Chapter Text
It was a day so cold that the oldest men on the Wall were muttering grimly to each other, faces stung with snow whipped to biting fierceness by the wind, each of them trying to recall the last year they’d known such a day. The gears and ropes of the lift creaked louder and longer today, turned slower. Men stood with hoods pulled tight down over their heads, stomping their feet to keep the blood moving, fingers and toes numbing quickly.
Brother Jensen was standing that day at the lookout closest to the lift, wondering why anyone in the Seven’s green world would choose a spell of weather like this to come and visit the Wall. But the morning watch had been told to expect a visitor, to be on best behaviour, keep the chit-chat down, brothers, not even any hot cider carried up to warm themselves a bit, and consequently everyone was more on edge than usual.
It was therefore a relief when the lift starting creaking and the bell rang twice to announce the advent of their guest. When it crawled to a stop at the top of the wall and the door swung open Brother Karl stepped out, a youngish recruit, beautiful to look at and a born diplomat and so by a sort of unspoken consensus the guide for visitors to the Wall. He was followed by a man who had to stoop a little to fit through the door of the lift. Every watch-brother within eyesight would afterwards swear that as the visitor stepped out the sting of blown snow had fallen away, almost as if some giant fist had cut off it off at the source, as if perhaps some thaw had touched the very heart of the storm.
He was impossibly tall, a full head taller than any man on the wall, framed by a dark blue cloak that swung heavily from wide shoulders. He was wearing a leather cuirass fitted snug against his torso and a throw of fur across his shoulders, over the cloak. His hips were circled round with leather belts, weapons secured by straps and buckles, the weight of them giving his steps a swinging cadence. He had muscle to match his height and a body hardened and thickened by war but he moved like a son of the Seven, massive size worn lightly, movements lithe and quick. His hair was long to his shoulders, shaven close over one side of his head and pulled back into a cord, and his face was a study in beautiful lines cut from bone and flesh: strong, square-cut jaw, brow prominent over storm-sky eyes, lips set now together but suggesting dimpled warmth. When he raised his head and looked out to the north he flexed his jaw, nostrils flaring slightly, and Jensen felt the roots of his bones turn to water and ice.
His name was Jared Torstayne, and twenty years before he’d put his mark on Jensen’s soul and left him raw and ruined.
Jensen was 21 then, third son to a minor lord in the north-western lowlands, and from the time he’d known to think of such things he’d known himself likely to take the Black. It had been so natural a thing that he’d not thought to mourn or question it much. He had uncles in the Night’s Watch, a cousin too, and while he found the sisters of his friends pleasant enough the absence of female company seemed to him no immeasurable loss. The Watch it was likely to be, and in truth it appealed immensely to a certain part of him – the pure focus of its vow, readiness to protect the helpless by fighting monsters in the dark and cold.
It was the summer before he was meant to take the Black that his father sent him for a fostering of three months in the household of their oath-lord, Sormand Torstayne.
Jared Torstayne was 18 that summer, not yet quite grown out into his gangly limbs but slim and beautiful nonetheless. He was his father’s only son and heir and much beloved by all the people, unusually tall and possessed even at such a young age with the vital warmth and glowing charisma of a man in the prime of his life. Already, back then, Jared had fought at his father’s side against Wildling incursions and spent a year at King’s Landing to learn the ways of the court and the various languages of the realms. The first time Jensen saw him was the morning after his arrival, when he’d come down the stairs into the wide north portico of the castle and met, coming from the other direction, two houndsmen and Jared with them, just come in from a three-day hunt, hair muddy and plastered to his face, working distractedly at the buckles at his waist and laughing with his companions. His head was tilted a little to the side, the broad planes of his cheekbones and jaw cracked into furrows with the force of his smile. He moved with an easy virility, thin hips counter-swaying against broad shoulders, and when Jensen saw him it felt to him like the cheer of good wine, candles in the dark, the tug of planets into orbit around some predestined sun.
The heat between them had been quick and engulfing. Their first kiss was that first night on the parapet of the castle, Sword of the Morning hanging in the sky; the day after they’d not been able to stop, both clumsy and unpracticed but wrecked with battering passion. Afterwards, once the dust had (not settled but) been damped down by time and the cold discipline of the Wall, Jensen could remember almost nothing else from that summer – only intimacies scrabbled hard against cold stone, desperate rutting in dark stables and long candlelit nights spent in naked obliteration – as if Jared’s total possession of him had somehow seeped through and enfolded memory itself.
