Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.
Author's Note: Part One of either a two or three chapter story. Season 8 AU after 8x03, wherein Dany has died in the Battle for Winterfell and the North has no reason to march on King's Landing. The Starks learn how to live in the aftermath.
Wool and Tallow
Chapter One: To Staunch the Screams
"Perhaps that is the matter at heart. Perhaps it will never make sense. Perhaps loss like this isn't supposed to." - Jon and Sansa, Season 8 AU. After the Battle of Winterfell, the mending begins in earnest.
Sansa finds that sewing flesh is not so very different from sewing cloth, perhaps, except, for the shrieks and groans that accompany her new needlework.
All the same, she knows how to bind a tear, where to set the seams, how to recognize the places where it's thinnest, where the slightest tug may pull her work loose, where it takes more than delicacy to keep a slit from rending.
She wonders if the blood will ever wash from beneath her fingernails, or if the tiny callouses will ever recede from the edges of her forefingers, or if she will ever again stitch a dress or a handkerchief or a glove without the lingering tang of copper filling her nose.
Even still, Sansa puts her hands to the needle and mends the North. She patches the rips, she closes the holes.
It's her own hand that tends to the gash along Jon's forehead in his fever sleep, and when he wakes to a winter-beaten dawn, the sun a snow-washed blur at his window, he thinks he can feel her touch even now.
He blinks awake to a quiet room, to Sansa's room. She's slumped in a bedside chair, dozing, her needlework hanging precariously from her lap.
But she's alive, and so is he, and there is peace in this kind of quiet. A peace he hadn't expected.
Jon closes his eyes, the sound of her steady breathing lulling him back to sleep.
The harrowing space between them begins to slowly stich closed.
"It doesn't look that bad," Arya remarks, slurping up her stew beside him.
Jon raises a brow but then winces at the way it tugs the stiches along his forehead.
"Though it'll probably scar," she adds as an afterthought.
"It wouldn't be the first." Jon looks at his own bowl of stew when he says it, fingers itching to spread across his chest in some kind of comfort, some kind of anchoring.
He's never known death not to scar, is the thing, and when he finally looks up to glance around the table, to see Sam offering a hesitant smile, with no Edd beside him, to see Davos staring resolutely into the flaming hearth, to see Tormund tearing into his meal as though he expects it to be his last – when he finally sees the way death has settled so seamlessly and familiarly in the aftermath, in the very shadows of their halls, in the lines of their faces and the air between their words – he wishes it were a lesson he'd never learned in the first place those many years ago, the night his own brothers ended his watch with their very hands.
Arya nudges him with an elbow, dipping into her bowl again. "Eat," she says softly, eyes catching the way his hand lingers over his chest. "You have to eat." And then she says no more, eating away the silence like the rest of them.
"Is it over? Is it finished?" Sansa asks Bran one day while they sit in the godswood, a red shade of leaves stretching over their fur-lined forms while she worries a thumb into her gloved palm, breath tight in her chest.
They are still burning bodies beyond Winterfell's walls, the smoke a sour plume she smells even in her sleep – maybe especially then, and she needs it to be over now more than ever. She needs her haunts to stay dead this time.
Bran tilts his head slightly, a not-unsympathetic smile toying at his lips – but it's tinged with a kind of sorrow Sansa has learned to recognize early on. "Nothing is ever finished," he answers her.
Sansa stares at her brother. She looks down to her hands, shaking. She huffs a cold breath out into the air, stands stiffly. She stalks a few feet away, stalks back, turns back to him. "You know Bran, sometimes I miss you – really miss you. Even when we're in the same room," she bites out. Her lip trembles, but she tugs it back behind her teeth, keeps it trapped behind that delicate Stark composure.
Bran's eyes drift past her shoulder, lost somewhere in the haze of snow, and Sansa swears she sees the minute tightening of his hands in his lap. "I do, too, sometimes," he breathes carefully.
Sansa's eyes flutter shut as she takes a deep breath, her grief and her resentment and her guilt sinking down, down , down – anchoring between her ribs where they can fester safely from prying eyes.
She moves to him instantly, kneeling in the snow, the shock of cold to her knees barely registering. She reaches for his hand, curls her fingers along his. "Bran, I'm sorry. I didn't –" She stops, licks her lips. "I'm sorry." Her hand tightens over his.
