To say Jon was nervous was probably an understatement. Being called into the police commissioner's office as was a big deal, in bold, capital letters, for a lowly third-grade vice detective.

Not that Jon wasn't proud to be a lowly third-grade vice detective, especially since he was among the youngest to ever achieve the rank, but he wasn't under any delusions that his abilities were the reason he was called into Commissioner Mormont's office. He was fairly positive his promotion to detective had only happened so quickly because of his youthful looks and skill at undercover work. Those things came in handy in vice, but he couldn't imagine they'd be useful for anything Mormont needed.

On the other hand, though, he hadn't done anything wrong or given anyone any reason to think that he had done anything wrong.

Which left him with no clue what the commissioner wanted from him.

"You're a contradiction, you know, Snow?" Mormont commented, leaning back in his chair and gazing at him with an unreadable expression.

"Sir?" he said, not really knowing how to answer.

The commissioner smirked at him. "Half the people I ask about you call you arrogant, the other half swears you're the most self-effacing person they've ever met. Some call you a know-it-all, some say you know nothing at all. I've seen crooked politicians with more consistent reputations."

Jon carefully kept his face impassive even as a sliver of apprehension ran through him. They thought he was dirty. That's why he was called in. "I'm not crooked, sir," he replied simply.

Mormont waved off his comment. "I know that," he told him, leaning forward and looking Jon in the eye. "I didn't call you in because you're in trouble, Snow."

"Then why did you call me in?" he asked, brow furrowed in confusion.

"You grew up on the Upper East Side," the commissioner stated, flipping open a folder in front of him. At the mention of his childhood, Jon's blood ran cold. "Your file says you attended Westeros Academy. That's a pretty swanky private school. We don't get many police recruits with credentials like that. Not a lot of trust fund babies on the force."

Jon scowled. "I wasn't a trust fund baby. Just a charity case." Not that his foster father was a bleeding heart philanthropist by any stretch of the imagination.

"Regardless, you know these people, you know how they think, you know the circles they run in, that kind of thing," Mormont said thoughtfully.

"Yeah…" he answered hesitantly, not liking where the conversation seemed to be headed.

The commissioner nodded, picking up another file and sliding it across the desk to him. "Then you're the perfect man for the case."

Jon tentatively took the file but didn't open it. "What case, sir?"

"Jon Arryn is dead," Mormont told him grimly, motioning for him to open the folder, which Jon did to find himself staring at a picture of the easily recognizable face of the old man lying dead on a cold autopsy table. "Family and friends initially assumed heart attack, but his wife demanded the coroner perform an autopsy. He found a high concentration of tropane alkaloids." At Jon's blank look, he added, "Belladonna."

He blinked at that. "As in deadly nightshade belladonna? Isn't that a little medieval?"

Mormont snorted. "Well, you know these people."

"And you think someone in his social circle killed him?" Jon clarified, finding it hard to believe. He had known Jon Arryn growing up. Everyone had loved him. He couldn't imagine the old man doing anything to offend anyone. Hell, he had even treated Jon, the poor, pitiful foster kid, like he was no different from the other boys around him.

Then again, if someone in that particular crowd were going to kill someone, Jon would have definitely bet on them using poison.

"Sir, I don't think I should be the one on the case," he told him seriously, hating himself just a bit for giving up the opportunity but knowing it was the right call. "There's probably a conflict of interest."

"Detective investigate their childhood neighborhoods all the time," Mormont said dismissively. "You don't have any family there, and if you didn't know about Arryn's death, I'd bet you don't have many close friends there either." Jon really couldn't argue with either of those points. "Besides, Lieutenant Yoren is going to take point on the investigation. He just needs a competent partner with an in in the community."

Jon's eyes widened. Lieutenant Yoren was the head of the homicide unit in the 19th Precinct. He had been promoted after he had caught the guy who had set off a bomb during the Macy Thanksgiving Parade several years ago. He had just been a beat cop at the time. The guy was a legend.

How the hell was he supposed to be competent partner for a frickin' legend?

"He'll be expecting you at the 19th tomorrow," Mormont went on, not even letting Jon think about telling him no. "Eight o'clock sharp. Don't be late."

Jon recognized a dismissal when he heard from, standing up and nodding. "Thank you, sir," he said because it was expected, even if his insides were screaming at him to turn down the case, to go back to vice and live out the rest of his days as a lowly third-grade detective.

That sounded so much better than going back to his childhood neighborhood that had never felt like home.

#

As soon as he got back to his crummy little apartment in Queens, Jon called the only person from his childhood that he still had any contact with.

Sam Tarly answered the phone after about three rings. "Jon?" he said instead of a standard greeting, sounding puzzled. "Is everything alright? You never call."

That was true enough. Unless he had to call for work, Jon usually texted. Texting was much less intrusive than calling, and Jon hated to be intrusive.

"Why didn't you tell me about Jon Arryn, Sam?" he asked in accusation. If he had known about the murder beforehand, he wouldn't have been so blindsided by getting assigned to it. And he may have known how to say no.

"I was going to tell you!" he defended, voice high like it always was whenever he was flustered. "I just didn't know how, you know? I know he was Robb's uncle and that you knew him pretty well."

Jon squeezed his eyes shut and let his forehead land heavily on the wall he was leaning against. The name was like a dagger to his heart, but he couldn't let it get to him. He had no right to feel the pain.

"I would have appreciated the heads up about a murder as a detective," he ground out eventually.

"Murder!" Sam cried, panicked. That caused Jon to roll his eyes. He was sure the man was eying the locks on his door right now, as if whoever had killed Arryn would come bursting through it at any moment. "Who's calling it a murder?"

