Archive of Our Own ^beta

A shout went up outside, and the great gate groaned as it opened.

A guest had come to Castle Black. The figure was indistinct, their gender not apparent; but they were tall, and a hood obscured their face. Their steps were slow as they came into the courtyard. Jon had the impression of frailty and fear, and he leaned over the rail to assure them they were safe.

But before he could speak, the dark face lifted and turned to him--and he knew, even though he couldn’t see it, that their eyes were locked on him.

Slim hands rose jerkily to pull the hood back. Blue eyes. Pale skin. And though it was shorter than he remembered, red, red hair that could not be mistaken.

He could not move. The cold assailed him, but he did not feel it. She breathed in once, a sharp shallow gasp like thin ice cracking, and before he could reach her she tumbled to the ground.

He laid her in the Lord Commander’s bedchambers on the rug in front of the hearth and covered her with every blanket he could find. As he crouched, stoking the fire higher, Ghost nudged her sleeping form with his nose and, apparently dissatisfied, settled in next to her. He cast Jon a baleful red eye, as if to say, you didn’t do enough. Jon sent for some food. He ought to sleep, for this would be his last night in the Lord Commander’s chambers, but the arrival of his bastard cousin and childhood playmate had disturbed him, jarred something loose inside his chest that he thought had been rusted over.

Deathly pale and half starved, she’d come to him for aid, just when he thought he’d never see any member of his family again. Only now he did not know what exactly he could offer her.

She would not die of the cold, at least; whatever she’d been doing before, she’d been well insulated for it. But underneath her eyes were smudged with exhausted purple, and when he’d pulled up one eyelid to test her response, he’d seen the red shot through them. Such bright colors on white transformed her aspect into that of a wraith. Almost, or already, dead.

He shook himself from his maudlin musings and ate a bowl of stew when it came, extracting the hot meat with his fingers and chewing while he thought. He set the pot over the fire to keep the remainder hot for her. He waited.

She stirred hours later. He was not sure exactly how long it had been, but the sky was long dark and the murmur of activity around the castle had faded.

He heard the deep intake of breath that marked her waking, and then quick pants of fear. “Sansa,” he said from behind her, so that she might not be afraid.

She whirled to face him, half-rising into a crouch, and the fear in her eyes was that of a cornered animal, wild. In the moment of recognition, however, it faded somewhat. Not all the way.

“Jon?” she asked uncertainly.

“Aye. You made it to Castle Black.” He almost didn’t say the next words, but something compelled him. “It’s good to see you, cousin.”

Sansa looked around, taking in her environment. “Am I really here?” she whispered. “Is this all not a dream?”

Ghost whined, catching her attention for the first time. She seemed to freeze, in memory or realization or some unwanted thought. Her eyes squeezed shut, but a fat tear rolled down her cheek.

“It’s not a dream,” she gasped between hiccups. “If it were, Lady would be here.”

Ghost licked the salt from her cheeks while Jon poured another bowl of soup. He handed it to her when she quieted. “I imagine you’re hungry.”

She nodded eagerly, and ate while Ghost buried his face in her lap. Jon waited till she was done before he asked gently, “Did you come from Winterfell?”

Sansa looked down into her lap, and Jon’s heart sank. He’d received the news not long before her arrival. Bran and Rickon’s heads on pikes, for all the North to see, and the Boltons’ flayed man on the seal. He had nursed some small hope that it was untrue.

“It’s just me,” she said, so quietly he almost didn’t hear. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he said roughly.

Her knuckles whitened around the empty bowl. “I thought they’d be here before me,” she said vaguely.

“Who?”

“Ramsay. His dogs. They’d be waiting for me at the gates.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of Ramsay anymore. He can’t touch Castle Black, or you. Ever again.”

“It was my punishment. The boys had gone, you see, and I was the only one left. He even let me keep Lady. Said he wanted a good hunt.”

“I’m sorry.” Nothing else came to Jon except words that were even more inadequate.

“He didn’t think we’d separate.” Her voice held a bitter triumph, and the brief flash of her smile was wolfish. “She was my only protection. Those beasts were sniffing her out, not me. She drew them off for miles and miles, Jon. She was so good. And when they finally caught up to her--well, Ramsay Snow may spend the rest of his life limping.”

Though the thought was pleasing, Jon was puzzled. “How do you know?”

Sansa frowned, as if she had to consider it. “I don’t know. It’s almost as if, for just a few moments, I was really there, with her just before she…” One hand drifted down to scratch Ghost behind the ear. “But I suppose that’s not possible.”

