Work Text:
The White Walkers are gone and she’d been afraid they might have taken the last of her kin with them.
His wound heals but still he sleeps.
Ghost stays close to her. She had not realized the peculiarities of the beast until her handmaid remarks upon it as she prepares a bath, “He turns away like a shy boy, I think.”
And then she had looked and known.
After her handmaid had left she spoke. "Ghost" she said, and then she'd whispered, "Jon". His wolf had looked up at her.
Maester Tarly is worried, her guts twist and her insides might have been pulled out and piled at her feet.
“He takes broth but not much, not enough.”
She swallows. “Go into the books, find something. He will wake.”
Jon fought for her.
Once, he’d told her about his dreams, he’d run and hunt. He'd told her that he was not a man in them.
She wonders how much of him is left.
Her horse no longer startles as he pads beside it. The ghost he has become waits and walks and watches for her.
The wolf's red eyes follow her as she moves, around her chamber, as she takes her meals, as she walks the walls. She understands. She’d seen his own stare all through the long night, after each battle, before each meal they took together. They have not been long apart.
Meera sits beside her as she embroiders a weirwood face on the collar of a cloak for her. Howland Reed’s daughter is many things to her brother Bran and Sansa is thankful for her. Meera rises and walks to the window, the snows are melting. “There must be something he’ll come back for, when he's ready.”
Sansa looks down at the white beast sleeping by the hearth.
He is a man, like all other men. She knows she is beautiful, more beautiful than any other woman that might be found within Winterfell.
Jon is a man like any other man who has ever seen her, but he has been the only one to care for her. He cares for her but, like other men, he wants her in all the ways men want beautiful women.
She bathes, her skin smells of spring.
She takes down her hair, she is kissed by fire and luckier for it.
She comes to the bed they have laid him in, her lady mother's and her honorable father’s bed.
She brings the wolf that he has chosen to become, it settles next to its sleeping master, the man it has run from, the man it used to be.
She leaves her gown on the floor and she undresses the man who will die if he does not wake with tender hands.
He may hunt and run as a wolf but there are many other things he cannot do, cannot have of her as a wolf.
“Jon.” She speaks, he does not wake.
“I’d thought this would come to pass, after some great battle, after we won, when spring came. Instead it is this.” And the length of him swells in her hand, she strokes him and when he has yet to stiffen enough she puts her mouth to where he taste's of salt and seed and strength.
She is on fire above him, she weeps with shame because of how much her body delights in the dark act. The wolf he has become stares. Her throat feels as swollen as her sex, her voice is a rasp, stuck inside. She wonders if it is truly for Jon, she wonders if it is for her that she touches him, herself with her own hands and then with hers flattening over his.
She still holds him inside, his warmth is a throb, his blood thrills.
When his eyes open he gasps, like he has been born, like there’s pain in his lungs and throat and body and she drags herself closer, chasing some feeling she’s felt beneath her own hand in the warmth of Summer in King's Landing on nights before her flowering turned her sex and the thought of being wedded then bedded into something foul and unwanted.
She’d found her peak alone again, satisfied in the dawn after they took back there home. In the cold dark nights she’s thought about surviving, winning, the death of the people who have hurt her house. If vengeance was a man she might have been his bride or his whore.
She breaks like ice, underneath there is cold water that his body warms, his awakening, his cock, his gasping, his open eyes, her name hot inside his mouth, rolling with his tongue, his seed inside of her.
There is no time to settle into the grasp of his warm hands holding her hips, his fingers press into her back, the lowly and possessive heat of his handling sinks into her bones. His legs pull up, hips chasing her warmth, she bounces gently. His strength holds her on top of him until he’s settled into something that looks like peace, like amusement. She feels the flush color her face and then in the wake of his slow grin she scowls. She pulls a leg from around him, lies beside him and tells him not to speak.
“Why did you make me do that?”
“I didn’t make you do anything.”
His voice is near toneless, his eyes jump around the room, he looks at his hands, he pulls the bed clothes from her hands, he looks at her, touches at her face and throat and breasts with his hands and tongue, nuzzling. He’s a man but he’s been a wolf for too long.
“Stop touching me.”
He does in slow degrees, half unwilling to cease. She rises, steps into her simple gown and presses her thighs together against the warm slow seep of his seed from her body. He sits up, some wild careless thing full of want.
She accuses him. “You left me.”
He blinks and says nothing.
When she goes she feels guilty, then there’s something close to rage, something that might be the sister of lust. She wants him. Still. She can feel him moving inside, she can see him looking up at her.
They eat at the high table, Brienne behind her chair, eyes wide and face very long. Tormund is in his cups, he sings and her brother laughs, loudly, his eyes shine, there’s something in them that he brought back from the woods, from the hunts, from the nights running through the Wolfswood.
He eats with a grin, fingers tearing into the cooked fowl, he eats slowly and pushes his plate closer to her with the back of his hand.
The lords notice.
They are only cousins now and some might think that makes it a simple thing for her to be his queen, for her to share his bed and give him heirs.
She does not share his plate.
The great lords of the Hall rise as she retires.
The King stands and strokes the back of her hand as she passes, Brienne pretends not to see, Maester Tarly turns to look elsewhere, Tormund chews.
In the hour of the wolf she dreams of Ghost.
She dreams of herself.
Her sex is hot and slick when she wakes, her heart stuttering.
She startles. He is in her chambers. He must have waited in her solar, still and silent. Brienne would not have let him by.
“Was it me?”
“What?”
“Did I have you? Was I fucking you?”
She cannot tell him in her dreams it is his wolf that mounts her, sometimes Ghost becomes him, most times he does not.
“Why are you in my chambers Jon?”
He lifts a shoulder, careless. He is the King, he may go where he pleases, she understands but he’s never been so flippant in his authority to do as he might please before, at least not so boldly.
He rises. “I miss sleeping in your bed.” She sits up against her pillows as he comes closer to her bed.
“I never wanted to be a king.”
“King or bastard, does it matter?”
He is silent, waiting.
“Come to bed.”
He doesn’t take off his boots as he comes to lie beside her, on the furs he settles into the warm curve of her side. He noses at her hair, his hands move under the furs. He gives her no relief from the want that has followed her after every battle he returned alive from, every night they’ve shared a meal, every stare the other had never chanced to glance at.
Under the guidance his hands she comes out from the furs, pulls her night rail over her hips and he strokes warmth into with rough fingertips, she is shamefully slick, ready for him. In the light of the fire her hair is like blood, her skin is like snow against the deep black of her bed furs, his name is like a song in her mouth.
She let's him guide her to her knees to hold her hands against the wood of the bed, to stare into the fire and find secrets and dreams there.
His tongue laves over the nape of her neck, his cock is a sticky brand bobbing between her thighs, pushed up against where she is still hot from dreams of him, the raw, wild thing he has become.
He’s a hero from a tale told by Old Nan when she was a child. A King of Winter who became a wolf in Spring.
She will be his queen.
Perhaps she will share his plate the way she will share his bed.
He will be a wolf again because it is his way and she will wake him from his dreams of hunting and running and fucking because he longs to be reminded that he is a man who is needed.