Jon stole the stool for himself, his knees still protesting a day spent almost fully a-horse, followed by a stint on the floor. It gave her a chance to settle, to wince at her own bruises without needing to keep looking at him.
When he turned back, Arya was busy wetting herself, her shoulders and neck, and a single cautious dunk of her head. Her hair was short enough to hang down her brow without threatening her eyes, shorter than she'd ever worn it as a child.
"Does it help with the fleas?" he asked and palmed the side of her head.
She made a face at him. "No, and don't go cutting yours off. Your ears'll be awfully cold. Does that help?" and she jutted her chin at the waiting soap, strong enough to perfume the air even dry.
Most of the soap in the keep was like that, hard tallow and bitterly herbal in one final effort to keep off the fleas. Jon had come from the baths more than once feeling like a fresh-scrubbed floor. And it burned to even touch a minor scrape, he remembered with a wince.
He hadn't thought to set anything aside for this day, something softer, something that smelled less like the foamy buckets of wash poured over sheep before they were shorn. At least her injuries would be well-cleaned when he saw to them, he thought grimly.
She splashed a little water at him. Arya did poorly being ignored, like she knew that she filled the world. "Some," Jon said. "Or so the laundress tells me. Just don't go checking anyone's bed furs; I'd rather think that than know the truth.
"It cannot make it worse," Arya told him, opening her eyes wider that he might see how hard she rolled them. Spoiled, her smile said to him, her half-incredulous look. But Jon hadn't forgotten how it felt to be filthy down to your skin, or the shocking pleasure of any soap at all. Arya reached for a yellow chunk eagerly—
And he caught her wrist very gently and held her hand away. He'd moved before he even thought it, instinct raising a hue and cry.
He had no excuse for it, no reason he could offer, that he opened his mouth and the words fell out so desperately, "Let me do it. Please."
If he had no reason to ask, she had no reason at all to let him. Sitting in a warm room had bolstered her; Arya seemed in little danger of fainting now. It wouldn't tax her to take up a cloth and soap.
But Jon wanted to do it. He wanted to wash her clean with his own hands. He wanted it to be him, as if to wash her would, like magic, undo the grim past from her body, from her mind.
The heat of the water made Arya flushed, her short curls clinging to her neck, her cheeks as red as wine. Jon couldn't explain, didn't know how to put that deep and clinging desire into words. All he could do was ask, helpless with his words and his thumb rubbing gentle across the sharp bone of her wrist.
Arya used to match him in nearly everything. Mayhaps she still did, even in this. Even as they couldn't speak it, even as Jon half couldn't understand it. She said, almost shyly, "Aye. If, if you like."
There were rags there, soft worn scraps cut from sheets too ragged to lay upon the beds. But he soaped his hands, instead, waiting patiently until she was finished shifting about and deigned, at last, to sink deep into the water. Arya's sigh now was all deep pleasure and her own submission to it.
It was worth the ache of his own body, to slide off the stool and kneel at the tubside, to reach into the water and take up her hand. Her fingernails were ragged black half-moons, her knuckles swollen from ill use.
"You passed through the Twins," Jon said as he scrubbed between her fingers, and worked soap across her wrists, first one then the other. Under the reassurance of his touch, she might be prompted into speaking; he might be gentle enough about it that she wouldn't feel shamed again to tell him what she'd done.
Every green boy first come to the sword should speak about the proving blow. Maester Aemon had done it for Jon, a healing touch. If Arya had been born a boy, if she'd come to the Wall with him or if Jon had stayed at Winterfell to see her raised so fierce and wild, Jon would have still put her sword in her hand. He would have done this too.
T'was late for it, this speaking. But it was Jon's right either way, and he wanted it too badly, wanted to give her the chance to name and look at and banish any lingering ghosts.
The skin of her elbows was rough. The cold had made prey of her body; dried skin was likely to crack and bleed and ache. He was as gentle as he could be, using force only enough to wash away the dirt. If the soap bothered her, she didn't show it. Arya had her face turned away. She murmured, "Aye, and through the Neck. But closer I got, mostly I went at night."
"The worst time to travel, in winter," Jon breathed out. He didn't want her to take it as a scold; he scrubbed the ticklish insides of her arms with a firm hand, holding careful silence. When he dared look up at her, she was chewing her lip, but no more upset than she had been a minute before.
Her hair was inky-wet. A long drip of greyish water slid down her neck. She put her fingers to it, then dragged them across her throat to scratch the skin there, leaving behind a thin dirty mark.
"I didn't want to risk the kingsroad," Arya admitted, worrying the skin there under her jaw, "but I didn't dare trust the swamps without a crannogman to guide me."
Howland Reed himself had told Jon how they'd dug deep pits where their paths had gone even just a year before. He'd described the careful process of thinning the ice, that it might look solid enough until you trusted your full weight to it.
Jon felt ill, acid on his tongue like he might be sick. An image fell on him, looking at her dark wet hair, the way she kicked her foot a little in the water. He mumbled something, some wordless encouragement, as he tried to drive it away.
Those who fell to the swamp in winter weren't found until long in the spring, if at all. Arya, with her shoulder-blades like tight wings on her back as Jon bent her forward to scrub them, a hand tender on her arm to steady her, weighed so little.
She'd come home weak and tired. With heavy furs like to take on water, she would have gone under the black mud without even a chance to scream. How long there, under the mud, would it take until her skin was sloughed away and she was left only bone?
"The worst was after Moat Cailin, with nothing to keep the cold away at night," she said now and gave a shrug. Her body moved under his touch; she shivered once involuntarily, like a horse after a landed fly. A man's bones fell apart with rot. Scattered in such a way, would he know her?
Jon was frozen with his hand on her back; every breath was a struggle. He matched himself to her, the slow patient inhale, the slightly wheezy exhale. Arya did poorly being ignored. She craned her neck to see him and said, "The Neck had trees, at least. Jon?"
"Aye," he told her numbly, from very far away, "I'm here."
"But are you awake?" A hesitant question. She was shy again, his girl. It stung him worse than his own fears. He bowed his head and traced down the full length of her spine, a firm touch.
You know me, he ached to say. You know me. Don't ever be shy with me.
Or else, clinging to his mouth like the oily film onion soup left behind, enough to keep from starving but no more than that, Pardons. Every single thing you tell me gives me more reason to fear for you. Even though you're here. Even though you're safe now.
He'd have nightmares about it, to join the other dreams. The knobs of her spine were painful to look at, pressed to her skin, indecent. Jon shuddered out a breath and soaped high up her neck, to the short curls of her hair. "I won't fall asleep," he said at last.
She turned back, tugging her knees up to her chest and folding her arms about them.
"If you don't want to hear—" she said, hurtful and sulky.
How many things had he wanted to say to her, to share with her? He'd stored them packed tight in his chest all the while. Had she, too? The truth was painful, but pushing her aside would hurt her worse. She'd wanted him, she'd said it. T'was no less true to say that Jon had wanted her.
And Arya had always understood his pain. He cleared his throat and murmured, hushed, "If you'd fallen in the Neck, I might have never known."
Silence, for a long moment. He breathed shallowly, tracing soap across the thin bridge of her shoulders. And then she said back, "When you— At the Wall. I was passing a sailor by, when he said it. If he hadn't, if I hadn't—"
She uncurled herself, fumbling to turn, reaching her hand out, reaching for him. Jon twined their fingers together, came around the tubside so she could see him without straining her neck. Clean, the skin of her knuckles looked worse.
"You need better gloves," he said stupidly, meaning, I don't want either of us to be afraid anymore. Whatever happens, we'll know. At least we'll know.
"You're strange now," Arya said. "Stupider, too."
She was smiling at him now, ducking her head even as she did it. She rubbed her other hand across her mouth like she wanted to wipe the smile away.
Outrage filled him. Arya used to laugh so loudly that Winterfell's halls would ring with it. Even as a babe, all the women wanted to come around and coo at her, all the other grimy children of the keep had tumbled and tried handstands and made endless disgusting faces, just to hear the sound.
Jon had been the best at it, of course. He'd stolen her laughs like a crow stole shiny things, winging higher with each victory. All the while she'd been gone, he would have killed to hear the sound again. But somewhere she'd been laughing, and whoever had her then, too stupid to know the treasure in their hands, had taken from her even the safety of her joy.
