"Son... if you have to have sex with my friend's children, could you at least do it one at a time?"

Really, Ned is remaining a lot calmer about this than Cat is. Bran at least has the decency to look very embarrassed, which is more than she can say for either of his 'friends' – the boy looked so cool and collected you'd hardly think he'd been having sex at all, and the girl mostly laughed about the whole thing. Cat can't remember either of their names, though Ned probably knows. Still, it seems the wrong moment to ask – given what her temper's like, and what Ned knows her temper's like, he probably wouldn't tell her for the poor kids' safety.

"Sorry Dad," Bran mutters, staring at the floor. "Still: can't you at least be glad that I physically, you know, can?"

Cat raises an eyebrow. "You are not using your disability to get out of this one."

"Aren't I?"

"No."

Bran sighs and an awkward silence falls between them. "I'm going to have to tell Howland about this," Ned mutters.

A horrified look crosses Bran's face. "What? Dad, no! I don't want to die! You don't want me to die!"

"What do you expect of me, Bran?" Ned asks. "He's one of my closest friends, and I just walked in on two of his children having sex together, do you expect me to keep that from him?"

"B-but it's not like they were doing anything to each other!" Bran insists. "It's just, you know, I've been doing it separately with them both for awhile and it's always been a bit of a fantasy and... I'm not helping myself here, am I?"

"No you are not." Cat says. But then she hesitates. Perhaps she sympathises more than Ned can – it's not like back in her confused adolescent days, she didn't occasionally fantasise about having Ned and Brandon both at once. If she's being honest, sometimes she still thinks about it, even if she knows it would all be far too awkward and she's barely even spoken to Brandon for the past few decades. And she doesn't particularly want Howland Reed murdering her baby boy either, even if she is very mad at him. "It was your idea then? You asked for it?"

Bran blushes. "Y-yeah."

She sighs. She would have liked to think otherwise, that the Reeds must have corrupted him and taken advantage of his youth and naivety (and so it'd all be Ned's fault), but from all the shouts and demands she heard coming through the walls just now she didn't really think it was the case. Where did her sweet son learn how to speak like that? She supposes, he's almost twenty now, he has grown up. She knew she'd have to face that fact someday, she just didn't expect to be confronted with it so directly.

Ned sighs in turn, and looks back between Cat and Bran, both nervously chewing their lips in time. "Bran, can you promise me this will never happen again?"

Bran, always the clever one, recognises a lifeline when he's been thrown one. "Yes, yes, absolutely," he nods frantically. "Really, it was more awkward than anything else, since they had to spend so much time avoiding touching–"

"Alright, that's enough," says Ned. "In that case... look, I'm not going to lie to my friend, Bran. But if the subject never comes up... I won't be the one to mention it."

Bran lets out a deep sigh of relief. "Oh. Okay. Thank you, Dad," he says firmly. "So we can all forget this ever happened, right?"

"Oh no," says Cat, narrowing her eyes. "You are grounded, young man."

"What?!" cries Bran. "I'm nineteen, you can't ground me."

"You live under my roof, I can ground you, and I will."

"B-but Sansa had sex in your bed and she didn't get grounded!"

Cat's eyes narrow even further. "Did Sansa have sex with two siblings in our bed?"

Bran averts his eyes. "Oh, like Margaery's never shared her with Willas," he mutters.

"What."

"...Nothing, because I don't want her killing me." Cat is about to interrogate further, but before she can Ned frowns in puzzlement.

"How do you even know about Sansa – in our bed?"

Bran pauses, the shrugs. "I know a lot of things." That does not seem like a complete answer, but Bran seems to realise it doesn't seem like a complete answer, and so carries on before anyone can probe it too deeply. "Why didn't she get grounded?"

Cat and Ned share an uncomfortable look, and then Cat sighs. "Honestly, she seemed so upset and embarrassed and guilty about the whole thing, we didn't feel like she needed any extra punishment. Indeed we thought that would only make things worse." It's not until she's finished her response that Cat realises she didn't really have to answer at all; she could have easily told him it was none of his business and given his current situation he really shouldn't be asking anything of them at all. Cat's always been too soft of Bran, she knows that.

Bran sighs. "You couldn't have told me that when you first came in, could you? It would have made getting out of trouble much easier."

Cat valiantly tries to force herself not to smile. "No, then," she says and Bran sighs again. "Now get some sleep, sweetheart. Alone."

"Alright," he says. "Thanks for not killing me."

Cat and Ned both shake their heads and walk out. As they make their way down the corridor, Ned turns to Cat with a worried look.

"Don't think we were too harsh on him, do you?"

She scoffs. "Hardly. We probably let him off terribly easy." Despite what she said, she does sort of want to forget this ever happened, and pretend Bran is her perfect little boy she's always thought he was. Although then she's just going to have to think about what he told her about Sansa and Margaery and Willas, and really, that doesn't seem much like the Margaery Tyrell she's gotten to know after the past few months, who must be the sweetest and most considerate fuckbuddy of all time; she's stacked the dishwasher for them when Sansa is already asleep having forgotten her chores. But perhaps it was Sansa's idea, like it was Bran's. Cat sighs. Maybe she should call Brandon. Sure, it would make a terrible hypocrite of her, but maybe it would work out this strange genetic sibling threesome kink she seems to have passed on to her children, like it's Huntington's or something.

"But I didn't even do anything this time," she mutters.

"What was that?"

She looks up, meets Ned's eye, then flushes and looks back down again. "Nothing," she says. No, no. He'd never agree.