Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jon speaks the words of the Kingsguard kneeling in a sept of seven glass walls before seven southron gods that are not his own. Barristan Selmy touches his sword to either of Jon’s shoulders and Jon swears to these strange gods to serve a king he hates, to forsake lands and titles and to never sire sons or know a woman’s touch. When it is done, Selmy drapes a white cloak across his shoulders and bids him rise. “Rise as a knight of the Kingsguard,” the old knight tells him, “rise as our brother.”

Rickon. Bran. Robb. Those are my brothers. But that was a life ago in Winterfell, so Jon rises and clasps hands with Selmy and these new southron brothers of his: Jamie Lannister with his glittering eyes, scowling Meryn Trant, silent Arys Oakheart, cold eyed Preston Greenfield, bandy legged Boros Blount.

“Stand vigil until morning,” Selmy tells him. “Watch the candles and think on your vows. In the morning we will have need of you at the crowning of good King Joffrey and Queen Sansa.”

Once, Jon had meant to join the Night’s Watch and have black brothers in place of white, but his lord father had only shaken his head when Jon told him. “Before Bran fell you might have gone to the Wall,” Ned had answered. “But things are different now. When the winter wind blows the wolves must gather. And winter is coming.”

Stark words, Jon had thought bitterly, but I am no Stark, or have you forgotten, father?

But there was no arguing with Lord Eddard Stark, and so Jon had bit his tongue and done as he was told. When his father journeyed south as Hand of the King he had followed, a bastard stowed in the baggage train.

“Show them how fierce we northerners are,” Robb tells him as they clasp hands in the cold of the Winterfell courtyard, snow falling on the horses and riders and servants churning around them. He grins at Jon, just like when they were boys. “And give the girls at court a kiss for me.”

Jon laughs, but there is a lump in his throat that he cannot seem to swallow. “Tell Bran…” He starts, but he does not know how to finish. He’d wanted to go the tower where Bran lay in a sleep from which he might never wake, but in the end the specter of lady Catelyn’s cold gaze had kept him away. To every woman a bastard was a reminder of the faithlessness and lusts of men, but the bastard of her own husband was a special afront. All his life in a thousand small ways Lady Catelyn had made it plain he was no Stark: a cold look, a terse word, a flattening of lips in displeasure when he mussed Arya’s hair, and he is too afraid that something in him will crack like old brittle ice if she tells him that a bastard like him has no place beside her son’s sickbed. “If Bran wakes…”

“I’ll tell him you said farewell,” Robb finishes for him, and for a moment he seems already serious and solemn as the lord he will one day be, “when he wakes.”

The door behind Robb swings open, and Sansa slips out. She’s dressed in what Jon recognizes as her best dress, blue and grey wool fit to the slim of her waist and hips. “Have you seen Arya?” She asks Robb in an aggrieved tone. “The queen’s already in the wheelhouse, and Arya’s supposed to be riding with us.”

“She’s probably hiding from the queen.” Jon wrinkles his nose. “I know I would.”

Sansa glances at him as Robb chuckles, brow scrunching as though she’s just remembered he exists. To Jon it seems she’s always looking at him like that. Rickon and Bran and Arya are all too young to truly know what it is for him to be a bastard, but Sansa knows and like her lady mother never forgets. “Do you know where Arya is?” She tosses her hair, the red-bronze sheen of it flashing in the light, a quiver wobbling the edge of her voice. “She’s going to ruin everything.”

Jon sighs and whistles Ghost to him. It will be worse for Arya if she’s late. “I’ll help you look.”

Ghost rises to his feet and pads behind Jon as he turns and sets off across the yard. A moment later Jon hears more than sees Sansa hurry to catch up to him. “I don’t know why Arya has to be so difficult,” she says with a huff. “The queen is very gracious to let us ride with her, and Joffrey said he will keep his horse near the wheelhouse as we ride.”

Jon resists the urge to roll his eyes. “How brave of him to protect you from all the dangers of a king’s procession.”

“It isn’t a matter of that.” Sansa gives Jon a pitying look, the same she gives him when he steps on Jeyne’s feet during lessons with Winterfell’s master of dance. “It’s courteous of him to offer to attend us at all, and a lord’s courtesies show his true heart.”

Jon scowls. Joffrey is a little shit, he’d told Arya days before, but he doubts Sansa will laugh the way Arya had if he says it now. Of all his half siblings Sansa is the one Jon’s always understood the least with her love of dances and sewing and songs of knights and maidens. With Arya he could muss her hair or tease her and she would huff or laugh, but not Sansa. She is too like her lady mother with her red Tully hair and distant eyes. Sansa loves her songs of gallant knights and maidens fair, of brave deeds and beautiful ladies, and there are never bastards in songs.

They reach the stables, and Nymeria pads out to nose Ghost and Lady. Sansa’s nose wrinkles at the sudden scent of horse and hay, and she lifts the hem of her skirts above the churned earth and mud. And where is your prince now, he thinks darkly, or is trudging through mud a job only for bastards? He motions for her to stay. “I’ll fetch Arya,” he tells as he strides into the stables, mud sucking at his boots.

Inside stable boys bustle about leading horses from their stalls and saddling them while Hullen, Winterfell’s master of horse, stands with his arms crossed before him shouting directions. He catches sight of Jon and waves him to the back of the stable. “Your horse is saddled, Snow. And speak to your sister, gods know I’ve tried.”

Jon nods his thanks and makes his way back to find Arya perched on a bale of hay. He grins at her. “Hiding, little sister?”

“No.” Arya scowls. “I was trying to get Hullen to give me a horse. Father is going to make me ride in the wheelhouse with Sansa and the queen.”

“A wheelhouse sounds warm.” Jon rubs the nose of his horse and lifts the reins from where they’re looped around a post. “I’d much prefer that to riding in the cold.”

“Arya, come on.” Sansa appears around the edge of the stall, nose still wrinkled, Lady padding beside her. “The queen is already waiting and we’re late.”

“I don’t care. I want to ride with Jon.”

“You don’t have a horse, idiot.” Sansa tugs Arya’s sleeve. “Now come on.”

Arya grumbles but jumps down from the bale of hay, and Jon leads his horse to follow Sansa. Once out in the yard again Sansa makes to walk off, but abruptly turns on her heel and gives Jon a swift courtesy. “Thank you for your aid, Jon.”

Jon blinks, too surprised to answer, and by the time he opens his mouth Sansa has turned again and is dragging Arya across the yard. The sight of the two of them already beginning to bicker makes Jon grin, but in his chest there is a desperate ache as he pulls himself up into the saddle and looks about the Winterfell yard. How long will it be until he see it again, until they are all like this again? You knew this day would come eventually. Winterfell is the home of the Starks, and you have never been one. And so as he whistles Ghost to him and turns his horse to the gates of Winterfell Jon does not know what to think. Kingslanding is not the Wall, but neither is it Winterfell. Perhaps a bastard could make a name for himself there.

Weeks they are on the King’s Road, a fat snake of riders with snapping pennants and servants leading wayns heavy with tents and food and wine trickling southward. Every forest or field it seems they must stop for King Robert to go hunting or hawking or whoring. Of his lord father Jon sees little. He is always with the king, a chain of gold interlocking hands hanging heavy from his neck.

Much of his time Jon spends with the other Winterfell men or Arya. He has little interest in Joffrey or any of the squires and upstart sworn swords he keeps about him. A little shit, he’d called the prince back in Winterfell, and the longer their days on the road grow the truer Jon learns it to be. Joffrey can be gallant, even generous, among others, but when no one is watching his gold face falls away and he mocks and laughs at servants and his lessers.

It only makes it all the more galling the way Sansa fawns over him, the way she hangs on his every word and jest. Always together they are, a shining prince and his beautiful maid. It is enough to make Jon and Arya shake their heads and pretend to retch when no one is looking. Which often no one is. In Winterfell he’d promised Arya he would teach her what he knew of how to use a sword, and Arya forces him to keep the promise. Jon and her slip away for an hour or two from the camp every day and he shows her how to hold and swing and cut. The only one who notices is Mycah, a butcher’s boy who trails after them to watch some days.

For a week it lasts. They travel from Moat Cailin to the Trident, and on the day the sun dawns before the Inn of the Kneeling Man it all comes tumbling apart.

With Jory, the captain of his father’s guard, Jon’s been all day. He still has no idea why his father insisted he journey south with him, but so long as he is he’s determined to learn more of how to be a man. Beside him Ghost’s head shoots up and his lips pull back in a silent snarl. Jon follows his gaze to see Joffrey riding into camp with a bloody arm, Sansa ashen faced beside him.