Bran looks at her. Just looks at her, and then his eyes flit to the snow at his feet. "I know," he says in answer, and suddenly he is her little brother again, with his impish grin and his scabbed knees and his lying tells.
Sansa lowers her head to rest along their joined hands.
Her brother.
Her little brother.
Her last brother.
Her nails dig half moons into the tender flesh of his palm even through the gloves.
Sometimes the pain in Jon's leg is blinding and apparent, bringing him to a sudden stumble in his trek through the halls or having him grip desperately at his thigh when he sits down for a meal. Sometimes the pain is dull and barely-there, like a vague, lingering shadow, a forgotten dream that hazily haunts his waking moments.
Sometimes it doesn't hurt at all.
Sometimes, that's a lie.
Stone can be rebuilt. Snow can be plowed. Wounds can heal.
Sansa stands staring at the entrance to the crypts, her hand at her throat, fingers trembling as they tug at her chain.
Ghost's low whine beside her drags her attention back, and then she is stalking away, breath tight in her chest, shoulders quaking.
Stone can be rebuilt. Snow can be plowed. Wounds can heal. But the dead can no longer rise.
Let them rest, she tells herself.
Let them rest.
"I have given the Unsullied and the Dothraki leave to stay, should they wish."
Sansa knows he hears her, if only for the faint lift of his brow and the low hum that leaves him. He continues staring into the hearth before them as they sit in her chambers.
She takes a breath, swallows down that bite of resentment, that needless sense of possession. "I'm sorry, Jon," she says softly, and suddenly she realizes she means it. "I'm sorry she died."
He looks at her finally, mouth thinning into a frown.
"I'm sorry Daenerys died."
"I didn't love her," he says in answer, almost on reflex it seems, but the minute widening of his eyes tells her he hadn't even expected to say it himself. He stares at her, takes a breath, licks his lips. "You asked me once."
"I did." Her chest tightens, her fingers curling around themselves in her lap. "But you do not owe me an answer to that, and I was wrong to ask you."
"I didn't love her," he repeats, turning back to the flames, throat flexing beneath the weight of words she doesn't think he will ever bring to air.
"Still," she offers, because she knows the harrowing mark that guilt can leave, justified or not, "She was your aunt. She was… family."
Jon closes his eyes, shaking his head. "She wasn't pack," he says in answer, and she can't be sure whether it is regret or relief that taints his words.
Sansa doesn't speak further.
Perhaps Daenerys wasn't pack. But Sansa wonders if she could have been. If she hadn't demanded they bend the knee, if she hadn't traded Jon's fealty for her aid, if she hadn't held him prisoner all those moons, if she hadn't invited him to Dragonstone with falsities –
If she hadn't been a dragon in the first place.
Except she was, and maybe it's a truth that could have never been unwritten.
Sansa looks at Jon.
He sighs, rubbing a hand down his face. "You are the Lady of Winterfell, and guest right is yours to grant," he says finally, granting her the agreement she had sought from the start.
"You are our king, Jon," she says softly, a tender, persistent reminder, barely a whisper above the flames before them.
His brows furrow, his face pinching tight with something akin to pain, and then his face is in his hands and he heaves a long, quaking sigh, his shoulders trembling with the effort, and she can think of nothing else to say.
So she says nothing.
She keeps their quiet long into the night, until he heralds his farewell with a jarring scrape of his chair along the stone floor and a hesitant touch to her shoulder.
She lights her hand over his and doesn't protest when he slips away moments later.
The lords filter out of the hall and Sansa stands from her place at the head table, lingering in the quieting room a moment, contemplative.
Jon eyes her from his seat still, a frown of worry upon his face. "What about Cersei?" He isn't simple enough to think she has forgotten her former tormentor, her former captor.
Sansa's jaw clenches tight. "You heard the lords."
"Aye, I heard them," Jon says, standing finally himself.
Sansa continues to look out upon the now empty space of the hall, and if Jon stares long enough, he can imagine that she sees the same dark stain lighting the stones where Baelish had bled out before the Northern court.
But she gives no indication of the sort, only steeples her fingertips along the table before her, glancing down at the motion as she takes a steadying breath. "They are tired of war, wounded still, only just rebuilding."