“Stranger things have happened,” said Jon, thinking of his wolfish dreams. She was quiet.

“Did they hurt you? I mean, do you have any injuries that need tending?” he corrected, for the first question could be taken as salacious curiosity.

One shoulder rose and fell. “I was beaten sometimes. For entertainment. They cut off my hair. Ramsay said it was too good for a bastard girl.” She fingered the ends of her boyish, shorn locks. It disturbed him how casually she spoke of such abuses. “It’s funny, though,” she continued. “I’ve never had cause to be thankful for my parentage, but Ramsay declared my maidenhood too worthless for a man to take. He was going to… when his dogs caught me… well, I suppose it doesn’t matter now.”

“You’re safe now,” he said again, and he wasn’t sure whether the words were for her or himself.

She changed subjects abruptly. “Did Bran and Rickon come here?” The question came with a new hard edge he did not understand.

“Did they--what do you mean?”

“I told you.” Her voice was impatient, almost petulant. “They escaped Winterfell. They left in the middle of the night, without me. I thought they would come to the Wall too.”

His voice was a dry scrape against stone. “They didn’t come. Or else…”

He left the other possibility unsaid. Her face pinched; anger and hurt warred with sorrow and regret over her delicate features.

“I thought I’d never want to see them again, after they left me behind.” She sniffed. “It was stupid of me to think that, when they might be…”

Jon said nothing, for he knew what she meant. Sansa had been the more favored of Winterfell’s bastards, and everyone knew it. He had resented her for it: for the easy, meek way she accepted her role, for Lady Catelyn’s clear preference, even for her name. Even though Sand was just as much a bastard’s name as Snow, it was foreign and far-off like her dead parents.

But most of all, he had resented her for leaving him.

She might have been a bastard like him, but she had a grace and temperament the envy of highborn ladies. He had always defended her honor; it mattered not that she was baseborn. She was a lady and she deserved respect; many years before, after Theon had laughed at a declaration of Jon’s very much like that, Jon had punched him. Years later, Jon could see that his anger was as much on behalf of himself as his cousin, but it was his sincere sentiment nonetheless.

He’d gotten in trouble for the fight--and Theon too, for when Jon threatened to tell Lady Catelyn the nasty things he’d said about the prospects of baseborn girls, Greyjoy muttered grudgingly it was all his fault--but it had been worth it when Sansa had come to him after with a cool rag to press against his blackened eye, murmuring admonishments and thanks in the same breath.

“He spoke true, though,” she added somberly. “No one marries baseborn girls.”

“I will,” Jon told her fiercely, and she blinked and swallowed and teared up, and Jon thought he’d said something wrong until she said, “Really?” in a voice that wobbled.

The idea had not occurred to him until it came out of his mouth, but from that point forward he found himself gladly committed to it. She’d hugged him, jarring his bruises, but he hadn’t said anything, heart too full to speak. In the tumult of excitement and hope that followed, her mouth found his in a clumsy kiss, and for the first time since he was a child he looked forward to a happy future.

Like everything else in his life, sweet turned to sour, and not long afterward Sansa began avoiding him, never speaking to him without being spoken to first and then only what was necessary. In the beginning, he’d thought it a new shyness thanks to the shift in their relationship. When her coolness had persisted, he’d grown bewildered and hurt. It had not helped his reputation for sullenness, he reflected wryly.

“What is it?” she whispered.

She must have caught his brief smile. “Nothing,” he said. “You should go to sleep.”

“You’ll sleep with me, won’t you?” she asked, patting a stretch of rug next to her with a yawn. “I feel as if I’ll never get warm again.”

He wouldn’t have to sleep in the Lord Commander’s bed. The thought was profoundly relieving. It was foolish, perhaps, this newfound resentment, but it was well earned: the half-healed scars on his breast attested to that.

“If that’s what you want,” he said, and they lay down, Ghost at her back and Jon at her front. She drew the blankets over their bodies.

“I thought I would sleep for days when I finally got here,” she confided, playing with the laces of his nightshirt. “Now I feel as if I never will.”

Her palm pressed against his chest, right over his heart, and the sound of his blood in his ears grew louder. Her fingers splayed out, and the tip of one caught a patch of exposed skin beyond his collar in a flash of heat that had nothing to do with the fire or the blankets.

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what an ass I was to you.” There was a wistfulness to her voice that Jon spent many years driving out of himself, not wholly successfully.

“We were children.”

“Do you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Forgive me,” she demanded.

“All right, I forgive you.”

Her fingertips traced a path up to his cheek. “I think all the time about how you left. It was because of me, wasn’t it?”

