Unearthing
Jon always gently sighs and shuts his eyes if Sansa makes a mistake, or if they're arguing. He's not angry with her, never angry. He wants to understand her. He never had to before, young boys never had to understand their bratty little sisters. But now he's not a boy and she's not little. He thinks of his father's solemn expression. Protect her. Protect your sister.
He wants her to understand him, but he's not sure how to carefully put it into words that her suggestions sometimes sound like a vague fiction he doesn't know how to create. They're still speaking the same language- let's kill the monsters that have taken our home, let's avenge our family as a family- but their dialects are different and they resort to awkward hand signals that have to be signaled over and over to finally make sense.
They're ready to trust each other. Sansa has forgotten how, but with Jon, she's remembering. She's gripping his hand while they run through dark and unfamiliar woods together. If she stumbles, he will catch her. It is the rest of the world that leaves her struggling. With fingers on soft fabrics and faint memories of stern lessons about needles, she can breathe in the North she once knew. With that, and with Jon.
He is just like Father. When they stand in front of lords with men and wildlings with men and bastards with men, she feels the familiar pull on her face, the pull of a false smile or a boldness that isn't entirely hers. But she finds comfort in thinking this is what it would've been like, being Ned Stark's grown daughter, standing behind but close, learning how to be a diplomatic lady. With that big fur coat round his shoulders, she can sometimes pretend Jon is him. And then she is safe.
Jon carries a hollowness in him. He doesn't raise an alarm, but something has been stolen from him. Something from his chest, where there is now a cavity. Have his innards been excavated? He never did learn what the Red Witch exactly did to pull him from that deep dark abyss he felt nothing in. He brought a piece of it back with him, he thinks. They traded his guts in for a piece of an abyss. In the night he puts a hand over where his heart should be, and doesn't breath, and listens. Thump. He keeps his hand there, to make sure. Thump. It could've been a noise outside. Thump. Maybe he's dreaming. Thump. He'd died. Thump.
He'd died.
Somehow, like that, he falls asleep, until there is a THUMP on his door and he bolts up in bed, gasping for air like he is reborn again. Every time he wakes it is like this, like being reborn again. Now he welcomes every nightmare because every dreamless night is like being dead again.
There is no mercy from the fist that strikes the door to his chambers to deliver news in the night. In the morning he can shake the darkness, but if they wake him in the night it's hard to find sleep again. He checks the guards. He goes to Ghost in the kennels, feeds him a treat. And one night in the kitchens he finds Sansa.
He frowns when she tells him, "Can't sleep. Nightmares." Maybe it is because she is his little sister and he is still expecting for her to start giggling about princes or start preening in newly-sown dresses. There was never room for nightmares for a girl lost in a daydream with Arya as her only great enemy. Then realization dawns and his fists are aching once again, with the need to tend to dead men's jaws.
She sits at a table and there is a plate of lemon cakes in front of her. She is unapologetically picking up the crumbs with her fingers and licking them off. "Care for some?"
He shakes his head as he take a seat in front of her. "Some would say this is very unladylike, Sansa."
"Who cares about being a lady when you're starving?" She bites into a new piece and moans with pleasure. "Gods, I missed these."
Jon smirks. She's bold and strong and changed. He thinks of Arya, for this kitchen-lurking is something he would've expected her to do. His smile fades. He wonders if Sansa's nightmares include finding their sister's direwolf's head, and a trail of blood that leads from it to Arya's pale, dead body.
He'd given something away in his face, for Sansa asks him, "Why are you here? Is something wrong?"
"No. I can't sleep, either."
"Nightmares?"
"Aye, something like that."
They sit in silence for a moment. Then, with a renewed sense of purpose, she tries to talk him into trying a lemon cake. She's stubborn, he's tired. She wins.
"All right, fine. But I'm bringing some ale back to this table with me."
His sister, he discovers, is a giddy drunk. She giggles and sways and makes faces every time she sips the ale.
He had offered some as a joke and she accepted some as a challenge. This time she drank enough to get herself warm. And with that discovery, there was no going back.
Jon never had much taste for sweets, and at the Wall the men were taught to forget flavor all together, but the lemon cakes are good, he thinks. They are the taste of Sansa's happiness.
She laughs and laughs and laughs when they remember how Robb and Jon had stuck young Bran into the kitchen pantry for an hour and didn't understand why he'd gone silent until they opened it and found that he had eaten half a dozen honey cakes. He'd had a belly ache the whole day after.
She can barely speak between fits of laughter. "I-I was so relieved because he hadn't- oh, gods. He- he hadn't touched the lemon cakes!"
When she isn't looking, Jon moves her cup away.
Jon's eyes crinkle when he smiles, Sansa thinks as she watches him watching her. She hadn't known that. There's so much about her brother she doesn't know.
Her head is spinning in a lovely way. Her cheeks hurt from a laughter she thought she'd lost long ago, laughter that was dropped somewhere on the long road away from Winterfell and weeped over like a favorite doll.
It's dark in the kitchens but the moon outside is bright and serves them well. She thinks she might howl, howl like a wolf girl at the moon, and Jon, would Jon howl with me? They should howl, for they've taken back their home. Shouldn't they howl?
It's not long before her head starts spinning painfully.
There's still blood in her teeth from the pieces of the bastard that she watched die, and it is viscous and sticky and awful. No, she's only half-wolf. She'll hunt and kill but she can't swallow the rotten taste of him.
She doesn't realize she had put her head down on the table and shut her eyes until she feels Jon picking her up in his arms. Then he's carrying her and she's mumbling into his chest, asking if he liked the lemon cakes and telling him she can walk very well herself and does he want to be a Stark? I am the rightful heir and so are you and I will make you a Stark, Jon.
Then he's easing her into her bed. She runs her hands over the thick covers and spaces out her legs and thinks, How curiously large this bed is. This isn't her old room, her room before the long road away from Winterfell.
She catches a whiff of a familiar scent. Something about it clears up the fog in her head. Jon is walking away when she sits up in bed and says, loudly, "This was Mother and Father's room." Yes, she had known that. They had suggested she take this room, as lady of Winterfell, as rightful heir.
Then she is howling- no, she is crying. Jon is at her side in an instant with a firm hand on her shoulder, asking what's wrong.
There is a knot in her throat and she is gasping for air and she can't explain to him how she tried to be a wolf and failed and that's why she is crying.
They're never coming back.
Her crying must sound like howling because a worried guard appears at the door, asking what's wrong. Jon waves him away. Poor, silly Jon- he is frowning again. She reaches for him, wants to tell him to smile again, wants his eyes to crinkle.
They're never coming back.
She feels Jon still, like he's heard her. Oh, he has heard her. She'd been sobbing out the words against his chest. He pulls her closer and her nose presses uncomfortably into the rough leather of his vest and she knows he is still frowning in that gentle way of his that reminds her of how Father was always more patient with her tears, he'd speak to her in gentler tones than Mother, who grew frustrated and wanted her to be a well put-together lady. Father. Father. Father.
They're never coming back.
"We have each other."
She doesn't say anything, just nods as she weeps. They stay like that, long into the night, until Jon slips a cup into her hand and tells her to drink. She knows the bitter taste: milk of the poppy. Soon she is too tired to carry on. Jon gives her face a last caress and plants a kiss on her forehead before he leaves. She doesn't think he wants to lie in bed with his own demons, but she knows he told himself he must. For his men, he must be ready in the morning. Dutiful Jon.
A faint thought tickles her head before she's taken with sleep. She hopes the moon is proud. She howled for her all night.