Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.
Author's Note: Takes place during Season Six. Placed directly after their reunion scene. Sticks to canon but with the idea that Sansa was pregnant when she fled Ramsay and Winterfell. Warnings for miscarriage and mild blood.
The Warmth of Wolves
"He should have known something was wrong when Ghost whined at her feet, his nose nuzzling into her abdomen. Castle Black sees its first miscarriage, and so does Jon." - Jon and Sansa. When Ramsay leaves Sansa with more than just scars and Jon finds something he thought he lost.
Sansa loses her unborn that first night at Castle Black.
Jon thinks he should have known something was wrong when Ghost whined at her feet, his nose nuzzling into her abdomen. Instead, he watches as Sansa' face pinches tight, a sudden croak leaving her, and then her arms are around her middle and she's doubling over. Wet, sudden gasps escape her lips, and Jon can only stand there, hands hovering uselessly in the air, hollering for Brienne, for help, for anyone. He takes her by the elbow and tries to lead her to the bed.
When she turns, he stills abruptly, his gaze pinned to where the seat of her dress is soaked through with blood. He's ushered from the room shortly after by Brienne's commanding hands and the last thing he sees is Sansa's sweat-lined forehead pressing into the pillow of his cot, a lung-scraping groan eliciting from her mouth and then the wood of his door is shut in his face. Ghost whines next to him with restless paws.
And so he finds himself standing outside his own chamber door in the dark of a crisp, winter night. They've had no new maester report yet, and Sam and Gilly are gone, so he goes to the Red Woman and Davos. Sometime in the night, between the hoarse orders he shouts for new bed linens and hot water and the herbs that Melisandre has asked for, Jon finally begins to understand.
Castle Black sees its first miscarriage, and so does Jon.
He slumps back against the door for most of the night, just listening to the moans at his back, his hands clenching and unclenching, the image of her blood-soaked dress blaring and ripe in his mind. He can almost taste the copper tang on his tongue when he sees it behind his closed lips.
His lady sister. His porcelain sister. A secret Southern dove struggling beneath the winds of winter.
(He sees the cracks in such an image, even now, and he reminds himself that nothing lasts.)
Brienne opens the door and he almost falls through it, steadying himself just in time. He looks up at the lady knight, eyes searching. "Well?"
"A bath, my lord. My lady requires a bath."
"But is she alright?"
Brienne's lips purse tight, her shoulders bunching. "A bath, sir, please. My lady is too exhausted for much else – questions especially."
Jon swallows thickly, nodding, even when his chest tightens with an anxious need for answers. He orders a bath to be readied, and while the men bring forth the tub and the hot water, he catches a glimpse of her curled form atop his bed, her back to the door, and she has never looked so small before.
The door is shut as soon as Brienne finds the opportunity again and Jon is left standing outside once more, eyes fixed to the slowly lightening twilight over the horizon. The sun is still deep beneath the snowy hills, but it is not the blanket darkness of night anymore. He doesn't even know how long he stands there, just waiting.
He watches the tub being pulled from the room when she is finished, and he has to swallow back the bile on his tongue when the water glints a deep pink in the bare dawn light. The bloodied bed sheets and dress soon follow, gathered in a hurried bunch in Melisandre's hands when she exits the room. She glances at Jon a moment, something passing over her features that he cannot recognize, and then she is nodding her farewell and disappearing in the snow. He hasn't a mind to watch her go. He waits outside the door, Ghost turning in anxious circles beside him before he finally lays down, huffing.
Brienne opens the door one last time, and it might have been hours, it might have been days, but the slowly creeping sun at his back says it was just the better part of a night, even when his mind is too rattled to notice.
Brienne steps from the room, a dour look upon her face. "My lord."
"I'm not a lord." He doesn't know why he says it. It's not important now. It's not important ever, really, and yet he says it. Perhaps because he doesn't know what else to say.
Brienne only blinks at him, her chin rising imperceptibly. "Sir."
Jon huffs impatiently. "Sansa, is she – "
"She is well. Or… well enough, at least."
Jon runs a hand through his hair. Ghost takes his chance and bounds into the room. Neither warrior moves to stop the direwolf.
Jon remembers the way Sansa used to tie her hair, and the way she used to dote on the horses, and the way she preferred raspberry jam to strawberry and yet, he can't remember her nameday or the heroes she used to go on about from her books, or a single moment when they had sat in a room together – just them – for more than a matter of minutes.