The words stayed on his mouth, bitter-thin. Tell me who taught you to hide your smile. I'll beat them to death. She was too shy to look at him and see the thought. It passed even as she turned her face to him again.
"Telling me to wear better gloves when you don't have any yourself," Arya scolded, almost laughing, and reached out. She took his jaw between her hands, a warm possessive press, and Jon was hot with it, fire down his back. He could ignore the rest, for this single peaceful moment. He could set aside her unconcern over her own hurts, to know that she still lived unafraid to reach for him, the confident grab of a girl who knew she'd never be denied.
Their father had said to Jon once that he'd spoil Arya, indulging her endlessly as Jon had. He'd laughed at Jon's confused protest, thinking Jon sought to avoid a scolding. Had ruffled Jon's hair and sent him away again before Jon had time to explain.
Jon's thought had been this: how could you spoil someone already endlessly good?
Arya said musingly, her nose a little scrunched, "I suppose you've gone mad about me wearing gloves now, even in the bath, because you take so little care of your own hands."
"My hands—" Jon said, and absurd laughter bubbled in his throat. T'was hard to keep track of her words, when he was listening so close to her body, to the glad cry of it as she touched him, how his own body cried back.
"Aye," Arya said. She looked at him from under her lashes, added near a whisper. "They're rough."
They both turned their heads down to look. Arya let go his face to touch her fingers to his, a stroke across the length of them. Jon turned them palm up that she might do it again, and she obliged. "You should take better care of yourself," she chided, not japing at all now, only hushed and sweet. "Is there— Maester Luwin is gone, I know. But is there another maester? I want to ask for a salve for you."
You couldn't spoil someone so endlessly good. Arya turned his hands over and scrubbed her thumbs across his knuckles as if she might stroke away the cracked skin there. She murmured, "It wouldn't hurt this scar, either, to be worked a little. Does it hurt to close this hand? You should take better care of yourself."
Before he could protest, could say t'was a brother's job to look after his little sister, not the other way around, she broke his heart. She looked up then away, flushed from the heat and so very shyly that it pained him, and added, "Or you should let me. Take care of you, I mean," and bent to brush her lips across the burn scar spread wide over his palm.
The sight of it, the way she pressed her cheek to his tired hand, just after, made him shut his eyes lest he wept. He'd wanted this, and so badly.
Only Arya would come in from the cold, half-fainting, starved lean as a sighthound, and think that Jon needed looking after. "Lean back," he coaxed, throat thick, feeling the tears gather there.
To say yes to her would be to dissolve. Arya was more tired than he, and Jon needed his last strength to lend to her. We can speak on it after, he told her with look, with careful touch as he eased her back against the tubside.
She frowned at him, unhappy protest that he hadn't answered, but let him. He soaped her neck, feeling the scratch of his callouses on the thin skin, and then her collarbone. All the while she watched him, lids half lowered, some secret look.
It used to be that Jon knew all her secret looks.
It used to be Jon kept all her secrets. Now he washed her chest, the dips of her ribs, and her breasts carefully, with the lightest touch he could. As he touched her navel, dried blood lingering there absurdly like it'd soaked through her stained shirt, as he was making it fleck off with each touch, she said at last in an unhappy little voice, "Does someone take care of you already?" And then with rancor, "She does a poor job. Jon, I could do better."
It struck him dizzy, how much he'd missed her. Arya had been his most ardent defender; if he'd been the one to wipe away more of her tears than she had his, t'was only because he was older. "No," Jon rasped out, and rested his hand on her belly, feeling it rise and fall with each of her fast breaths.
He had a passel of squires he didn't want, and aides for everything from war-advise to how best to distribute Winterfell's fast-disappearing stores. Jon knew women a little better now, and he wasn't ignorant of Wynafryd Manderly's long looks, or even the way the chambermaid lingered as she poured out fresh wash water at the end of the night.
None of them, not even one of those many people, had ever cried unfair that Jon must sit with the squires on feast days, or stay home when all his other siblings might ride to White Harbor.
None would ever throw themselves from a horse to reach him faster, or say his name as if their heart was breaking with joy. None would hold the news of his death so tightly they'd faint at the very sight of him. None would ever demand he take their socks off, or call him stupid when he spoke without thought.
Jon couldn't imagine a single one of them ever looking at him with eyes wet for sheer sorrow that he'd been alone.
"No one," and he wanted it so much that it choked him. He wanted her care back so much that he could barely speak. It just seemed too much to ask, when all he'd ever prayed for was that she come back to him, even if she came back a stranger. Even if they lost the closeness they'd had, the closeness he craved.
Arya looked so wary now, as if he'd ever turn her away. He croaked out, "Will you? Will you look after me?"
Tears clung to the thick fringe of her lashes. She was reaching for him, that beautiful mindless reach, knowing he would reach back. Jon wanted to spend the rest of his life reaching back. He folded her into his arms, the edge of the tub biting into his stomach and the bathwater soaking his shirt through, and he pressed his temple to her shoulder and shuddered out years' worth of worry and fear in a single choking breath.
"I wanted you, when I was gone," Arya said so softly in his ear, as if t'was a secret she'd carried in her heart for far too long. "I was so lonely, Jon. I want, I wanted you."
"I'm here," he told her. Her wet hair was cool and stiff with mud. He pet her roughly, like she was a cat, feeling more than hearing the croon she made, wishing her hair was longer so he could muss it properly. "I'm here," he said again, the relief of it like a chilled hand to a fevered cheek. "I'm here and we'll take care of each other again, alright? Just like we did before."
She made a messy little noise, almost a sob, almost a laugh. When he pulled away slowly, not wanting to leave her but not liking the water to get cold, she was flushed and wet-faced and nodding, a hand twisted in his shirt again.
"You're tired," they said at the same time, and it made him choke a laugh out, made her giggle and tug away further, to wipe at her eyes.
"You're tired," Jon said, and his own exhaustion didn't drag at his bones anymore, but he could see the future, in perhaps an hour's time. Arya, warm and clean and dry, sleeping next to him in his bed where at any moment he might reach out a hand and rest it on her chest to feel the rise and fall of her breath and know she was well. "Let me finish this and feed you, alright? So we can rest."
He wanted it more than anything. She yawned, a squeaky sound, and settled back into the water again. Her look was familiar pleasure, the delight she'd kept just for him. "Be careful with my leg," Arya ordered, that charming way she used to boss him, and tilted her head back, giving out a deep peaceful sigh.
All of Arya felt fragile, like glassed windows in a hailstorm. T'was the worst with her feet and hands, Jon thought, because he knew how easy there were to break. Two of her toes were crooked in that tell-tale way and he winced to see it.
He worked soap over her feet then up over her legs. Arya was mostly leg now, tall enough to tuck just under his chin. He wanted to make a house for her from his arms, his chest. Selfishly, Jon hoped she didn't grow anymore.
She was still tense here, from long days riding. Jon felt the twin pangs, and from just a single day. He worked the wiry muscles until they unknotted, to keep her from cramping in the night, then scrubbed at her knees until they were rosy-clean. She was silent all the while, dozing or daydreaming, and Jon was loath to disturb her.
He wouldn't have washed any higher, would have woken her enough to press the soap to her hands and turned away that they could feign privacy, only she gave another hitching little sigh and spread her thighs, just a little.
He pressed his fingers to her inner thigh, cupped it, but all Arya did was shift in place. Her head was still tilted back, her body pliant under him, and sweetly unafraid. Her fingers traced across the rim of the tub when he glanced at her face, the little sliver of red cheek and red mouth that he could see of it.
But she made no move to speak. He washed her thighs slowly, watching her collect soap suds between her fingers, watching her perform some obscure little game, building greying foamy peaks and towers.
She wasn't shy or afraid. He felt it for her, a knot of worry deep in his stomach like a boot bruise to his ribs. It was good, that there were no bruises across her thighs, no scars. It made his hands steadier, the trusting way she lay back and let him, without flinch or shiver.
That she would trust him with it, with her most intimate place, her softest, gave him the courage to move his hand. Here, Jon thought, was the place a girl was the easiest to hurt.
Some nights he'd been sick with fear at the thought of it, that someone might have forced her body under theirs. It had only gotten worse after discovering Jeyne Poole masquerading in her place.
Ramsay Snow had a name, a face. He was a man, and Jon could kill a man for daring to hurt Arya in such a way. He couldn't kill a specter, a shadow above her in his worst dreams, the ones where she screamed and thrashed and was left weeping bitterly.
