A/N: Heya! Sorry, I completely forgot I hadn't uploaded the rest of this one. AO3 got it ages ago.

"Father?"

The winds seemed to pick up at his utterance, the reflected image of Eddard Stark beneath him shimmering and shattering. The voice hadn't come beneath though, but ahead. Fear and anticipation gripped Jon's heart as he pulled his eyes away from the pool to look upwards again. The white bark of the Wierwood Tree, where once it had reflected light, now seemed to glow with its own intensity and the red leaves themselves seemed to come alight with fire.

But it was the face, that ancient carving left by the Children, that caught his eye the most. No longer did it have the jagged etchings of a blade on bark but the cut precision of a face...his face. The face of the man Jon had long called Father.

Ned Stark's gaze fell upon Jon and almost immediately they took on that same saddened look he'd always carried when they conversed at Winterfell, as if he wanted to say something but never could.

"Jon...you are lost."

"Lost?" Jon's repetition was almost lost behind a bemused laugh that he caught with a cough, his disbelief at what he was seeing slowing wearing away. "Is that what they call it where you are now?"

His joke almost pulled a smile to both their faces, but the underlying truths that had never been told between them prevented either from forming such. Indeed it re-lit the mild bitterness Jon had been carrying with him into the South. "You lied to me."

Such a simple statement, yet it carried more than two decades worth of decisions that had brought him to where he was now. Gods would that he could express it more, but for that Ned would need to be more than a face on a tree.

For an age Ned remained silent...and then the wind picked up, rushing through the burning leaves and carrying his response. "I did."

That's it? Jon heard his voice scream in his head. That's all you have to say? The lies you told, to your friends, to your bannermen, your children...Gods even your own wife! All you have to say is 'Yes?!'

"Did you expect an apology?" Something of his feelings regarding the simplicity of the face's response must have shown on his own as Stark's own for lost the sadness in exchange for that grim Northern firmness, a face Jon had used many times himself when he was certain in his decision. "All I did, I did in the name of protecting you just as your mother, my sister, begged me to do on her death bed. You lived, I kept my promise, and I will not be shamed for doing so."

"You committed treason against your best friend!"

"A best friend who would have had you smothered in your sleep had he known who you were." Ned said back, still certain but also with a returning sadness. "I loved the man, but I wasn't blind. If anyone had known the truth you wouldn't have lived to see the Greyjoy Rebellion."

"And Lady Stark?" Jon pushed, unwilling to be swayed despite knowing all this reasoning to be right and true. "What of her? She lived every day in Winterfell expecting me to usurp Robb, Hells all her children, and you didn't say a word?!"

"Deceiving Cat was...a hard choice." Ned had the decency to admit, a troubled look looming over his brow for a time. "But when you were born, I hardly knew her. Her family was elevated by the Targaryens, they only sided with us after Jon Arryn and I married Hoster Tully's daughters. What if word reached them that I was harbouring Rhaegar Targaryen's trueborn heir? What would have happened to the North, Jon?"

What would have happened? Jon wanted to say nothing...but then Dany's own arguments, her pleas not to tell anyone echoed in his head...the Riverlords might have fallen into chaos...and then Robert Baratheon and Tywin Lannister...

But no. That was the early days. "What about later then? When you did know her? Why not tell her then?"

And at that - finally - Ned's face went from troubled to shamed. At last they were getting to the point. "Aye, I should have told her then. When Sansa was born, or perhaps after Theon joined us...I should have told her then...but by that time...I believed my own lie."

Believed his...no...surely not. "You can't mean to say you kept it up because you were jealous!"

"You were my son, Jon!" The sharp tone that suddenly overcame Stark's tone tore into Jon's disbelief, accompanied by a hard gust of wind and the blaze of the Wierwood leaves seemed to grow in strength. "Lyanna gave birth to you, Rhaegar provided the seed, but I carried you North, I raised you in Winterfell, I taught you...you are my son, and no one else's."

For a moment there was silence again, the wind dying down and the glow calming some, as if reflecting Ned's need to recompose himself. Jon too took the chance to recover from the revelation, Eddard Stark, good honourable Lord Stark of the North, had kept up the pretence with his wife because he'd wanted Jon, really wanted him...to be his son? He didn't mean for it to, but that admittance kindled something in him that had been dying of late: the hope that he'd meant more to Lord Stark than just duty.

But with that rekindling came the reemergence of another bitter truth. "But I'm not. I'm his."

"No." Stark returned, firmly. "You are not. You're more. Neither North nor South. Ice and Fire, Jon."

"But what does that mean?"

"...I don't know." He admitted, echoing the answer of every person Jon had ever asked when it came to prophecy, resurrection, or any bloody thing regarding magic. And then he carried on. "But I do know that, if left unchecked, Ice will freeze the land to the root...and Fire will burn it all to ashes. Ice and Fire, Jon." Ned murmured. "You're the only one...the only one...you must be Ice and Fire."

"So now you want me to take the Iron Throne too?!" Jon yelled at him furiously, is that where this was going? "You want me to walk into that cesspit of a city and sit on that chair of broken swor-?"

"THE IRON THRONE IS A POISON!" The loud booming, so unlike Ned's voice, accompanied by the Wierwood leaves again blazing and a rumbling beneath his feet with rage unattainable by man sent Jon reeling back again. Those had not been his father's words. The angered gaze fixed still upon Jon, the voice for the Old Gods continued. "Not since the Andal Desecration has something so vile touched our lands! It must not sit another. The Dragons' reign has ended, Winter has been halted. Neither must come again!"

Those ominous words were left to rattle inside Jon's head...and the more he thought about it the more horrifying ideas he came up with about what Lord Stark was telling him to do. Destroying the Iron Throne he could understand, Hells he'd do it himself if he didn't think Dany would burn him alive before he could, she was wary enough of him right now as it was...but the rest, about Winter being halted...something inside was telling him it wasn't the Night King he was being warned about.

"Ice and Fire, Jon." Ned repeated on the wind, his voice suddenly sounding weaker than it had before. It was enough to knock Jon out of his thoughts to properly look at the Wierwood Tree again, and to his mounting horror he could see the human face begin to crack and shift, turning back into woody bark, and all the while Ned repeated "Ice and Fire."

"No...no! Wait!" Before his words were out Jon had leapt into the pool and was staggering towards the Tree on the other side. "Don't go!"

"Ice and Fire." The tree repeated, Ned's face contorting outwards, stretching until the face was barely recognisable as one anymore. "Ice and Fire..."

"FATHER!"

But he was gone. Replaced by a mockingly cheerful grin, as if the Old Gods themselves were laughing at Jon's plight as he finally pulled himself out of the pool and , barely noticing his sodden state, crumpled onto the bark, little more than a boy again calling for his father. "Don't leave me alone..."

Have faith [Hela, hey mamela]
Hela, hey mamela
Hela, hey mamela...