A cry goes up from somewhere in the camp, and then chaos consumes it as men swarm around Joffrey and Sansa. Jon pushes his way through the crowd. Sansa’s face is pale, the sleeve of her dress ripped, but her eyes latch onto him. “Jon?” She says faintly.

Jon shoves back the bannerman looming over Sansa and steps beside her. “What happened?” He asks, and finds himself surprised by the anger thrumming through him. Of course Sansa is his sister, but they have never been close, not like Arya and him. And yet something ugly twists in his chest as he asks, “did someone...?”

Sansa’s mouth opens and closes like a gasping fish. “Arya…” She starts, and clutches Jon’s arm. “You have to find-”

But what he has to find is lost as Joffrey starts shouting. And that’s how the story comes out: of how the Stark girl had set her demon wolf on the young prince and maimed him before escaping. Sansa’s fingers fall from Jon’s arm as she turns to Joffrey, and forgotten again Jon slips back through the crowd to Jory’s side. “We have to find Arya before the Lannister’s do.”

“Go to your lord father and tell him what’s happened.” Jory pushes Jon toward the king’s tent. “Go. We’ll saddle the horses.”

As hard as it is in that moment not to simply jump on his horse and go tearing after Arya, Jon nods and does as he’s bid, sprinting away to find Ned.

Later Jon prefers not to think on all that happened after that: of how he and Jory found Arya miles from camp, of how small she’d felt in his arms as he held her tight, of the anger that boiled up into his chest as she told them with her eyes downcast of what had happened. And of after that, of how her fingers had dug into his arms like a hawk’s talons as they had to throw stones at Nymeria to make her stay away, of how how it felt like he was dragging a knife through his chest as he kneeled in front of Ghost and ran his fingers through his thick white fur a last time, looked in his red eyes and whispered for him to protect Nymeria and go north and find Robb and Bran and the rest of their pack, of how it was like cutting out a part of himself to ride away from where Ghost stood staring at him with his silent eyes as Nymeria slunk in the shadows behind him.

They brought Arya back to camp and she told her story: that Joffrey and Sansa had found her and the butcher’s boy beside the river playing with sticks, that Joffrey threatened them and Nymeria defended them. A slow fury filled Jon as Joffrey lied and lied and lied again, and Sansa refused to say the truth of what had happened. Never had he thought her possible of this, and he is sorely tempted not to stop Arya when she launches herself at Sansa. But all his anger had turned to cold dread as Cersei demanded Nymeria’s pelt, then Lady’s, and Robert did nothing to stop her.

The man that passes the sentence swings the sword. It is the northern way, and because of it Jon refused to take Arya and the stunned and silent Sansa back to their tent with Jory when his father ordered him to. Instead he’d stayed beside Ned as Jory fetched Ice and stood still and watching until it was done. Father will know if you look away, he’d told Bran only months before when they’d watched sentence passed over the Night’s Watch deserter, and Jon does not blink now. This is your fault. He knows it in that moment more truly than he’s ever known anything in his life. You gave Arya Needle, you encouraged her to play with swords. You’re the one who wasn’t there to watch her. You killed Lady sure as if you swung the sword.

Later he’ll learn of how the Hound ran down and slaughtered the butcher boy, but he is already gone searching for Arya by the time the Hound returns. He ducks through the door of a tent, but in place of Arya he finds Sansa with her knees hugged to her chest in a corner of the tent sobbing into her arm. He pauses, unsure what to do, all the anger he’d felt an hour before fled and cold and gone. “Sansa?” He asks tentatively.

Sansa looks up at her name, face splotched and red with tears, and before Jon can react she’s running to him, throwing her arms around his chest and clutching him to her, sobbing into his shirt. Jon opens his mouth to speak, but his own eyes are burning and he does not have the words. Instead he raises his arms and awkwardly wraps them around her, holds her as sob after sob wracks her slender frame.

And then just as sudden as she’d thrown herself at him she is pulling away, pushing him aside and fleeing out into the camp, leaving Jon standing alone and confused in the doorway of the tent.

He eventually finds Arya hiding in a tree, comforts her best as he can. She blames Sansa and Cersei and Robert, but Jon knows the truth, knows that it should have been him instead of Ned that swung Ice. The man that passes the sentence swings the sword. It’s why the next day Jon refuses to meet Sansa’s red rimmed eyes when they stumble into each other at the door of the tent. She tries to catch his gaze and her lips part as if she’s going to speak, but he mutters an apology and pushes past her before she can, anger and shame coiling in his gut.

Next Jon sees Sansa she is on her horse beside Joffrey, lovely as a sigh in her blue dress, and when she glances at him her eyes hold the same distant look they always have.

They never speak of what happened.

Chapter Text

To a child of the north raised among villages and towns King’s Landing is immense, a city huge beyond understanding, but in truth it does not take long for Jon to learn its rhythms and ways and moods, and those of the Red Keep are easier still. Lord Stark’s bastard, all the court calls him. The castle servants and cooks and pages are blunter: that Stark bastard they call him, or sometimes simply Winterfell bastard.

Make your name your armor so none can ever use it to hurt you, Tyrion Lannister had told Jon once, and so even though it causes him to grit his teeth hard enough to ache, Jon smiles and pretends he cannot hear the whispers. There are advantages to being a bastard in the Red Keep he realizes quickly: servants who would never speak to a knight or lady think nothing of gossiping with a bastard, and the court squires are happy to welcome him among them so long as he pays for a round of ale every fortnight.

Even so Jon finds himself keeping to the Tower of the Hand more than not. He is too much a child of the north to ever truly feel at home in this strange southron city and prefers best the company of Jory and the other men of his father’s guard; likes best those times when Arya drags him along with her to explore the Red Keep or practice needlework with the Braavosi dancing master their father has allowed her.

Of Sansa he sees little and less. After the crossroads he cannot look at her without a fist of guilt clenching in his gut and it is easy enough to avoid her. They have never been close, and here in Kingslanding she is always laughing and gossiping among the empty headed ladies of court or sowing beside the vain Lannister queen or beaming in the company of her betrothed. In Winterfell she’d been a flower hiding its petals, but here in the court of King’s Landing she is in full bloom, the laughing and beautiful and shining lady she was always meant to be.

A month after they reach the capital Tyrion Lannister returns from the Wall, and Jon finds himself falling into the little man’s orbit. He makes good company, and knows the ways of King’s Landing better than any. More than once he insists Jon come whoring with him, but each time Jon refuses. He will father no bastards, he tells Tyrion seriously, but the little man always smiles his crooked smile and laughs. “It is not so hard to escape fathering bastards, Snow. Why, look at me. A hundred women my cock has known, and not one bastard. If you must worry then spill your seed on her leg or find a woodswitch to brew her a good strong cup of moon tea.”

Still Jon refuses. He knows too well what it is to be a bastard to ever risk the same for a child of his own.

Jaime Lannister too refuses his brother’s attempts to get him to come whoring with him, though always with a laugh or strange smile. Before Tyrion Jon had only ever seen him from afar in court, a gold haired knight clad in the armor of the Kingsguard, but the brothers often spent time in each other’s company and so once and again Jon sees him, lips always curled in a smile as if to some jest only he understands. Bastard or Snow he calls Jon, and each time Jon must grit his teeth not to throw back at him the name of Kingslayer.

“Go on,” Jaime laughs one day as though he knows. “Do you think I’ve not heard it before?” The smile he gives Jon is hard, eyes glittering. “Kingslayer men may call me, but few to my face. Do you know why? For all the pretty vows a knight takes it is his skill with a sword that matters above all else, and no man is more skilled than I.”

And so though he prefers the company of Arya and the other Winterfell men best, Jon forces himself spar with any squire who is willing until he ends each day soaked with sweat and his arms aching. And when there are no more squires to spar with he forces himself to learn from Arya’s odd dancing master and his strange fluid way of fighting. In the north Jon had never dreamed of knighthood, but here in the south he begins to, begins to dream of a life where his name can be more than Snow. A life where deeds and valor and skill with a sword can wash away a bastard’s birth.

Strangely, as the year passes Sansa begins to spend less and less of her time with her lord husband to be. Though she sits always at Joffrey’s side at feasts and court, the rest of her time she spends in the Hand’s tower until Arya can stand it no longer.

“Why don’t you go back to your rooms?” Arya snaps after Sansa corrects a line of her stitching. Every few months septa Mordane makes a new effort to civilize her, and Arya has been chafing under this latest. “No one asked you here.”

Sansa clucks her tongue. “Don’t spoil things, Arya. I’m only stopping them from being crooked.”