The world was full of danger; it was impossible for her to have forded it without taking any number of hurts. The proof was written on her, her cheek and ribs and wrist and ankle. But this— Jon couldn't ask, couldn't make himself, but he felt certain anyway, that violence of that type wasn't something Arya had suffered.
He'd keep every pain from her if he could, especially this. His rough palm had caught on the thin wet skin of her neck, but touching her here was like silk touching silk; he could make himself gentle enough for her and the wonder of it filled him.
She made a noise, the smallest noise, a tender little croon. He wanted to swallow it down and keep it in his heart. Gentle, he need be gentle to tend her, and he washed Arya with more care than Jon had ever shown anything in his life.
She was hotter than the bathwater. Clean now. He took his hand away, brushed his fingers over her belly, not meaning to tickle her but feeling the strong clench of her muscles as he did, and the way she almost-laughed, huffing as she pulled away.
"Don't," she ordered, a lazy little whine, sleepy almost, and kicked her foot in the water.
"You're still ticklish, then?" he rasped, low. He rinsed the soap from his hand, and cupped the bend of her knee in his hand, then pressed his mouth to it. A silent apology.
Arya sighed again, and swept all of her odd little towers away. All of her was clean now but for her hair, cropped close to her head and clinging in short soggy curls. She tucked her cheek to her palm, looking at him with that same wanting look, almost disbelieving he was there with her.
Jon could spend the whole night just looking back, telling her with his eyes that he was, but the water was cooling. "Come closer," he ordered. "Here, in the middle. I don't want to splash water all across the floor."
Arya gave him a mischievous little look and flicked droplets from her fingers to scatter across his chest. It didn't matter much; his shirt was soaking through and cold where it plastered against him. Now a wry little grin for him, teasing; she knew it too. But she slid closer and tilted her head back, that he could take up the dipper and spill water over her head.
The water ran brown and grey; road dust, mud, ash. He carded his fingers over the curve of her skull, checking carefully for lumps or the heat of swelling, then reached for the soap again.
When she was small, washing Arya had been like scrubbing a wild cat, all high screams and sharp claws. Brushing her hair had been worse; she cringed from every touch and fled at the sight of combs. But a cat would calm if you brushed its fur the right way, at least; Arya was too sensitive for even that.
She hadn't gentled for the maids, or for her mother. But she'd always been sweet for Jon, perched on the fence in the stableyard, babbling on about her day as he practiced braiding his horse's mane, its tail with his clumsy child's hands.
He'd never had the chance to try it with her, too see if he could tend to her without the hurt. If he could undo time, if he could give her something careful and tender to carry with her, he'd go back to that boyhood again and settle her between his knees and show with his hands the care he had for her. Arya's body was a story in neglect. He wanted to help her feel precious again
Arya liked to be touched firmly, slow strokes of his fingers as he combed her hair through until t'was thick with soap. She hummed a little under her breath, a song Jon had never heard before.
Curiosity coiled in him. Once or twice her lady mother had ordered Arya's hair trimmed to cut the worst of the tangles loose, but never so short as this. "Your hair," he said at last, combing his fingers through the burgeoning curls. "Did you— Were you ill?"
His other hand kept the soap suds from her eyes, but it kept him from seeing them, too. All he had was her voice, hesitant, as she murmured, "Most mummers shave. It helps with wearing all those wigs."
She'd always loved pretend, and story-telling. He'd used to play at being Daeron the Young Dragon, and her as Visenya. "I bet you were a good mummer," he told her thoughtfully. Had she hacked at some man with a pretend sword then, and that fierce determined look that even play-fighting gave her?
"I was," she said back. "But I didn't want to be. I hated the man I worked for, and how people looked at me sometimes, and I didn't, I didn't want to keep shaving my head. I knew it would grow again. But all I could think was…"
She trailed to thick silence. Jon scraped soap-foam from her forehead and rinsed his hands in the bathwater. Her own thin fingers, scabbed and scarred, worried the mess of her knees; she'd curled tight as a nautilus again.
Jon took her hands in his and waited till she looked at him again.
To have any of her be so foreign to him, any thought so strange and far that he couldn't guess it, or read it from his face, chafed like ill-fit boots. Like wearing a stranger's armor, pinching as it protected him, when he'd rather take the hurt. He wanted to know her again now. This was perhaps the only wound that couldn't wait.
"What did you think?" he asked and squeezed her fingers gently.
She didn't want to tell him, blush stained her cheeks. But he was patient, and it eased her. At last Arya lowered her eyes, tears clinging to the thick lashes, and mumbled, "You used to muss my hair."
He was struck blind by it, stunned. Her look was still wary, as if this was something she wasn't allowed. Jon turned away, reaching for the ewer; he said quietly, "It's grown a bit. Shall I find you a ribbon to tie through it, that I can come steal it and make you untidy again?"
Arya said, "Yes!" too loud and painfully earnest.
Arya when she wanted things had wanted them with no reserve, no shame, no distance. That she wanted this back with the same desperate grasping of her heart that she'd wanted horse-riding and sword-fighting and fairness for all the people she loved, it humbled him.
"Then I'll fetch one tomorrow," Jon promised. "Head back, now. And close your eyes."
He rinsed the soap from her hair, careful to keep the water from her eyes, then set aside the ewer with a clatter. Her hair was soft on his fingers, familiar even in the shortness of it. And too, the way she flushed and turned into his touch, a secret language between them that lingered, speaking to them both, for the whole time he touched her.
Even with the fire so close, the bathwater was cooling. He liked little the thought of her growing chilled again when she'd just gotten warm. He'd worked too hard to make her warm again to let the winter take it back.
He stood, his knees creaking, and offered Arya a hand to help her rise. "It's cold," she complained, giving him a baleful look even as she clasped his wrist.
"Aye, it'll be even colder when the water cools," he told her as she stepped from the tub. He was quick to fling a length of thick toweling about her shoulders, but it did little to stop her shiver, or the gooseflesh climbing her neck and racing down her legs. "Go stand by the fire," Jon ordered.
Her hair was too short to need combing. The tray on the hearth was waiting, kept warm by the fireplace stones. Her hands— Jon didn't have a true salve and he didn't trust any maester that had served the Boltons to come around Arya, not when she was like this. Not so long as she was cracked open and peeled apart, shifted foot to foot on the wet floor and sniffled into her wrap.
He had a little bear grease in a pouch with his riding things, the free folks' cure for everything from fleas to flux. White and soft as sealing wax, as bitter-scented as the berries they stewed it with, t'would be better than nothing. He unearthed it and turned back around.
Arya was still lingering by the tub. "Do you want to catch a cold?" Jon asked, and made to take her arm, to brace her across the damp floor lest she slipped and fell.
She said, very patiently, in that way she had of speaking—that way Jon had almost forgotten—as though the maddest things she said made sense and t'was you who was the fool not to see it, "Aren't you going to get in the water?"
She had her brows raised, in a thoughtful sort of way. Jon said slowly, "No," and when her face fell, her chin lifting, he tried to coax her. "Are you not cold? Come by the fire; there's supper there and I've something to put on your hands."
Her chin lifted just a fraction more. Jon should've been surprised, but it only made sense in a heartbreaking way, how she told him firmly, thoughtlessly, "You said we would look at each other. And you're just as tired as me, and dirty too," and she let go half her wrap to flick a nail against his neck, where dirt had gathered, unable to fall past the tight lacing of his jerkin.
She wrinkled her nose a little, then plucked at the front of Jon's shirt. "And you smell like horse," she complained. "I don't want to sleep next to you if you go to bed smelling like horse."
He loved her so much it hurt. "Little sister," Jon said, catching her hand in his, "you've spent the last however many days sleeping on your horse. You cannot possibly complain now, when I've only been a day riding."
She twisted her hand until she could fit her fingers in the spaces between his. "I only did that because I had to," she said back. And her eyes, so fine and sweet, told him, We don't have to anymore. We don't have to drag our tired bodies through the mud, not when there's someone here to help us keep walking.
Jon had always been defenseless in the face of her. He passed her the leather pouch, fat with grease inside it, and stripped his wet shirt up off his head.
He hadn't forgotten about the scars. He couldn't; the cold made them ache and t'was always cold now. But Arya had always known all of him, and it was so easy, with her come home to him, to fit themselves back into those familiar spaces again.