He remembers what is was to live with Sansa Stark but not what it was to live with his sister, and maybe that makes all the difference.
It's a rare sort of guilt that tugs at the space between his ribs now. A needling, burrowing sort of yearning he doesn't know how to name.
"She's asking for you," Brienne says at last.
Jon releases a breath. "Thank you, Brienne. That will be all, then."
She looks at him a moment, seeming to study him, and then she steps aside, but not without a final word. "Be kind, my lord. I don't think my lady has known much kindness these past few years."
Jon looks at her a moment, his throat tightening, but before he can answer, Brienne is shifting to the side of the threshold, resuming her watch, eyes ahead, and he slips through the door with nothing but a resigned silence.
Sansa sits atop the bed with his cloak wrapped around her, a flash of red fabric peeking out from beneath it just at her stockinged feet and the rest of the borrowed dress from Melisandre that she wears is covered by his cloak. She bundles the fur of the cloak's collar closer to her throat, eyes steady on Jon when he closes the door behind him.
Ghost is already along the floor at the foot of the bed.
"Sansa."
She attempts a smile, but it's tinged with pain and doesn't do much but quiver a moment before it's lost.
A quiet room. The copper tang of blood still suffusing the air.
Jon glances to the floor and sees the trickled stain of blood leading up to the bed, hastily washed but still glistening threateningly along the stone at his feet.
He swallows back that familiar bile.
"I'm sorry to have commandeered your chambers so abruptly," she says, a true sense of apology bleeding into her tone beneath the weariness.
Jon shakes his head, moving to the chair beside the bed. "It's not important."
"Have you slept? You should sleep, Jon, you're no good to anyone like this."
He huffs in mild frustration. She is simultaneously every bit the Sansa he used to know and yet, nothing like her at all.
"Sansa," he says again, and it seems to be all he needs to say.
She swallows tightly, glancing down to her toes as they curl along the floor, her wool stockings catching on the stone.
Jon rubs a hand down his face, sighing with an exhaustion that has nothing to do with his body. He's never had this kind of conversation before and didn't think he ever would. He doesn't know where to start. But he knows he needs to start.
He clears his throat, leaning his elbows over his knees. "Did you… did you know you were carrying?" It seems a safe place to begin, safer than all the other questions he has, at least.
(Questions like was this the first? and what else has he done? and is this the worst of it? Questions he isn't sure he wants to ask.)
Sansa glances back up to him, considering a moment. "I… suspected."
He thinks of her journey to Castle Black, of all the things she's told him. A high fall from the walls of Winterfell. Crossing at the near-frozen winter. Scarcely any food and even less shelter. Days on horseback in the bitter cold.
And all while with child.
Had she known then? Had it mattered?
And then he thinks the worst of it –
Had she lost the babe – if it could even be called that (he'd seen the soiled sheets, the bloody bits of something unborn but not yet fully formed) – because of him?
Had he gripped her too tightly when he embraced her in the courtyard? Had he not noticed her river-soaked dress freezing to her skin in time? Should he not have given her the ale? Should he not have yelled at her, fought with her, pushed her further when she was gaunt and fragile and already bruised?
Jon grips his hands before him, staring at his white knuckles.
"This changes nothing."
Jon looks up at her, brows furrowing.
"I meant what I said earlier. I will take back Winterfell, with or without you."
Jon sighs, the anger already seeping back into his throat. "This isn't the time."
"This is exactly the time."
He doesn't think he's ever heard her growl before but he imagines it's the closest he'll ever get to witness it. He stands then, his chair scraping with the force of it. "You're tired. You're hurting. You need to rest."
She glares up at him. "I will rest when I'm home. Or I'll rest in the grave. Anywhere else will be a lie."
His nostrils flare with his frustration and he stalks away to the hearth, passing Ghost as the direwolf raises his head to Jon. "You've just lost a babe, Sansa."
"And I daresay it won't be the last."
She says it so mournfully and so resignedly he has to look back at her. He catches the way she presses a hand to her stomach, her eyes blinking back the wetness. She pulls a deep breath through her nose, purses her lips tight, and then her eyes are dry once more, turning to look at him.
His bones thrum with a sickening rage when he thinks of the Bolton bastard. What in seven hells had he done to her?
This is not the Sansa who used to preen at flattery and squeal at gossip and flutter at princes.
He misses that Sansa, he realizes suddenly, as much as he's intrigued by the Sansa sitting before him. It's a strange sort of unease that churns beneath his ribs. A longing and an awe, all at once.
