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Wool and Tallow
Chapter Two: What Pains Them Still
"Sansa reminds herself that Jon's bed has never harbored nightmares. His embrace has never bred monsters." - Jon and Sansa, Season 8 AU. After the Battle of Winterfell, the mending begins in earnest.
They share a bed every night – his mostly. Because he is not thoughtless enough to add to the rumors with a late-night visit to her chambers, but he is also not resilient enough to latch his chamber door shut to her. He can't. He won't. And every night, when she silently climbs into bed with him, he turns his back to her, lets her bury her face in the soft linen of his tunic, lets her wrap him in her warmth, never meeting his eyes, because he understands why she can't look at him beneath the condemning shadows of night. He knows why she needs this embrace. He knows why she still needs him to be her brother.
Even when he is not.
Even when he never wants to be again.
Perhaps she's become too accustomed to entering his chambers without an invitation. Perhaps she's become too comfortable with this unspoken intimacy. Because when she opens his door mid-afternoon, Jon is sitting on the edge of his bed, breeches off, clad only in his smallclothes and a thin tunic, reaching for a salve on the bedside table next to him.
He stills, blinking at her.
She sucks a breath through her teeth, halting in the threshold, casting a stiff shadow through the open doorframe.
"Seven hells, Sansa, the door!"
She releases the knob instantly, as though burned, stepping away from it and further into the room.
"I meant close it!"
"Oh." She walks back to it, stiltedly, shutting it with a deep breath before she turns back to see he's dragged the bedsheet across his legs.
"I meant with you behind it!"
"Oh," she repeats, backing toward it, gaze shifting frantically through the room for something else to focus on beside his half-undressed form, hand fumbling for the handle behind her. And then she stops.
Jon looks at her with raised brows, a comically desperate look gracing his features when she turns her gaze back to his, and suddenly she can't hold back the laughter.
It breaks from her in a wave of unexpected release, her hand flying to her mouth to smother the sound.
Jon stares at her, shoulders tight with tension, and then he blinks, and then he sighs, and then he's laughing with her, head bent to cover his face, his pink-tinged cheeks and his disbelieving grin.
Sansa braces back against the door, one hand still clutching the door handle, the other smothering her chuckles as she watches his shoulders shake with his mirth, even when he doesn't meet her eyes.
They stay like this for many moments, both trying to settle the laughter in their gut, and then silence pervades the room once more, a steady stillness that keeps them in their places as Jon raises his head to lock eyes with her.
She makes no move to leave the room.
(This is her first mistake. It is also her last.)
"Sansa," he begins, face softening, running a hand through his unkempt hair.
"Do you need help?"
Jon's mouth clamps closed, his throat flexing beneath his swallow.
Sansa takes a breath, licks her lips. She pushes from the door, hands settling in a tentative grip before her as she walks toward him, eyes glancing to the salve on his bedside table with meaning.
Jon looks at the jar, hand clenching the sheet over his lap tighter.
She gives him a moment, only a moment, and then she's reaching for the jar herself, turning it in her hands to get a better look. "Your leg still pains you?"
Jon only nods, watching her hesitantly.
She purses her lips in thought, fingers running over the smooth lid, her teeth clenching behind her cheek.
The thing is, she already knows what still pains him. She always has.
His leg is the least of it. His heart is the most of it.
Sansa remembers the morning after. She remembers the infinite dawn, the thread of light through blood-flecked snow, the promise of sun in the wake of a long, long night. Sansa remembers searching for him, running through the dark, stone all around her, panting his name in the cold air – his name – breaking from the ash-filled crypts with Rickon's black bile still staining her cheeks, her hair undone and ragged, dragonglass dagger still clutched in her palm, the hilt cutting into her skin with the way she shook, the way she gripped it with all of her, with the last of her, with everything she was certain to have lost in the night, in the deadly, cold night that took them and never truly let go.