He'd forgotten she didn't know about this yet. It was too late to cover himself again. He wasn't nearly ashamed enough of the scars to flinch. But he hadn't wanted to hurt her; he was sorry for that.
Her eyes went wide, wet with tears almost at once. But before she could speak—she didn't need to speak, the fat tear that crept down her cheek said it same as a scream—he said, "Go sit by the fire."
She hesitated. He didn't want to explain right then. News down in the Neck was that he'd betrayed the Night's Watch, news in White Harbor that the free folk had done it, news in the Vale that t'was an Other's own hand. He didn't know what Arya had heard, wherever she'd been, and he couldn't bear to tell her the real cause.
Arya wouldn't hear, I was trying to save you, without taking from Jon's mouth words that had never been there. That would never be there. T'was your fault.
"Later," he rasped. "Alright? Later. I don't want you to be cold." If it sounded like pleading, that was only because it was. "Will you please go by the fire?"
She turned her eyes back to his face. Arya loved him too much to want to hurt him back. She swallowed, and wiped her eyes, and threatened, "If fair's fair, I should stay and scrub you."
Twelve and lashed with growing pains, muscles stiff and aching from knocking Robb across the yard with practice steel, of being knocked back himself, Jon had spent most nights on the verge of exhausted tears. Lady Catelyn used to sit beside Robb's bed and knead the knots from his shoulders and legs, talking all the while, a little of Robb's grandfather and mostly of his uncle, and how Lady Catelyn had helped Edmure Tully grow up too.
Jon had been bitterly alone; t'was Arya who'd badgered Maester Luwin into showing her how to do the same. One long hot day he'd spread himself across the grass and she'd straddled his waist and worked his back with her small hands until he could lift his sword without miserable groaning.
He wanted nothing more than her hands on him again. And she wanted it too; she kneaded the edge of her wrap between her fingers, her mouth an unhappy little frown.
Want strung him tight as a trap-line in a heavy stream. But she was still shivering, little shakes wracking her body. "Next time," Jon offered, a compromise, as he chafed some warmth back into her exposed arm.
She narrowed her eyes at him, that dangerously stubborn look. When Jon had hated himself, his bastardy, his weaknesses, Arya had tried to love him enough to make up the difference. She loved him still, and he was weak with it. "I swear," he said, so softly. To neglect himself, to refuse her care, that was a wound he couldn't bear to give himself anymore.
She gave in to the shivers and crossed to stand near the fire, then sat very gingerly on the hearth. The firelight limned her gold as she bent her head and knocked water from her hair.
The water was cold enough to be unpleasant. Jon undressed, fast, and stepped over the tubside, reaching already for the soap. He wasn't all over bruises at least, just sore, and so he could be fast, and rough in his fastness.
Arya said from her careful perch, "Oh! Bread."
Jon didn't need to ask if she'd starved. He scrubbed dust off his neck, watching as she so carefully broke a piece of bread away and ate it, then licked crumbs from her fingers with the fastidious of a little mouse.
It hurt to look at her, almost, folded up as she was like a bundle of weirwood sticks. He scrubbed his hands, scraped dirt and ink from under the short half-moons of his nails.
Arya was examining a piece of cheese now, tearing away the tiniest slivers and chewing them impossibly slowly. A man could become ill too easily if he ate rich food when he was starving, but Jon couldn't bear the thought of feeding her a bowl of murky brown, the same as all the smallfolk were eating.
T'would fill her belly just as well, but same as Arya couldn't bear the thought of Jon contenting himself to be cold and grimy and reeking of horse, he couldn't bear the thought of her scraping year-old beans into her mouth and proclaiming she was satisfied.
She liked her tray better than the broth, at least. Her attention wandered back to him, peeking looks, but most of her was focused on the tray. He was glad of it, that he'd chosen right.
He doused himself with the last of the clean water, dumping the ewer straight over his head, and shook water out of his eyes and off the cold clinging strands of his hair like a dog.
Arya was watching him back now fully, turning half a dried apple over and over in her hands. She laughed at him when he shook, cheery-bright, her cheeks packed full of the apple's other half. "Did Ghost teach you that?" she teased him, and it was apple sweet.
There was another length of towelling, water-speckled now. Jon scrubbed it across his hair, then wrapped himself in it, more to keep off the chill than from any pretense of modesty.
"I saw him, you know," Arya went on. Her mouth twisted to a frown, but a look down at the tray brought her smiling again. "A few days ago, mayhaps. He came for Nymeria and they went north together."
Jon crossed to the fire, trying not to shiver. There was more meat on him than Arya had, a knight's bulky muscle, a slowly disappearing bit of fat, but t'was still good to sink down on the hearthrug, settled just below and beside her, and feel the heat of the fire wash over him.
Arya had her hand out, offering him the other half of the apple; he took it and told her, "I thought he was hunting. He goes off on his own now, sometimes."
"Nymeria too," Arya agreed. "She's got a pack now, and it seemed unfair to try and keep her near me when I was the one to send her away. But she always comes back now." And another unhappy look. Musingly, she added, "I think she saved my life, coming back when she did. And, and Ghost, too."
She held her hands to the fire, warming them. Jon could imagine it too easily, the cold, the fear. If she hadn't meant to come to Winterfell, had Ghost more than the banners brought her?
The edges of old hurt lingered in them both. Later, he'd share that most secret fear of his, that Jon's death had left Ghost as something more complicated than a wolf. He'd ask to hear from her how Nymeria was lost, not just the jumbled tale of Hallis Mollen's frantic explanation, told so faintly when he'd creaked to his knees before Jon with their father's bones and news on both Jon's sisters.
Arya saw his hesitance. She put her hand to his head and combed through the tangled mass of his wet hair. The apple was sweet on his tongue, tough to his teeth. Jon leaned forward until he could rest his forehead to Arya's bony knee.
"T'is strange," she murmured. She touched him hesitantly, then rougher when he didn't protest, dragging her nails across his scalp. "Your hair is longer than mine. Messier, too."
"Aye," Jon agreed. A quarter of an apple now, sticky in his hand. "My stitches are worse than yours now. That's stranger."
She laughed, an unexpected chirp. "Do you remember what Septa Mordane used to say?" Arya asked. "She said I had the hands of a blacksmith."
"You were always underfoot in Mikken's forge." Arya had been underfoot everywhere, making the oddest of friends. It wasn't surprising such a sour dried-up woman had hated her; Arya drew love to herself like candles drew moths. "Mayhaps she got confused, after squinting at stitches all damn day instead of teaching you something useful."
Arya hummed. It felt impossibly good to speak to her in the language of their childhood, those things for which there was no one but them left to remember. "Eat your supper," Jon said as she combed a tangle from his hair, her fingers careful and clever not to pull.
"I think the Lannisters killed her," Arya whispered, and took her hand away.
He hadn't felt so tired before, but it came over him in a wave, just then. "Are we sad about that?" he teased, but his heart was gone from it. T'was all of Father's household, truly. Hallis Mollen had come to Winterfell bleeding; he'd died a fortnight later in his bed.
Arya shifted, tired bones uneasy on solid stone. He wouldn't have her be melancholy when he was there to take her out of it. Jon tugged at her ankle, wrapped his hand around her knee, that the heat of his palm could ease it. "Come here," Jon said and she slid down to the floor, then crawled closer to curl into his side.
T'was a moment's work to tug her wrap higher on her shoulder, to pull the tray down after her and break apart the loaf of bread, thick with currents and honey and nuts. Arya stuck half the piece in her mouth at once, an enormous bite.
"Were you hungry often?" Jon asked, and stroked the neat ruin of her hair until she was leant against him and easy again.
"Sometimes," she said when she was done chewing. Between little licks of her hands, chasing the last of the honey, she asked, "Were you?"
"Aye," Jon said. She'd ignored the slices of venison, rough from the smoke and tender all inside, but opened her mouth for it when he offered. "When I was ranging, mostly," Jon went on, feeling the motion of her jaw against his shoulder as she chewed. His thumb lingered at the corner of her mouth; she took his wrist and licked salty grease from his hand too, a soft wet heat against the very pads of his fingers.
She ate from his plate often enough as a child. This was no different. "But the Wall has onion soup enough for every man that serves there," he murmured, letting her even as it worked a thrill deep down in his belly. "And there's game across the Wall, if you're quick enough to catch it."
