TW: Discussion of suicide.
Chapter Sixty-Two: Blue
Winterfell
Jon Stark
There was little food to be had north of the Neck, and what little they had had faded in the weeks since the wedding. The glass gardens had been shattered during Ramsay's sack, and the few that remained were dealt with by the Night King. They had a few stores of salted meat, but not enough to last them the winter. More than a few men had begun feasting on the corpses that had been too wounded to make the trek south, while still being too buried to burn. Jon tried not to look at them, but he made no effort to stop it. "The hungry man eats," Donal Noye of the Watch had told him once, and Jon had never dared question him again.
The rest of them stayed hungry. Soon enough, the leather of their armor was nutritious enough to be boiled into soup. The bark of the trees was enough to stave off the pain in their bellies. They even found that rotted weirwood leaves could sustain a man, some. It only took a few hours chewing.
The hunters brought back enough to keep them alive, as they found squirrels and rabbits hibernating in the trees. Once, they found a bear, and Jon found himself thanking Lyanna Mormont for the gift. It lasted them less than a day, but it was more than he'd eaten in weeks.
Of the survivors, it was the smallfolk who fared best, and Gendry and Arya. Where Jon, Sansa, and the few surviving nobles scrounged for food, they wandered the castle, giving orders in Gendry's case and hiding in Arya's. Once, he had found his sister supping on worms in the crypts, and it reminded him so much of the times she'd done it as a girl that he couldn't even find it in himself to be suitably horrified.
It was only because of her that most in the castle could eat at all. Though she had left King's Landing in secret, all the realms knew where she had gone. A few months after the trade negotiations opened, the South had begun to send their gifts again. Some nights, they found riders with casks of promises and arbor gold. Others carried boxes of salted meats and candied crops. The first time they had come, there had cheers and celebration for days. The riders had been dressed in the green of House Meadows, and the smallfolk had mistaken one for Garth the Greenhand. It had taken many hours for Jon to explain that he was not, in fact, Garth, though the man himself had not been too inclined to agree.
Those had been good times. Genuinely good. They was not enough. By the turn of the moon, they were starving again, and all the castle was angrier for it.
Now, devoid of answers, Jon found himself answering his troubles the same way Lord Stark had. While Dany toiled in the Great Hall, he made for the godswood, content to kneel at Bran's sapling until day turned to dusk and the world became clearer as the gods answered his pleas.
And mayhaps he would have, had he not found her there. Arya Stark, kneeling where he had planned to kneel, whispering wordlessly to the gods just as Jon came to. She was dressed in nothing more than a thin tunic and torn breeches, a heavy contrast to Jon's layers of fur and leathers. But, while he trembled in the bitter cold, she showed no signs of succumbing. Her lips were no bluer than they always were, her skin no paler. She thrived here, while he froze.
She rose to face him before he even passed through the gate. She always seemed to know when he was coming lately. Hells, she always seemed to know when anyone was coming.
In some strange way, it reminded him of the Faceless Man they'd met in King's Landing. The thought never failed to make him shiver.
"What are you doing here, little sister?" he asked, though the answer was clear enough.
"Bran," she said. She'd been deep in her cups the night before, he remembered, but now there was no hint of a slur in her voice. Not even the slur of a frozen tongue.
"Where's your shadow?"
A slight smile broke on her face, but she lost it all too soon. "The smithy. Says you asked him to help with something." Before he could say a word to confirm or deny, she shrugged. "He's lying."
"He's probably making himself a new hammer," Jon told her.
She shrugged again. "Why are you here?"
"Bran."
"All three of us then," she said.
"Three?"
And now that he'd been told, he could hear it. Footsteps crunching in the snow. A gentle voice calling out his name, over and over again. He looked to Arya and grinned. "You ought kneel, little sister. The Queen in the North approaches."
Sansa must have heard, for she was already speaking as she stepped through the gates. "Stop it," she said, laughing. "Keeping watch over Bran?"
Arya looked to Jon. "Old gods."
"Shouldn't you be hailing the fire god?"
Arya shrugged again, but said nothing more. It fell to Jon to answer, "The old gods were Father's gods. And Bran's. Rickon's. Robb's."
