Disclaimer: Not mine.
Note: Back to dabble briefly in a fandom. You guys know me by now, I don't have to explain, right?
honest.
He raises a fist to knock on the door that's appeared before him as if by magic. The wood, plain and solid, hums with the force of the sea beneath it. His eyes catch on the hair sprouting darkly from his knuckles in rough profusion. That hair had stood on end when he woke from death feeling like he'd swallowed a jar of lightning.
Sound punctures his thoughts, an echo in reverse, the ancestor of the hollow rap his fist will make on the heavy, polished oak of the door. The noise is intrusive and absurd, like a grave robber's footfalls on the cobbles of a mausoleum as yet unfilled with bones.
He hesitates. His heart hammers, hammers, stops. He feels the cold seep in.
His knuckles freeze and crack like ice falling from the Wall. Who is he to be here? Second born and last choice, bastard son and heir of nothing but the honesty that might yet be the death of them all? Jon Snow, ill-begotten, ill-fated, ill-met. Too stupid to stay dead at the advice of a dozen knives, too prideful to lie to save thousands of men.
You know nothing. You know nothing.
He is here because he fights for life. He's met her because he knows what it is to be dead.
His heart stutters back to life. Blood pounds in the arteries of his neck, prickling the skin of his face with life.
Lightning leaps between his fingers.
He knocks.
The sound is softer, warmer than he could have anticipated, hardly louder than the groan of the ship. He feels like a dead man in a mummer's farce of the living. When the curtain opens, what's his part. Not Commander now, not King, never Stark. He doesn't know what is meant to happen next.
The door opens on the Queen and he remembers himself in an indrawn breath.
"You know nothing, Jon Snow," he hears in the exhale, in the moment before the one in which he meets her eyes.
But then, "I was expecting you, " she says. "Come in."