He fed her another slice, and she kissed his fingers when she was done. "It wasn't hunger that bothered me so much," he admitted as she let him go.
She reached for the tray, tearing up the last of the bread. When she put one of the pieces to his mouth, he ate it from her hand. Sweetness on his tongue was rare now; the other lords ate at the high table, but most often Jon took trays in the war room, or sat arguing among the other men, all of them hunched over the weak soup.
Arya watched him, waiting sweet and docile and keen to hear. He said, hushed, "Mostly I was cold. Or frightened, sometimes."
Or angry. Despairing. Once, with Ygritte, he'd felt the first sweet blossom of something that might have someday grown to love. But he didn't tell her that. Later when they were both less raw, he could confess to it, to wanting to stay with Ygritte, without Arya feeling it a betrayal.
Arya said now, just as quiet as him, "I was frightened too. Sometimes I thought t'would kill me."
There in the shelter of his arm, she ate another piece of apple. A cloth tied around a shying horse's eyes, a confession in unsteady murmurs between bites, because to treat it as nothing was the only way to keep from falling apart. She told him, chewing, "And after Mother and Robb died, I didn't feel anything. For, for a while."
"Me neither," Jon told her, tucking her up closer. Her wrap was drying, her hair still damp. She smelled of soap and honey and her eyes were screaming. It hurt almost too much to touch on, to talk about. Robb had been his brother and his friend and his rival; Robb had been Arya's brother too, her knight, her hero. It hadn't seemed possible, to hear the words.
It hadn't seemed possible Robb could fall.
"I used to pretend it, when I couldn't sleep," Arya murmured. "Finding Robb. Robb finding me. I used to think maybe he— he might not ransom me if someone caught me and tried to sell me back."
His eyes burned. That she could doubt it, that she could ever doubt it, stirred so much hurt that he could barely breathe. "Robb loved you," Jon said, as unyielding as stone.
"A king," Arya said with murmured heartbreak, heartbreak gone old and familiar, "can't put his sister above the realm, no matter how much he loves her."
Just that, just those handful of words, ran like icemelt down his spine. He couldn't speak. He didn't dare say anything. She'd carried this with her, carried it rotting inside her for so very long.
"I used to pretend about you, too," she went on, turning to rest her cheek on his skin. Stroking over hurts so old that pink flesh had grown over an infection still kept deep inside. Her hand was a fist in his own wrap. "About going to the Wall. How you'd hug me, and muss my hair, and call me little sister. I was—"
Her voice was thin, just at the edge of breaking. Enough, he thought wildly. Enough. Jon kicked the tray away, reached for her as she forced out miserably through the threat of her tears, "I used to be glad you weren't king. I know it hurt you, not to be, to be like the rest of us—"
To be trueborn.
"—but I didn't care. I was so glad for it," Arya told him in hitching little hiccups. "I was so happy you'd never have to choose— I think it would have killed me," and she was reaching back, trying hard to swallow down her cries.
He was ill with it, sick with the words, with the need to hold her. He hauled her into his lap, bony and shivering and fever-hot where she'd sat too close to the fire after so long in the cold. "If you were king," she wept, and he felt the tears wetting his chest, his neck, "and you didn't, you couldn't trade for me back, it would have killed me. I would have died. I was so happy you'd never have it. Jon—"
If t'was anyone else who made her weep such high frantic cries, as if someone had put their hand around her heart and squeezed, they wouldn't have lived long. Jon would have struck them dead. He would have parted head from neck in a single bloody stroke.
But he was unmanned in the face of her sobbing, unmanned by the grief and love she had for him. "Don't," he begged. "Don't," and she sobbed out, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" like the words were knives come to cut her throat.
He had no bandages for this. It came from the cellars of her heart, this wailing, and refused to be stemmed by word or touch. Something in her had broken to say it. Jon could do nothing but hold her and rock her and press his own wet face to the short silky curls of her hair.
It was Arya's own heart that was breaking, and she who was breaking it, her own hand wormed between her ribs with a vengeful squeeze. He knew her shame at it as surely as he'd ever known her mind, that her secret happiness lay like stones on her chest.
All his life, Jon had wanted nothing more than to be Ned Stark's trueborn son, and she knew it. But Arya had loved him best because he was not. He felt stunned with it, wild with it. Her ragged fingernails were leaving bloody lines across his shoulders and neck.
"Don't hate me," she choked out, hysterical. "Please, please. I cannot— Jon, I can't—"
All her life, all her life, she had been alone in her heart but for him. And all his life, too, save those five empty years before her, times he couldn't even remember anymore beyond the lingering scraps of loneliness and fear.
And then Arya, and her love like the sun as it broke over him. Arya had been the dark Stark, the strange Stark, and Jon had been the bastard. But it had gone beyond looks, the pair of them. It had been the wolf-child girl and the sullen unwanted boy. It had been a solitude so boundless and inescapable, a melancholy homesickness that could have driven them mad for lack of no one understanding it.
No one had ever known Jon the way Arya had. And he had been the only one to peer in her most secret and sacred heart. They were twins of each other, reflections reaching for each other in a mirror.
Could he have understood her as he did if he'd been anyone other than Jon Snow? Would she have felt even half so adoring of him, even a fraction so devoted if he hadn't joined her in that cool and narrow place between the hearth fire of their family, and the endlessly barren world of that unlooked-for, untrodden-upon summer snow?
She wept as if she was dying, and t'was killing him to hear. "Shh," Jon said, a hoarse scrape from his throat. He pressed her closer, frantic skin to frantic skin. Gods but if he could carve open his own chest and press her there! If he could but coax her into curling small and quiet as a suckling pup next to his heart, where the bone and meat of him might shield her from any blow.
He couldn't imagine a world where Arya wasn't his heart—the most precious, the most treasured.
Would Jon have loved her less, if he'd been another red-headed Tully son? Loved her different if their father had wed Jon's mother, and loved her, and lost her after Jon came into the world?
He couldn't love her better, he knew that. He couldn't love this girl more than he did now, absolutely, with all of his body and spirit and heart. It would have killed Arya if duty and birth had made Jon turn her away; it would have surely killed him too.
He'd cast aside the Night's Watch vows for her, and thrown over a hundred brothers he neither loved nor wanted. He'd torn his honor to the smallest shreds. He'd cried to the world that Jon had a bastard's black heart and a bastard's black blood on the smallest chance that such a truth would let him hold her safe again.
But what had he had at the Wall, that he'd valued above Arya? Nothing, not even himself. T'was no contest to prove himself rotten to men who had long believed it, not if it meant bringing her home.
But if better birth had placed a crown upon Jon's head, heavier than the regent's bronze circle he wore now—
If Robb's will had named Jon heir above Bran and Rickon because t'was Jon's right and duty, not for fear that they were dead—
If t'was the whole of the North or Arya he had to choose between, victory for their people, freedom for their people—
Arya gave a final shuddering hiccuping sob and fell limp against his chest. She had no more strength, Jon thought. She'd used so much of it coming home to him, and the rest in this. Confessing her greatest sin, that he might judge her or cast her out as he saw fit.
He loved her so much it had killed him. Jon half-wished he could die again, for the easy uncomplicated peace it had given him. Those three days and three nights beyond a world in which pain and suffering seemed too great to bear.
But Arya hadn't been in the dark, not even the faintest whisper of her laugh, or the softest most hesitant press of her body to his. The want of peace faded in him like ink left in the sun. He couldn't bear to leave her again.
He cradled her head in his hand, the vulnerable curve of her skull, and said in smeared kisses to her forehead, her temple, her cheek, "I don't care. I don't care. Gods, how could you ever think—"
He would take five years of loneliness and pain, he'd take a hundred years of bitter war, every slight he'd ever suffered against himself, every harsh word or ugly knowing look, if it meant he might look into her eyes again and see that understanding as she looked back, more precious than diamonds, more precious than dragonglass.
"Arya," tender and chiding and coaxing, "Arya, look at me. Little sister, please," and she pushed up against his chest, her hands splayed across the scars that papered him there, eyes so red and swollen that he knew they pained her.
He didn't know how to say it, how to make into words the sudden starburst of fear and love and pain crowding his chest. He kissed her, instead. A tender press of his lips to her cheeks, to the tip of her nose, to her brow and all across the curious scar that ran the length of it now.
Her eyes, then the very tips of her lashes, soft as snowfall on an outstretched hand. The sharp point of her chin, the edges of her jaw where the bone pressed starving-close to the skin.
