this is a disclaimer.
AN: happyending!AU, because I'm a sap.
my watch began
They said afterwards that Jon had found him in the weirwood grove in the Haunted Forest, half-frozen to death, Summer standing guard over him, Meera, Jojen and Hodor all four, silent and still as the stone direwolves that lay at the feet of the Kings in the North in the crypts of Winterfell. Bran remembered little of it: darkness, strange, weary warmth. A voice from far away, harsh as the caw of a crow: one boon you may ask of us, in return for the service we will take from you. The cry Jon gave when he saw them, a choked-off noise between a howl and a shout of joy. Then Ghost licking his face, and icy cold when Jon lifted him up and the wind found his face, and then nothing, for a long time.
When he awoke, he was still in darkness. Terror clutched his throat for long awful moments before Jon's hands took hold of his shoulders. Bran, Bran, you're safe, little brother. It's me, it's Jon. This is Castle Black; you're safe.
I'm blind, he realised. I can't see.
And then, very gently, Jon had said, Bran, you're standing up.
He had cried then: not for joy as Jon first thought, but for anger. This was not what I asked of you! But Meera, quietly, from somewhere in the dark: Perhaps you'll need your legs to serve them, Bran.
That made sense.
Serve who? Jon had demanded.
The gods, Bran had said. The old gods, the weirwood gods. I – he tried the words on his tongue for the first time – I am godsworn now.
With the words came certainty: the dark was a part of it, the blindness a help. Summer would be his eyes now, if he needed them.
In the darkness, the light would shine all the brighter.
They said afterwards that Jon had hidden him from Stannis Baratheon and his red witch-woman for weeks and weeks. Again Bran remembered little of it. For a while after he first lost his eyes he lost all sense of time, blundering around in the dark hanging on to Summer's fur or Jojen's arm or Jon's hand like a child, relearning the use of his legs, discovering hearing and smell and touch infinitely heightened. He didn't know if that was normal for blind people or a part of being godsworn. Perhaps a little of both.
But what he did remember, all the rest of his life with undimmed clarity, through all the Long Night and the battles that it brought and the Coming of the Dragon Queen and every slow second he spent weaving spells into the ice of the wall and feeling it grow once more beneath his hands, was the smooth wood chair underneath him and the crackle of the fire on the day the ravens came: the press of Summer against his leg and the click of Ghost's toenails on the floor and Jon's heavy footsteps and the break in his voice when he said: Bran – the birds – they come from Greywater Watch. Howland Reed says – he says Robb lives, and Arya with him.
The Seven Kingdoms never did make up their collective mind if the Young Wolf had truly died at the Red Wedding and been brought back to life by his father's gods at the behest of his brother, or if he'd simply escaped the slaughter in the drunken confusion, or if indeed he had ever been at the Red Wedding at all, but had magicked up a sending of himself and Grey Wind and sent them in his place, and it was these shadow-copies that the Freys had butchered. Robb himself was never to speak of it one way or another, though Arya loved to tell the tale of how she'd stumbled into a farmer's croft one snowy evening searching for shelter on her way back north and found her brother sitting by the fire, pale and thin and prone to coughing, peeling potatoes for the lady of the house who'd taken him in. It was always Rickon's favourite story, even though it made Sansa sniffle.