Chapter Text
When she had come back, she wasn't her.
Well, she was, Jon mused. But that was only in looks, if it could count for anything at all.
Because the little girl who'd chased the dogs around Winterfell with him was now long since a woman, with a woman's body and features that looked so shockingly like his own that it made him pause.
This stranger that was both familiar and foreign made him want to cry some days when he could not-and would not be allowed to- bridge the ravine between them now, when before all this-before the War- there wouldn't have been even a gap to jump. She had been his favourite of Lord Stark's other children, one of the few in Winterfell that did not treat him as if his bastard status meant anything.
Lady of Winterfell, now she was. Her younger brothers either still missing or too young to rule by themselves as Kings in the North.
But, for a time, she had her Lady sister's help with the etiquettes of court; but Sansa too had to leave to her new life as Lady of the Flowers.
She hadn't kicked and complained as he had first thought she would; ruling or being a Lady was not something a younger Arya Stark would have accepted gladly. But this woman-this warrior-Queen- took control of armies larger than even King Aegon's and the Little Queen's, and she sat alone atop the throne in Winterfell's hall.
Chin raised haughtily, she denied marriage to the new Lord of Storm's End. And again she rejected the new Prince of Dorne.
She did, however, start a liaison with the 99th Lord Commander.
Mayhaps it was the familiarity of the relationship she sought; something safe in a world full of danger and lies.
But it most certainly wasn't love that drove them to it, or anything truly close to what they had as children. Not, that it was not.
Their couplings were always fierce and hard and angry, as if they took their loneliness from the past six years out on each other in those few moments they had to spend away from court.
His brother, King Aegon, had once tried to court her.
She had called him a ponce and poured wine over his head when he had called her comely.
Jon knew that if they had not already been allies with a long-standing friendship, that night would have given the young Queen in the North no small amount of ill tidings.
The King had not been pleased though, and had asked Jon to bring the matter of both the marriage and insult up one day.
He hadn't. Because he knew that Arya would not care-she never cared anymore.
Jon thought that maybe it was his second month there at Winterfell when he was called back to the Wall to negotiate with the Freefolk again.
She did not seem to care about that either, and he did not see the way her grey eyes tightened, or the way she held herself even tighter, if it were possible, when he told her that he made for the Wall.
Or at the very least, he pretended. Theirs was a destructive relationship, one that brought out the worst in the other, and he had no right to be in her life anymore.
Least of all as her lover.
But gods he loved her. And she did not feel the same; he was not even sure she could love anymore. That for her to love something openly now would be to admit weakness.
So he bowed before her feet at court, as others, strangers who barely knew what either of them had been through, watched on silent and stony-faced.
And he left.