"The coroner who found the poison in him," Jon said dryly. "And the commissioner has roped me into the investigation because I 'know the people,'" he continued sarcastically. "Like I've seen any of them in the last ten years."

Sam made a derisive noise. "As if any of these people ever change," he remarked bitterly. "But for what it's worth, I'll feel safer with you around."

"Well, it's not like I have much of a choice," he replied with a shake of his head. "But I'll let you get back to whatever you were doing. I just…"

"I know," he told him softly, sympathy heavy in his voice. Jon barely bit back a biting comment about how Sam didn't know, but he knew that would just be cruel. "I would have warned you if I had known the police suspected a murder."

"Yeah, well, thanks," he said, needing to get off the phone before his emotions overwhelmed him. "Bye, Sam."

He hung up and barely kept himself from throwing the phone in misplaced anger. Instead, he took a deep breath and sank down onto the couch, numbly turning the television to something loud and happy and mindless.

He couldn't let himself wallow in self-pity over this, he decided after a while of, admittedly, wallowing in self-pity. The past was the past. He couldn't change it, and it had absolutely no bearing on his life now.

It was one case. He'd play sidekick to Lieutenant Yoren, they'd find out who murdered Jon Arryn, and then they would leave the blue-bloods to their snobbery. He might not even have to see Robb at all.

With that comforting thought, he shut the tv off and went straight to bed.

#

If Jon thought he could avoid seeing Robb Stark, he quickly changed his mind as Lieutenant Yoren drove them straight to the Stark house the next morning.

"Why are we here?" he asked, looking to his new partner and sounding a little lost. Pull it together, Snow, he told himself harshly. This is your job. Do it.

Yoren raised an eyebrow at him. The lieutenant was older than Jon thought he would be, but he was by no means old. Jon had instantly liked his no-nonsense attitude, grateful for a partner who would tell him like it is instead playing games. If Jon were to guess, he would say that the reason Yoren had yet to rise any higher in the rankings was his unwillingness to play games.

"Now where else do you expect us to start if not the wife?"

Jon made a face but got out of the car all the same. With Arryn being like a father to Ned Stark, it was easy to forget that their wives were actually sisters. Jon really should have expected for the Starks to be high on their to-be-interrogated list, even if Lysa wasn't staying with her sister.

A fashionable young girl with bright red hair answered the door when Yoren knocked, her blue eyes going wide as they slid past the lieutenant and landed on Jon. He recognized her immediately as Sansa Stark, no longer the teenage girl he remembered but he couldn't forget that face.

"Jon!" she cried out in surprise, brushing past Yoren and surprising Jon by throwing her arms around him. "It's been so long," she murmured before pulling back and smiling at him. "You haven't changed a bit!"

To say that Jon was shocked would have been an understatement. He and Sansa had never really been that great of friends, no matter how often he was over at her house. Arya had always been his little shadow, and Bran and Rickon's hero-worship of Robb had rubbed off on Jon, but Sansa had always treated her older brother's friends with tolerance if not disdain.

"I'm afraid this isn't a social call, Sansa," he told her, not really knowing what else to say. He held up in badge sheepishly. "We're here to see your aunt."

She frowned a bit but nodded and stepped back. "Come on, she's in the parlor with Mother," she said, leading them into the house. She gave Jon a rueful little smile as they approached the room. "I'm still glad you're here, even if it isn't the greatest of circumstances."

It wasn't long before he was sitting across from Lysa Arryn and Catelyn Stark, drawing their attention as Yoren walked about the room and chimed in at random intervals.

Catelyn Stark's glare was making it very clear that she did not like him one little bit.

Not that she had ever liked him. Jon knew she had her reasons, whether or not they were justifiable. This time, though, he figured she had a pretty good reason to hate him.

He had, after all, just implied that her sister was a murderer.

Jon made to calm the two socialites' outrage, but his words died on his tongue as Robb Stark walked into the room.

Either he had forgotten how gorgeous the other man was or he had grown more attractive with the years. Jon was not prepared for the sudden rush of emotions as he stared into those too-blue eyes.

"Jon?" Robb said faintly, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. "What are you doing here?"

"Accusing your aunt of murdering her husband," Catelyn said harshly.

"I'm not accusing anyone of anything," Jon replied, finding it difficult to slip on the impassive mask he had been wearing. "It's protocol to rule out all obvious suspects before moving an investigation along."

Robb caught sight of the badge clipped to Jon's belt. "You're a detective?"

"Of course I had nothing to do with my husband's death," Lysa said disdainfully. "I was the one who wanted an autopsy done, remember? If I hadn't insisted, Jon's death would have been ruled natural! I would have to be the most incompetent murderer in all of history to ask for an autopsy!"

"Or the smartest," Yoren quipped. "Come on, Snow. We've got a crime scene to check out."

Jon followed the lieutenant numbly out the door, resisting the urge to look back to stare at Robb. "We didn't finish the interview," he said dumbly after they had gotten into the car.

Yoren rolled his eyes. "Those two high-class broads aren't gonna tell us anything," he told him with a shake of his head. "You and I both know that. If we want the truth in this investigation, it won't come from those two. Though the boy seemed like he'd be pretty willing to answer questions if the right detective were asking them," he added suggestively.

Jon narrowed his eyes. "I'm not going to use Robb like that," he snapped angrily.

"You ever think that maybe your boyfriend might want to help us catch his uncle's murderer?"

"Ex-boyfriend," he corrected bitterly before wincing. He hadn't meant to let Yoren known exactly what kind of history he had with Robb Stark. There were a good many in law enforcement that didn't take too kindly to gays, even in this day and age.

Yoren just laughed and put the car in gear. "I knew there was history between the two of you."

Tbc...