And now –
‘Brother Jensen?’ Brother Karl was looking at him expectantly. ‘Lord Torstayne, this is Brother Jensen, captain of this morning’s watch. I’ll let him show you the defences and then the Lord Commander will be very pleased to see you in his rooms.’
Jensen was wearing the equivalent of several thick bedspreads – full kit for the top of the Wall, hose and woollen tunic, two capes and a long woollen scarf wrapped around his upper body – but when he stepped forward to greet Jared he felt as exposed as if he stood naked, flayed right open to the boy inside who used to shake with want for the hands of his lover.
It was as if Jared stepping out onto the wall had activated in a single instant some dormant sensory function – not so much a single emotion, surprise or passion or anger, but a thing that framed and filtered all the rest of the world. Jensen recognised it in a rush of feeling, half sickening half sweet: it was the sensation of the summer they’d spent together, the thing that still sometimes woke him in the night with tears on his face or bedcovers soaked and sticky.
He’d heard it said that smell was the strongest trigger, the one that brought the past most vividly to life, but Jensen knew this for a falsity, had known it every time he’d stood at sentry or lain awake in his cot and let himself mouth the word ‘Jared’ and felt the force of it pulling him inside out. Jared was a sense all to himself, another layer to the world.
It had been a summer of sleep deprivation and thus of dazed and inchoate memories, moments that flashed up like silver fish from the opalescent flow of the summer entire. They were flashes that he had kept and turned over in his mind for twenty years, that had sustained a life in the Black. The line of Jared’s profile against the sky when they’d fucked in the middle of a hayrick; the sounds he’d made in the middle of the night when Jensen had pinned him with his knees and a forearm and sucked him off in the dark; the exact distance between the mole on his cheek and the top of his upper lip. But to keep them Jensen had made a vicious trade, brutal and binding – he’d cut the memories off from the living, kept them like artefacts set in wax in a shadowbox of memory, divorced absolutely from the person he was now.
He’d done it the very day that Jared had told him, had ridden away and gone to the Wall, hadn’t even stopped at home first.
Jared told him in bed – actually bed, that time, in an unused bedroom high in the castle’s north wing. It had been so late it was early again, dark purple smudge along the night horizon and the fire sunk low in the hearth; but the boys had lit three stout candles and lay on the bed wrapped lazily around each other, long limbs cast in fire-glow and creeping shadow. Jensen was on his back, sprawled-out and loose, all eyelashes and cock-raw mouth those days, and he’d been staring across at Jared’s profile when Jared had rolled over on his front and said, almost off-hand, almost cheerfully, ‘So, I’m to be married next month, they’ve found a girl at last.’
He’d bent to bite at Jensen’s hip, the casual incessant intimacy of new lovers, and Jensen had flinched back as if he’d been burnt, had scrambled to his hands and knees and knelt there staring, still and paper-white. Jared looked up, face furrowed with concern, tried in a single swift movement to take Jensen’s lips and arms together, but Jensen startled back again, calves finding the edge of the bed. His feet hit the floor and he stood there, fists curled, thighs still streaked with Jared’s cum, half-dried and sticky.
‘Married?’ he’d said, voice soul-stricken, its usual husky softness harsh and jarring. Jared was kneeling up now on the bed, upset but face still open and unguarded, vulnerability softening the chisel-cut lines of his leonine good looks.
‘Jen,’ he said, tentatively, ‘it’s just - I mean, I’ve got to marry, I’m my father’s heir, only heir. I - there’s no choice, it’s just - it’s got to happen.’ He paused, but Jensen just kept looking at him. ‘I’ve met her, she’s nice, but -’
‘And you’re going to fuck her.’ Jensen had been shaking by then, had gripped a low-hanging crossbeam and held it so tight his fingers turned white.
Jensen had known this was coming, of course, had known it before he ever arrived. Jared had had one absolute purpose from the day he was born: to carry on the family bloodline. Of course he would have to marry. But the force of the feeling between them over the past weeks had made the idea seem vague and unreal and Jensen had easily blocked it out, had given his entire being over to this ephemeral golden hour, Jared become both end and beginning of his whole cognisance. But now Jared’s callous frankness had ripped the bandage away and his soul felt like an open wound.
Jared had looked at him with a combination of worry and exasperation.
‘Well yes, the point is to have a heir Jen. But it won’t be like - us - I want you to still stay here, stay with me, be with me Jen. I won’t enjoy - I mean, I’ll try to make sure that it’s alright for her-’ he paused again and went on with a crooked grin, gambling, hoping to break the tension. ‘I’ve been told, you know, after all, I’m quite good.’
