ii: not yet dawn
When a sadness chews at the bottom of your heart, it's as though you walk all day with your dress on backwards, the buttons facing the forest, the collar facing the village.
- Deathless, Catherynne M Valente
Jon moves through the hall silently, hardly disturbing even the shadows. During the day, Winterfell hums with the shared breaths and labors of near a thousand men and women dedicated to restoring it, preparing for winter, preparing for war. But in the night it's so quiet and still, he thinks sometimes he can hear his own heartbeat. Too quiet, in truth. There are ghosts in Winterfell and in the night, Jon can hear them whispering.
It's what's got him out of his rooms and stalking the hallways, as the rest of the household sleeps. Had anyone asked he would have said he was making sure everything was in order, but the truth was he walked so that he wouldn't have to think too much. Most of the time the noise in his skull kept to a dull roar, but sometimes it did not. Sometimes he needed to walk.
As he turns the corner that will take him to his rooms, he notices the flickering light at the end of the corridor, just a few feet from his own room. It comes from the fire within, he knows. Some candles too, if she's reading. It's what she does before she goes to bed, almost every night, like a ritual. She reads missives, or goes over all their provisions and the notes that lord Manderly must have left on the books. And since she'd realized that Jon slept as little as she did, if not less, she had started leaving the door of her room open. An invitation that she had to verbalize the first few times, before she did not need to any longer. Sometimes she wished to speak to him of something that had happened during the day. Most times, she just wanted the company and by now she knew that he did too.
He smiles as he walks towards her door. It feels good to have an understanding of this kind with Sansa; little secret ways of speaking to one another - with a look, or a tilt of the head. They build these bridges to and from one another, ever so tentatively, as if they are learning a second language. He's learning his first one all over too. Sometimes he is not sure he remembers it all.
He doesn't know if Sansa understands how relieved he is that this does not scare her. So very little about him seems to scare her, in truth. Not even when he admitted to her that sometimes, when she tried to share with him a memory of Winterfell before they left, he did not remember it. That sometimes he felt as if he had come back in pieces and did not know which bits were him and which were something else. He remembers telling her how the night he was killed he saw his own body on that table before he opened his eyes and how there were times when he felt closer to Ghost than his fellow men. Sometimes he wakes up and feels like the he is only the memory of someone who was once called Jon Snow. That for all that he would die for her and kill for her, for all that he did both, sometimes there are moments, when he looks at Sansa by the firelight after long stretches of silence, and he forgets who she is.
It's one more secret they share - and it's also half a lie. He never forgets. Could never. But sometimes sorting through the fine details of himself feels he's like trying to read a page from a book while standing too far away.
He'd confessed this to her while he'd been standing on the other side of the room. She'd been the one to cross it and put her arms around him.
It hasn't taken him so long to understand that she is just as afraid of losing him as he is of losing himself. They're both lonely in their own ways, which is why they keep each other company, guarding each other. The way they've been guarding each other since that morning they met on the north of the White Knife. He still remembers how pale she'd looked, how red her hair against the snow and her grey furrs.
He had known her immediately, despite how changed she was. And she had known him, though back the he had been the farthest from himself he had ever felt. But she'd known him, and embraced him, and trusted him. And then when he told her how he came to be there, she'd released him. Had told him he was free to go wherever he wished, if he so wished. If he was tired, which he had been. If he was angry. He had been that also. She had read him like the back of her hand, he'd known it. And he could not leave her.
Where else would make more sense than being there with her?
Melisandre said he'd come back to deliver the world from darkness, but Jon had never believed it. He'd felt more like a dead man walking than a savior of anything, when he took his first breath after death. He'd felt nothing at all. He'd just wanted to float away, like a kite whose strings have been cut. Sansa… Sansa had been real. More often than not John wonders if he did not come back so that he could find Sansa and finally come home. If he had to die, he might as well die in Winterfell. He might as well be around people who loved him.
When he is in front of her door, Jon raises his fist to knock, but then stops when he sees her and smiles.
