Ned
Tonight, for once, they are alone.
That is rare now; more often than not, with the long summer and its sudden storms, come the frightened children to bed. Robb and Arya insist that the thunder does not scare them, that they only accompany Bran, Sansa, and baby Rickon, afeared of storms and gales. Ned knows better and cradles trembling Arya, so like her brave mother, so like the aunt she never knew, as Catelyn nurses Rickon, strokes Bran's mess of hair. Their babes, their sweet babes, sleep in warmth and solace.
Tonight, at last, the Lord and Lady are alone, are one. She melds to him, almost, and there he feels the heat of flame and ember, all glory in the shadows of her hair.
Catelyn
Rickon remembers no mother but Osha, no father but the wilds of Skagos, no brothers but wolves.
When Rickon returns to Winterfell from Skagos and White Harbour a man grown, fourteen and barely bearded, but a man nonetheless in valour, Osha shepherds him into the crypts. Rickon remembers those, with their stone kings set hard on immarcescible thrones, their eyes unseeing upon rust-cankered swords. The father whose face he cannot recall is one of them – that had been Manderly's doing, he knows – and the mother who comes to him in dreams, whose eyes are ash and whose visage is only blackness, is waiting.
Stoneheart, they had called her, and stone she looks in her rotting pall; her face is sunken and pearly-grey with flecks of mould, worms twining in her hair like cold licks of languid flame. Three days she had lain dead, he had been told, and years she had roamed the world, brought back he cannot fathom how, in search of vengeance, her children, her Sansa and her Arya and her Brandon, all bone and moss and loam, now.
No Stark was Catelyn, but others had insisted. Sansa, too, and Arya had there found their sleep, as had what little had been found of Robb. None of them Rickon remembers, either, though his own countenance he recognises in their long and sombre effigies, and their granite eyes bore on him as, unmoving, he watches his mother's bier lowered into his father's tomb. Their babes, their sweet babes, the wolf-gnawed, the fallen, the murdered, and the lordling beside them, have come home.
"No elegy, Lord Stark?"
Rickon blinks. "I didn't know her."
Osha's hand is warm upon his shoulder. "She was your mother."
"I don't remember."
"Might be someday you will," she says gently, "or might be someday you won't. She loved you all the same, enough to die o' lookin' for you."
Rickon says nothing, only glints at the tomb, at letters he cannot read that form names vaguely familiar yet wholly strange. Eddard. Catelyn. Strangers. With a discomfited sigh, he sulks away, grabbing the torch from Osha as he goes.
"I've kept 'im safe, m'lord, m'lady, as best I can," she whispers before following him. "Rest you quiet now."
Alone in the cold and lightless crypts, the Lord and Lady sleep with immemorial kings whose steel guards naught but dust. Once more she melds to him, and the hair Ned loved, now grey and brittle, moulders where it spans his breastless ribs.