Turning back to her, Jon lets his hands fall limply to his sides. The flames lick at the backs of his calves like a threat. "Sansa, please."
She must sense something in the way he says her name, because she has to turn away then, digging the heel of her palm into her suddenly wet-again eyes, something like a scoff leaving her lips. "Why in seven hells am I crying about this? I shouldn't be crying."
He never knew how to handle Sansa's tears before and he doesn't know now either. He steps toward her, unsure. "It's okay to cry."
"It's not," she grinds out.
"Sansa – Sansa, please." He shuffles back into his seat, wanting to reach for her and not knowing how. So he just sits across from her, gives her time, watches her hesitantly. Something akin to desperation lights within him – quiet and ill-formed as it is. "I'm so, so sorry."
Sansa nods mutely, dropping her hand from her face to grip at the cloak over her shoulders.
Jon's brow furrows, his mouth opening, and then closing. He grips his hands before him, one palm rolling smoothly over the other in what should be comfort.
He doesn't imagine either of them know much comfort at this point.
"I know that… I know…." And then he stops trying.
You know nothing, Jon Snow.
He nearly scoffs at the remembrance. How right Ygritte had been. To think he knew anything of what Sansa must be feeling in this moment. How arrogant. How stupid and callous and…
He looks at her, sees a woman he's never met before, with the eyes of a girl he used to care for, in some small, temperate measure. In the way of easy, childhood affection.
How arrogant, indeed.
He wipes a hand down his face, sits back in his seat, stares into the fire across the room a while longer.
Eventually, Sansa sniffs, shuffling a bit on the cot. "You can say it."
He glances back at her.
She licks her lips, tries again. "Whatever it is you want to say to me. You can say it."
The sudden, fierce need to hold her startles him into stillness. Outside the door, the snow still falls, even as the sun rises. Ghost stays curled along the floor at the foot of the bed, and something in his presence, in the chill air, in the unassuming way Sansa sits atop his bed, is familiar in all the wrong ways.
In the way of home.
(Except she had never been one to visit his chambers then, and yet, in a castle full of false brothers, it is the most welcome sight to greet him since he woke from death.)
And so he tries again.
"I know how much you wanted it."
She narrows her eyes dangerously at him.
"Not… not his, just – " He has to stop, has to swallow back the bile at the thought of Ramsay touching her in ways too foul to speak of. "I mean, I know how much it meant to you, when it used to mean something. When princes and children and family meant something to you."
"You mean when I was young and stupid."
"That's not it."
"Except it is." She stays very still, just watching him, and he has to look away.
"I just… I'm sorry it turned out so ugly. It was a beautiful dream, it was," and he means it, for her at least. He may have taken the Black, but some part of him always knew his lady sister deserved that love she wished for, if only because she wished for it so purely and so dearly. "It was a beautiful dream once and Ramsay turned it ugly, and for that, I am sorry beyond measure. I truly am."
His words end on a fervent breath, and something in her face tells him she understands. That she thanks him for it, even. But the look doesn't linger long. She turns away, and shadow has overtaken her face once more. She breathes deep, curls her fingers along her thighs.
'Half-brother' she used to call him. Yes, her words were too well-mannered for 'bastard'. But she never joined them in the yard when Arya used to tug her along to watch the boys spar. And she never stitched him a favor like she had her dear brother Robb. And she never shared a cup with him when their father allowed them wine at feasts. But then, he also never told her he liked her singing, or ever offered to ride with her when she took the horses out, or ever bothered to wonder what it was she prayed so fervently for.
So many lost years. So much blood between them. So much love that never had the chance to be.
"Such a stupid, little girl," she mumbles, eyes downcast.
"You're not," he says quickly.
She scoffs, shaking her head. Her eyes stay wet, but no tears fall.
"You're not," he says again, this time surer, this time with the grounding knowledge that she will never be a little girl again.
"You don't even know why it mattered so much. Why I… " She grinds her teeth, blinks her wet eyes. "Yes, it's true. It used to mean something to me. A marriage, a marriage to Joffrey even." She spits the words derisively. "I wanted the kind of prince the songs spoke of. I went on and on about having his babies and being his lady wife and yes, those stories meant something to me. They mattered – I wanted all of it, it's true. I still – " She clamps her mouth shut, seems to think better of it.
(So much love that never had the chance to be.)
Sansa closes her eyes and breathes deep.
