She is cold.
She is always cold, but since returning to Winterfell, to a home that is broken like her, it is as if the chill has found a permanent resting place inside the hollows of her soul. Her fingers are numb and painfully stiff as they handle the familiar weight of a blade, her pale skin wrapped thin and tight around the brittle shifting of her bones. Her breath freezes jaggedly in her lungs, cutting like glass into the old, deadened tune her heart beats against her chest in constant defiance of a god who had once consumed her. She is alone and it turns the tears she will not shed to ice.
She finds him amid the flames he bends so easily to his will and drags him to her bed. In answer to her questing mouth, he drives the winter away with sweeping strokes and rough, familiar touches. He is a blinding heat that scorches her skin and warms her limbs; bringing her roaring back to a life she can accept, a version of herself she remembers. And then he holds her close, stroking the marred skin of her back beneath the furs they have burrowed under, kissing her hair with a tenderness she craves but does not want and in this simmering aftermath, her tears seep into his chest. She tells herself, with eyes squeezed shut, that this is not love.
When she wakes, he is gone and she is cold again.