The corners of her mouth, and then across it fully, as sweet and chaste a kiss he'd ever given her when they were children.
She shuddered with it, and when he pulled away, shoved herself back in close. His lips were rich with salt now, with honey. Understanding was as warm as a wedding cloak about him, in his keeping only for the time it took to grow warm from his body, the time it took to say those vows beneath the great heart tree.
He loved her more than anything. More than summer, more than sunlight, more than dragons. And it was dangerous, to love her so much when the world wanted to cast more and more weight upon Jon's back.
But if he would trade a true and honest name for her, there was nothing he wouldn't cast away on a whispered word, a single plea.
He'd hated his father, sometimes. He'd hated himself. Snow, and every playful time that Robb had called him that, it was a secret knife into his flesh. But Jon couldn't hate something Arya loved so much and so dearly.
He'd lost every chance of having a lord's life, of having an honorable name, of having trueborn children he might give that name to, lost it from the very moment he'd been born. And all his life, Jon had known it, had mourned it, had resented it.
To take the vows of the Night's Watch hadn't felt like a concession when Jon had already thought that all his life he couldn't have what they barred him from.
The wildlings had japed, when Jon woke from three days of peace, that his vows were done, the gods were satisfied. They hadn't been the only ones who felt that way; Stannis, when Winterfell was retaken, had offered him that poisoned deal again.
But that had been before news had crawled up to Winterfell's gates with Howland Reed at the column head, with his assuring dreams that Bran lived, with Old Mormont's raven cawing in a boy's voice, "Alive! Alive! Four and you, alive!"
How many months had Jon held Winterfell in his own name, thinking himself the last, yet had made no move to ensure that there would be a Stark there for years to come, a Stark to sit it even after his death?
He might've at last satisfied the pained wanting he'd known all his life. He might've taken a wife and gotten children on her. Stannis would have legitimized him even if Jon didn't consent to burn the godswood down, so desperate was he to be backed by the North.
Even when Howland Reed had come, even after Jon learned Robb's love and trust had given him this—Jon's children would be named Stark—he'd made no move.
He'd been so uneasy in it. The men had hailed him as Stark and all the while Jon had felt a queer unrest.
Jon Snow had no name, no hope, no future. But he'd had this, this girl and the deep warm weight of her love. The understanding he'd found nowhere else. The weight of her body on his lap, and the wet cheek tucked to his neck, and the knowledge that wherever life and war and fear had taken her, she'd still loved him enough, wanted him enough, to claw her way back home.
If he'd been born to be a king, he'd never even know to miss it. T'was an unbearable thought—to even imagine it made his chest ache. Arya's back was all gooseflesh under his hand, her knuckles a horror as he took her hand from his chest and bent their fingers together.
"I love you," Jon said to her. "Don't ever be sorry— Don't you ever dare ask me to forgive you. There's nothing to forgive."
She gasped, hot and wet against his neck. "Little sister," Jon said, just to have the words in his mouth. "Little sister," and it was better he'd ever felt in his life to say it, sweet and good as spring mead on his tongue. He felt dizzy with it, his love for her, as he crooned, "Let me look after your hands. Will you? You can stay there—" he soothed to the nervous shake of her head, "—just where you are. Only let me, please."
She mumbled, very wetly, "Your hands need it more."
Never had there been a girl more easy to love, and Jon of all people had been the one blessed with a right to it. How could he ever set that aside? How could he ever grudge her for loving him back? "Your hands first," he said, reaching for the leather pouch she'd cast aside in favor of her supper. "And then you can see to mine."
He shifted her on his lap, that he could better reach her hands, and she let him with a little sigh. Arya wasn't so small against him, Jon realized, t'was just that she made herself smaller, to better fit where she'd pressed herself to him before.
But settled on his leg, tucked to his chest with his arm about her back and her hands in his, he could tell better that she'd grown. They were eye to eye like this, and her long greedy looks at his face soothed Jon better than anything else.
I feel just the same, he said with how carefully he worked grease into her cuticles, the raw red tips of her fingers, across each of the joints where the skin threatened to break. He smoothed it over the worst of the red patches on the backs of her hands, and the dried skin of her wrists. And then tenderly, he kneaded grease into her knuckles, until the stiffly pained little gasps she gave eased away to shivery little sighs.
First one hand, then the other. She had a swordsman's callouses now, and other rough marks, the ground-deep signs of laborers' work. These hands had held him, they'd soothed him, they'd laid bandages on his wounds. These hands, so many years ago, had gripped his fingers when he'd peered into Arya's cradle, those chubby babe's fists and every time he'd kissed them she'd laughed uproariously.
These hands had taken and held as if they were the finest treasures everything Jon had ever offered them—the ribbons and odd rocks and pretty leaves he'd carried back to the nursery, the reins of ponies and more than once of his own horse. The inky quill in her first writing lessons, which he'd switched to her swordhand, the left, with such a glare that Maester Luwin hadn't dared object to it.
Jon had put a sword in these hands once, and by Arya's own tearful confession, he knew that these hands had killed. He couldn't promise she'd never need do such things again. Blood had dirtied these hands, and the foulness of life, but they were no more dirty than his own.
Tenderly, he smoothed grease in the hollows between her fingers and worked it across her palms.
Twice Arya made as if to speak, drawing in breath, but stayed silent. Finally, as he folded her hands between his own, and turned his look to her face, she said, "You don't hate me for it," still a little frightened.
"No," Jon said. He played with her fingers now, felt the changed strength of her grasp. "There's nothing you could ever do that'd make me feel such a way."
"When I used to think about it, about you," Arya said, and tugged his hands until he looked at her face again, "I used to think, 'Jon will always want me'. No matter if I got fleas, or my hair was all chopped off like a boy's, or if I killed somebody. Jon would still want me. But I didn't, I don't—"
Arya had such a tender heart. Wound it, and she'd carry the wound for ages, years. She said, with her lashes wet with tears, "Why? Why don't you—"
"Would you have loved me less, if I'd been fully your brother, instead of only half?" he asked. "If Lady Catelyn was my mother, or Father had wed my mother and I'd come before Robb?"
She jerked in his lap, scrambling, kneed him in the side so hard he lost his breath as she made to kneel and cup his face in her hands. "No!" and there were tears in her eyes. "No, how could you think that—"
"I don't," Jon assured her. "Hush, no. You would still love me, I know. But would you have loved me different, if I was trueborn and red-haired like the rest?"
She said nothing, only looked at him and sunk her teeth deep into her lip.
"You would have, same as I would. Neither of us could help it. But I like the way you love me now," Jon told her. He brushed his thumb across her cheek, across the bruise there that he'd get to watch as it faded to pale skin again. He coaxed her poor abused lip free. "I like the way you love me now," he confessed, watching her fine bright eyes. "Nothing's so dear to me than that. I wouldn't change it, little sister, not for anything."
"If I wouldn't want to give it up, what made us what we are to each other, why should you?"
He knew the answer, but still asked with his own eyes, with the hand on her waist to steady her as she shifted back to perch on his thighs. Would you? Is there something in the world you'd give this up for?
She looked down, away. Shy in her pleasure, same as when she was a girl and overwhelmed by happiness. He waited, patient, pleased enough to just hold her and caress her cheek as she thought it over so seriously.
Arya was reaching for the bear grease now; she turned her head, snake-quick, and nipped at the pad of his thumb, then soothed the bite with a kiss. Don't ask me that, stupid, the look from the corner of her eye said. 'Course I wouldn't.
She'd always been able to make him smile. Jon mussed her hair and watched with deep satisfaction that if t'was just a little bit wet, the curls stayed sticking straight up all over her head. When she scowled at him, her mouth a-tremble to keep it from smiling, and reached to smooth her hair back down, he trapped her hands with his.
"You said you'd look after me," Jon reminded her. "Aye, and complained all this while about my hands looking so poor. So will you do something about it, or ought we go to bed now?"
She wrinkled her nose at him even as she giggled, teasing back, "I should have let Jeyne give me my bath," taking his hands in hers all the while.
Arya had a practiced maester's hand, a maester's gimlet eye; she turned her focus to his burned hand first thing, and worked grease into his palm, digging her thumbs in deep. Jon grunted, feeling the pained stretch, then under her hands, something went loose, six seconds' sharpness followed by deep relief.