Jon nods silently.
She taps her fingers along the wood. "The North needs to heal first."
"And then?" He wonders if it is wariness or hope that tinges the words.
Sansa glances at him out of the corner of her eye, her shoulders going rigid. She takes a moment, a dangerously long moment to Jon, her eyes shifting between his, and he thinks he may have stopped breathing entirely when she finally opens her mouth.
"Then nothing. Cersei doesn't have the forces to subjugate the North any longer. And if she tries – if she marches north, then we will be ready. We will wait her out behind these sturdy walls. We will starve her out, freeze her out. Let winter take her and her hordes." She turns away, meaning to leave the hall. A quiet dismissal.
He catches her hand and halts her before she can make it any further.
"And if she doesn't? Could you just let her be? Sansa…" He knows how she has craved Cersei's demise, how the nightmares still plague her, how any notion of her venturing to the South is shot down with a vehemence he has only ever seen once before (the night she promised never to return to Ramsay alive).
"If she doesn't," she begins, turning slightly in his hold so that she can face him, though she doesn't tug her hand from his, "then I'll have lost nothing more."
Jon's eyes widen minutely, mouth parting at the way her thumb arcs over his knuckles pointedly. He releases her hand at the subtle intimate motion, staring at her, breath pooling hot and stifling in his chest.
She keeps his gaze a while longer, and then she leaves him entirely, her skirts rustling over the stones like a winter's gale.
Sansa leaves the latest meeting of the lords with a nagging headache. Rebuilding the North is laborious and slow, but she sees the ever-growing number of shelters in Wintertown and she hears the ever-louder laughter in the kitchens and laundry room. She sees the slow progress of life beneath the snow, beneath a dead-riddled winter.
And then she comes upon her old chambers.
Sansa comes to a halt almost jarringly, her feet having taken this route practically without her consent, and it shouldn't make any sense. It shouldn't make any sense at all. She is safe – has been for a while now. There is no one north of the Neck that can threaten her here, in her own home. And her pack has returned. She is safe.
But perhaps that is the matter at heart. Perhaps it will never make sense. Perhaps loss like this isn't supposed to.
"My lady?" Brienne asks behind her, a taut line of concern lacing her address.
Sansa's trembling hand slips from beneath her cloak in a low, subtle command, and Brienne keeps her distance, keeps her stance, when Sansa pushes the door open.
It assaults her at once, the visceral memory of Ramsay's mouth at her ear and his blade on the backs of her thighs and his bruising fingers along her spine. Her face pressed to the furs, her teeth biting down on the sheets, cry strangled in her throat.
Sansa stumbles in the threshold, eyes raking over the empty, unused space.
And then it's Theon's rattling voice beneath the stale air, his terrified, staggering steps back, his trembling face in her hands.
"Tell me that they weren't your brothers!"
And then his hand in hers, tugging her through an icy river, huddling her beneath a fallen oak, weeping into her shoulder –
Lying spent and bloodied upon a pyre.
(There is no sea near enough to bear him away, but she wonders if there is enough salt in her tears to beg the Drowned God to his side nonetheless.)
Sansa grips at the doorway, breath raking through her chest.
It shouldn't make any sense, it shouldn't, it –
Her skin alights with the terror once more, the scent of rotting flesh flooding her nostrils, and then it is Rickon – sweet and wild and bold Rickon – rotted with decay, chest still mottled with arrow holes, eyes too inhumanly blue to be the soft brilliance of the Tullys, and it's her dragonglass dagger shoved into his throat when he wrestles her to the ground, and his gasp of blackened bile on her cheeks before he slumps over her, dead again, and the ragged cry that breaks from her, that rends her to pieces because her brother – her brother – and he isn't sweet Rickon anymore, he isn't Rickon at all and yet – and yet –
The sob that breaks from her jars her back into the present, where she finds her hand has made its way back to her throat, her fingers curling along her chain, and her back has pressed into the threshold, the door still held ajar.
Because if these walls could talk –
"My lady?" Brienne asks once more, moving closer from her guarding stance, a hand hovering in the air above Sansa's shoulder, never alighting.
Sansa brushes her hands down her skirts, takes a deep breath, swallows back that threatening bile – sour on her tongue, rancid with disuse, and then she shuts the door behind her once more, loud and resonant in the empty hallway.
