PLEASE READ FIRST!
I started to write this story because I am a sucker for h/c, and I found the show's treatment of the injuries that Jon sustained at Hardhome completely implausible. So, enter my OC to take proper care of them - Charleen Wollard, the daughter of one of Ned Stark's bannermen, who was orphaned in the course of Robert's Rebellion and brought to Winterfell as a baby to be raised by the Starks. Growing up with the Stark children, she learns the art of healing from Maester Luwin and later has to watch from the sidelines as her adopted family and home are destroyed. Forced to witness first-hand the torture that Ramsay Bolton inflicts upon Sansa, Charleen finally takes her chance to escape from Winterfell and seeks out whom she believes to be the only other surviving Stark offspring at Castle Black. When Charleen arrives at the Wall, however, she learns that Jon has gone north to seek out the wildlings at Hardhome... (Essentially, this story started out as an excuse for some shameless Jon h/c, but I'm going to try and expand it a little. Please read & review, and tell me if I should continue!)
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
"You're worried about the Lord Commander, aren't you?" Gilly asked, looking up at Charleen over the huge vat of bread dough they were kneading.
Charleen bit her lip. "Of course I'm worried," she said. "What if the wildlings decide that they don't trust him?"
"Sam says that Jon always comes back", Gilly answered with a small smile. "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but he'll come, you'll see."
"I pray to the gods that you're right", Charleen said, plunging her hands back into the dough, "the old and the new."
As if in response to her prayer, the reverberating blast of a horn suddenly boomed out over the Wall, seeming to shake its very foundations. Both women froze, counting the seconds before the dreaded second blast.
It never came.
Instead, the silence was finally broken by a sharp call, the sounds of hurried footsteps, and the creaking of the chains as the northern gate of the tunnel was opened.
A triumphant smile broke out over Gilly's face, but Charleen did not notice. She grabbed a cloth from the table on which she had been working on the dough and hurried out into the passage leading up to the courtyard, wiping her hands as she went. Emerging into the dull white light and the swirling snow, the calls of the Brothers of the Night's Watch reached her ears – "The Lord Commander! The Lord Commander's back!" – and for a moment, she felt almost giddy with relief.
Her eyes fell on Sam, waiting at the entrance of the tunnel where the gate had not yet been raised, and she pushed her way through the crowd towards him.
"Sam!", she called, "Sam!"
He turned at the sound of his name, and she moved with some difficulty to stand next to him. "I'm going to wait in Jon's chambers," she told him, "I don't want to intrude here. Maybe when he's done, you can tell him that I've come to see him?"
"Of course!" Sam exclaimed, his eyes wide with excitement, and Charleen turned to climb the stairs to the gallery. When she reached the door into the castle, it was pushed open from the inside and Olly emerged. He threw her a searching look as she passed by him into the building and made her way upstairs to Jon's chambers. There was a faint orange glow coming from the inner room – clearly, Olly had just been in here to light a fire for his Lord Commander. Charleen settled down on a chair in the outer room, listening for the sounds coming up from the courtyard.
All of a sudden, she noticed that her hands were shaking. How would Jon react to her presence here, at Castle Black? After all, there was nothing he could do for Winterfell or for his sister, having forsworn all allegiance except to the Watch. Moreover, had his vows not ended their childhood friendship, as well? She could hardly be sure from what position she was to address him, the orphaned daughter of one of the minor Northern houses speaking to the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. In her headlong flight from Winterfell, she had not had the time to ponder these questions, but they had been hovering at the back of her mind ever since her arrival in the relative safety of Castle Black, and now that she was about to speak to Jon, they crowded in upon her with renewed urgency as she sat in the semi-darkness of his room, gazing unseeingly out at the snow that was slowly piling up on the windowsill.
After what seemed like hours, the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs outside broke through her anxious musings. Charleen barely had time to straighten up in her chair before the door opened and Jon stepped into the room. One glance at him told her that he was in pain – there was a certain stiffness to his movements, and on the side of his face a deep cut bore witness to where he must have received a violent blow.
"Charleen," he said huskily, "what are you doing here?"