He groaned, took his hand away, and stretched it. He could hold a pen, hold a sword, hold a horse's reins, but it wasn't comfortable if he did it long enough. Arya was saying, "Give that back, I'm not done!" and he surrendered it again.
"I told you someone needed look after you," she scolded, friendly, as she worked his fingers one by one, as Jon reveled in the sensation of muscle stretched too far and finally relaxing.
"Aye," he said, meaning, I needed you. And she heard it, flushing red all down her face and across her neck. Fascinated, he put his free hand to her neck, touched the hot skin there at her collarbone.
"Tell me if this hurts too much," Arya said, low, and gave his hand one final brutal stretch, her face all pleased concentration.
Jon bit the inside of his cheek and stroked petal-soft across the base of her neck. When she finally let his fingers relax, he said thoughtfully, "Do you remember when Ser Rodrik first let me use the practice steel?"
"Aye," Arya said. She smoothed across his knuckles, then lay his hand in her lap, reaching for the other. Eyes still lowered, she said, "I could do that again. If, if you like."
Her shoulders were charmingly pink, the top of her chest. Mayhaps even below the wrap; Arya used to blush down to her belly when they'd gone swimming and Jon had teased her too much.
He wanted her hands on him, the comfort of something so simple and so complicated as a touch. And he could have it now again, a feast after so long with an empty belly. Gorging himself on this couldn't make him sick, but he wanted to savor it still. "Later," Jon said, and let her see to his other hand, surrendering it so easily to her care.
They were quiet as she worked, a good silence, the silence of people who didn't need words with each other. Arya kept glancing up at his face, kept smiling that slow and brilliant smile, sweet with understanding that he was there. Sweet with confessing and learning that there was no crime at all, but to doubt him.
Now she set aside the little pouch of grease, and her touches to his hands were absent-minded as she played with his fingers, learned the shape of his hands again. She murmured, "Your hands are bigger now," never mind that hers were too, long and slim against the blunt broadness of his own. And then, her tiredness peaking through, "I missed you. Gods, but I did."
T'was still too raw a wound for but the most gentle of teasing. But even after she'd handed him a dozen of them, a hundred, he still craved her smiles. "Did you?" he teased, and jostled his leg, that she had to catch herself against his chest. "And here I thought t'was some other half-brother you were so eager to see again."
She laughed, a jewel in his hand, a perfect beam of summer sun in a winter snowstorm, warm and beautiful enough to break his heart. "Since I have so many of those lying about," Arya agreed.
She settled closer and laid her hands to his, palm to palm. "I missed you too," Jon told her, though he knew she didn't doubt it. "You used to pretend about going to the Wall to find me?" At her slow nod, "I used to pretend the same, that you would turn up there someday, all dirt and scabs and wild hair, shouting out my name."
How often had he taken out that fantasy, worn-thin and dependable, to turn his mind away long enough to complete some grim task? Another set of sword maneuvers, another foul bowl of bloody soup, another sleepless hour before exhaustion dragged him under.
But it wasn't the full truth, and she gave a little hum, to coax the rest of it from him.
She measured her hands against his, and it struck Jon how different they were now than last time they'd laid their hands together. "I didn't truly want you there with me," Jon confessed. "The Wall, the Watch—it's all horrible. There's little honor there, just the worst of men and none of them glad or grateful for their jobs. Once—" and his voice was hoarse with remembered horror, "they sang Brave Danny Flint in the halls, and laughed about her fate. What kind of man could want that for his sister?"
"But you wanted me," Arya said, soft and sure. A gentle hand smoothing over the bruise.
He folded his fingers around hers, laced them together and bent his head to kiss her narrow wrists. "More than anything," he told her. "More than anything, I wanted you near."
"Would you—" and her own voice caught in her throat. When he looked up, her eyes were wet with tears. "Would you have gone away with me?" she asked hoarsely, and Jon knew her well enough to know, knew himself well enough to remember from all the times he'd thought of it, how sweet a nursery story it was, that t'was something she'd told herself to ease the sting.
"Yes," he said. He'd cast aside his vows on the merest chance of her; to have Arya with him for true wouldn't have even been a choice, so obvious Jon's actions would've been.
Tomorrow, he thought, when they were both less raw, he'd tell her about Bolton and his bastard. About how Jon had broken his vows on the strength of her name alone. "If you'd shown up there, yes. I'd have taken you across the sea, to Braavos, or Pentos."
Her eyes were shining. She said, very shyly, "You would like Braavos, I think."
He let go her fingers, taking her arms carefully and drawing her closer, until he could tuck her face to his neck, until she was sprawled all warm and bony across his lap. The ridge of her spine was little hills and dips under fingers, and he kissed her damp clean hair before daring to ask, his own throat tight, "Was that where you were? Braavos?"
She nodded, then set her lips to his shoulder in a warm chaste little press. "I'll tell you," she promised. "Everything, there's so much that's happened—"
"But tomorrow," and they said it together, a small chorus that would always make Jon smile. He pressed another kiss to her temple and felt her hand raise, brave enough at last, to touch with intention the scars across his chest.
"Do they hurt?" she asked, small and uncertain. "The scarring's all red."
The knife that had done it, it had reached for Jon's very heart itself. But no blade was so great that it could span the mass of the Narrow Sea. "Aches," he said, "in the cold."
She sat back, left her fingertips to linger. "Let's be warm then," she said. She gave a rough scrub of her hand to the scars, all that she could reach, as if she could erase them with a touch. And then Arya was clambering off his lap and tossing aside her wrap, her own body scar-speckled, dark lines across the backs of her legs and her ass as she walked away. Switch marks, Jon thought, and they didn't make her ugly, but they were ugly to look at, those faded lines that proved the roughness he couldn't shelter her from.
He wanted to ask. He wanted, badly, to lay her out on the thickest of his furs and touch each scar, trace the paths of them as she told him what lay behind those marks. He wanted to know her body again, wanted to learn the limits of all the cat-sleek muscles shifting under her skin.
Arya had been a terror as a child. He wanted, Jon was realizing, to see her take her sword in hand, that slimly dangerous rapier, and to let her fight him with it. Every time they'd wrestled as children, she'd fought him as fiercely as a shadow-cat. But he'd been so much bigger than her then, and so often t'was Jon pinning her under him and tickling her until she was red and shrieking out ecstatic laughter.
They would be better matched now. It was growing too hot here by the fire. Jon rolled to his feet and stood, aching from her weight on his lap, from sitting on the floor.
Arya was slow to approach his bed, hesitant. She didn't seem to care about his eyes on her; t'was the bed itself she paced around, like a wolf uncertain of where to den. Had she truly been so used to sleeping on horseback, to sleeping in the root hollows of trees and the sides of roads?
But after a shifting moment, getting colder each second, she threw back the bedclothes and gave him an imperious look. He was helpless against her; he couldn't not give her what she wanted, not now when he wanted it so much, too. He came and pressed a hand to the small of her back, saying, "In bed with you, then."
She crawled up to perch in the center, then lay flat and starfished across the breadth of it. "It's soft," she said in the same tones of delight as when she'd announced that there was bread.
"I had it changed just for you," Jon teased. "Stuffed my mattress with rocks, before." He watched as she turned her cheek to hide her giggle to the bedclothes, and rested a hand on her ankle as he asked, "Will you move, that I might come to bed."
She cracked an eye open to peer at him, and shook her head. "You can't yet," she said and yawned.
He loved her always, but especially like this, making mischievous little games for him to play. No one else had indulged her so endless; Jon had gotten to horde this just to himself. "Why not?" he asked, and made to drag her to the side, saying, "Is there a reason, or are you just being greedy and wanting all the furs?"
"No," she protested. "I'm not." And then as he gave her a doubtful look, playing, she added, "I need a shirt to wear."
He turned to the chest of his clothes, then back to raise a brow at her, This, my lady? and she kicked out at him, crying, "No, you stupid! One you've worn."
"Aye, alright Your Highness," he said and went around the dressing screen to where his nightshirt hung. T'would be too big on her, and thinner than a winter nightgown should be, but Jon thought he could keep her warm enough despite it. "Why, exactly?" he called as he snatched it from the hook.
As he came back around, he slowed at the odd look on her face even as she shifted, making room for him. "What's that for?" he asked, making the same face back at her as he crawled up the bed and held the shirt for her to put on.
