Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.
Author's Note: A re-working of the forehead-kiss scene, because soooo much more could have been said. Rated M because of mentions of past trauma, but otherwise nothing much M about it.
The Dread of Winter
"Jon's chest heaves, once – long and slow – like he's trying to reign in something more than just his breath. 'Sansa.' She steps toward him once more." - Jon and Sansa. When truth has its day.
"You were right about Rickon."
He says it and she has never felt more guilty about being right in her entire life.
Sansa flits a gloved hand to the snow-touched rampart before her, looking out over the hills as Jon stands staring out similarly a few feet from her.
"I didn't want to be," she says, because it's the truth, if the truth even matters at this point.
He glances at her out of the corner of his eye and shrugs his cloak tighter to him – his cloak, that she had stitched herself, and she catches sight of it in the white-touched cold, the crisp air of Winterfell's battlements. Below them, banners with flayed men lay burning. The wolves have returned.
But not all of them.
It is a hollow victory in some respects, but the part of her that had filled these halls with screams still rejoices in some small measure. She will take her comforts where she can.
He sighs then, and it's a weary sort of ire, one she has grown used to in Jon's presence of late. "Was it that easy? To give him up for dead?"
Sansa's eyes snap to his with a fury she hadn't thought herself still capable of, not to him at least. "Nothing about Rickon's death was easy."
She had seen his corpse when they brought it in, seen the arrowhead protruding from his chest and knew that it had not been a painless death. He had likely gasped for air in the same way that she had those many nights Ramsay's blade cut along her chest, his mouth smothering her scream with a moan of delight.
Ramsay liked his victims gasping. It reminded him of the life still left in them, the air still filling their lungs, the blood still rushing through their veins, the heart he still had yet to crush.
Be still, be silent. Learn to live in the breathless. This is what Sansa knows.
Rickon was wild-born and now he was wild-dead and some part of Sansa still thinks he got the better end of the deal in all this.
She shuts her eyes to the thought, remembers smoothing her cool hand over little Rickon's feverish forehead that night he lay abed sick, and the pleading lilt to his voice whenever he asked her to sing him to sleep, and the way he used to swipe her lemon cakes when he didn't think she was looking (she always was, and she always let him).
"I loved my brother," and yes, she's aware of the way the word 'my' instead of 'our' makes Jon flinch just the slightest and yet she cannot keep the spite from her voice, "I loved my brother from his first breath to his last but I would tell you the same if I could do it all over again."
"We'll never get him back."
Because nothing in the world could have returned Rickon to them at that point and she won't risk more to a losing cause. She has weighed the scales (it isn't her first) and she knows the cost.
She knows the cost.
(She tells no one how she sobbed herself to sleep that night after meeting Ramsay in the field outside Winterfell. How she had curled in on herself and wished for her brothers over and over and over again. Robb and Rickon and Bran and Robb and Rickon and Bran and –
Robb and Rickon and Bran please, oh gods, please.
Maybe being Stark means knowing how to say goodbye.)
"How dare you try to shame me of my grief," she says lowly, dangerously.
Jon looks away, glances out over the white hills, licks his lips.
A steady silence pervades the space between them, neither of them willing to speak, and she wonders if maybe it wasn't also grief that had him lashing out. She forgives him for it, in her heart of hearts, but the part of her that still cries over her too-innocent brother's too-soon death still quakes in fury, still keeps her steadily from him.
In the end, it's Jon who breaks the silence, gripping at the stone wall before him, his profile like a mountain in the snowfall between them. "We're here because of you. We're home – because of you." He says it like a final admission, like a curse.
She startles at the proclamation.
He turns to her then, his gaze obscured slightly in the falling snow, and maybe that is best – otherwise she'd have to face that endearing look of his, that face full of tender longing, and she doesn't know what to do with that just yet.
"I'm not simple enough to have missed that," he says, and it seems almost an insult when he voices it.
She eyes him cautiously.
"But at what cost?" he finishes.
Ah, and there it is.
Sansa bundles her furs closer, turning to face him fully this time. "The Eyrie isn't a threat. My cousin has pledged to our aid."
"And how easily is this cousin of yours manipulated by Lord Baelish?"