She remembers stumbling into the courtyard and finally catching sight of him, watching as he staggered through the gate with the other men, limping, bleeding, hand gripping at his thigh, a coat of ash already lining his skin, and then his stumble, the way he dropped to his knees against the snow-littered stone, the way his whole body seemed to be a question, a yearning, a desperate plead with the morning light – give them light, give them light, please gods, just give them light! – and how the dawn arched over his shoulders in answer, a soft orange-hued illumination silhouetting his form and then his eyes (his eyes, ever searching for hers), blinking beneath the blood flooding down from his temple, everything said in that one glance, in that one moment of grief and mourning and quiet, unspeakable regret. And then the quick, trembling lilt of his lips in what would stand for a smile in any other light, in any other dawn – except that such a dawn means only one thing, means only loss, hard-won and deserved as it is. And then the way his eyes rolled back into his head and how he fell to the snow unconscious and how he didn't wake up until two days later, smothered in her furs, her stitches lining his brow, her hands bloodied with the remembrance of Northern soldiers, her heart laying slaughtered in the crypts, her faith – that endless, unbroken faith – slumbering beside her cousin (her cousin, Bran had told her, when Jon was still laying unconscious in her bed, as though it should mean something, and it does, it does mean something, it means more than 'something'.)
Yes, Sansa knows what pains him.
Perhaps because it pains her, too.
"Let me help," she manages in a rough whisper, clearing her throat in hopes of clearing her apprehension. She doesn't give herself a chance to regret it, doesn't give him a chance to refute it. She reaches for the sheet and pulls it aside, revealing his scarred thigh.
He lets her, unable to speak, unable to do much but look at her, something passing over his features she will not be able to name for many years.
She rests the sheet over his unwounded thigh and most of his lap, letting him keep his modesty while still baring the wounded expanse of his thigh to her gaze. She settles to her knees in the space between his legs, eyes locked on the red, swollen skin of his thigh.
Jon sucks a sharp breath between his teeth, stiff as he watches her.
"Let me help," she repeats, eyes finally lifting to his.
She's surprised to find his eyes wet, the moisture gathering at the corners, his brow drawn taut over unblinking eyes. He looks pained. The kind of pained she wants to kiss away.
Sansa startles at the realization.
Jon nods at her, slowly, evenly, eyes never breaking from hers.
(Not leaving the room was her last mistake because she can never call what follows a mistake. She can never call this a mistake.)
Sansa dips her fingers into the salve and sets to soothing the ache.
Jon never takes his eyes from her.
Arya watches Sansa from her place across the desk, cleaning her Valyrian blade. Sansa glances at her through the candlelit shadows, setting a ledger to her desk. "What?" she asks her sister.
Arya simply raises a brow, lips pursed in thought.
Sansa gives her her full attention, leaning back in her chair, tapping her quill lightly against the parchment. "You're being eerily quiet again. You're being… strange."
"I thought you liked quiet."
"Not from you," she scoffs in fondness, the lilt of her smile a far easier thing than she once thought possible with her younger sister.
Arya doesn't share her smile, only looks at her with that same sort of strange query in her eyes. "You weren't in your rooms last night."
Sansa's fingers tighten over the quill in her hand. "No, I wasn't."
Arya nods, turning back to her dagger, a foreign kind of tenderness to the wipe of her oiled rag along the blade, stiff as it is. "Your nightmares are back?"
Sansa opens her mouth, and then promptly closes it, chest rising steadily in her nervousness.
Arya doesn't press her further, instead, focusing on the cleaning of her blade. The candles flicker uneasily atop the desk separating them.
Sansa looks down to her ledgers. "They never left," she finally answers, but it is a half-truth.
Her nightmares have long since stopped being the work of dark nights and restless sleep. Her nightmares have tasted daylight, been brought to air, lived a thousand lives in her captors' skins and her dead brother's visage and even in her own mirror.
She has long since grown accustomed to simply living her nightmares.
(The half-truth of this is that she shouldn't rightly expect any kind of reprieve. But the half-lie is that her visits to Jon's bed are only for such.)
"Be careful you don't become them," Arya whispers, a taut line of reproach hidden beneath the concern. "Your nightmares," she finishes pointedly.
Sansa draws a deep, lingering breath in – lets it fill her with all the resentment and indignation and guilt such words should draw from her.
And then she watches the way Arya stares fixedly at her hands, at the way her mouth draws into a tight line.
She looks away, eyes fixed to the waning candle beside her clenched fist. "We need more tallow," she manages through clenched teeth, quill returning to her parchment – another nock on the ledgers.
Sansa still goes to Jon that night, but when he moves to give her his back, as he always does, providing that precarious smokescreen between them she'd always thought she'd need to embrace him like this, she instead stills his turn with a fist in his tunic, tugging him back to face her.
Jon stares at her wide-eyed, hot breath fanning her cheeks, chest heaving beneath her steady stare.