She stands breathing heavily against the shut door, throat parched, back rigid, eyes unable to lift to Brienne's.
"There is work to do," she says finally, and her voice is blessedly sure – the only part of her not breaking beneath the assault of memories.
Brienne does not question further. She follows her lady down the hall to her true chambers, and she does not leave her door that night.
Not even when she hears the crash of a chair being thrown to the floor, or an inkwell shattering against the far wall, or her lady's heavy, piercing wail reverberating off the stone.
Sansa sinks to the floor of her chambers, skirts tangling beneath her legs – a sea of wool.
Brienne enters her chambers hesitantly, slowly, beneath the dead of night.
When her lady knight's arms wind around her huddled form, Sansa finds that it is foolish to think it would ever make sense.
She lives and she breathes and she aches even still. She bears witness to her horrors each night anew.
She thinks of Jon's embrace in the courtyard of Castle Black, those many moons ago. She thinks of how his chest had heaved beneath hers, true and beating and alive – even when he claimed otherwise. She thinks of what it means to know the Long Night, and yet to brave the dawn. She thinks of how it felt to stitch closed the bloody gash along his forehead in those haunting, ethereal hours following the end, praying for him to survive ("please gods, if there is any goodness in you now, you will wake him please, just… just let him live") how he had been fever-warm beneath her hands, how her teeth had cut the thread, lips braced a whisper above his skin –
How death has been their constant, their companion, their only guarantee in this world.
How they have refused it – and refuse it still.
Sansa shakes and cries and bellows her agony into Brienne's arms. She lets it to air. She lets it rip from her.
Because it will never make sense, she realizes, and it never should.
Such loss, such keen loss.
Because oh, if these walls could talk –
How they would scream.
Sansa does not break her fast with them the next morning, and when Jon looks to Bran in a moment of concern, he finds his brother is already watching him.
"She hadn't meant to kill him again. She hadn't wanted to."
Jon narrows his eyes at Bran so quickly he hardly blinks. "What?" It's a coarse rush of air that leaves him.
And then Bran returns to his bread, fingers tearing at it quietly. "Rickon," he says in answer, so casually it leaves Jon light-headed. "In her nightmares, the dead keep rising."
Something settles beneath Jon's skin like a splinter, a subtle prickling of awareness too small to cut out and too sharp to soothe.
He pushes from his chair and bolts from the room, finding his way to Sansa's chambers on instinct. He barrels through Brienne's objections outside her door, and then barrels through the door itself, Sansa's name a rough desperation on his tongue.
She stands from her seat by the window where she'd been overlooking the snows, hair undone in the filtering sunlight, clad only in a shift. "Jon!" she manages, blinking in her surprise, before her arms wind around herself as though to cover her state.
Brienne huffs her indignation, moving to stand before Sansa and block Jon's view of her lady. "Your Grace, I must insist that you – "
"Why couldn't you tell me?" It breaks from him before he can even taste the words along his tongue.
Both women stare at him heatedly, Sansa's eyes wide as they peek out from behind Brienne. Her fingers wind around her knight's arm as she firmly pushes her aside.
Brienne acquiesces reluctantly, still eyeing Jon with clear disapproval.
"Tell you what?" Sansa asks warily, stepping toward him.
"Rickon. In the crypts, you – you…"
Sansa sucks a breath through her teeth like a brand.
They stand there staring at each other for long moments and then –
"Brienne, step outside."
"But my lady…"
"It's alright."
Jon doesn't even register the knight's exit, or her censuring gaze, her deep frown. He doesn't even register the click of the door behind him. All he can think of is how often he's seen Sansa staring at the entrance to the crypts lately, never venturing in, a vacant, eerily-still look to her face. And how Ghost accompanies her to the godswood so much more now. And how she embroiders handkerchiefs with black, wild wolves. How she pushes the plate of lemon cakes unobtrusively away at dinner, a glaring remembrance of how little Rickon used to steal them from her plate suddenly unavoidable in his mind.
Suddenly, it makes such glaring, obvious sense as to flood him with shame. The kind of shame that doesn't wash out.
"Sansa – "
"Your lessons proved their worth. My blade did not miss." She twists her hands before her, unmindful of her thin apparel or the cold, morning breeze drifting through the still open window behind her.