Sansa huffs, grinding her teeth. "Blood matters to these people. To the Eyrie. To Riverrun. If I call on them, they will answer. The North is loyal."
"But these are not Northern houses," he reminds her, with a ferocity that only reinforces the sentiment.
She stills, matching his steady glare with her own.
Jon shakes his head, stepping closer finally (and she doesn't acknowledge the breath of relief she releases when he does). "Sansa, please, you have to understand –"
"I understand perfectly."
Jon releases a low noise, very near a growl, and Sansa blinks at him, then furrows her brows in determination. "We're here because of Lord Baelish," she says, clipped and sure.
Jon scoffs at the comment, turning from her, stalking away in aggravated petulance, and then stalking back just as furiously. "Lord Baelish stands for no one but himself."
"Do you think I don't know that?"
"Then why trust him?"
"I don't trust him, Jon, but we need him."
Another scoff, Jon's hands in the air. "I see the way he looks at you. Would you still say we need him when he demands more than he should?" He snarls at her then, and it startles her into breathlessness, her eyes trained on his, chest heaving.
She closes her eyes then, the memory of Littlefinger's lips pressed to hers too warm and too jarring to bring the proper words forth. "He…" She stops, heaves a breath, opens her eyes. And this is where she understands. Jon is looking at her and she understands. It doesn't matter what she says now. Because he knows what Petyr Baelish wants as much as she does.
Had he become so transparent? Or was this something more?
It doesn't matter. They don't have the numbers to man the Northern border without the Knights of the Vale. She has played this game before. She knows how to keep her allies happy. She knows how to play the part.
Sansa straightens, her fists curling at her sides. "You don't approve of my choices. Fine. I understand. But I saved us out there." She points out along the battlements, past the hills, out into white and cold and still, snow-touched death – out into the fields where she had seen him gasping (dying) and sent her men forth.
And she would do it again.
"I know the cost. I know exactly what Littlefinger wants, and you're a fool if you think I haven't weighed the consequences before. I lived with him. I survived by him. I know him. More than anyone else can claim to."
"That doesn't make you untouchable!"
"No, it doesn't, but it makes me the best person able to handle him."
"'Handle' him? You say it like he's nothing more than a weapon."
Sansa lifts her chin, her eyes hard. "He isn't, if you know how to use him."
"And you do?' Again, the incredulous scoff.
It sets her skin to righteous blazing, her anger stirring her forward, her steps light in the snow.
Jon takes no note of her encroaching proximity.
"It's not without risk, no, but nothing in this venture ever is," she says lowly.
He stares at her then, hard and unyielding. The snow billows between them. "I don't like it."
"I never asked you to like it," she retorts.
He throws a narrowed glare her way. "Sansa." Always like a warning, and oh, how she tires of such warnings.
"A smart commander would use him," she snaps.
"Like you used me?"
She stops then, eyes blinking furiously at him. "What?"
A scoff leaves his lips then – faint, but enough to brand her with its incredulity. "Don't play dumb, Sansa. It doesn't suit you."
She licks her lips, takes a deep breath. "Is that what you think this was? This whole… endeavor to take back Winterfell? Our home?" She steps closer. "You think I used you?"
Snow crunches beneath the curl of the gloved hand he lays atop the stone ramparts when he looks at her out of the corner of his eye. "Whether you meant to from the start or not… aye, aye I think that's exactly what you did. And I let you."
It's startling, she realizes, how very not wrong he is. Startling enough to catch the breath in her throat, enough to strangle whatever words were fighting for air.
He turns to her then, a sigh leaving him, and he reaches for her hands, holds them delicately, even as she blinks startlingly at him with the motion. He holds her hands with far more tenderness than she thinks maybe she deserves this very moment, but she lets him hold her anyway, stilling out of some kind of awe (and maybe this is the start of it all – this is her downfall).
Jon looks to their joined hands, runs a gloved thumb over her knuckles. "You are my sister, Sansa. And I would fight for you again, I would, but – "
She stays silent, lets him collect his words.
Looking up at her, Jon furrows his brows, eyes softening. The look is endearing as much as it is frustrating and Sansa regrets that she hadn't noticed before quite how much like their father Jon looks – in a tragic, somber sort of way.