“I don’t care if they’re crooked.” Arya scowls at her. “No one wants you here, Sansa. Father keeps saying how you’re going to be queen, so go be with Joffrey.”

Jon sighs and lowers the sword he’s been silently polishing in the corner. He’s seen this enough times to know how Sansa’s lips will thin in the way that only Arya can make them and spit back something and then there will be no end to it. But this time Sansa’s face pales sudden as though she’s been struck. She stands abruptly and whirls as if she’s about to leave, but doesn’t take a step. The moment stretches and Arya’s brow furrows. She opens her mouth to say something else, but Jon stands before she can. “Come on, Arya,” he says sheathing his sword. “Let’s find Syrio and go riding. It’s too hot to be inside.”

Arya throws down her sewing and stands. As they pass Sansa a strange look of relief flashes over her face as she smooths her skirts and takes her place back in her seat. It lodges itself in Jon’s mind, and he cannot shake it free as he and Arya ride through the Kingswood.

Next Jon sees Sansa it is a week later as he spars in the yard. He doesn’t notice her at first, too focused on Garth opposite him. He’s Ser Balon Swann’s squire, a header taller than Jon, and mercilessly swift, each stroke of his sword a hammer blow against Jon’s shield arm. Dimly, through the sweat stinging his eyes, Jon is aware of the other squires ringing the yard; a few sparing, but more watching his and Garth’s dance from the corner of their eyes. There is a kind of pack among the squires of the yard, and even those he counts as friends would chuckle at seeing mighty lord Stark’s bastard take a fall.

The knowledge only tightens Jon’s grip on his sword. Garth lunges, a powerful downward stroke from the shoulder, and Jon moves out of instinct honed razor thin by the stinging tip of Syrio Forrel’s practice sword. Flow as a river, strike as an ocean surge, the old water dancer has sing-songed half a hundred times, and Jon does just that. In one smooth movement he feints a pommel strike at Garth’s eyes, steps into the tall squire’s lunge, and as Garth stumbles back Jon hooks his leg and sends him tumbling to the ground.

“I told you to watch your legs,” Jon says, but reaches down to haul Garth back to his feet to take the sting from it. “You’re large enough that’s all most of us can reach.”

Garth scowls. “You might take less pleasure in being right.”

Jon grins. Garth is always bitter after losing, but come the morrow will be back to joking and laughing with the rest of the squires. “Another round?”

Garth shakes his head, scowl deepening. “I’d prefer not to land in the dirt again before a crowd.”

Jon follows his gaze to the edge of the yard where a knot of ladies in waiting dressed in silk stand watching. Among them Jon catches sight of Sansa’s auburn hair. He chews the inside of his cheek. While he’d prefer to slink back among the other squires Jon knows it would be uncourteous, and before his eyes flits again the strange look of relief on her face from the week before.

A few of the ladies wrinkle their noses as he trudges across the yard, and belatedly Jon remembers that this late in the day he no doubt stinks of sweat. Sansa doesn’t wrinkle her nose, and Jon finds himself absurdly grateful for that as he reaches her. “Jon,” she says with a dip of her head. “You fought valiantly.”

Jon shifts his weight awkwardly. “Garth is better with a lance than sword.”

Sansa’s lips twitch. “You might thank me for the compliment. A knight would.”

“A knight might, but I’m no knight.” Not yet. The attention of the ladies in waiting has drifted to the other squires on the far side of the yard. Sansa’s auburn hair is pinned high to either of her temples, and Jon eyes where it falls loose around her shoulders. “You don’t come to the yard.”

“Joffrey is to break lances with Ser Loras.” There is something queer in Sansa’s voice, an uncertain edge to it that Jon cannot place. “He asked I watch.”

He bites his lip, but does not know what to say. Since she’d been old enough to curl up in old Nan’s lap Sansa had dreamed of marrying a lord like Joffrey, a shining prince with flashing blue eyes and gold hair. This is the song she’s always wanted: and she is not his sister in the way Arya is, in the way where he can ask her what troubles her. “The tourney lane is past the yard.” He says finally with a nudge of his chin. “You’ll find him and Loras there.”

Sansa makes no move to start across the yard. “I heard the other squires speaking of you,” she says. “They said you’re already fierce as a knight with sword and lance. They called you the Wolf of Winterfell.”

“Wolf?” Jon raises an eyebrow. “Bastard of Winterfell, I think you mean.”

Sansa has the grace to blush. “Not all of them.”

“I’ve heard it before.” Jon shrugs, but somehow still it stings. Even now, even here a thousand leagues from Winterfell, he cannot escape his name. But soon. “I know my name is Snow.”

Sansa frowns, but before she can answer one of the other ladies is grabbing her arm. “Oh please let’s go, Sansa. I want to catch a glimpse of Ser Loras before he closes his visor.”

Sansa lets herself by pulled away, but not before casting Jon a last lingering look. “They will call you it one day. Ser Jon Snow, the White Wolf of Winterfell.”

Sansa marries Joffrey in the Baratheon cloak of gold and black a year later.

It is done in the sept of Baelor, and when her new husband’s cloak is draped over her shoulders a great cheer goes up through all assembled. It is nothing compared to the roar that greets prince Joffrey and his new bride as they emerge from the sept. As they ride back to the Red Keep all through the streets ring shouts to their good health and happiness.

Seven courses for the seven gods are served once the prince and his bride have taken their place at the head of the table. Fat king Robert staggers to his feet and bellows out a bawdy toast to the fruitfulness of their marriage bed, and all but Jon and Arya raise their cups. “The two deserve each other,” Arya had grumbled the day before while making a face, and Jon had laughed. But now among all the raised cups and merriment Jon cannot help but notice something strange in Sansa’s eyes when their gazes happen on each other for a moment, something glazed and distant in them that he does not understand. Perhaps she finally realizes what a little shit Joffrey is, Jon thinks to himself as he finishes his cup and tries to put it from mind.

But try as he may the thought gnaws as the feast goes on and he drains one cup of wine and then another. Her coming marriage had seemed like it was all Sansa ever spoke of when they first arrived at Kingslanding, but as he casts his mind back Jon finds he cannot think of a time in the last year when she’s spoken of it lightly or even with a smile. The two deserve each other, Arya had said, and Jon had laughed, but did anyone truly deserve Joffrey?

One after another each of the seven courses is consumed until all are full near to bursting and some unlucky fools drunk under the table. Finally, Robert staggers to his feet again and shouts that it is time for the bedding. Hoots and suggestions come from all across the hall as Joffrey and Sansa rise from their seats on the high dais and descend. Jon dutifully rises to his feet, finds Jory, and together they shove through the crowd of men and knights already beginning to call out bawdy jokes as they form around Sansa.

In her wedding gown Sansa is a sight lovely enough to make men weep: she wears a gown of blue samite sewn with freshwater pearls that hugs her waist and bodice, her neck long and lovely and pale, red hair pinned to fall in loose spirals and whorls. She turns as Jon and Jory push through the circle of men, gaze flitting to Jon’s face, eyes distant and desperate as a doe caught in a snare, and for a moment Jon is back on the Kingsroad the day Lady died, Sansa’s eyes seeking him out from within the circle of men around her.

Jory elbows him, and Jon realizes he’s stopped stiff in his tracks. He forces himself to step forward, the sound of revelry dimming around him as he touches Sansa’s arm. She gives a stiff nod, and gentle as he can Jon bends and lifts her slender frame onto his shoulders as on her other side Jory does the same. Across the hall the women of court have hoisted Joffrey up as well and are already beginning to snatch away pieces of his clothing.

By the time both processions reach Joffrey’s bedchambers husband and wife have been stripped of clothes like a bush stripped of berries by magpies. Jory trips over the the threshold of the bedchamber and Jon suddenly finds himself holding Sansa alone in the prince’s bedchamber. Joffrey is still in the hallway outside, shouts from the ladies holding him aloft echoing against the stone walls, but all of it seems very far away compared to the silk slide of Sansa’s shift in Jon’s arms, and he is suddenly overwhelmed by how slender and delicate and truly fragile she is.

Carefully, Jon lowers her into the bed, and only then does Sansa look at him again, eyes trapped, the line of her jaw clenched and sharp and fragile as a shard of glass. The night’s wine has left Jon’s mind murky and slow. “Your grace,” he mumbles, tongue thick, meaning to step back. Her hand flashes out, fingers clutching his sleeve. “Don’t call me that,” she whispers, eyes pleading, “please don’t call me that. I’m still Sansa.”