"The Boltons have Winterfell," she replied hurriedly, anxious to get all the bad news out at once, "and your sister, Sansa –"
"I know about Winterfell," Jon interrupted, "Roose Bolton sent a raven –" He winced, leaning forward gingerly to support himself with his hands on the table.
"Oh, Jon, you're hurt," Charleen blurted out, unable to keep on discussing the events at Winterfell with him in the face of his obvious distress. She rose to move to his side and drew up a chair for him. "Here, sit down. What's wrong with you? Tell me."
"Nobody must know," Jon replied breathlessly, carefully lowering himself down into a sitting position. "I have divided the Night's Watch. One sign of weakness from me and it will tear itself apart. I am their Lord Commander, I must keep order now at all cost."
"Nobody is going to find out from me," Charleen reassured him, "but please let me help. What happened to you?" She knelt down in front of him, looking up earnestly into his face, and he reached out to grasp her shoulder for support.
"Oh, Charleen," he shuddered, and she realized that there were tears in his eyes, "it was a failure. I failed these people." Slowly and haltingly, his voice choked with pain and emotion, he told her what had happened at Hardhome, while she listened in silence. "I set out to save them," Jon finally concluded, "and instead, they've swelled the ranks of the Night King." He buried his face in his free hand, his whole body shaking with suppressed sobs.
Charleen gently put her hand on his arm. "You led a lot of people through those gates today," she said quietly, "I saw them from up here. Old and young, men and women, even a giant. They are all here because of you. And they will mourn the dead, but you must take care of the living. You must stay strong."
There was a moment of silence between them, then, Jon nodded and raised his eyes to hers. "Thank you," he whispered. "I know you've come because there's bad news, but I'm glad you're here."
At that moment, there was a sudden tap at the door, and Charleen instinctively drew away from Jon to resume her former position in the chair. Jon cleared his throat. "Come in," he called, and the door opened to reveal his steward, Olly, whose eyes moved from his Lord Commander to Charleen with the same searching expression that they had worn earlier, when he had met Charleen on her way to Jon's chambers. "Thank you, Olly," Jon said immediately, "I won't be needing anything else tonight. Sleep well."
The boy's eyes narrowed. "Good night, Lord Commander," he said in a tone held carefully level, and his gaze lingered for a moment on Charleen before he disappeared, closing the door behind him.
Charleen waited until his steps had receded down the stairs before turning back to Jon. "I can take a look at you if you want," she said gently. "Maybe I can make you a bit more comfortable."
She rose to stand next to Jon as he struggled to his feet, and guided him into the inner room, where a glowing pile of embers in the grate was all that remained of the fire that Olly had made. Charleen moved over to the bed and folded back the blankets and furs, while Jon unfastened his cloak and his sword belt and laid them down on the heavy chest beneath the window.
"Sit down," Charleen told him, motioning towards the bed. She took a few pieces of firewood from a basket in the corner and set about to rekindle the fire, and the room was soon filled once again with a warm orange glow that made the shadows dance on the walls. In spite of this, however, when she drew up a chair to sit beside him, she found that Jon was shivering, and his eyes were glazed with fever. "Let's get you out of these damp clothes," she said, "you're burning up."
Jon's hands moved to the buckles of his leather cuirass, but he shook his head. "It's nothing to do with the clothes," he told her, "this has been happening every evening since Hardhome. It's always worst at night, and better in the morning."
With a grunt of pain, he tried to lift his cuirass over his head, but Charleen took it from him. "Let me do it," she said gently, "it'll save you some hurt."
"Thank you," John whispered, closing his eyes as she unfastened and removed first his quilted coat and then the two or three layers of clothing underneath it until only his shirt was left. The old familiarity had sprung up between them as effortlessly as if they had not spent a single day apart – Charleen's touch was as sure and steady as always, and Jon relaxed into her gentle ministrations with a long-forgotten feeling of trust.
Finally, Charleen helped Jon remove his boots and his outer hose, and then straightened up again. "We're going to have to take off your shirt," she told him. "The right side is the bad one, isn't it?"
"Yes," Jon replied, gingerly lifting his right arm to hold out to her, but she shook her head.
"We'll start with the other one," she said. "Can you get your arm through if I pull on the sleeve –? Very good."