"We have to trust each other. There's too much at stake not to. Too many enemies trying to tear us apart. We need to be together if this is going to work at all. We need to be honest with each other."
This is the same boy who used to entreat Robb from her company in order to play swords in the courtyard, and the same boy whose arm Arya used to take when she snuck from their sewing lessons together, and the same boy who never glanced at her from the far side of the hall during feasts.
But this is also the boy (the man, she corrects herself), who gave her warm soup and bad ale and a cloak she had clung to after the night terrors came to visit that first night at Castle Black. And this is the man who said 'We fight with what we have', knowing it likely meant his death (again), and never going back on that promise he made when he held her hand over the letter full of Ramsay's foul threats and nodded his assent to take their home back. And this is the man who broke his knuckles across her husband-captor's face with a ferocity that would have scared her had it been another man's jaw he shattered, and still – still – he passed the key to the kennels from his blood-drenched glove to hers with nothing but a somber nod and one final look over his shoulders as he left her to pass her sentence.
Sansa feels the well of something not unlike shame fester in her throat, but she swallows it down quickly – too quick to taste the full sourness of it. Her throat is stained with it regardless, and she begins to wonder if it will always be thus with him.
But Jon is silent now, has been for a while, simply staring at her, and the words are too many and too few in her head and nothing seems right so she does nothing when he slips his hands from hers and sighs his resignation, turning from her as though to leave.
"I did, Jon." Her voice has found air before she has a chance to school it into calmness and he stops beneath the stone threshold, a glance over his shoulder. She licks her lips. Presses on. "You're right. I did use you."
His brows furrow as he turns back to her fully. Snow catches in his hair once more.
Sansa flexes her fingers at her sides, wills herself not to press a worrying thumb to palm, and Jon's gaze flicks to the motion a moment before returning to her eyes. She begins to wonder when he started to read her so well. Had it been from the very first? No. Not from the very first. From Castle Black perhaps.
They parted as little more than acquaintances when last they were at Winterfell together and have since returned to each other as strangers. She wonders now if perhaps she had missed something along the way, all those years ago, in a summer-touched Winterfell she hadn't bothered to properly share with her bastard brother.
(But those years are past and she has no mind to return to them anymore, not with the years in between keeping her from them and Sansa already knows that yes, yes she had missed something along the way – something too dear to linger on now without the stark wither of regret lighting her bones.)
Swallowing tightly, Sansa straightens her back, lifts her chin. "You had an army. You had the experience. And you're father's son as much as I'm his daughter. I knew I could persuade you in the end. Ramsay's letter only helped."
Jon's chest heaves, once – long and slow – like he's trying to reign in something more than just his breath. "Sansa."
She steps toward him once more. "You know what Ramsay did to me. In some small, vague measure, you know."
She can see the clench of his jaw from where she stands but he says nothing.
"Perhaps I never told you precisely but – "
"You don't have to," he interrupts her, eyes drifting down.
Sansa swallows, presses on. "But you know enough. You know I would have made good on my promise to never return to him alive. You know I would have done whatever it took to take back our home."
He looks at her then, those dark eyes unblinking, keenly aware. "Sansa." A ghost of a rumble.
She looks at her hands then, notices how her thumb has found the crease in her other palm already, how she worries a hole into her gloves even now. "You made it easy to feel safe." Her thumb stops its path at the heel of her palm. She looks up at him.
Jon heaves something very close to a sigh, but it's tinged with pain and frustration. It knots in his body, pulls taut. He rubs a hand down his face. "I promised I would protect you, Sansa. And I stand by my promises."
"I know. I know your word is your life." She scoffs, more fond remembrance tinging it than any kind of skepticism. "I've known it since we were babes."
"'Safe' was supposed to feel easy. I wouldn't be doing my duty otherwise."
"And is that what I was? Your 'duty'?"
Jon stops, brows furrowed.
Sansa takes a deep breath, feels the sting of winter take root in her lungs. "You wanted honesty, Jon. So be honest."
"I don't… Sansa, what are you – "
"We used each other. You and I."