She winds her arm around his waist and pulls herself up against his chest, burying her face in his neck.
His hand hovers hesitantly over her form as he swallows thickly, eyes shifting frantically in the dark. But at the contented sigh she releases against his throat, his hand finds its place easily, settling along her waist before sliding gently up her back and anchoring at the nape of her neck.
Sansa reminds herself that Jon's bed has never harbored nightmares. His embrace has never bred monsters.
She is not her fear. She is not her scars. But when she awakens to Jon's open mouth pressed to her collarbone in his sleep, and his hand fisted in her shift, and his thigh wedged adamantly between hers –
She finds that she is very much his.
Jon takes to hunting with Arya. He's not as good with a bow as she, but somehow this is more comforting than anything. She beckons him on, skirting through the grey trees, her light footsteps barely denting the dense snow, silent as shadow, swift as wolves.
He thinks his hands may never unlearn how to hold a weapon, and so he follows, but in his still-healing, scar-riddled form, he feels cumbersome in Arya's wake, his heavy cloak catching along the low snow-thatched branches.
(He hasn't the heart to remove it, not when Sansa's stitch lingers along the collar, her touch sewn into the fur, her hand at his shoulders.)
Even still, he smiles when he watches Arya dash ahead after a hare. He braces a hand along a tree to steady himself, breathing heavily, and the bark splinters beneath his gloves. He pulls his touch back and his hand comes away grey and dusted.
Soot and snow.
Jon glances up at the canopy, watches the flakes of ash filtering down through the trees, mingling with the snow.
Fire cannot snuff winter for long, Jon knows this. Not even dragonfire.
A soft, hesitant smile tugs at his lips.
He can see the sky through the ash-lined branches – clear and white and crisp.
Arya calls him on and Jon finds it is not so heavy a load as it was before. Soot doesn't linger long on true Northern furs, after all, and Sansa has sewn him nothing but the finest.
Jon drops the dead stag atop the kitchen table, startling Sansa with the loud thud.
Arya smirks beside her brother, arms crossed. "Enough to fill those stores you're so worried about?"
Sansa retracts the hand braced over her chest from her surprise, blinking at her sister, before realization breaks over her and she barely checks the urge to roll her eyes at Arya, chuffing a sigh instead. "Hardly."
Arya piques a mildly annoyed brow.
Sansa lifts her chin, hands retreating behind her back in her usual stance. "Get me two dozen more and then we'll talk."
Jon doesn't bother to hide his grin at Sansa.
Arya huffs her exasperation, whisking out her dagger and burying it in the stag's shoulder with a quickness that has Sansa jolting before the table. Arya laughs at the jump. "Still so demanding, I see," she remarks, a sly grin tugging at her lips, her fingers flexing over the hilt of her dagger.
Sansa purses her lips. "And you're still so… brutish, I see," she teases without malice.
Jon barks a laugh, silencing it immediately when Arya flicks a dangerous look his way. He shakes his head, unable to hide his mirth. "Come on, little sister, time for another hunt."
She lets him drag her off unceremoniously. "You were hardly any help on the last one!' she reminds him, pulling her dagger free from the meat atop the table.
Sansa watches them leave the kitchens with a smile breaking over her face, her chuckle locked behind her lips. She clears her throat and summons the cooks.
Winterfell eats well that night, and when Jon's knuckles brush against hers as he reaches for his mug of ale, Sansa doesn't bother to retract her hand.
He glances at her, face soft and warm and everything this winter is not, before he looks away, sharing a cup with Tormund, hand settled on the table dangerously close to hers.
She does not see the way Arya purposely looks away from them, and for the moment, Sansa remembers warmth, for she is home – with stew at her table and Jon at her side and an uproarious, joyful North filling their halls.
The stain that was Littlefinger sits unseen beneath one of the longtables, and Sansa forgets for a time the words that have haunted her for so long.
"What do you want that you do not have?"
Jon does not take her hand, no, but it is of little consequence. He still keeps his door unlocked. He still holds her in the night.
It should be enough, she thinks.
Sansa stares down at his hand. So woefully far, so inexplicably close.
It should be enough.
(It isn't.)
Sansa catches sight of the cloak Jon throws over his shoulders. "You still wear it," she says softly, as though in afterthought.
As though it could ever be an afterthought.
He doesn't meet her eyes, but his are warm nonetheless. It is impossible not to notice.