"Robb?" Sansa said. "I always thought…"
"Lady Stark always tried to get him to the sept, but he hated it. He'd pretend, for her sake, but I'd always find him in the godswood after. He used to practice here, even before Ser Rodrik put a sword in his hand. He'd just be swinging a branch about." Every time so much as a stick fell, he would be so excited, Jon would hear about it for days. Sometimes he even gave an extra branch to Jon, and the two would battle until Maester Luwin came to drag them back to the turret.
"They would be proud. Of all of us."
Jon shook his head. "Robb would be angry. He would have wanted to fight. War for the Dawn, and he wasn't part of it."
He had not been jesting, but Sansa still laughed. "He would be. But he would be proud, too."
"Of you, mostly. A Stark ruling the North. It's everything he wanted." A lie, he knew. Not everything. It was a thought they all must have had. He wanted an heir, a wife, and a life of his own. He wanted Winterfell whole and safe. His brothers and sisters returned to him. We've returned, but not to him.
"What about you?" Sansa said. "Have you any plans for the future? Fancying a traipse to your lady wife's castle?"
Jon shook his head, grinning to himself. "I hadn't planned anything beyond the Walkers. Thought I'd head somewhere warm, but-" He looked about their own castle, to the budding sapling in the snow, the ever-growing walls, the dragon soaring high overhead, and even to the direwolf nestled in the snow a few feet from Arya. "-looks like I prefer the North."
"You'll need to do something. We don't have the resources for you to waste away for the rest of your life."
It was a jape, and he knew it, but he feigned offense all the same. "Maybe not you, but Arya's brought in enough to cover all three of us." He went to muss her hair. His fingers were halfway to her scalp when he noticed the tension in her shoulders, the emptiness in her stare. He stopped before he came too close. She hardly seemed to notice.
Sansa had though, for the humor had slipped from her, when she said, "What are you planning to do, Arya? You can always stay here, if-"
Arya looked to the sapling. Her lips pulled into a wry smile. For all that it reached her eyes, it seemed faked all the same. "Not staying North."
Though Jon was suitably stunned, Sansa hardly looked surprised. "Storm's End?"
But Arya only shook her head. Her gaze dropped to her feet, while her hands fisted at her side.
No, Jon thought, suddenly afraid. "Not Braavos," he said. Not with the Faceless Men. The smiling man. Not again.
But Arya had never been one to do as expected. She was silent for a moment – a long moment – and them, she said to her boots, "West."
Jon frowned. "Deepwood Motte?"
She only shook her head. There was a pause – a long pause – and then, "What's West of Westeros?"
A beat. A single moment of silence that hung tauter than a noose. A moment in which every muscle in Jon's body went rigid and every instinct that still remained in his battered head was shouting to run, to fight, to do nothing at all but stand. The boy he'd worked so hard to kill was screaming in his ears, but he could not make out a single word over the static bludgeoning at his ears.
It was Sansa who spoke, soft and cautious, when it should have been him. He was the one she was supposed to go to with these things. He was the one who was always an outcast with Arya. He was the one she would go to as a girl to cry her troubles and seek his answers. Instead, it was Sansa. Sansa, standing tall, and asking, "You're not saying that you want to go there, are you?"
She was waiting for a denial, it seemed, but that denial never came. Their little sister stayed silent, glaring at her boots as tears sprouted in her eyes. It was hard to see it through the glow, and Jon could hardly focus on a single sight when all he could feel was the sting of knives carving through him once more.
"No one knows what's west," Sansa told her.
"No one's tried," Arya answered, quickly. Too quickly. She was always quick.
But now Sansa was just as fast. "Of course, they have! Brandon the Shipwright, Elissa Farman, the Hightowers. They all tried."
Jon may not have been much of a man of maps, but he knew his histories as well as Sansa did. And in knowing them, he knew one thing. One essential thing that made the static in his ears scream. "They didn't come back."
Arya stared at the tree, said nothing. Stayed silent even as the two of them watched, waiting for even a hint of a breath to offer some sort of answer. But none came. None at all.
Not but from Sansa, who sucked in air and released it just as quick. "But you know that," she said, stunned. "You sat in the same lessons as we did."
Jon felt his eyes widen. "Arya…"
"It doesn't matter."
"Of course, it matters!" Sansa hissed.
"I've already died twice," Arya said, so quiet Jon could hardly here. There was more to it, a silent what's a third that all three of them could hear.