"I still want it, in some regard," she admits, opening her eyes once more. "But not the way I used to. Not in the way of a naïve, bright-eyed child."
Jon's brows pinch together, his throat flexing. "What do you mean?"
"Mother told me once I was the first choice she ever made for love."
She stares at him, and suddenly it is Lady Stark in the line of her brow and the cut of her cheeks and the Tully blue of her eyes. Suddenly, it is a face he's always longed for – even when he wouldn't admit it.
(The only bit of mother's love he's ever known – small and unyielding – and he craves it even still, even now.)
But Sansa is not her mother, never has been, and some part of him is blessedly thankful for it – though he hasn't the mind to understand why just yet.
"She told me once that the only time she's ever struck father was when he came home with you in his arms." She doesn't revel in it, he knows, but even still – even still…
Jon's chest tightens, his jaw working. He thinks he should be angry, spiteful even, but all he feels is a hollowness he hadn't expected. Their father's death has cast a shadow so long he can't even remember what the world looked like when it wasn't beneath the shade of winter.
"She was so angry. So… so hurt. So betrayed. She slapped him, she told me. Wouldn't speak to him for days. She even rode back to Riverrun for a fortnight, to be with her family, to… rethink, get her bearings."
Jon raises a brow her way at the news, at the way Sansa says it so abruptly, so unashamedly. But then, he's learning that Sansa takes no pains to hide her barbs, takes no steps to soften her honesty. It evokes an intimacy he hadn't thought to assume before. An intimacy he keeps tight to his chest.
"It was all very discreet," Sansa explains. "No one but immediate family even knew she made the trip, and Grandfather sent her back after the fortnight, urging her to make amends with Father, to do her duty as his wife."
"To raise his bastard child," Jon supplies. He can't help the bitterness laced in the words.
Sansa eyes him steadily, nodding. "Yes."
Something like a growl brews in his chest, but it's softened by the grief anchored there.
Ghost rises then, padding over to Jon, and his shoulders lose some of their tension when the direwolf stops at his feet, looking up at him. "Alright, boy, alright," he mumbles, scratching behind his ear, and then Ghost releases a low whine, turning to Sansa and sitting just before her as he places his head over her thigh.
Sansa looks down on him in question, her hands hovering in the air, and then she looks at Jon. At his nod, she lights a hand delicately atop Ghost's head. He releases a soft huff of air, nudging closer. Sansa's hand glides through his fur quietly for many moments, and all at once, Jon is reminded of her own direwolf, Lady. He questions her absence a moment, but at the way Sansa's tear-filled gaze is riveted to Ghost, at the way her shoulders bunch and her hands tremble and her lip quivers – he thinks he knows what fate has stolen Lady away.
Yet another piece of her, taken. It makes the anger ripe in his stomach, the coil of rage and longing that much tighter. Crying sounds too much like howling to Stark ears, and he has heard enough of Sansa's cries.
In winter, they must protect each other.
"But this isn't about me," he says finally, making her glance up at him. He takes a deep breath, folds his hands together once more, and waits.
Something in her face shifts, nearly crumbles, and her hand curls tight along the scruff of Ghost's neck, yet he makes no noise to protest.
"What happened when Lady Stark returned home?" he prompts her.
She takes a moment to collect herself, patting Ghost one last time before he canters away from her and resumes his place at the foot of the bed. "It took time, and patience, and plenty of arguments but… Mother always said that love isn't something you find. It isn't something waiting for you, it doesn't just happen. You build it. You work it from the ground up, stone by stone, hand by hand. Love is a choice. A hard one, oftentimes, but a choice, nonetheless. And it's what she chose with father."
Something lights along his skin like realization. "You were their first child, since Father's… infidelity."
Sansa pulls her lip between her teeth, a tremulous, hesitant laugh leaving her. "She said she wanted me more than anything in this world because I was her choice. After all the hurt and the betrayal and the doubt, she chose love. She wanted it. She meant it, with all of her. She put her hand in Father's and they built something of it. They made me. And gods, but is it wrong to want that, too?"
He's suddenly reminded of the kiss atop the wall he shared with Ygritte. The adrenaline was still pumping through his veins, the exhilaration of the climb still raging in his lungs, the grand, sweeping scope of possibility laid out before him when he looked over the edge and saw the sun greeting the earth over a winter-white horizon.
How he had kissed her and wanted nothing else in that moment. Not a black cloak. Not a sworn oath. Not even father or Robb or Arya.