In some way, yes, but Jon thought he might have ended up here anyway, and time and experience had made him grimly glad he had. She took the silence of his struggle to express this as consent, however.

“Oh, Jon, if you had stayed--”

If only, if only. Words he hated and craved. He kissed her, cutting her off.

Years had passed since they’d seen each other, and they’d both seen the darker places of the world, but something about kissing Sansa made him feel like a green boy of fourteen again. At least for a moment. Then she drew breath against his mouth and kissed him harder, and he forgot about the past.

Jon sank a hand into her short hair, anchoring her to himself. He nipped her lower lip, not as gentle as he could be. She gasped but did not pull away; in fact, the little violence seemed to inflame her. He caught her about the waist with a groan and pulled back to look at her. She stared back at him fearless and wanting--gods, she wanted him, after all this time, and there was only so much he could bear. He owed the Wall nothing now.

He kissed her again, this time with intention, and she responded. His hand ran down her side, feeling every dip and curve, and when his thumb brushed over her nipple she made a low, ragged sound that did nothing for his self-control. She was no still, pliant lady, either, he discovered to a twisted delight. Her hands roamed over his nightshirt, seeking entrance, and he twisted so she could pull up the hem and get her hands underneath. They traveled greedily over his bare skin, and for the first time since he’d met cold daggers in the dark, Jon felt a fire raging in him. He pressed the heel of his hand between her legs and felt shock travel through her frame.

“Jon,” she breathed, and clutched his shoulders with wide eyes. A fierce possessiveness took him in its grip and squeezed.

His hand made slow, hard circles over her smallclothes, the fabric steadily dampening until he could feel the outline of every fold and nook. When she was panting and whimpering in his ear, he succumbed to temptation and slid a finger under the edge to find slippery skin, just the barest touch making his cock ache. She was maiden-tight, and though she took one finger easily into her hot depths, two would be too much. He clung to this last thread of self-discipline, stroking and rubbing his thumb over her, thrilled by every quake of her body, every gasp and strangled iteration of his name, until she hid her face in his shoulder and seized around him. Jon coaxed her through it, slowing until she took his wrist and pushed it away, his wet fingers leaving streaks on her thighs.

Her eyes were half-closed, her expression dreamy and body slack with satisfaction, so he resigned himself to the company of his own hand. It was easy to look on her flushed cheeks and stroke himself--easier than it should have been, easier than it would have been even days before, before the daggers came and the Red Woman’s magic pulled him from the grave and left some part of him behind in the process.

Her blue eyes opened and fixed on him, then drifted lower, attracted by his movements. Pink lips pursed into a surprised ‘oh’. He wondered if he was corrupting her, if this would finally disgust her and cause her to pull away. He didn’t stop.

Her grip was surprisingly strong as she wrapped her hand around his. His breath stuttered, shallow. Together they bent their heads and looked. Her thumb swiped at a bead of liquid that formed at the tip and he grunted, fisted his cock harder.

“You could,” she whispered. Her hips shifted, and his gut tightened at the thought of her warm, wet cunt. “If you wanted to.”

Just the suggestion was enough. Jon gave a heavy groan as he spilled into their interlaced fingers, eyes squeezed shut.

He felt Sansa press her lips to his uncertainly. It was a gesture too intimate, too tender, for him to bear, and he pulled away with a sharp sound. “I’m leaving Castle Black,” he said in a gasp, and she stilled.

“What? Why?”

“I have to.” He didn’t know how to explain the betrayal, the Red Woman’s magic. The comfort of the void. The feeling of all life and warmth leaching out of his body as he lay in the snow, and how it had never quite all returned. He settled for the simplest explanation. “They tried to kill me.”

“Where will you go?” There was a quiet dread in her whisper as she watched him rise and search for a rag.

“Where will we go.” He knelt in front of her and wiped their hands clean.

An unsteady breath. “Where will we go, then?”

He recalled his words to Edd. “South, maybe. No one knows me there. Or you. We could get warm.”

A puff of air, not yet a laugh. “Warm sounds nice.”

He set his thumb over the delicate skin of her wrist. Underneath thrummed heat and blood. His desire the distant ache of a phantom limb. The gate would close behind him, and ahead of him would be a path not yet traveled. At least he would not be alone in his exile.

She turned her wrist, trapping his fingers loosely between hers. Her eyes turned an unspoken question on him.

“I’ll protect you,” he promised, though the words sounded hollow to his ears. His word was not worth much, any longer.

She squeezed. Her knuckles were startlingly bony. “We’ll protect each other,” she said, and if he could not trust himself, he could almost believe in her.