"Aye," he answers, and she flushes with fondness, chest tightening.
When he finally looks up at her, it's with a sheepish sort of affection that makes her step toward him, hands reaching for his chest. He stills beneath her touch as she adjusts the straps, tugging them into place, fingers spreading over his jerkin with surety.
"There," she says, gaze bright with her satisfaction.
His eyes flick to her mouth for a moment, before making it to her eyes. "There," he murmurs in agreement.
There.
Right there.
Right there from the start – blatant and glaring and almost between them.
They part reluctantly, reconciled with the distance.
(But there is nothing reconcilable about such parting.)
Meera Reed shows up at Winterfell one day with her father.
Howland Reed eyes Jon with a flicker of tenderness in his gaze, some long-lost fondness too unspeakable in the wake of his ever-present grief. "Your father would be proud of you," he says, hand clapping over Jon's shoulder. And then he nods his deference, a knowing smirk lighting his lips. "Your Grace."
It goes unspoken which 'father' he means.
It has always been Ned Stark. It will always be Ned Stark.
And so Jon swallows back his questions, knows there is time yet for them. Instead he watches Bran, notices the subtle tightening of his fingers along his armrests at the sight of Meera. The young woman barely looks at his brother.
Later, at the welcoming feast, Jon leans over the arm of his chair to question Bran. "Won't you speak to her?"
Bran's eyes linger over Meera's form as she chats with Arya and Tormund across the room.
"What would I tell her?" he asks, and it's such an earnest question that Jon thinks he hears his little brother somewhere in the words.
Jon takes a gulp of ale. "Anything." He pauses, glances to the table on the far left of the hall where Sansa sits sharing a glass with Sers Podrick and Brienne. "Everything," he adds, throat thick with longing.
"She wouldn't be interested," Bran refutes softly, eyes drifting to the table. His plate sits untouched. "I'm not who I once was."
"None of us are." Jon's eyes stay fixed to Sansa.
There is silence between them for long moments, and then Jon hears the shift of Bran's furs beside him. "Some of us are."
Jon snaps his gaze back to his brother, finds his eyes following Sansa as well.
It awakens something in Jon that never truly leaves him.
"Take me to the godswood, cousin?" Bran asks, a heavy sigh leaving him as he offers a barely-there smile, his back straight, fingers no longer gripping his armrest.
Jon watches him a moment, and then nods quietly, setting his mug of ale down.
Sometime between the gate and the weirwood, sometime between the first and last fall of snow that evening, Jon understands how to reconcile the Sansa of his childhood with the one who shares his bed now.
She has never stopped looking for heroes.
Jon presses a gloved hand to the now-healed gash along his forehead, remembering the steady thread of her stitches even in his feverish sleep. He remembers the way the embroidered wolf along her chest had shown in the light atop the hill overlooking the Battle of the Bastards, and he remembers the way the Northern lords looked to her in the hall and bellowed their allegiance, and he remembers the way she slid her direwolf pin into Theon's bloodied tunic and sent him away as much a Stark as he was a Greyjoy.
Jon comes to a halt in the center of the godswood, gripping the handles of Bran's chair tightly in the frigid air, the weirwood's shade arcing red and shadowy above them.
No, Sansa has never stopped looking for heroes, even when she crawled into his bed that first night at Castle Black – and when they were children, had he only taken the time to learn, he could have told her to stop looking.
She's always been one herself.
"Does it hurt still?" she asks one night, fingers grazing his scarred thigh through the fabric of his breeches.
He hisses at the contact, grabbing for her hand.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, head ducking down slightly, chin to her chest.
Jon closes his eyes and breathes deep, tries to ignore the warmth of her beside him, their heads sharing the same pillow, her hand caught in his, dangerously close to his groin, because it isn't pain that has him jolting beneath her touch.
"It's… it's alright, Sansa, it's just…" His eyes flicker back open in time to see her lifting her gaze hesitantly.
"What?"
He swallows tightly, releasing her hand. He almost wishes she would place it back on his thigh, but it's an abhorrent wish, he knows, and he nearly breathes a sigh of relief when she instead bundles her hands together beneath her chin, even as she scoots closer to him beneath the furs. "What is it, Jon?"
He pulls back slightly, keeping the space between them.
Her brows furrow at the motion.
This has only lasted so long because they never speak of it. It's a silent oath they take the moment she pulls the furs back, vanishing with the dawn, with the image of her back retreating through his door when he pretends to be asleep still.
