya his eyes catch on, Arya he smiles for in the midst of death and loss, victory and triumph, and she grips her sword tighter, remembering when his smile was the only thing in the world she'd wanted to see.
***
When they travel back south, returning to King's Landing and the Queen's throne, he comes with them. She doesn't question it, tells herself it's for the sake of Daenerys, for the sake of the realm, for any reason other than her, because as much as she's wanted to find him for all this time, now that she has, she doesn't know what to do with it. He doesn't seem so different, at least not from the distance she's kept from him – older, of course, and a little harder and more confident with it, maybe, but still her Jon, all in all – but she doubts there's much left of the girl he knew in the woman she's become. She could see it in his face, once the initial shock and pleasure of recognition had faded, could see she wasn't at all what he'd expected. She's avoided him since, sticking close to the Queen's side; still, all too often he's nearby as well, and Arya is always conscious of his eyes following her, of his many attempts to catch her eye, to speak with her alone.
Daenerys watches them closely, with a speculative gleam in her eye, and when Arya finds herself told, kindly but very firmly, that she must take a night off duty and seek out her own tent, she feels somehow betrayed, well aware before she pulls up the flap that he'll be waiting for her.
When he begins speaking, she's desperate not to hear it, desperate to keep him quiet, and a ridiculous fragment from long ago comes into her head, a memory hardly worth recalling: Sansa and Jeyne Poole, watching the boys down in the training yard, giggling and talking of who they'd best like to kiss.
“I'd pick Jon,” Arya had said, too young then to understand why that made Jeyne laugh all the harder, why Sansa looked like she thought her sister even more of an idiot than usual.
“You can't kiss Jon, silly,” Sansa had explained, secure in the vast knowledge of her nine whole years. “He's our half brother. Only the Targaryens did that sort of thing.”
Well, Arya thinks, standing in a tent miles south of Winterfell nearly a decade later, watching Jon's lips move without paying mind to his words, he isn't my brother now, is he.
As her mouth meets his, cutting off both the flow of words and the past, Arya wonders obscurely what Sansa would say if she could see them now, but then, she doesn't really care. She's never cared, and she's not likely to start now, because as unlikely as it would seem, Jon's kissing her in return.
When she turns them over later in her mind, the memories seem giddy, unreal; the way he made quicker work of removing her armor than any squire she'd ever known, the smell of leather on his skin and the sharp cold smell of ice below it, like he carried some part of the Wall, of the North inside him still.
His fingers were hot on her skin though, the calluses on his hands rough against the soft skin of her breasts, and his mouth was hot too, pressed against her neck as he slid his fingers down her body, between her legs to where her own heat was building.
She remembers, clear and vivid, the moment he entered her, so agonizingly slowly she'd have surged up to meet him, if not for the way he'd kept his eyes on hers the entire time, never blinking until his hips rocked up against hers and he buried his face in her hair for a long moment, whispering, “Gods, Arya,” into her ear.
She remembers too the way it had felt to have him inside her, the way she'd been able to stop thinking and simply feel, and ride that feeling all the way through the moment when the world went white behind her eyelids.
She doesn't remember him leaving, but now, in the light of the next morning as the day's ride begins (a little more uncomfortably for Arya's part than it had been the day before), the way he's looking at her suggests that he'll be coming back, as often as she allows it.
If anyone notices, they keep their silence, and Arya thinks they are both good at keeping secrets; they always have been, by choice and necessity.
At times she sees Jon's eyes watching her and wondering, and thinks she can never be good enough to keep secrets from him, because he's always known her too well.
“What happened to you?” he asks her sometimes, his hands carded through her hair, tangling it around his fingers.
There's always a part of her that wonders if he'd still love her if he knew what she'd done, how many people she'd killed without remorse, how hard she'd struggled to forget her family, to forget him. So she doesn't tell him, using her hands and her mouth instead to make him forget, wrapping one or the other around his cock until his mouth forgets how to form words.
He doesn't always forget though; tonight, after they're finished, after he's spent himself inside her and brought her off with his tongue (so much better applied to her cunt, Arya thinks, rather than occupied in questioning her past), he comes back to it, his voice soft and sad.
“We used to share everything, once.”
In the darkness, she runs her fingers down his chest, pressing them into the scars he won't talk about, the ones she's had to find the story of from other people, the ones that speak of betrayal and death and knives in the dark.
“That was a long time ago,” she says, “when we were other people. The things we share are different now.”
She knows it disturbs him, how she can divorce her mind from her body so well as to say things like that at all the wrong times, knows it from the way his ragged breathing catches, from the restraint she hears in his voice when he asks, “What?”
“The Queen,” she says. “Daenerys. I was an assassin, and I was supposed to kill her. That's what happened to me.” She's never told this to anyone; it could mean her death even now if the wrong people heard of it. She's simply choosing to trust, to put the miniscule amount of faith that remains to her in Jon and hope he understands, as he always used to, why she's confiding in him.
He's silent beside her for a long moment, and she wishes they had it back, that gift they'd shared back in Winterfell of knowing what the other was thinking without needing to be told. She truly can't predict what he'll do now, how much remains of the boy she once knew in the man next to her.
“What stopped you?” he asks finally, and she'd expected why, maybe, or how could you, or even who have you become, but never that, never a question that implies the why and how of it don't matter, that his trust in her is still solid enough that he doesn't need to hear her motives. She hadn't had enough faith left to hope for that.
“She smiled,” Arya says simply, remembering how she'd trailed Daenerys like a harmless shadow, watching and waiting and blending in, until that moment. “She smiled, and something about the way she did reminded me of you. And I forgot who I was supposed to be and remembered who I was, all at once.”
He doesn't say another word, only pulls her to him and holds her close, and she lets herself melt against him, just a bit, just enough to show him that for the first time in years, she feels safe.
She stifles a yawn as Jon comes up behind her; she can't turn to look, being on duty, but she knows it's him all the same, knows his scent and the way he moves as well as she knows her own body, feels every treacherous nerve in it respond to his approach, trying to make her betray her composure.
“Tired, my lady?” he asks, and she can just hear the self-satisfied smirk lurking below his words; he's just controlled enough now to not show it, but he still knows perfectly well that she'll hear it.
“It's unwise to taunt a member of the Queensguard,” she hisses without turning her head. Fortunately, the clatter of arriving horses serves to cover her words, and in the ensuing activity, no one much notices if she hangs back a step, captured by Jon's hand at her wrist, by his mouth, warm against the curve of her ear.
“I've just had a thought,” he whispers, as Arya catches the glint of red hair above the crowd, and knows her sister has arrived at last. “It would probably be best if we-”
“-don't tell Sansa,” she finishes along with him, and turns just enough to see him smile. For that moment, the world balances, and everything is just right.