The gale of voices of the ladies holding Joffrey aloft in the corridor is louder now, the sound pulsing in Jon’s blood. He reaches up and wraps his hand around Sansa’s fingers, and it takes all the will he has not to kneel in that moment and swear to her by the old gods and the new that he will protect her from Joffrey and the Lannisters and all the realm. But this is not a song and he is not a knight, not any more than he has ever been a Stark. Carefully, he untangles her fingers from his sleeve and gives them a tight squeeze. “Sansa,” he says meeting her eyes, and later he knows he will tell himself it is the wine that makes him step forward and brush his lips against her forehead. “Sansa Stark.”

And then Joffrey is inside the chamber and Jon is stumbling back as a gaggle of highborn women dump Joffrey already as naked as his name day into the bed next to Sansa. The last glimpse of Sansa Jon catches before he’s swept away by the tide of women out of the bedchamber is her eyes still holding his, trapped and pleading.

Chapter Text

It happens suddenly. One moment King Robert is a laughing, roaring mountain of flesh, and the next his heart gives out and all that flesh had gone slack. All the court but for his lady wife mourns him. If Cersei feels any sorrow in her lord husband’s passing it never reaches her face, but Jon cannot bring himself to blame her for it. He has never forgotten what Robert let happen on the Kingsroad and Jon has been too many years at court to think the fat man any but a poor sort of king. Still a chill shivers through him when he hears the news.

“He’ll dismiss you as Hand,” Jon says without preamble when he finds his father in the tower of the Hand. “The moment he’s crowned Joffrey will send us back north.”

“It is his right.” Ned says wearily, the chain of interlocking hands hanging from his neck clinking softly. His few years in King’s Landing have aged him more than all those in Winterfell, beard streaked with grey. “The king chooses the hand.”

Somehow, Jon thought his father would resist the loss of Handship. It makes him pause. “You won’t fight it?”

Ned shakes his head. “Joffrey is our rightful king now, no matter what we think of him, Jon. And truth be told I am tired unto death of being Hand. I would see Winterfell again.”

Winterfell. For a moment it is all Jon can think of: the scent of weirwood and pine, the crunch of snow beneath feet and cold wind on his skin, the warmth of Winterfell’s hearth and the sight of Robb and Bran and Rickon striding forward to greet him. But he knows too what returning north would mean, and before his eyes flits again the sharp, fragile line of Sansa’s clenched jaw, the way her fingers had fisted in his sleeve on her wedding night. “Arya and Sansa cannot come with us. One is betrothed and the other married.”

“They are good matches. Sansa will be queen.”

“To Joffrey.” The name is sour on Jon’s tongue. “You know what he is, father.”

“He is the rightful heir,” Ned says sharply, and Jon frowns at the sudden change in his voice. “And it is too late to change that, not without seeing the realm bleed. No, when his grace Joffrey demands it we will go north again and Arya and Sansa will stay in Kingslanding.”

“Let me stay too.” And suddenly Jon knows what he must do, the answer to why Ned brought him south with him all those years ago even if his father had not known it then. “Name me a knight of the Kingsguard. Bastards have served before, and you have the power as Hand. No one will question your right to name a brother of the queen’s own blood.”

Ned frowns. “It is no small thing to become a knight of the kingsguard, Jon. Till death you will serve, and for whoever holds the Iron Throne, no matter how little you may love him. It is not a decision to be made lightly or on a whim.”

“You kept me from taking the oath of the Night’s Watch once, but for what?” Jon draws himself up. “I will never inherit lands or hold titles. Not in the north, and not here. But there is honor in serving in the Kingsguard, even for a bastard.”

“Even for a bastard.” Ned studies his face. “You’re sure?”

Till death you will serve. But Jon knows the answer, has always known it. I will never be a Stark but I can still do the duty of one, father. He nods, once and sharp. “You must do it now, before he is crowned, while you still hold the power of Hand. Joffrey will never name me himself.”

Ned nods, something tired in his eyes. “I will speak to Selmy.”

Tyrion answers his door with a scowl, rubbing sleep from his eyes with the heel of his palm. He blinks when he sees Jon standing in the dark of the hallway outside his chamber. “Snow? I must admit if this is a dream I’d prefer if you were rather more woman and rather less dressed.”

“Your whores.” The word grates Jon’s tongue, but it is the one that fits. There is no hiding your shame with pretty words, Snow. Half a hundred times he’d tossed and turned in his bed unable to find sleep, a shameful and restless energy grating his nerves until he’d thrown himself to his feet and dressed in the dark. Tall and forbidding the walls of the Red Keep had stared down as he slipped from his chamber, like he was a thief caught stealing through them. “Where do you find them?”

The little man shrugs. “Here and there. When you’re a lord’s son, even one grotesque as I, they find you.” His mismatched eyes peer at Jon, a shrewd look in them. “Why trouble yourself with it now?”

“I-” Tyrion is no more friend to Joffrey than Jon. The knowledge of his knighting is safe with him, but still Jon hesitates. This is the path you’ve chosen. “Tomorrow I join the kingsguard.”

Tyrion studies Jon’s face with his mismatched eyes, then abruptly grins. “Well Snow, it seems I must introduce you to Chataya then.”

It is not so late that Kingslanding is yet sleeping. Lanterns seethe like embers under the skin of the city as Jon and Tyrion ride through winding streets that lead them to an elegant two storied house. Its windows shine a deep purple and blue and crimson like a many faceted jewel peeking out from among the drab walls of the behind it. Its door is inlaid with writhing vines of bronze that flash in the lantern light as a tall woman with skin black as teak opens it before them. “Lord of Lannister,” she says to Tyrion with a bow of her head. “And your squire?”

“Oh no,” Tyrion claps a hand on Jon’s back, “this is Lord Snow, soon to be Ser Snow of the kingsguard. I’ve brought him to taste what he’ll be forswearing for a white cloak.”

“A noble cause.” If the knowledge surprises the woman she does not show it. She raises a hand to invite them inside, and Jon follows Tyrion into a common room lit by bronze lamps twisted and teased into ornate shapes. In their flicking light are scattered a half dozen girls more lovely than any Jon has ever seen, slender and curved forms reclining in cushioned alcoves. A knife of shame stabs Jon’s gut at the way lust rises in him like an ocean swell, and he jerks his gaze away.

“Marei will be ready for you shortly, my lord,” the tall woman says to Tyrion. She pours wine into a pair of copper goblets and passes them to Tyrion and Jon as she nods her head to one of the girls half hidden behind a Myrish screen. “Might I suggest Dancy for Lord Snow?”

“She does have a wicked tongue,” Tyrion muses aloud, mismatched eyes sliding to Jon beside him. Jon flushes. The girl is beautiful, freckled and lushly curved, with long red hair brushed to a copper sheen that reaches to her hip. As if she can feel his eyes on her the girl glances up at him, a slow, wicked smile turning the corners of her lips. There is nothing of her but for the red of her hair that is like Sansa, yet her smile coils something sick in Jon’s gut, and for a moment he can again feel Sansa’s fingers tangling in his sleeve, the fragile weight of her in his arms, the way her eyes had pled with him.

Jon wrenches his gaze away. I am no Joffrey. He downs the goblet in a single swallow, tongue barely recognizing the smooth ripple that marks it as Arbor Gold. “Not her.”

“Alayaya then?” The tall woman beckons forward a girl teak black and near as tall as herself. The girl rises gracefully and crosses to them, dark eyes regarding Jon calmly for a moment before bending and kissing Tyrion on the cheek. “Thank you again for the history you lent me, Lord Tyrion. A strange line the Durrandon kings.”

“Are they not?” Tywin smiles crookedly at her. “But for now your thought should be to Lord Snow here. He’s come to make himself a man.”

The young woman meets Jon’s eyes. She takes his cup and gently pulls him towards a stair off the common room. “Come my lord, I will refill your cup.”

Jon lets himself be pulled away, the Arbor Gold warm in his chest as Alayaya leads him up the stairs and to a modest room with a silk veiled bed and a mural on the wall of a pair of women caught in the throes of release. Her fingers slip from his palm as she moves to the sideboard and refills his cup.

“I’m no lord,” Jon says abruptly. He meets Alayaya’s gaze as she finishes refilling his cup. “That’s only Tyrion’s jape. I’m bastard born.”

“I am bastard too counted your Westorosi way.” Alayaya tilts her head to the side as she returns to where he stands. She hands him his cup. “My father was a summer islander like my mother, a sailor passing through Kingslanding on his way to Braavos. But among my people there is no shame in bastard birth, for the gods made not only us but our desires too, and in that way we bastards are a gift of the gods.”