"This isn't… " He stops, tries to collect his thoughts. "You can't touch me like that."
She doesn't answer for long moments, simply watches him. And then, quietly, "Why?"
He shifts uncomfortably beneath the covers, suddenly very aware of her legs tangled in his. "It isn't… proper."
"If you were worried about 'proper' you should have turned me away from the start."
"Sansa – "
"But you won't." She stares determinedly at him, hands unbundling from beneath her chin. She reaches out one palm to press against his chest.
Jon sucks in a sharp breath, teeth clenching. "That isn't fair, Sansa."
"Maybe so. But it's right."
Jon releases a ragged sigh, the weight of it crushing his chest, trembling beneath her touch. "And what if it isn't?" The words are almost broken, and he has to shut his eyes to the tear-laced exhale that leaves him.
He hadn't meant… he hadn't meant for this. Maybe somewhere along the way, but not… not at the start. Not when she was simply Sansa and he was simply Jon and they were simply siblings. Not when the comfort of her arm around his waist became anything more than sisterly and definitely not when she first sighed against his throat and clutched him in her sleep, breasts flattening against his chest, hand resting dangerously over his hip, his morning hardness the kind of sin that should send him reeling from the bed but instead only had him rocking back into her, dreams flooding with her scent.
"What if it isn't right?" he asks her again, his traitorous body pressing closer, jaw clenching over the quake in his words
Sansa tilts her chin up so that her mouth is braced a breath's span away from his. "Then perhaps I don't want what's 'right'," she whispers against his lips, hand slinking down his chest, further, further still.
Jon's chest heaves, the breath raking from him, unable to keep the thrumming moan from broaching his lips, and then Sansa leans in, smelling of wool and tallow and the kind of dreams he is damned for, surely.
"Kiss me," she whispers against his mouth, and it takes all of Jon not to.
Instead, he pushes her back at the shoulder, steadying himself, his jaw clenching painfully tight, and when her soft gasp breaks against his mouth he has to pull entirely from her, throwing the furs back and sitting up, legs swinging over the edge of the bed. He stops then, breathing raggedly, back to her.
"You've kissed me before," she reminds him quietly from somewhere behind him. It makes him curl his fists in the furs.
"A mistake."
He doesn't have to see her to recognize the way she recoils – it's in the stilted air, in the salt-tinge lining both their eyes.
Yes, a mistake. Because he sees the way Arya eyes him with unspoken suspicion nowadays, and the way Bran pointedly keeps his silence, and the way Brienne fails to hide her disappointment behind her deference. He isn't Sansa's brother, no, but he may as well still be for all the outcry and distaste their union would bring. And he will not splinter the pack. He will not be the one to fail her this time.
Because what is right? Surely not this, not when he dreams in copper and drowns in wool and burns like tallow. Not when he is worn down to the wick with a grief and a longing he is too selfish to want to bear alone and it shouldn't be her. It should never be her.
(He thinks of their stone father still lining the darkened, abandoned crypts. He thinks of every Stark gaze from millennium past harrowing into him with their condemnation.)
She has always been his lady sister, even when she wasn't, and he can never want for more.
Bastards learn early to bury their desires, and he is – he well and truly is a bastard, because – blood or not – only bastards could crave like this.
Could love like this.
"Jon."
"You should leave."
Silence. Barely even the rustle of furs behind him. But he will not look at her.
"Are you asking me to leave, Jon?" she whispers, deadly calm, at his back.
Yes, and no. And yes. And… gods, does she even know? Does she even know how he would take her, right then, and never look back? Does she know what she tempts when she commands him so.
"Kiss me."
Oh, but he would do more than that. He would ruin her, he knows.
"Please… I can't…" He does not need to say more, because suddenly the bed dips beneath her shifted weight, the sound of rustling furs loud in his silent chamber, and then the door opens and shuts without any warning at all.
After many long moments, he finally turns to glance behind him.
He should have known she'd be gone.
But he could not know the pain such loss would render.
Sansa holds a hand out to catch the snow. It melts instantly in her palm, her gloves slick with the wetness.
She tucks her hand back beneath her cloak, looking up at the shade of the weirwood.
She loves him, she realizes – instantly and irrevocably and brutally.
She loves him.
Sansa closes her eyes to the frigid air. The snow never stops falling.