It was the wrong move, or rather (with the retrospect of decades) Jensen wondered if there had been a right one. He left in savage and silent pain and not spoken to Jared again, nor about him, not till today.
—–
Jensen began the tour by going west along the wall, because that was the direction they always took guests first, and if anything was going to get him through the next minutes (hours? oh gods) it was pure muscle memory.
Jared had looked at him once, a cool, impassive, unreadable glance, not even a spark of recognition. Jensen had walked a little ahead of him along the wall to the first ice-demolition post, where Brother Aelas followed his nod and began to explain to Jared the methods and failsafes put in place. While they peered over the edge of the wall Jensen hung back a moment and let his eyes drag slow and tactile across Jared’s back. It hurt to do it – gods, it hurt, like someone pulling his guts out on the rack – but he was past the point of conscious decision, carried on the brute force of his longing and nothing else. That was how it had always been, for him, with Jared.
Jared was asking the guard something, rolling his shoulders as if to ease a kink in his neck, and Jensen went dry-mouthed and hollow in the pit of his stomach at the memory of those shoulders – shoving him up against a wall, taut and rippling between him and the sky, pressed back writhing against the bed the first time he rode Jared’s cock. He remembered the thick calves now clad in wool and leather when they had been slender and lithe and naked against his; he remembered the way that Jared’s hips stuttered and rolled not just when he came but as soon as he’d pushed inside Jensen, every time, just for a second, as if the feel of Jensen around his cock was a tiny consummation in itself. Jared’s hair was longer now and cut in its stylised half-shaven way but it was as thick and tousled as he remembered it; and looking now at the back of his head, hair wind-whipped by the cold wall-wind, Jensen’s fists tightened involuntarily at the memory of it in his hands, of tugging on it, lying on his back young and soft and love-drunk the first time Jared had ever gone down on him and sucked his cock.
He shifted, slipped a hand under his cloak to adjust. He was half-hard already, even with all his dazed willpower gone to controlling himself. Seven Hells.
‘Brother Jensen,’ Jared said, turning from the wall, and at the sound of his name in Jared’s mouth Jensen shuddered a little. ‘This is all most impressive. I’ve not been since I was a boy but the defences are as fine and sturdy as I remember them.’ He held Jensen’s eyes for a moment, impenetrable blue-gold. ‘I’m very sorry not to have seen it before now.’
He turned to continue along the wall and Jensen followed, his guts a roiling mix of desire and white-blinding rage – the kind of rage that smelts together in equal part ferocious grief and anger at both oneself and the other – but underneath he was mostly consumed by the pull of flesh for flesh, nerves panting for the burn of skin on skin.
Twenty years before he’d set his whole self towards a single challenge, one that had sapped the bulk of his energies all through the end of his adolescence and the peak of his manhood. It wasn’t the challenge of the Watch, of long nights and years spent along the Wall, cold and ice and stone and the sternness of his vows. That he’d taken easily, had found in it a certain solace from his real struggle: to unbind his soul and mind and to unshackle his body from the hold of Jared Torstayne. And now the man was here, undoing with the simple fact of his presence the hard-fought work of a lifetime.
The boy and Jared had paused up ahead.
‘Jensen?’ Jared said, and Jensen swore he said it with the same rich lilt he’d known that summer, would have sworn he did it on purpose, and fierce hatred spiked at his spine. But the timbre of Jared’s voice now, dark and husky and lordly, snaked its way straight to his dick, made him clench and shudder a little.
Seven gods.
‘Coming,’ he said.
—–
That night he waited till the last minute before going down to vespers. He’d spent the rest of the afternoon carefully, brutally, locking himself back down. He shaved with cold water, slowly, nicking himself once, but he rubbed his jaw in satisfaction when he was done. Not for Jared (certainly not). But part of him, a small part, still found a certain comfort in putting back on for a time the habits of his old life, like the scent of familiar clothes or a chair worn down with use. He thought he could use all the comfort he could get tonight.
He looked at himself in the warped glass when he had finished, the lines of his face cut more deeply than in his youth but just as fine: a little grey now at his temples, but brows still thick and sharply arched over glass-green eyes, and a mouth whose wanton fullness age had only tempered.
He wondered what Jared saw when he looked at him now.