It struck him with the same terror he had faced on the beaches, kneeling before a corpse that he had once known so well. The corpse of a girl that he hardly knew at all, it seemed. "Arya, this isn't-"
"What's left?" she said, her voice as soft as Ygritte's, when she had lain in his arms, gasping for air that would not come. It was stronger, though. Stronger than it had been since they'd talked before the battle, when he'd ordered her to stay alive. Determined.
Jon's mouth was dry as sand. Somehow, he still said, "What? Everything."
Finally, she looked up and met his eyes. Bright blue met grey. It was enough to give him chills. "I didn't tell you everything. Either of you."
Dread crept through his spine. When he looked to Sansa, her lips were pursed. "What is it?" she asked.
"I was there," Arya said, and it was clear that she was only half-answering. "The Hound… got me there."
"Got you where?" Jon said.
But it was Sansa who would answer, staring blankly for a long while, before something finally clicked.
"The wedding…" she said. For a moment, he thought she meant his own, and the uncomfortable absence that they had never truly discussed, because discussing it would only make it worse. By the look on her face, it was far worse. Yet, by the look on Arya's, it hardly mattered at all. "You don't like weddings… You saw Grey Wind…" She squeezed her eyes shut. "You were there."
A single nod.
Where? Jon thought. Did she still mean the wedding? Where was she? On the walls? In the crowd? Or did she mean Sansa's wedding? Did she see Ramsay? Why didn't she kill him? Why didn't she change her face, end the war, and save Rickon the way that Jon couldn't?
But it was not his wedding that Arya spoke to any more than she spoke of Sansa's. Instead, she spoke with a clear voice, and said, "They were playing the Lannister song. Badly. It was all you could hear, coming in..." She clenched her fists, shut her eyes. "Coming out. That's when… I saw- I saw Grey Wind." For the second time in his life, his heart came to an abrupt stop. No. No, gods, no. "I tried to run, to save him, but the Hound… stopped me." She went to rub at the back of her head. "Woke on his horse, middle of the yard."
Jon reached out – to touch her, to hug her, to console her – and, while she did not pull away, she did not sink into his arms either. By the look in her eyes, she wasn't with him – no more than he was with Dany when they talked about his days beyond the Wall, or that Sansa was with him on the rare occasions they spoke of Ramsay.
"Arya…" Sansa said, but she could no more comfort her than Jon could. That, at least, was normal.
"'King in the North'," she said, bitterly. "That's what they were saying. Chanting. 'King in the North. The King in the North'… And then they brought him. Robb. Robb's body, sat up on a horse. And Grey Wind's head on top." The Sansa of their childhood would have gasped to hear those words, but now she was silent. Even the winds refused to answer. All there was were the sounds of hammers in the distance, steel clashing on steel, and a thousand footsteps marching, and all of it meant nothing at all. "Moored it right in the collarbone. I couldn't save him. Or mother."
"You were a child," Jon said into her hair. She shook her head, just enough that he could feel it on his shoulder. She didn't believe him. That hurt worse. "You were."
But she was pulling back, her eyes clouded by her unkempt hair. Even still, he could see the blue shining bright through it all. It had not been so bright when last he'd seen her.
Why haven't I noticed? Why didn't I see?
She looked to Sansa, not him. "Do you remember that day by the river, on the Trident? The- that boy and I were training…" She paused for a second, brows ruffled, before she said, "Mycah. And Joffrey came to hurt him."
"I remember," Sansa said. "What does that-"
"I hit him – Joffrey – and he tried to kill me."
It was nothing he'd ever heard before and, though his blood boiled, he was hardly surprised. The bastard would have killed them all if they'd let him. In a way, he had. Dead twice and never buried, he reminded himself. It didn't make him feel any better.
"Nymeria saved me, and I got his sword. I remember holding it to his throat. I didn't know what to do. If I should do it, if I should stop. I wanted to... and then you were there, screaming. 'Arya, stop it! Arya, leave him alone.'"
Sansa was stern. "I should have let you."
"But you didn't. You stopped me." She went to chew her lip, but stopped before she could bite down, suddenly afraid for reasons that Jon could not say. When he went to reach for her, she stepped away. Even death had not hurt so much as this. Her avoiding his touch. Her avoiding him. "You were one of the last people to stop me. The last to ever try. The rest of them- they saw what I was." She snorted. "They helped me."