Anger flashes over his features then, and Sansa is quick to step closer, close enough to reach a hand to his cloak, to clutch at the fur draped over his elbow. He steadies then, face softening minutely, and she cannot let herself think too long about what that means so she licks her lips and continues on.
"You said father's ghost would come back and murder you if you didn't watch over me. You said you had to watch over me. You said this like it was an obligation, a duty."
Jon's lip curls slightly, his frustration bubbling forth but she doesn't stop, only curls her fist tighter into his cloak, the swell of fur bunching between her knuckles.
"I don't begrudge you it, Jon, I don't." And she doesn't, not truly.
Back from death, and she still doesn't understand all of what he tells her, if he tells her anything at all, but she does understand this:
His watch has ended.
(And another begins.)
He had been lost when he cut that rope and hung those men (and one boy he would not utter the name of, though she sees the ache in the white of his knuckles when he speaks of him).
Jon has always been a ward of duty.
Don't look away. Father will know if you do.
"You're a protector, Jon. And I needed protecting." Her chest tightens. "And maybe I was just the nearest thing when you lost the Black and your brothers and I don't begrudge you, Jon, I told you, but I – I…"
"You weren't."
Sansa stops, suddenly shaking. Not enough for Jon to notice, but enough to make her clench her jaw shut at the rattle beneath her skin.
"You weren't just the nearest thing," he says, voice low and guttural. He blinks, takes a steadying breath, glances out over the ramparts for a moment. The white is comforting. Always has been. The snow of home.
Jon sighs, rubbing a hand over his eyes. "You were home," he tells her finally, hand dropping from his eyes as he finally looks at her.
Her hand unfurls from its fist in his cloak. "I'm not Robb or Arya."
"No," he says. "No, you're not."
Her throat flexes. She clears it. "We had little affection for each other as children."
"Aye, that's true. But there was affection, still."
She blinks at him. "Jon."
He lights a hand along her shoulder and she stills beneath its weight.
"We used each other, aye," he says softly, and the breath stills in her throat at his admittance. "I needed purpose and you needed a sword. And maybe… I don't know." He stops, licks his lips, tries again. "Maybe that's exactly it. Maybe we didn't use each other so much as we needed each other."
"What if I still need you?" She breathes the words before she can stop herself, before she can regret it. Because he wants honesty, she reminds herself. Because he wants trust. And because she wants it as well. "Not as a sword, not as…" She stops, takes a breath. "Just as Jon. Just… Jon. What if I need that still?"
It would be easy to say it was because of Baelish. It would be easy to say it was because the dead are coming and the northern lords never wanted her in the first place and because Cersei still wants her throat slit and because of a hundred different reasons why she should want him here but this –
But that she wants him.
Jon.
Jon, who stays her nightmares with a warm hand at her brow. Jon, who gives her his last piece of salted ham. Jon, who wears her hand-stitched cloak in the fall of winter. Jon, who looks her in the eye and says what he means, even when he doesn't say it well.
Jon, who loves her, and she knows this – she knows this because she loves him, too – even through everything. Even through battle haze and barren homes and brittle cold.
Jon – who stayed his fist over Ramsay's bloodied face and let her take her kill.
Some dark part of her will always love him for that, even when she knows she shouldn't, even when she knows it is too dangerous a thing to revel in.
"What if I still need you here, Jon? With me?"
Jon looks at her, just looks at her, his lips pursed tight, his brow furrowed, and it is a face she dreamt of once, she knows. Because he has always been home to her as well. Maybe not so well as Father or Mother or Robb, but he was. He was home.
He is home, now. The only one she knows anymore. The only one she wants to fight for.
He takes a step closer, and Sansa can feel the heat of him already. The wolf in her bristles at it, unsure, but when the warmth of his breath hits her cheeks it all eases into something else. Something that knots in her throat and keeps her rooted before him. And then his hand lifts from her shoulder and rests against her head, his gloved fingers sifting into her copper hair in a way that shouldn't feel quite so comforting as it does.
He leans in, and for a moment she thinks he might kiss her, right there atop the ramparts, right there in the harsh snow of winter, right there with his hand bracing her head gently and her mouth parted in trepidation and his eyes darker than she's ever seen them and she wonders – she wonders –
If maybe she would let him.