She falls asleep sometimes, even as she waits for him. Once, he found her sleeping on her desk, cheek pressed against her hand and fingers stained in dark ink, her quill an inch away from her face. Most times though she moves the long upholstered stool in front of the fire and lays there.
Only a mere three moons ago he would have never dreamed of walking in, but now he does. Sansa doesn't stir, not even her breathing changes. That too is so very different from what might have happened before, when she slept so lightly that she would always wake if anyone so much as stepped into the same room with her. But Winterfell is home, and he's done his level best to make it safe. They both have. And it never hurt of course, that whenever he smells her fear, Ghost is ever ready to spill blood. When they had understood that, both Jon and Sansa had started sleeping that much easier.
He glances at his direwolf now, curled as he is at the foot of her stool. Ghost flicks an ear and that is all the acknowledgment Jon gets.
He walks in, the warmth of her room enveloping him like an embrace. He leaves his cloak over one of the chairs and walks past her, to the fire. Adds another couple of logs to the fire stares at the flames, his mind half absent, still caught in all that he would have to do tomorrow. When his thoughts get too heavy, Jon turns to look at Sansa instead. Tomorrow is inevitable – staying up all night will not save him from it. It is much better to think about how, when she sleeps, Sansa almost looks as young as perhaps three and ten. Her hair is unbound, a red spill down her back and around her head. It softens the sharp angles of her face considerably and so does the way her cheek is squished against the pillow and her hand, lips parted just a little. If he told her that she drools in her sleep, she would pinch him, probably. The thought almost makes him laugh.
He reaches over and with the tips of his fingers he tugs the hem of her skirt to cover her ankles, and then pulls her shawl over her shoulder, from where it had slipped off. He's just about to leave her to this rare peaceful rest, when she takes a deep breath.
"Jon… Is it morning?" she asks, voice rough and sleep soaked, eyes still closed.
He smiles. "Not yet. Sleep, Sansa."
He strokes a hand down her arm and rises, but she reaches out and takes his hand in a strong grip before he can withdraw it.
Jon stops.
"I dreamt about Arya and Bran." She says slowly, eyes fixed on the hearth. "They were alone in the cold. I kept calling for them, but they couldn't hear me."
Jon stoops down next to her, covers her hand with his. She finally looks at him, the fire reflecting off the gathering tears in her eyes.
He can feel her hurt as if it lived in his own chest, a second beating heart.
"I wanted to go to them, but I couldn't move. I could just stand there, waiting." A tear falls down her cheek, disappearing into her hair, the other sliding down her straight nose. "I keep telling myself that we could see them again but sometimes it feels like just one more lie I want to believe in."
"The whole of Westeros knows the Starks are back in Winterfell. If they are out there, we will find them."
It's what they tell each other these days, depending on which one of them is standing on the dangerous side of doubt.
"It's been months and still no word…" And for the first time, she says it. They truth they've both known but never spoken, as if afraid of opening the door to something ill by giving their fear a voice. Even now, she only whispers it. "We don't even know if they're still alive."
Jon brushes away the tear from the top of her nose, her cheek. "What does your heart tell you?"
Sansa sighs and closes her eyes, clutching their joined hands a little closer.
"My heart is silent, Jon."
He doesn't know what to say. Night has a way of changing so many thoughts; it's the reason why he paces Winterfell instead of sleeping in his bed. So he just leans his forehead against her temple and takes a long breath. Hope is a dreaded thing to have in a dark place, it's true, but they also have each other.
"Everything sounds so much worse at night." He says softly and kisses the top of her head. "Sleep. It won't look so bad in the morning."
"That's what Old Nan used to say."
Jon's smile is small, but she sees it and mirrors it. "She's been right so far, hasn't she?"
He stays with her, sitting by her side until her breaths even out and his own lids start to grow heavy.
Jon knows he could sleep there as he is, sitting down in front of her fire with her hand in his, but he makes himself get up regardless. Gently, he tugs his hand away from her grip. He takes one of the furs from Sansa's bed and lightly lays it over her, taking care to cover her well. Thinks about smoothing away some hair that has fallen on her face, but doesn't want to risk waking her, so he leaves, as silently as he came.