"Arya-" Jon said.
"That's what happened to me in the Riverlands. That's what happened to me in the Vale, in Braavos. No one stopped me. They just showed me how. I wasn't a child, not for any of it."
"We don't blame you for it, little sister. No one blames you for it." But, even as he said it, he knew it was wrong. The same way that none had blamed him for the fall of the Eyrie, the fall of Winterfell, the fall of the Wall. None but himself. All the while, none but him.
"I've killed people. Innocent people. Because they told me to, because I had to, because I wanted to. People I'd never met."
Sansa looked as uncomfortable as Jon felt, but she had more courage than him. "You were a little girl on your own."
"And when I was older? If it was me – if I was the only one who could have done it – is it my fault? Shouldn't I have gone North? I went South to kill Cersei, and we lost everything… We could've ended it in Winterfell. All of it."
The Night King, now, he realized. We aren't talking about Robb anymore.
"Arya-" Jon started, but she spoke over him.
"They died because of-" She broke off for a moment, but shook her head, and continued on, "Me. Not Joffrey, not Ilyn Payne, not Cersei, not Polliver, not Raff the Sweetling, not Gregor Clegane, not the Hound, not Beric, not the Red Woman, not Thoros of Myr, not the Tickler, not Meryn Trant. Me."
He didn't know even half of the names, but that hardly mattered. None of it did. His eyes were wide, he knew, and his hands shaking. "Arya," he said, again, "you saved the rest of the world. You were a little girl out on your own-"
"I was a woman grown," she said through her teeth. And I killed… I killed him. I could've made it to Winterfell."
"It was winter!"
"I was a Stark," she shot right back. "Winter came, and I wasn't there. I don't care if I was young or stupid, or whatever it was, I should've been there! Father warned us! The lone wolf dies, he said, but I was happy to just wander south, on and on, away from the pack. I left you to them! All of you. And now Bran's dead, and Robb's dead, and Rickon's dead, and you died, and I died, and- and…"
In the corner, behind a mound of rocks and soil brushed with snow and ice, the last of the direwolves rose. Flakes fell from her fur as she shook it all away. When she approached, each step careful as the last, it was only to butt her head against Arya's shoulder. Somehow, even that did nothing to ease her.
"So, you want to join them?" Sansa asked, without any of the caution Jon had equipped. Instead, her words were harsh as any she could have offered. "You want to give up?"
"No," Arya said, without any of the confidence he wanted (needed) to hear.
"Have you ever sailed before?"
"Yes."
"Did you actually do anything important on the ship? Ropes, navigation, captaining?"
A pause. "No."
"Do you have a crew?"
Another pause. Longer. "I can find one."
"Do you want them to die too?"
Another pause. Her gaze shifted to the ground again. "No."
Sansa stepped forward and, to Jon's surprise, Nymeria hardly reacted at all. As Sansa went to a knee, mindless of the mud that drenched her skirts, Arya did not back away. Not even as Sansa reached a little too close, and Jon's little sister was left scrambling for a sword that she no longer had.
"Then what is this?"
There was a while, a long while, before any of them spoke again. A while in which Arya stared, narrow-eyed and frowning, into the snow. A while in which Sansa only moved so that she could stare at Jon. A while in which Jon slowly allowed himself to approach his little sister, step by step and inch by inch. A while in which Nymeria only whined. A while in which the only sounds were the sounds of Winterfell, no different to that which they had heard as a child. There were children sprinting across the castle grounds, fighting somewhere with stick swords. Distant bards playing songs for the workers, as they toiled at their building. The shrill sounds of hammers on steel that sung hollow songs all across what remained of their world. Here, the children no longer laughed, and the bards played different songs, and the hammers were no longer held by Mikken and his men, as they ought to have been, but the sounds were so similar, it almost made him choke. They ought to have been enjoying this. Instead, they swallowed past the pains left by a life best left behind. Instead, they wallowed in them.
And then the moment broke.
"Father didn't have to send me south," Arya said.
It was not the response either of them were expecting. They looked to each other, Jon and Sansa both, and neither knew what to say, except… "What?"
"I wasn't betrothed to Joffrey. I wasn't betrothed to anyone. I wasn't needed there."