His left arm free, Charleen lifted Jon's shirt over his head and slipped it off the other arm, revealing his naked torso. At the sight of the damage, she winced in sympathy. Jon's right side was a mass of purplish bruising, and several deep lacerations indicated where the enemy's weapon had made contact.
"Oh, Jon, that looks painful," Charleen murmured, carefully running the tips of her fingers over the injury. "I need you to lie down for me, so that I can have a better look."
She put her arm around his shoulders, gently supporting him as he turned and lowered himself down on the bed, and then pulled his blanket and furs up over his legs.
"I'm going to take a look at the damage," she said. "You need to tell me where it hurts, all right?"
"All right," Jon replied hoarsely, but at her last words his body had visibly tensed in anticipation of further pain.
"Easy," Charleen soothed, "easy. Deep breaths. That's it."
Slowly and systematically, she began to palpate first his left side from his shoulder down to his abdomen, and then the right. "Your breastbone's fine," she told him, "collarbones too… Here's the problem, though, hm?" She had reached his ribcage, and Jon whimpered as she touched the area where the bruising was darkest. "Have you been coughing blood?" she asked him, pausing for a moment.
"Aye, in the beginning," Jon answered thickly, his teeth gritted against the pain, "but it stopped after a few hours."
"That's good, at least," Charleen said. "Has there been any more coughing since? Without blood, I mean?"
Jon shook his head, and Charleen resumed her examination of his chest. "All right," she finally concluded, moving to pull the covers up over Jon's torso. "We've got at least two broken ribs, and two more are damaged – either cracked or also broken, I can't tell for certain. The good news is that you don't have any signs of pneumonia. I'm a bit worried about the fever, but that might simply be from exhaustion. In any case, we'll have to keep an eye on it. The important thing is that we make it as easy as possible for you to breathe normally, and to cough if you need to. I'd like to go and see what supplies your maester left. He must have had what I need."
"Sam can help you," Jon told her. "He was Maester Aemon's steward and helped him take care of the sick and the injured."
"I'll go find him," Charleen replied, "I'll be back in a moment, all right?"
When she had gone, Jon let his eyes drift closed. He was exhausted, but the pain from his ribs made it impossible to get any deep, restful sleep. With a grunt of discomfort, he tried to move into a more comfortable position, and found himself facing the wall behind his bed, which was alive with the shadows from the fire.
As he watched, a figure became discernible amid the flickering, dancing shapes – tall and pallid, with a crown of ice upon its head. Slowly, very slowly, it raised its arms, and from the shadows surrounding it came a writhing mass of bodies, cold, dead hands reaching out for him, blue eyes blazing through the gloom –
"Jon?" He started up at the sound of his name, and in the blink of an eye, the nightmarish scene in front of him was gone. Instead, he was looking up at a very different pair of blue eyes – Charleen was standing over him with her hand on his shoulder.
"It's all right," she murmured, "it's just me. Well, us, really." As she spoke, Sam's face came into view behind hers, wearing a look of concern.
"Jon, I'm sorry," Sam said, "I didn't realize earlier how badly you were hurt…"
"I'm not," Jon reassured him, "just a couple of broken ribs, that's all. Charleen's going to fix me right up, you'll see."
"Well, I hope so," Sam retorted, raising his eyebrows. "Feel better, Jon." He reached out and pressed Jon's hand for a moment before turning to leave the room, and a moment later, there was a soft click as the door fell into the lock behind him.
Meanwhile, Charleen had busied herself at the table in Jon's bedroom. She brought a bowl of water over to sit on the floor next to his bed and soaked a piece of cloth in it.
I'm going to wash out those wounds, all right?" she told him. "They don't look too bad, but I want to make sure."
Carefully, she folded the covers back from Jon's injured side and wrung the cloth out over the bowl, but before she had even so much as touched him, Jon involuntarily flinched back. "Hey, it's all right," she reassured him, "this won't hurt nearly as much as before, I promise."
"Cold?" Jon suggested, and Charleen gave a little laugh as she realized what he had been afraid of.
"No, it's not," she told him gently, "I heated the water up for you. See?"