“I’ve never felt a gift.” Jon laughs, the sound more hollow than he expected, and takes a long swallow. A fine vintage, but just as before his tongue catches little of it. He looks up to find Alayaya stepping closer. He swallows, finds his tongue thick. “I mean not to father a bastard tonight.”

“And I not to make one.” Alayaya smiles faintly, soft and lovely, and splays a hand on his chest. Her height makes it so all she must do is tilt her head to the side and then her lips are parting his, splayed fingers tangling in his shirt as she draws him beneath the canopy of the bed.

Jon does not last long. Alayaya stretches beside him after, lithe and dark in the lantern light as she traces faint circles across his chest and stomach, fingertips a whisper. And when those fingertips have again begun to coil a heat she slides down and takes him into her mouth, makes him as achingly hard as though he’d never spent his seed.

The second time Jon lasts longer. She sways above him, lantern light flickering along the curves of her arms and throat and dark tips of her breasts, hips grinding slow circles against him. She leans over him, arches against him, skin fever-hot, and then he can hold the growing pressure in him no longer. Alayaya seems to know without words, teeth nipping the hollow of his collarbone as she reaches down and pulls him from her, fingers milking his length as he spends into her hand.

“You may stay, my lord,” she tells him after, as he gathers his breeches and shirt. She rolls onto her stomach, dark eyes shining up at him. “We will speak or sleep and perhaps after a time lie together again.”

Jon shakes his head. Shame he expects the stab of, but instead all he feels is a marrow-deep calm. This is the path you’ve chosen. This is what you will forsake. He pulls his shirt over his head. “Tomorrow I am knighted.”

“Ser Snow,” Alayaya sing-songs, tilting her head. “A good name. Come back to us when you have it and I or Dancy or Marei will moan it in your ear.”

“Tomorrow too I take the oath of the kingsguard.”

“And?” Alayaya rolls to her side, stretches like some great languid cat, the curves of her sweet against the mattress in a way that even though he is twice spent makes Jon's groin ache. “Come all the same. You will not be the first of your white brothers to visit our house.”

All men are weak. Even his father had succumb to temptation once, but what worth is a knight who cannot keep his vows? For some reason again Sansa’s face floats before his eyes, and Jon shakes his head. “I mean to keep my vows. But… thank you. For this.”

Alayaya accepts with a dip of her head and a faint smile. “Fare well, ser knight.”

Chapter Text

The crowning of king Joffrey is a spectacle unlike any other, the crowd that gathers in the square before the sept of Baelor a hundred thousand strong, the sound of them as they cheer deafening. Jon watches it all standing behind the new king and queen in his white armor and white cloak. Arya keeps glancing at him from where she sits, brow scrunched in a frown. Neither she nor Sansa he’d told before he took the oath, and the first she’d learned of it was when she’d seen him in the yard of the Red Keep, white cloak around his shoulders. She’d stopped dead, dumbfounded.

When he’d seen him a moment later Joffrey had laughed. “What are you doing in that cloak, bastard? Take it off or I’ll have it stripped from you.”

“I cannot, your grace. A knight of the Kingsguard serves till death,” Jon had answered coolly, and he’d drawn a savage pleasure from the way Joffrey’s face purpled and he’d begun to sputter. For a moment it seemed as though he was going to call for Ilyn Payne to fetch his chopping block, but Sansa had lain a hand on his arm. “Let my half brother have his jape, your grace. Today you are crowned king of the seven kingdoms before all the realm.”

Joffrey scowled and shoved her hand away. “I want him gone. Take his cloak, Selmy.”

“He has spoken the oath, your grace.” Selmy’s own white cloak played in the breeze. “Only death can take it from him now.”

Joffrey’s face twisted and he whirled and shouted for his horse. Alone for a moment, Sansa had given Jon a sad smile. “You shouldn’t have done that. He will never forgive you.”

Even shining in cloth of gold sewn with the crowned Baratheon stag Sansa had never looked sadder, and Jon realized that she must know well and truly what Joffrey was beyond the shadow of a doubt. He’d felt the sudden urge to reach out, offer her comfort or simply say something, anything. But they have never been close, so in the end all could do was shrug. “Joffrey can bugger himself on a spear.”

Sansa’s mouth curved, and for a moment she looked young again as the laughing, beaming girl she’d been in Winterfell. She reached out and squeezed his arm. “You look gallant.”

And then she was gone, and Jon had fallen in beside his white brothers behind the king he now served.

Tywin Lannister replaces Ned as Hand. He is a hard man, his gaze whenever he sees Jon cold. “Joffrey is only a boy,” Ned warns Jon when he clasps hands with him a final time before he returns north. “but Tywin will stop at nothing to see the Lannisters keep their power.”

“I’ll watch him.”

Ned nods to himself, a look of something like sorrow passing over his face. “Your mother, she- I will tell you of her one day now that Robert is gone. She would be proud to see the man you have become, Jon.”

And you, father? But even a man grown and a knight of the Kingsguard, Jon does not have the courage in him to ask. They clasp hands, and then Ned and Jory and all of the Winterfell men are gone.

His white brothers Jon comes to know. Some are easier to love than others. Barristan Selmy and Arys Oakheart were both honorable knights but poor company; Meryn Trant and Boros Blount poor knights and poor company both. And Jaime Lannister... Jon knows him well enough from his time with Tyrion, but he has never trusted him and does not now. Joffrey is his blood, and Jon will always remember him as he first saw him: a gold knight riding into Winterfell beside Robert all those years ago that Bran had mistaken for the king.

Joffrey grows no fonder of Jon as the months pass, a sneer always on his lips when he looks at him. Jon finds his own loathing growing with each passing day. He’s always known Joffrey is a stupid, callow child, but it is one thing to know and another to have to stand silent witness to it. If Robert had been a poor king Joffrey is only worse, callous and cruel to all around him, handing out petty and mocking judgements when he can bother to sit the Iron Throne as justice.

And Sansa… . as a knight of the Kingsguard Jon sees her each day seated with her lord husband at meals or beside him at court, and each day Jon understands more and more why she had taken to spending her days in the tower of the Hand before her marriage. A thousand small ways Joffrey cuts her: sneering jests and petty insults, and a thousand small ways Sansa bears it. Anger fills Jon until he is a cup near to spilling, but he can do nothing more than grit his teeth till they ache and stand silent behind king and queen. Say something, he snarls inwardly, but he does not know if he is speaking to himself or to Sansa, show him a wolf has teeth.

Arya at least shows no hesitation in baring hers. Without their lord father to rein her back she becomes more wild than ever, the lone voice at court without fear of Joffrey’s wrath. “He’s just a stupid boy,” she snorts when Jon tries to warn her, “crown or no.”

Jon shakes his head, but in truth the words only make him miss her all the more desperately. As a brother of the Kingsguard he no longer has the time to spend with her that he once did, to spar or wander Kingslanding or ride out from the city. Every moment he can he seeks Arya out, but if it is once a week then he is lucky. This is the path you chose, he reminds himself, but it is a hollow kind of comfort.

His mind wanders to Alayaya sometimes during long afternoons when he stands guard, the sleek shape of her against him, the slide of her smooth skin against his, the grasp of her fingers around him, the lilt of her voice as she whispered: you will not be the first of your white brothers to visit our house. So easy it would be to slip his white cloak and find Chataya’s again, find a few hours comfort there. You swore an oath, he reminds himself, but in those moments it is hard to remember why.

And during long nights when the sheets of his bed seem suffocating he thinks not of Alayaya, but Dancy and her wicked smile and red hair. The thought stabs a knife of shame in his gut though he does not understand why. I am no Joffrey, and she no Sansa. Was this how his father had felt for Jon’s mother, the same desperate shame like poison in the blood?

Bastards are a gift, Alayaya had told him, but Jon knows it a lie. And so while he shames himself in his thoughts, he resists the urge to visit Chataya’s again. He will not stain his white cloak for lust or loneliness or a few hours fleeting comfort.

Months pass, and under Tywin’s handship the realm is quiet. Across the Narrow Sea Myr and Tyrosh go to war and there are rumors of dragons in the east, but in Westeros summer never ends. In the north his lord father and the Night’s Watch begin to settle wildlings into the gift, Robb marries a Karstark girl, and Bran returns from the Hightower a maester. The news makes Jon smile, but there is precious little else to draw joy from.

And then, late in the year, everything changes.

Jon is not there to see it. Later, he’ll hear of how Arya challenged Joffrey, told him he was no true king, and how Joffrey flew into a rage. When Jon hears of it he abandons his post and strides through the halls of the Red Keep searching for Arya. He finds her already in the stables saddling her horse, Syrio beside her. A look of relief flits over her face when she sees him, and she runs and throws her arms around him. “Jon!”