Just this. Just her chest pressed to his and her smile against his lips and the gruff warmth of her laughter like a whole new dawn between them, even brighter than the one creeping over the distance.
Jon thinks he understands Sansa, if only a little. He thinks he understands what it means to want something solely for you, and to want it with everything of yourself, and then to lose it.
He thinks he knows why such a choice would be important to her.
He'd made his own when he finally left Ygritte and not a day goes by when he doesn't wonder what would have happened if he'd chosen differently – especially when the first blade had pierced his chest and he dropped to his knees in blood-flecked snow while his brothers watched.
"It's just words, boy, to keep us a little warmer in the night – make us feel like we've got a purpose."
Qhorin Halfhand was right about something at least. Jon believed in that purpose once. But he doesn't know what he believes in now.
Jon looks at Sansa.
Maybe it's simpler than he thinks.
"It's not wrong to want it," he finally manages, more a croak than anything.
Sansa looks at him with furrowed brows, her throat flexing, jaw clenched tight. Her tears still haven't fallen.
And what a sweet, sweet girl. What a wonder. The stature of a heart tree and the grace of wolves. There's a fierce winter in this summer child. There's the striking North in her still.
(It really is much simpler than he thinks.)
Perhaps purpose is rather like love. It doesn't fall into your lap, it doesn't wait for you to find it. You have to choose it. You have to place stone upon stone and build it. You have to grasp it with your own to hands and hold it like your life depends upon it – because it does, in the end.
Jon pulls his chair closer to the bed, close enough that his knees bump hers, close enough that he can grasp her hands between his, if only they weren't buried in his cloak – close enough to see the Tully blue of her eyes, eyes he used to turn from but not now.
Not ever again.
"It's still a beautiful dream, Sansa." He reaches up and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, catching the way her breath halts and her lips part uncertainly. He keeps his hold along her jaw, brushes a calloused thumb along her cheekbone. He offers her a tentative, bruised smile, and something catches in his chest at the way her eyes flutter at the motion. "It's still a beautiful dream. Too beautiful to be marred by the likes of Ramsay." He leans in closer, and doesn't think about the way the fire's light flickers over her copper hair, or the way she won't stop staring at him, or the way he swears he can feel the thunder of her pulse beneath his hand at her jaw. "He will never have all of you, not so long as you have that."
Her face crumbles, her chin dipping down so that shadow hides her pained features from his view, but the ragged exhale that leaves her tells him enough. His hand slips from her face and suddenly, she reaches out a hand to grasp at his thigh, her fist curling in his pantleg as she hunches over and sobs, just the once, just a single heaving, wet sound that racks her whole frame, her shoulders quaking beneath the force of it and he wonders how he ever thought Sansa Stark unremarkable in her youth.
It takes long moments for her to steady herself, moments he takes to remind himself that this is his blood, this is family. But more than that, this is Sansa.
This is purpose – the purpose he chooses.
When she finally looks at him, uncurling her fist in his pantleg to scrub the tears away, her knuckles digging into the eye socket, she lets out a long, exhausted exhale. It seems to wash more than the tears away. Her hand clutches back at her stomach but he doesn't think it's with the same kind of pain as before and this he can understand.
"Thank you, Jon," she whispers, her voice still rough. She clears it, nods at him, and something like a smile graces her lips.
Jon is suddenly reminded how devastatingly beautiful his sister is and the tightness in his chest is all at once unfamiliar.
But he only nods in response, his own smile tugging at his lips. They sit staring at each other, their knees still bumping, the fire still crackling, the snow still falling.
The blood still drying.
Sansa scrunches her nose then, looking down at the cloak wrapped around her. "How old is this thing, anyway?"
Jon raises his brows at her.
She fingers the edge of the fur collar in what looks to be distaste. "It's not particularly good craftsmanship."
The laugh that bubbles out of him startles both of them. But it's warm, and it's welcome, and it swallows him whole.
Sansa beams at him in return. "Really, Jon, you should get a new one already. A warmer one." Contemplation steals over her face as she taps a finger along the fur.
Jon settles back in his chair, his smile now small but quietly affectionate. "Are you cold then?"
Sansa clutches at the fabric, shaking her head. "Not anymore," she answers softly, eyes unblinking on his.
He isn't either, he suddenly realizes.
It's a long, harsh winter ahead still – but there is warmth with wolves.
A pack, after all, must start with two.