With this, she pressed the cloth against his cheek, and Jon relaxed as he realized that the temperature was indeed quite pleasant. One by one, Charleen washed out the wounds on his chest, working in silence, and for a while, there was no sound in the room except for the crackling of the fire and the occasional tinkling of water as she rinsed out the cloth.
Last of all, she washed the cut on Jon's face, and then picked the bowl up from the floor to throw out the dirty water. When she returned, Jon had fallen into a light sleep again, and she gently touched the uninjured side of his face to wake him.
"I'm sorry, Jon," she murmured, "I've got to bind your side, and then you can rest, all right? Look, I found something in Maester Aemon's stores that is exactly what I need."
She picked up a jar of ointment from the floor next to her and offered it to him to smell. The scent that reached his nostrils was grassy and not altogether unpleasant, and Jon's lips suddenly twitched up into a smile as he recognized what it was.
"Most new recruits smell of that for the first few weeks after they start their training," he said.
Charleen snorted. "I'm not surprised," she told him, "it helps with injuries caused by blunt force, and I expect that new recruits have to take quite a few beatings before they're ready to take their vows."
As she spoke, she began gently to rub some of the ointment on the bruises covering Jon's right side, and his smile turned into a grimace of pain.
"Easy," she reassured him quietly, "easy now, it'll be over in a minute. Deep breaths. There, that's it. All done."
While Jon recovered, she retrieved a thick roll of bandage material from the table across the room and then helped her patient to sit up.
"I'm going to bind your side fairly tightly," she told him. "The point is to give your ribs some support, but it shouldn't hinder your breathing, so you need to tell me how tight is too tight, all right?"
With every revolution of the bandage around his torso, Charleen made Jon take a deep breath and adjusted the fit accordingly, and when they had finally reached the end of the roll, he sank back down onto his pillow with a groan of pain and exhaustion.
"That's it," Charleen said softly, "now you can rest."
She pushed Jon's dark curls away from his forehead to feel his temperature, and found to her surprise and relief that he was no warmer than before.
"How are you feeling?" she asked him.
"Better," Jon replied, "thanks to you." In fact, for the first time in what felt like weeks, he was comfortably warm, and the bandage around his upper body gave his ribs just enough support to allow him to breathe normally without aggravating the pain.
"Is there anything more I can do to make you comfortable?" Charleen asked.
Jon raised his gaze to look at her. "Stay." He reached for her with his good hand, and Charleen took it in both of hers.
"I'm not going anywhere, Jon," she said, "I promise."
Without letting go of his hand, she resumed her seat by the side of his bed, and they exchanged a smile. Then, Jon's eyes drifted closed, and after a few moments, Charleen felt his grip slackening. She did not withdraw her hand from his, however, but merely shifted into a more comfortable position in her chair.
In the silence of the room, the sounds from outside fell upon her ears with renewed clarity – a muffled call, the sound of a door closing sharply, the slight creak of the winch chains – and she was struck with the incongruity of her situation. In here, in the microcosm of Jon's chambers, everything was perfectly familiar to her, from the easy trust that came so naturally to them both down to the very actions with which she had taken care of his injuries, but all this was embedded in circumstances so utterly strange that they seemed almost to be part of someone else's life.
At this particular moment, she and Jon might just as well have been back in Jon's chamber at Winterfell when she stitched up a cut he had sustained sneaking off with his brother, Robb, to practice swordplay with real weapons pilfered from the armoury instead of their wooden training swords. But they were at Castle Black, not Winterfell, Robb was dead, and Jon was not just Jon anymore but the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, to whom she had blindly run for succour from Ramsay Bolton.
As if in search of an external sign of these changes, Charleen leaned forward slightly to study Jon's face, and became consciously aware for the first time how different he looked from the boy that had left Winterfell almost five years ago. His beard was thicker and slightly longer, his features harsher somehow, more angular, and there were faint lines on his forehead that suggested that these days, a frown came more easily to him than a smile. His body, too, had changed, the boyish slimness of his figure having been replaced by a broad chest and shoulders, the veins on his arms and hands more prominent than before.
Charleen had never thought of him in those terms before, but now for the first time she found him handsome, and as her gaze lingered on his sleeping form, a small smile stole across her face.