"Arya, what are you-"
"They wanted to get rid of me." She blinking away tears that Jon had not seen her cry since she was a little girl. She was shaking too. Her entire body claimed by terrible shudders that seemed to have nothing to do with the cold.
"What?"
"I'm not playing this stupid game anymore. I won't pretend." She spat the word at Sansa, and suddenly Jon was very aware that he had missed something important. Something very important. "Bran could see the whole of the world and never looked. Robb had an army, and none of them knew I was gone. None of them looked! Gendry left, and Hot Pie, and Jaqen-" He hadn't the faintest idea who the latter two were, and it made matters even more painful than they ought to have been, though they ought to have been very painful. "And… and you. Both of you. You never looked. You had Winterfell, and the Walkers weren't there yet, and you never looked."
She's right, he realized with a start. They hadn't. Not a single search, not a single question. Sansa had warned him she had still been alive after the wedding, and he hadn't done a thing. Too concerned with the Walkers, too concerned with the war. Too concerned with everything but the one person who could save them from it all.
He couldn't find it in himself to regret any of what he'd done during the war. It had been necessary. It had been brutal, horrible, and inhuman, but it had been necessary and that was what mattered. This, though?
Would a search party have been too much to spare? He didn't know.
"Arya, we wanted-" Sansa started, but his little sister was not prepared to let her finish.
"You forgot," she hissed. Her eyes were wide now and blazing blue. Even the wind, kicking her hair into her face, could hardly do a thing to disguise it. Did I miss that too? When did they get so bright? "And when I found you?" I held a sword to your throat, he realized with horror. But, while it hurt to realize, that was not the source of her wroth any more than Lyanna Stark was the source of his. "You left," she said. "I was there, I was dead, and you left!"
"I was trying to keep you safe," Jon answered.
It was not enough. "No," she said. "You forgot. You all forgot. That's why I'm leaving. That's why I'm going west."
He felt the guilt that coursed through him like a physical blow. If the boy of his childhood saw this now, Jon had no doubt that boy would strike him, nor did he doubt that he would deserve it. He'd alienated his sister. He'd alienated one of the three people left in the world he'd sworn to protect.
Old gods, help me, he thought to the branches. Help me make this right.
And from the sapling of a tree that would someday grow to tower over them all came only a single sign. A word whispered on the winter winds that carried across the coarse soil and right into his ears. "Liar," came the whisper of the gods, the whisper of Brandon Stark of Winterfell.
He jerked to look at the sapling. There, the winds gently tussled the red leaves that had sprouted from the bare white root. Even as he watched, it seemed to grow just a bit taller, just a bit more stable. "Bran," he said. The leaves trembled in answer.
"That was Bran?" Sansa asked, eyes wide and wild.
Arya said nothing, but Jon nodded once, twice, a thousand times. Dumbfounded. It worked. Bran's trick worked and Jon's prayer did too. For the first time in his life, the gods had answered. Finally, they'd answered!
A grim smile took hold of Sansa's face. Unlike him, she did not have to wait to uncover Bran's meaning. "You're lying," she said, so calmly. How she stayed so calm, when Jon's own heart was beating like a raven's wings, he could hardly say.
"I'm not," Arya hissed, but the damage was done. He could see it now. The shakes that were just a bit too strong. The tears that never truly seemed to fall. The fists clenched at her side, but the knuckles only pale instead of white.
"You are," he said, hollowly. "Why?"
But even as the words left his mouth, he knew the answer. In some unconscious way, he supposed always had. He'd known it from the moment he'd noticed the flecks in her eyes, from the moment he'd seen her bare-armed when the rest of the kingdom had donned cloaks, furs, and leathers all at once, and from the moment he'd heard her speak, too quickly and too easily.
But no more could he say it than she could. "The war's over, Arya," he told her, softly, the same way he'd once assured her that she was Lady Catelyn's trueborn daughter.
And she read his lies the way he'd failed to read hers. "It's not. It'll never be."
It was Sansa's turn, now, to misunderstand. "It is."
No, he realized, with a budding sense of horror that had once been reserved for the days left staring at a blank black sky, while the enemy marched through day and night. A pure unaltered sense of dread, a weight on his shoulders so heavy that he bent under the pressure. I should have asked for more maesters. I should have waited. I should have stayed with her and ridden North. I should have noticed. I should have, and I would have, and I didn't.