Jon hugs her tightly, then pushes her to arms length. “What happened?”

“It’s over. Joffrey broke my engagement to Tommen.” Arya’s face twists and her eyes flash. “I’m glad of it. I’m sick of him and the court and all the south. If he’d ordered the gold cloaks to seize me I would’ve killed every one of them.”

Dread knots Jon’s gut. “You didn’t, did you?”

“Of course not. But only because Sansa convinced him not to order it.”

“A girl must be leaving.” Syrio has pulled himself onto the back of his horse. His eyes flick hawk-like from point to point outside the stable. “Before a king is changing his mind.”

Arya grabs Jon’s arm. “Come with us. You hate it here as much as I do. We can finally go home.”

Home. It is all Jon has ever wanted, all he’s ever dreamed of since he was a child, but he has no home, not in Winterfell and not in King’s Landing. “I’m a knight of the Kingsguard, Arya. Only death can free me.”

“I don’t care.” Arya’s grip on his arm tightens. “Come north with me. Father will protect you, or you can take the black like you always wanted. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.” Through Jon’s mind flits Sansa’s face, the pleading look in her eyes. It hurts like drawing an arrow from his arm, but he pulls himself from Arya’s grasp. “I took an oath. I swore I would serve.”

Arya steps back. She studies his face, her own puzzled and uncomprehending. “You hate it here. I know you do.”

Jon shakes his head. Dearly he loves Arya, but she has never been a bastard: never known the bone-deep shame, never heard the hiss of whispers, never felt the cold gazes of those who watched in mute judgement waiting for him to show his true treacherous nature. “I do. But I swore an oath.”

Hurt flashes over Arya’s face, and she whirls and jumps onto the back of her horse. She turns it to the door of the stable and without a word kicks it into a walk. Syrio gives Jon a nod as he falls in behind Arya, and then he is following her out of the stables and Jon is left alone in the stable but for the whicker of horses in their stalls and the sickly sweet scent of hay.

Chapter Text

Later, in the hall of the small court behind steepled fingers, Tywin regards Joffrey coolly. “Dismissing the Stark girl was a mistake. We do not need them as enemies, and now all the court knows you can be defied.”

“She mocked me.” Joffrey’s lips twist. “I should’ve taken her head for it and sent that back north instead.”

“That would be a fool thing to do. Do you want to be known as the second coming of mad king Aerys?” Twin tilts his head to the side. “You’re a vain, callow child, and we are blessed by the seven that the realm at large does not know it. Do not tempt them.”

“You can’t speak to me like that,” Joffrey’s face purples, and for a moment his head seems to swell like a bladder about to burst. “I am the king. The king! Do you understand? My word is law. You’re just a toothless, doddering old man. So long as you wear that chain you’re my Hand, and you’ll wipe my shit if I tell you to.”

“As you say, your grace,” Tywin answers, and the chill in his voice cuts to the bone. “But I wear that chain no longer.”

Joffrey sputters as Twyin reaches up and lifts the chain of interlocking hands around his neck, drops it to the table with a clatter. He leaves the hall as Joffrey finds his voice and screams at him to return or lose his head.

The news of Tywin’s departure spreads through King’s Landing like wildfire. If before the whispers of Joffrey’s cruelty were faint, now they are an ever present buzz through the halls of the Red Keep. To Jon it means little. His days are still spent standing silent behind Joffrey watching as he sits the iron throne and makes a mockery of being king, his only joy taken when one of the throne’s hundred blades cuts Joffrey, leaves a thin red line across his arm or hand or leg.

As half brother to the queen Barristan gives Jon the duty of standing guard over Sansa much of the time. Often she is in the company of the lords and ladies of court, the gracious and graceful lady she was born to be, and Jon begins to notice things he never had before: the compliments she gives to even the lowest ladies, the tilt of her head to show those who are speaking she is listening, the way she can draw a smile from even the most taciturn lord.

Foolish, Jon has always thought the gossip of court, but standing silent behind Sansa he learns of how fat Lolly’s mother was desperate for her to find a husband, how the ebon skinned Jalabhar Xho thought he’d finally found an ally in the Tyrells to help him win back the Summer Isles, how lady Taena thought her husband a fool but would do anything for her son, how the Kettleblacks spoke only to those who could make it worth their while, how tall lord Blackwood was hoping the king would rule in his favor in his feud with the Brackens.

“How do you remember it all?” Jon asks one day when it is only the two of them in her chambers, Sansa sitting beside the window sowing and he leaning against the wall beside the door. “It makes my head hurt.”

“A knight has his battlefield, a lady hers.” Sansa shrugs as she draws tight the thread of the needle between her fingers. “Mother used to tell me that.”

Jon chews her words. Was it so different from being a bastard, in a way? As a child he’d learned to always be watchful of others: to know when Catelyn was close, when lords were visiting Winterfell, when to slink away so he didn’t embarrass his lord father, to say Lord Stark in place of father.

“Do you ever wonder what it would’ve been like?” Sansa says, and Jon looks to find her gazing out the window, breeze playing with the red strays of her hair. “If we never left Winterfell?”

Jon is silent a long moment. “Sometimes,” he admits eventually. “I would’ve gone to the Wall. I’d planned to before Bran fell, but father forbade it.”

A frown creases Sansa’s brow, and she glances up at him. “I never knew that.”

“I only ever told father and uncle Benjen. And Arya.”

“You would truly have given up taking a wife or inheriting lands even then?”

Jon smiles faintly, the expression tinged with bitterness. “What lands? A bastard has no lands to inherit, no more than he has a home to call his own.”

Sansa draws back as if stung. “And Winterfell?” Her voice is hot. “How can you not think of it as home?”

“I love Winterfell.” The words hurt to say, even here, even now. “But no bastard is ever truly welcome among his father’s trueborn family. Your lady mother never let me forget that.”

Sansa blinks and looks away, out to the window. For a moment she looks so like a maiden from a song waiting in her tower for some brave knight to come save her that it cuts Jon to the bone. “And you?” He asks to take some of the sting from his words. “What would you have done if we never left Winterfell?”

“Married some lord.” Sansa laughs, but it is a wistful sound. “A fat old man, no doubt, but I would’ve been a dutiful wife and born him a half dozen strong sons all the same.”

Jon shakes his head. He forces his voice light. “No, you would have married some tall handsome lord. Father would never have made you marry someone you hated for duty.”

“He wouldn’t need to.” Sansa looks away from the window, eyes seeking out his, so sharp and pressing and blue that Jon wonders how he could’ve ever found them distant. “You are a Stark, Jon,” she says softly, “or you would not wear that cloak.”

The first time Joffrey strikes Sansa the bruise mottles the side of her collarbone round as the pit of a peach, a day old by the time Jon sees it. He frowns when he does, the crease of his forehead deepening as Sansa glances at him, then away. “What happened?” He asks.

Sansa refuses to meet his gaze. Her hands fiddle with a piece of embroidery, turning the silk between her fingers. “I displeased His Grace.”

“Joffrey did this?”

Still Sansa refuses to meet his gaze, but she is a Stark and lying has never been their way. “I made him wroth.”

The words fill Jon white hot. He is across the room in a heartbeat, kneeling before where she sits and unsheathing his sword with a long low rasp steel. “Ask,” he says, voice cool, “ask and Joffrey dies. Today. This very hour. Ask and I will do it, I swear it by the old gods and the new.”

Sansa’s eyes meet his for a moment, trapped and distant, and then she is looking to her embroidery again. “And have you tortured and killed?” Her voice is soft. “He is the king, Jon. You know that well as I.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.” Sansa tilts her head to the side, only the tremble of her fingers as she takes up her needle and begins again her embroidery betraying the forced lightness of her voice. “I’ll be more careful, that’s all. I will. He won’t do it again.”

Jon clenches his jaw till it aches, but all he can do is stand and shove his sword back in its scabbard. “If he does it again I’ll kill him,” he says, but even to him the words ring weak. You swore a vow. But which? To protect the weak? To serve the king?

“He won’t.” Sansa finally looks up at him. She forces a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “He was only wroth.”

Jon refuses to leave Sansa’s side after that. Everywhere she goes he follows, a white shadow always a few steps behind her as she sews with her ladies in waiting or sits beside the king at feasts and court or kneels before the heart tree in the godswood. Even at night Jon stands before her chamber door, a white and silent sentinel.