But he tilts his chin upwards in the last moment, his hand urging her head down just a fraction and his lips meet her brow, hold fast, light with a sure tenderness that sets her eyes to watering. He kisses her there, and all at once he has never felt more like a brother and, simultaneously, not like one at all.
He releases her slowly, but keeps his lips braced to her skin. "Then you shall have me, Sansa. Because I think I still need you, too." His whisper ghosts across her forehead before he pulls back, keeps his hand in her hair, locks gazes with her.
She pretends not to see the way his eyes flick to her lips – just the once – and maybe that makes her craven.
(But there are worse things, she reminds herself.)
He pulls away fully and she finds her hands curled into the front of his tunic, keeping him there against her. He blinks at her in surprise. "You were home to me, as well," she whispers.
His lip quirks upward in that mark of fondness she has learned is the most open his affection will ever allow him to be with her, and she loves him all the more for it.
"And I don't want – ," she starts, takes a breath, looks down at her hands curled in his tunic, and only continues when she feels the steady reassurance of his own hands folding around her elbows, holding her to him, "I don't want it to be just 'home' between us."
His brows furrow in confusion, but he lets her continue.
"There is so much that has happened to us since then. So much we still don't know about each other, and I want… I want to learn it, if you'll let me. I want us to be more than simply the last Starks to each other."
His gaze drifts from hers then, and she has to clutch him harder. "And you are a Stark, Jon. You are. You're more Stark to me than anyone I've ever known."
His eyes snap back to hers. "Sansa," he says almost as warning. Again, a warning. A warning she has never heeded.
"Anyone," she stresses. And she knows that means more than Robb, more than Father, more than her. "Being a Stark isn't just blood and honor. It's the North. It's the people. It's choosing them, again and again, even knowing the cost. It's fighting for them, and knowing exactly what that means." She unfurls one fist over his chest and spreads her hand over the heart-wound she knows lays beneath the layers.
He winces, though not from pain, and oh, how she wants to hold him for it.
"Being a Stark is putting the lives of your people before your own, something you know intimately, something you know better than anyone." Her hand burns where it rests against him but he doesn't try to remove it, only grips her tighter, shifts his hands from her elbows up her arms. "I have the Stark name, it's true, but I haven't always lived up to it. And I… I want to, now. You make me want to."
Jon shakes his head. "You're more Stark than you think. The Vale rode for you."
"Littlefinger rode for me."
Jon nearly snarls at the reminder.
Sansa's hands are at his cheeks before she realizes she's moved. "Jon, listen to me."
And he does. He hasn't always. But then neither has she. And maybe that makes them more family than she realized.
"You're right," she begins. "We need to be together on this."
"But Baelish…"
"Do you trust me?"
He snorts, and she can't stop the smile that graces her lips at the apologetic look he gives her following the noise. "Sansa, you said it yourself, we can't trust him."
"Do you trust me?"
He is silent for longer than she is comfortable with, but then they had agreed on honesty, hadn't they? She can't fault him his hesitance.
"Aye," he says finally, his face between her hands.
"This is about more than me," she says, and she knows he understands. "This about the North. And the people we've vowed to serve. This is about what it means to be a Stark. We do what we must."
"We do what we must," he echoes breathlessly, staring at her.
Her hands slip from his cheeks and he catches them between them, presses his forehead against hers and just breathes. They stand there sharing breath and time and thought for longer than either thinks is proper but neither has the heart to pull away.
"I'm sorry I wasn't truthful," Sansa says, lip trembling, eyes watering.
Jon hushes her, his hand reaching to the back of her head once more.
The snow falls around them.
"Winter is here," she whispers in the space between their lips.
"Father always promised," he chuckles, and it seems to break the quiet, and then he's reaching around her, tugging her to him, burying his nose in the furs at her throat, and her hands are grasping at his back, anchoring him to her and there – there in the cold and frost and stillness – there in the heart of a white twilight, they vow silently to each other –
"The pack survives."
The snow never stops falling.
And Starks never stop howling –
Even in the dread of winter.