"How long?" he asked her. No, it was hardly a question at all.
For a moment, it looked like she would lie again. Somehow, her better nature reigned supreme. Perhaps she did it for the sprouting tree, perhaps it was for him. Jon would never be able to say. But he would thank whatever it was until his dying day, because Arya slouched and said, "Since we started North. It was… easier."
"Easier to what?" he said, asked, demanded.
She swallowed. "To breathe," she said. "To move, to sleep…" She took a breath. "Think."
"You should have told me," he said. "You should have told anyone." For a moment, he thought that he was wrong, that she might have told Gendry, but there was too much shame in her eyes for that. Her blaring blue eyes.
It was only then that the realization seemed to click on Sansa's face. "The White Walkers. You're-"
"I don't know," Arya said.
But Sansa continued anyway, "-dying."
Somehow, she never failed to break his heart. Both of them did. It seemed that every passing moon, they found a way to kill him more than the Night's Watch ever had. Every day, the boy was buried just a bit deeper.
What was it he had thought on the day the war ended? The day the living nearly fell? That duty was done, and now he could love? Mayhaps he would have thought something else (anything else) if he had known how painful it was to love. Duty had wounded him, but never so deeply. It could only bring him death, and nothing crueler.
Love, though… love was a different sort of pain. Love was madness. The sort of madness that drives a man to care so mindlessly about someone or something that he hardly notices it slip away. It lets him cloud his mind to that great impending doom, for some things are too painful to process and too unspeakable to perceive. Love let him stare for weeks as his sister's eyes turned bluer and bluer, and love let him ignore it all the while. It let him fall for platinum hair and chapped lips that had once been soft. It let him fall for kisses of fire and a woman wed to a spear. It let him know the bitter touch of his broken sisters' holds. It let him ignore all trouble, because some things were too horrible. And now, it let him face the consequences of that far, far too late.
Dying.
He could take her south, he knew, but that was no more a life than death. If she reverted once more, she would be no more than a breathing corpse, damned to bedrest for all her days and left choking on single words and single breaths. Eager to write, but only when the fire was low. Dying in the cold, but worse in the heat.
The gods had chosen their champion. The old gods, the new gods, the fire god, the faceless god. And they, the humans, had laughed and celebrated and sung songs of their glory, and all the while, they had all forgotten the one unquestionable truth about those gods that had chosen her, and about all the gods that ruled over these dying kingdoms. The gods had chosen their champion, but these gods were no kinder than the Walkers.
"It'll be okay," he said, though his mouth was dry and his voice trembling. "We'll find a way. We'll fix this."
Sansa looked doubtful. Arya, too.
"Aye," she said, grinning a grin that was no realer than her tears had been. She stepped back, stumbling through the snow without ever looking where she was going. "And it'll all end well. Father'll come back-"
"Arya!" Sansa hissed.
"-and Mother'll crawl out of the river, and Robb'll ride in with his head on a spike, and we'll all sing songs together, and Bran can call me a liar as much as he wants, and Rickon can... Rickon can…"
"Candies," Jon said, defeated. "He liked to steal candies from your lady mother's table."
She slumped against a dead tree, and Jon reached out to grab her before it could give way. She reached for him too and for the sword she no longer carried. Stumbled into his arms, shaking and stilted, but not crying. Never crying.
"I can't go south," she said.
"I know," he said. "I know."
"Ryndon told me they wouldn't stop hurting, the scars," she said, "but they have."
"I know," he said. I should have known sooner.
"Let me go," she said. She didn't mean physically, and he knew that too.
"No." And as he felt her clench her fists around his furs, he held her tighter. "We'll fight this, whatever it is. You and I… death's had us. He didn't like the taste."
"Valar morghulis." All men must die. The Faceless Man had ingrained those words in his mind, and he doubted they would ever leave.
"We already have," he told her.
She still frowned, but there was life there. "The Last Hero came back too."
"He was a knight," Jon said, forcing his lips to smile just enough. "You always did want to be a knight."
But Arya only shook her head. She studied the ruins of the city with eyes far too dead for his liking. The blackish-blue scars on her throat seemed to stand out against a world that burned green and red and grey, and it stood especially so against her pale white skin. Stark skin, he'd thought once, but now he knew better. It was dead skin. The skin of a girl damned to die 8,000 years before she was ever even born. Just like him.