But it is impossible to deny Joffrey his marriage rights, not unless Jon is willing to spill blood. And so though Joffrey only visits Sansa a few times each moon, Jon stands rigid during each listening to the murmur of Sansa’s voice, the bark of Joffrey’s; tries to ignore the creak of the bed and Joffrey’s grunts, ears straining for the sound of a fist striking flesh. It never comes, but the waiting leaves Jon so ragged by morning that he moves in a half stupor the rest of the day.

The second time Joffrey strikes Sansa Jon is again not there to see it, having risen late from exhaustion. Sansa’s eyes meet Jon’s as he enters her chamber, and Jon knows instantly what’s happened even before he glimpses the freshly risen purple-blue circle along her jaw.

“Jon-” she begins, but Jon is already turning on his heel, striding back through the halls of the Red Keep as she calls for him to come back, a dull pounding in his ears.

Barristan is with Jamie Lannister in the White Tower of the Kingsguard. Both men look up as Jon sweeps into the room. “Joffrey struck her again,” he says without waiting, gaze flat on Barristan as he ignores the Kingslayer beside him. “It’s there on her jaw, a bruise plain as day.”

Barristan puts down the quill he was holding and glances at Jaimie in dismissal, but the Kingslayer merely smiles and leans against the chamber wall. Barristan turns his gaze to Jon. “He was wroth. His grace has been much… unsettled since Tywin gave up the handship. There are rumors of a dragon queen ruling the slave cities of the east, and the Iron Bank of Braavos is refusing to extend the crown’s debt.”

“They could be refusing to fuck the queen mother and I wouldn’t care.” Distantly, Jon knows he should pick his words with more care, but there is a well of rage in him that makes him want to grab the old knight and rattle him in his fine white armor until he understands. “He struck her, Selmy. Does that not mean anything to you as a knight? To the vows you took?”

“I know my vows.” Barristan says sharply. He takes a seat at the head of the table upon which the white tome of the kingsguard sits silent and heavy. “We swore to guard the king, Jon, not judge him.” He sighs and shakes his head. “But I will do what I can to see that Sansa is kept distant from his grace until his temper cools.”

“Until his temper cools?” Jon whirls on his heel for the door. If he does not leave now the rage throbbing through him will consume him, have him draw his sword and then there will be no undoing what comes next. “If he strikes her again Joffrey will see just how sharp a cool temper can be. That I swear to you, Selmy.”

Hundreds of steps the White Tower has, but Jon does not remember his feet touching a one as he emerges from the cool of the tower into the morning sun of the yard and stands there shaking with rage, hand gripping the hilt of the sword at his side. His fingers itch to draw it, to lash out, but there is nothing to strike but the old stone of the tower, all his hours in the practice yard useless here.

Jon does not know how long he stands like that, but soon the sound of footsteps echo behind him. He doesn’t turn as Jaime Lannister ducks out from the tower. “You should take more care with your words, Snow.” Jaime tilts his head up at the tower. “Some might not take as lightly as Selmy a threat against his grace’s person.”

“And you, Lannister?” Jon clenches his jaw. “Joffrey is your blood. Do you not have any shame for what he’s done?”

Jaime shrugs and leans back against the tower wall. “He’s within his royal rights.”

“Royal rights?” Jon spits at the ground. “Any king that strikes a woman does not deserve the name.”

“You would have unseated Robert, and Aerys before him, then?” Jaimie smiles as Jon turns to him with a scowl. “Three kings I’ve served, Snow, and each did the same when wroth or in his cups. Did you never wonder why my sister was absent from court for weeks at a time? Weeks is what it takes for a bruise to fade, though Robert usually took care not to strike her where it could be seen.”

“You lie.” Jon’s hand clenches around the hilt of his sword. “My father would never have allowed such a thing.”

“Allowed?” Jaime laughs, high and scornful. “Your father saw it and never raised a hand. And if noble lord Stark with his precious honor would not stop a king who am I to do different? Why should I protect his blood when he would not do the same for mine? No, bastard, I care nothing if Joffrey strikes your sister. And do not think Selmy will either. Do you know what mad king Aerys did to queen Rhaella, the way she would plead and shriek while Barristan stood guarding the door in his fine white cloak? They say I have shit for honor because I slew the Mad King, but all through the realm Barristan is loved for having stood silent.”

Jon can do no more than stand just as silent, fists clenched, as Jaimie leaves the wall and walks away across the yard, white cloak swirling behind him.

Chapter Text

The wolf dreams start soon after. It is always the same dream: running swift beneath the moonlit sky, loping over hill and forest and grove with his grey sister, of pulling down deer between silent pines or nosing hares from their warrens, of the copper tang of blood and crunch of bones beneath his jaws. Sometimes Jon wakes with the taste still in his mouth and it takes him a long moment to remember that he is a man and not a beast, a knight bound by vows and not a wolf free to run beneath the night sky.

It is always bitter.

Quickly Jon regrets having confronted Barristan. Perhaps fearing he will do something rash Barristan no longer assigns him to guard Sansa during her days and nights. At court and feasts he places Jon farthest from Joffrey of all his Kingsguard brothers. It becomes impossible for Jon to see Sansa each day, but still he tries, gives up sparring in the yard or drinking with Tyrion to find Sansa in her solar.

Gossip and whispers swirl through the Red Keep, servants murmuring in Jon’s wake when he walks the halls, their eyes flitting to him and then away. Jon can do no more than grit his teeth and meet their gazes flatly. He knows what the whispers call him without having to hear them: coward, false knight, bastard. After all what true brother would let his sister suffer that way, what true knight? What good is a knight who cannot keep his vows? Simple, the answer had always seemed to Jon. Not easy, but simple. For so many years since coming south Jon had dreamed of being knighted, of proving his worth, of carving out a name for himself that was more than Snow. But now…

His white brothers Jon no longer speaks to unless he must. The way they refuse to meet his eye when he stands beside them proves they know of Sansa’s bruises, and the way they stand silent behind Joffrey proves they do not care. Yes and no and speak with Barristan Jon forces through his gritted teeth when he must but otherwise stands silent and furious beside them. Only Jaime acts as though nothing has happened, still as smiling and friendly with Jon as though they’d never spoken that day at the steps of the white tower, jesting and laughing even as Jon remains silent with his jaw clenched. Only the knowledge that Jaime is the most skilled swordsman of the seven kingdoms keeps Jon from drawing his sword. He will be no good to Sansa dead, he tries to tell himself.

But he is not sure what good he is to her living either. Each time he returns new bruises have bloomed across her shoulders and arms like mottled flowers. And though Jon’s fury grows no less white-hot each time he glimpses them, he forces himself to bury his anger deep inside him, in a sunken place where all his shame and bitterness from a childhood of lady Catelyn’s cool gazes still lurks. His anger is not what Sansa needs no matter how helpless it makes Jon not be able to curse or spit or rage. And so each time he returns to her chambers he simply kneels and slips from her hands the warmed rags she uses to ease the swelling, presses them gently to the mottled and raised skin, each hiss of her breath as he does the stab of a blade into his chest.

She never looks at him, face tight and gaunt as she stares at the walls of her chamber or down at the ground. She shakes sometimes, her whole body trembling like a leaf, and in those moments Jon has never felt more useless. All he can do is tell her of his day, of the little he knows of the happenings at court and Kingslanding. Sometimes it is on the tip of his tongue to tell her of the wolf dreams, but he never does. They are only dreams, and telling her will remind her of Lady, of all she no longer has because of him.

Instead he tells her of he and Robb as children, of having to save Arya from whatever latest trouble she’d gotten herself into, of climbing with Bran or wrestling with Rickon. Sometimes the stories draw a smile from Sansa, though just as many time she listens with her gaze on the floor and Jon does not know if she can hear him, if the words mean anything to her.

“You have so many stories of them,” she tells him one day, listless eyes rising to find his. “Is this to be our story, Jon? Yours and mine?”

Jon shakes his head. He forces his voice light despite the ache in chest. “No, our story is the time Arya dared you to spend the night in the crypts and then when you didn’t come out she made me go find you.”

“Gods, I’d forgotten that.” The hint of a smile flits across Sansa’s lips. “I’d brought only one candle with me, hadn’t I? And it had given out by the time you came. I’ve never been a place so dark as those crypts.”

“Neither had I.” Jon finds himself smiling. “I remember thinking I’d never be brave enough to stay the night there myself.”

Sansa cocks her head to the side, a smile playing across her lips. “You thought I was brave?”