"Oh, Sansa," he croaks, because he can say nothing more.
Why couldn't you tell me?
It isn't so much a demand of her as it is a disgrace upon him. Because why couldn't he ask?
It's easy to pretend all the dead were laid to rest that night. It's easy to pretend the faces of their haunts aren't familiar. It's easy to pretend the living won in the end.
(It's not so easy to pretend that 'surviving' is the same thing as 'living' anymore.)
"Was he always so tall?" she asks tremulously, brows furrowed in disbelief, a hesitant, quaking laugh leaving her. Her eyes are already dangerously wet.
The question throws him and he moves to step toward her, unsure.
She rubs a hand at her nose, sniffling behind her knuckles, and then the laugh escapes her again, delirium and terror in equal measure. "I don't remember." Her face falls, her tears with it, shoulders shaking. She reaches for him. "Oh gods, Jon, I don't remember!" Her cry of self-chastisement and incredulity is smothered in his shoulder when he makes it to her, arms wrapping around her trembling frame, pulling her tight to his chest.
"Shh, Sansa, it's okay."
Her fists bunch against his chest. "It's not." She draws a tight breath in, catches it along her tongue. "It's not, it's not, it's… I don't remember, Jon, and I should, I have to, because – because he's our brother. Our little brother, Jon, oh gods, and I – I didn't – I want to remember!"
She crumples against him, sagging to the floor. He falls with her, knees hitting the stone in a painful thud, but he keeps his arms around her, keeps his cheek pressed to hers, his soft shushing sounds at her ear, and he knows it will never – can never – be enough.
He fumbles for her face, holds her reddened cheeks between his calloused palms, urges her gaze to his. "Sansa."
A promise, a plea, a prayer.
She shakes her head, the tears hot on her lids, and something twists unnaturally inside him. Just the sight of her. Just the rending, aching knowledge that surviving will never mean living, and damn him, but he wants her to live.
And maybe more importantly, he wants to live with her.
He presses his chapped lips to her cheek, tastes the salt of her tears, doesn't flinch from her stifled gasp. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Sansa. Sansa, please," he whispers against her skin, and then it really is a prayer. Another press of his lips to her closed eyes. "Sansa, Sansa, Sansa."
Her breath goes still, her fingers curling against his tunic.
His lips find her forehead, and the sharp line of her jaw, and the corner of her mouth – desperate and quick and flooded with unexplainable yearning.
"Jon."
(His name on her lips – the kind of answer his prayer has always sought.)
He kisses her.
Terrified and needful and incredibly, disappointingly quick – before he releases her lips and finds her cheek again, drags his lips across her cheekbone and then against her ear and the clutch of air he holds in his lungs is so unbearably tight, so near exploding, that all he can do is hold his tongue between his teeth and hope for blood.
But she isn't crying anymore. She isn't shaking.
And Jon finds that the space between their chests is practically nonexistent at this point, the way his hands wind into her hair entirely inappropriate, and his own disregard for such improper intimacy far too heady to be brotherly.
In the end, he finds he doesn't care.
Not when she holds him just as surely.
Not when she buries her nose in the furs at his throat and sighs in his secure embrace.
Not when the prayer of her name still clatters around his skull like a howl.
She comes to his bed that evening, slips beneath the furs and sidles up to his back before he can shake the grogginess of sleep from his mind quick enough to notice her entrance.
"Sansa, what are you – "
"I don't want to be alone."
It isn't the first she's slipped beneath his covers. They've shared a bed at Castle Black, when her nightmares drove her to familiar warmth, when the night was too dark and too lonesome and too quiet for solitude.
(When she was still his sister.)
He should turn her away, he knows. But he says nothing when she rests her head at the space between his shoulder blades, when she winds an arm around his waist, when her cold feet press against his.
Jon closes his eyes and steadies himself.
"I don't want to be alone," she repeats, the threat of tears lining her broken voice.
"You're not," he whispers back, because he means it, has always meant it.
Enough to curl his palm around hers at his stomach.
Enough to hold her there until dawn.
(And then even longer. And then – )
Their fingers thread together like stitches.
Jon begins to understand that ruined flesh and ruined hearts take time to mend all the same.