He was nearly the last one in, just a couple of horse-boys behind him scurrying across the yard, and then as he came up the steps to the archway of the Great Hall Jared was in front of him, come round the corner from the guesthouse. Both of them stopped, perfectly still while the horse-boys ran by with curious half-glances (nothing was worth being late and a beating from the horse-master).
It was cold as hell now, the absolute cold of still hoarfrost air, and the breath of them both hung white and heavy in the air between them. Jared was looking fixedly at him with a gaze of smouldering fire, impassivity gone, and looking back at him Jensen felt his knees turn to water. His features were still set like steel but he felt heat flush beneath his cheeks and down his neck, felt his breath speed up and his lips (cock-raw mouth) fall a little apart. His cock twitched, throbbed so hard that his hips pressed reflexively forwards and he was – gods above, he was all but panting, shifting a little to keep his balance. And all the time Jared just watched him, eyes dragging down across his body but returning to meet his gaze. His eyes narrowed, the line of a dimple flickering on one side of that (sinful wanton-wide) jaw.
Jensen could remember how that dimple tasted, and at the thought of it, involuntarily, the tip of his tongue flickered between his open lips.
And then Jared turned and went inside. Jensen waited a minute till he’d got his lips back together and his knees unlocked, and then he followed. It was going to be a hellishly long night.
It was. As the guest of honour, Jared was seated at the high head table with the Commander and the Maesters, facing the rest of the men. He spent most of supper casting glances at Jensen’s table, so patent there could be no mistaking them. Not glances of pain or wistful regret but of latent aggression, deliberately taunting, powerful and angry. At first Jensen met them stubbornly with grim-set features, but as supper wore on he stopped looking up, made small noises of vague affirmation to the small talk of the brothers beside him, because the veiled emotion in Jared’s eyes (promise? threat?) was setting his whole body slightly to shaking, muscles drawing up tight.
He had one thought when the meal was over – get to his quarters, take a breath, jerk off to anything except the memory of Jared’s boyish dimples and jaw and the way his young bones had pressed against him, and then see if any ale was to be found.
Jared was waiting on the landing just before his room. He had taken off his furs and cloaks and was dressed in a simple tunic and breeches that somehow made him look even taller and more gigantic than his formal clothes, as if stripping away the imposing finery only emphasised the virile force of his physicality. He was a little taller than Jensen remembered but he thought he looked twice as solid, almost burly now in his thighs and shoulders, and in the next moment he knew it for fact, because Jared had moved quick towards him and pressed him against the wall. The weight of Jared’s body was on him from hips to chest and Jensen could feel the crush of his muscles, working and flexing against him. Jared grabbed his wrists, held them for a second down by his sides while he stared into Jensen’s face, breathing hard. Then he wrenched them up over his head and pinned them to the wall above him with one massive hand. His arms were so long that Jensen’s shoulders were stretched almost out of their sockets and he winced and gasped, twisting a little against the wall, but when Jared moved back slightly and then slammed his weight back into him Jensen shuddered and went almost slack, gave himself over to it, to the feel of Jared’s thigh pushing between his legs, spreading his thighs open against the wall; to the smell of him, so strangely the same, and the feel (white hot molten down his core) of Jared grinding against him, thigh pressed hard and hungry against his cock.
He was slumped against the wall, now, held up mostly by the pressure of Jared’s body against him and the hand seizing his wrists, and he was panting, groaning at the bottom of each breath, because it was so good it was close to pain, a terrible honey-edged ache, and Jared was talking low against his ear, voice dusk-dark and silky with heat.
‘It seems,’ he said, with a leering kind of growl, ‘that twenty years hasn’t changed quite everything, now has it? I wondered if you’d soften for me as fast as you used to, Brother, but it seems that the black robes don’t quite kill the man underneath. You can’t bed women, that I know, but – how about it, then? Have you let other men take you and pretended they were me? Could any of them get you off just – like – this?’
He was jerking his thigh hard, now, and Jensen’s breath was coming short and shallow, not just from his arousal but from the violent shaking of his frame. But he didn’t care, hardly noticed, was lost in Jared’s voice and started writhing underneath him, head tipped back against the wall, mouth fallen open a little. Jared ran his free hand down his body and grabbed Jensen’s ass, hard, clawed his fingernails up its curve, and Jensen came right in his breeches, bucking against Jared’s hips, face contorting in an almost silent scream.
Jared let go of him immediately and stepped back from the wall, so fast that Jensen almost fell; he staggered, caught himself against the stone, put a hand reflexively over his dampening crotch.
‘Jare-‘ he started, but Jared was walking away and he didn’t turn around.