"I didn't," she said. Her voice stayed steady, despite how his own had trembled. "I never wanted to be a knight. I just didn't want to be a lady. I wanted to be a castellan, or a High Septon, or Bran the Builder. I wanted to be Visenya, or Nymeria." Something in her eyes flickered, but Jon didn't know what. That hurt more than a knife to the heart. It always did, of late. "I wanted to be the little girl in Winterfell. I never wanted to fight a war."
He sat beside her, then. It was hard to look at her like this, but he forced himself to anyway. "I did," he said. When she cast her eyes aside, he put a hand on her shoulder, and went on, "I wanted to be a ranger, and Lord Commander. I wanted to be Lord of Winterfell, and King in the North. Aemon the Dragon Knight and Symeon Star Eyes." That made her crack a smile, if only for a moment. "I wanted all those things, and you know what?" He laughed. "I got them. I was Lord Commander, Lord of Winterfell, and the North crowned me king. I'm a dragon and a wolf, and I never even knew it. And you know what, little sister?" Her gaze went back to him, and he answered it with a smile. "I would trade all of it, all of it, for the chance to be a Stark. Just a Stark. To be a family. You, me, Sansa, Robb, Bran, Rickon, your father, - gods - even Theon and your mother. To be part of that? I'd trade it all."
It was a lie. Kindly spoken, but a lie all the same. There was one thing he wouldn't trade. One person.
Arya didn't say anything. He didn't expect her to. It was too soon. Just a few moons ago, she had been a corpse on the battlefield. Grey skinned, milky eyed, and limp in the jaws of her wolves. Just a few moons ago, she had woken with fire in her mouth and an emptiness in her heart.
Jon had abandoned the Watch when he'd woken. He'd murdered a child who'd been no older than Bran. He'd killed a mentor, and he'd killed his brothers too. Left behind everything he'd ever cared for, just because his heart was a steaming pile of ash, and he was tired of it all.
She was coping better than he had, and she hardly seemed to be coping at all.
"It'll get better, Arya," Jon said.
"Will it?" she asked. "I should be dead, Jon."
"Don't say that."
"It's true," she insisted. "Why should it be me? Why not Father or Robb? They deserved it more than me."
He could have told her that she'd used R'hllor's gift and saved the world. She'd saved millions from a cold and icy death, where Robb and Father would have only died once more. He could have told her that he never would have survived without her. He could have told her that he'd died too, and he'd never have been able to do what she did. He wanted to tell her a million things more.
Instead, he sat beside her and threw an arm around her shoulders. She looked away, eyes intent on the pommel of a knife that hardly ever seemed to leave her hand.
"Robb and Father are gone," he told her. "They're not coming back."
And for a moment, it was the two of them again. Not Bran and Sansa, nor Gendry and Dany, nor Rhaegar Targaryen and Lord Stark. None of them were there. It was only the two of them, Snow and Stark. And so it was still, though Jon had long since shed the name and no one who heard of Arya called her Stark anymore. It was Jon Stark now, and Arya Dawnbringer. King Jon and Arya the hero. They were different people in a different time in terribly different circumstances, but somehow it didn't matter.
It was Jon and Arya again, embracing in the godswood. It felt right. It was.
"I'm tired," he heard her whisper, and it broke his heart in a thousand places.
"I know," he said. "I know."
A/N: Just be glad she didn't know about Elmar.
But yep! Arya has finally confronted her trauma! And the underlying depression that's been plaguing her for- what, 250,000 words now?
So, yeah, I promised I'd stick to all the major show points, right? Well West of Westeros was one of them. Problem is, it's just… it's so stupid. In all of GoT, we witnessed no historical/"modern" development in naval technologies that would have enabled this, of all trips, to be successful. Arya had no experience on the seas except as a passenger. She took literally one ship, when Elyssa Farman took three and is still considered dead. I'm honestly a bit amazed that it's an unpopular opinion that Arya planned and executed a suicide mission. So, in order to address the issue properly, we needed an intervention chapter (especially since Prince had an even darker arc for Arya than the show gave her).
Anyway, we're onto the last anyway. Oh my god we're onto the last anyway. Oh god.
It's- the final (oh god) chapter is going to be an Arya. I just- I gotta go lie down.