She made no move to do it herself, but gave a pleased noise when he dressed her as if she was a babe in arms again, putting her arms up to make it easier, then letting him lean in to fuss with the ties at her neck. As he did, she told him very slowly, "I am a princess now."
He laughed, finishing the pretty little knot and bow, same he'd used to tie in her overskirt strings when she'd had the patience to hold still long enough for it. "You are," he said and chucked her chin just to make her wrinkle her nose at him.
"Odd to think," he laughed, "a girl who ate so much mud, and couldn't seem to spare her skirts from tears, and drove her mother, and her sister, and her septa, and her nursery-maid to distraction, is the girl I'll have to watch curtsy to all the ladies tomorrow."
"I'm wearing breeches tomorrow," Arya announced with great satisfaction, "so you won't have to, no."
He wanted to dress her in yearling wool spun fine as hair, and silk, and the most expensive lace from Myr. He wanted to swing a cloak of shadow-cat fur about her shoulders, and drip diamonds and rubies and gold over her. Jon didn't want a single person to look at Arya and doubt her worth to him.
"I cannot tempt you into a dress?" he asked, but tugged her close, their legs tangling, kicking at each other, to soften the question. She knew he wouldn't force him; she knew he'd understand as she smoothed down his nightshirt where it rested on her thigh and said back, "I can't run in dresses, or fight in them. I don't— I do not like those clothes."
He let it lie. The Mormonts were fond of split-skirts; he might offer her those in a day or two. "Do you like these clothes?" he asked and took her hand away where it fussed at the hem, high on her long legs.
Arya lifted her head a little and opened her eyes wide, that he might be sure to see how she rolled them. But her sauciness was spoiled; she cracked into a yawn and her words afterwards were half a mumble. "'Course I do. They're yours."
Arya used to always take his things, and t'was Jon who Father chided for it. Jon had felt confusion every time, even as he mumbled promises that he wouldn't let it happen again. But it felt normal to him, good even, that Arya felt the same protective possessiveness over Jon's own things that made Jon grit his teeth and shout at Robb when he so much as borrowed an unused quill.
He'd never questioned it, how she liked his things above her own. It had never bothered him, so he'd never truly asked. Now though, he was greedy to keep Arya's secrets again, eager to hear her thoughts.
"But why did you want it?" he asked. "I don't grudge it to you, it'll be warm enough bare-skinned if you still sleep like you did before—" and the arm slung over her side, the leg he tucked over hers said it, So eager to conquer my space, same as it said, Come in and take it, you're welcome here, "—but why do you—"
Lying on their sides like this, so close their noses almost brushed, it was easy to see her look to him, cheerful and tender disgust in Jon's stupidity. "The shirt you wear," Arya said to him as if he were slow, "smells like you."
T'was overly warm just lying there, even without the bedclothes pulled up. "And you like the way I smell?" Jon asked, so surprised and charmed at how obvious she thought it.
She sighed out a little laugh, and flicked his chin, saying, "Aye, when it's not being overpowered by horse."
T'was fitting punishment to roll onto his back, dragging her close and letting her nest between his arm and his body. She sank in there, a space that Jon thought had always been made just for her, and put her hand above his heart.
"You're one to talk," Jon told her, feeling the muscles of his back unknotting, feeling the candlelight getting harsher across his face. He'd have to get up and pinch the candles out, and tug the furs up to keep Arya from freezing in the night, and bar the door so the ash-girl didn't startle them awake before the sun was even up.
"Oh," she said, kneeing him gently, sinking her weight onto him as he grabbed at her leg, hitched it higher till she was almost lying on him. "Oh, says the man who put me on my first horse!"
Arya, four and perched in the saddle, had given Harwin such a mistrustful look. If her laughter dragged all the smallfolk closer, her tears had sent everyone around her scrambling to make them stop. Jon had been the one to set her in the saddle, and t'was little work on his part, with her threatening sniffles, to get the lead rein in his hand.
The hour was later than Jon thought. Both of them jolted as the candles guttered, one after another. In the sudden rosy dark, Arya turned her cheek to muffle her sleepy laughter into his chest.
It was better than dream wine, better than milk of the poppy, how good it made him feel to have Arya here with him, warm from his hands, clean from his hands, fed from his hands.
She slid off him as he sat up to gather the bedclothes, but Jon was quick to pull her close again and tuck the sheets about her shoulders. "We should sleep," he said, and smoothed a hand down her back. "There's so much to speak on, tomorrow."
Would that the winter night was long; would that tomorrow was slow to come! She made an unhappy little noise, agreement smeared to his skin, a hot press of her mouth.
He put his palm to her hip, but Arya was quick to take it, to tug his arm better around her, squirming until she was bonelessly comfortable pressed as she was against his side.
Here in the warm safe dark, Arya twined her fingers through his and asked in a trembling voice, "I'm so tired of war. Is it, is it bad? Just tell me that; I don't think I can bear not knowing."
His heart, his precious heart. His little sister, and even the darkness couldn't hide a lie from her. "Aye," Jon said, hating to say it. Hating to hurt her with a word. He rubbed his thumb across her knuckles until her body lost its tenseness again. Wordless reassurance, This war won't be like the rest, for I'll be here with you through it.
To wound Arya was to wound himself. She said, so tired and unhappy and exhausted, "If I asked you, would you go away with me?"
It was a childish question, a child's question. He wanted to answer it. He wanted her to ask for true. Jon turned on his side, tilted her head up, cupped her thin cheek, and brushed kisses across her face. A hundred, a thousand, until she was making little comforted noises, animal croons in the dark.
She wouldn't really ask. Arya loved the North, and all the people in it. Tomorrow, when he took her down to the deepest undercroft, where they kept the wight still chained and stirring in the frigid dark, she'd know why Jon had hushed her now rather than answer.
She wouldn't ever ask, and Jon was filled with the fierce-burned gladness of it. The North was his home, too. Those people in it were his people. The wildlings had japed that Jon's troth had been satisfied, but he had never japed it with them.
No son of Ned Stark's, trueborn or base, could walk away and leave the land to freezing.
But Jon had known it long, and the truth brushed over him again and again, in every one of Arya's looks, held tight in her touches, so careful like she was afraid Jon was some moon-swollen dream, ready to fall away in the very next breath.
There was nothing Jon loved more than this girl. He valued nothing above his little sister.
Not Winterfell, or his heavy regent's crown. Not Westeros, not even the world. He couldn't lie to himself, much less before a heart tree; the heavy weight of Arya in his arms, this girl already sliding into dreaming, was yet more sacred than that. To lie before her, even in his own mind, was unfathomable.
He loved her more than the weirdwood-whisper ghost of Bran. More than the half-memory half-scream of wild Rickon. More than Sansa in her high and distant towers, foreign as a bird he'd heard cry of but never seen.
More than the memory of Robb and their father, even.
If Arya asked him, they would go to White Harbor and by sword or by coin, find passage on the swiftest ship headed to the farthest wildest land. The warmest land, and he would keep her there and happy, until the Others learned to cross an unfrozen sea.
Jon had been full of fierce and terrible gladness to know that he wasn't alone. That only Robb was lost to their pack forever. He loved his siblings, he did. But it wasn't just for love of Bran, that dear and sweet little boy, that made Jon breathless with gratitude when the raven had spoken.
Bran was Jon's brother, and Jon knew that time and distance and strife hadn't touched him for ill. He knew that Bran was growing to be a better man than him. He loved that boy, that child Jon had corrected in the practice yard, and let sit on his shoulders as they faced Arya and Robb in playful joust. That boy Jon had left sleeping unpeaceful despite his stillness in his bed.
Robb's will had made no mention of Bran. Jon's own will held Bran's name in his best, most careful hand.
Come home, he thought to Bran wherever he was. Come home, and he thought it with no little despair. Come and let your sister see you. Let our wolves be brothers again. Come home and take back your crown.
Because Jon couldn't be king in the North, not when he owed his loyalty elsewhere. Let some other of Ned Stark's sons, the better of Ned Stark's sons, take up that mantle. Jon had the dark and greedy heart of a bastard, no matter how much he played at nobility.
Jon had his true duty back, and it was here, making a little nested home in the circle of his arms, murmuring and twitching in her sleep. Come home, he thought to Bran even as he tucked Arya up under his chin, even as she laid her hand upon his heart.
Jon had his home back, taller and bruise-fragile and lovely and frightfully thin. He couldn't spare even a corner of his heart to care for more than that.