“Not always.” Jon looks down, shame welling in his throat. “I’m sorry for that. I never understood your love of dances and songs and courtesies, I thought them-”

“Foolish?” Jon looks up to find her smile twisted bitter. “I know, Jon. I so wanted to believe the songs, the ones of knights and maidens. I thought Joffrey was a prince from one of them, but he isn’t. He’s the monster the knight goes to slay. Not that there are knights. Not truly.” Her eyes have drifted away as she spoke, but now they snap back to Jon. “None except you.”

Jon laughs, a harsh, hollow bark. “Don’t say that. I’m no true knight. If I was-”

“You are.” Sansa reaches down to where he still holds the rag and threads their fingers together. “Even back then in the crypts, Jon. When you came for me you were a knight. I’m sorry I didn’t see that then. I thought a knight had to be like they are in songs, with shining armor and snapping pennants. And I’m sorry if I never thought of you as my true brother, sorry if I treated you unkindly or like you were lesser just because you were a bastard.”

“I didn’t make it easy.” Jon smiles, but his throat is dry and aching, and he squeezes her fingers tight. “I judged you just as harshly for just as little. I thought bravery was skill with a sword or lance or even just getting into trouble like Arya. But I was wrong. You are brave, Sansa. Both now and in the crypts.”

Weeks turn to months, and new bruises bloom over Sansa’s pale skin. They are less frequent but no less ugly, purple-blue veined in sickly yellow, and Joffrey begins to take less care in where he raises them. Jaw, eye, temple: each he graces with a bruise, and for each Sansa is forced to withdraw to her chamber for weeks to let them heal before appearing in court again. Quieter and quieter she is each time Jon comes to her, eyes sunken, cheeks gaunt, and Jon does not know how to draw her out.

And then one morning Sansa will not speak at all, lips closed in a thin line. An hour Jon stays tending her bruises, and only as he turns to leave does she speak, voice a thin whisper. “I haven’t had my moonblood for months.”

Jon freezes with his hand outstretched for the door. Carefully, he turns and kneels in front of Sansa, tilts her chin up from the floor and searches her face. “You’re sure?”

In place of nodding or answering Sansa tucks a loose strand of her hair behind her ear, a tremor shivering though her hand as she does. Only then does she look up, meets his eyes, her own glassy and horribly calm. “I am.”

Jon falls back on his heels. His mouth is dry and tongue too large for his mouth. You should’ve known. In a way it is strange it has taken so long. Even as bruises bloomed across Sansa’s skin it wasn’t as if Joffrey had stopped coming to her. A slow anger fills Jon, replaces the dry of his mouth with a bitter taste, but he lets none of it show on his face, turns his eyes dark and unreadable. She does not need your anger. “What will you do?” He asks.

“What can I do?” Sansa give a bitter little laugh. “I don’t want it, Jon. Isn’t that monstrous of me? But I don’t. I don’t care it’s mine, it makes me sick to think of anything of him growing in me.”

“There are ways to stifle it. I could go find…”

“You are a knight of the kingsguard, and my brother besides. Even without your white cloak all the court would whisper if you left the Red Keep to find a medicine woman, Jon. Your white brothers would know. Varys would know. And what would it matter? Joffrey is the king, and the king must have an heir. It will only happen again.”

“Not if you could not bear him sons.” A sudden hope sparks in Jon and he leans forward, takes her hands in his. “If you could not bear him children he would be forced to set you aside. I know it isn’t what you wanted, Sansa, isn’t what you dreamed of, but you’d be free of him, you’d-”

But Sansa is shaking her head even as the words are still on his lips. “I’m the daughter of a great house, Jon. Joffrey may be king, but do you think Tywin would ever allow him to insult all the north like that? Marriage is a pretty cage they build around us ladies, but a cage nonetheless.” She shivers and pulls her hands from his. “And Joffrey would never let me go. He’s told me before when he’s… inside... he’s told me he’d kill me before he ever lets another man touch me, before he ever lets me be parted from him. He told me if I ever fled he’d have Ilyn Payne take my head.”

Jon clenches his jaw. “Send a raven to our father then. He will come. He’ll raise the north for you.”

“And see all the realm bleed?” She looks down at her hands. “I’m one woman, Jon. Joffrey is a poor king, but war will make a thousand widows and orphans and it would be one great house against six. The north would lose, and I would still be queen.”

Jon stands and rips his gaze from her. His anger is not what Sansa needs, can feel it rising sure as an ocean surge, all the helplessness and anger from the past months like poison in the blood set aflame, and if he stays any longer it will spill from him. It is weak, cowardly, but Jon turns on his heel and crosses her chamber in a single stride, tears open the door and leaves Sansa alone in her chamber.

Chapter Text

It’s easy enough for Jon to find the whorehouse again, even without asking Tyrion. An hour of wandering the streets and Jon finds the house with the many colored glass where he remembers it snug against the high hill. Chataya, the same tall, black skinned woman opens the door. She blinks when she sees Jon. “Ser Snow. I did not think to find you here again.”

Jon forces a smile he does not feel and steps inside, the smell of perfume filling his nose as he does. The room is just as he remembers: myrish screens decorated with figures caught in the throes of passion, ornate copper dornish lamps simmering in sconces, and lush rugs thick as fur. Shame coils in his gut, a bone deep disgust for the desire that he can feel prickling through his skin. “Is your daughter here?” He asks Chataya.

“Alayaya? She’s occupied for the moment.” Chataya raises an elegant hand to the common room. “Perhaps one of my other girls would suit you? Tansy is especially lovely tonight.”

Jon shakes his head. “I’ll wait.”

“Of course.” Chataya fills a goblet of wine she passes to him. “She should not be long.”

Jon nods his thanks. He takes a long swallow from the goblet and crosses the room. It is empty but for a table where a man plays dice with a gold haired maiden who’s gown has slipped down to her waist to bare the slope of her breasts and their pink tips. The man looks up as Jon passes and Jon recognizes him as lord Osmund Florent. Jon doesn’t flinch away from his gaze. There’s no hiding your shame, Snow. All the court will know it now.

Jon takes a seat on a silk couch with embroidered and gold tasseled pillows. He takes another swallow from the goblet, heat prickling down his throat, but doesn’t sit back, instead hunching forward with his elbows resting on his legs.

“Is milord feeling unloved?” Jon turns at the words, and before he has a chance to resist a warm and lushly curved girl is sliding onto his lap, perfume filling his nose. He looks up to find the same wicked smile he remembers from all those years ago dancing across the girl’s lips. She sweeps back the red hair falling across her shoulders and pouts. “You’re far too handsome to be brooding so.”

How many times has he shamed himself in his thoughts at simply the memory of her red hair and full lips and wicked smile? A dozen? A hundred? Jon forces himself to wrench his gaze up and meet hers. “I’ve come for Alayaya.”

“How rude of her to keep milord waiting.” Dancy’s hand slips down, and Jon shivers as her fingers grab the hardness trapped by his breeches. She giggles. “He doesn’t seem to want to wait. Why not let him out and see how he likes my lips wrapped around him?”

Jon shudders as Dancy’s fingers slide along the length of him. He is hard, achingly so, and nothing has ever felt half so good as her fingers around him, the tug and slide of them. So easy it would be to give into that feeling, to lose himself in the warm curves of her, the smooth skin that the few wisps of silk she wears do nothing to conceal, the press of her perfume. He’s already come here to shame himself one way, why not another? A hundred times he’s already had her in his thoughts: the tangle of her hair in his fingers as he wrenches her head back and takes what he wants, the stiff and pebbled tips of her breasts between his teeth, the wet warmth of her around him, the moan of his name on her lips as he tears his pleasure from her as if he truly were the wolf he dreams of.

“Ser Snow.” Jon looks up to find Alayaya standing before him, slender and lovely in a wisp of yellow silk. Her mouth curves in an amused smile as her eyes move over Dancy. “My mother says you sought me.”

Dancy pouts at him again, lips full and red. “Mayhaps milord would like to take us both to bed?” Her hand gives him a firm squeeze and she giggles. “You have more than enough to share. And two mouths on a cock is such a prettier sight than one, wouldn’t milord agree?”

Jon clenches his jaw. All his life he’s heard the whispers that bastards were creatures of lust, faithless and base, and all his life he’d thought that with a ser before his name and a white cloak he could escape them. But he hadn’t, and with Dancy’s warm and soft on his lap and the promise of her and Alayaya twining around him he knows he never will, that he will always be a creature of lust and faithlessness.

There are no true knights. None except you.

It takes everything Jon is, every drop of will in him, all he’s ever wanted or feared, to stand in that moment. But he does, Dancy spilling from his lap as he stands despite how he knows his hardness is plain for all to see. Dancy falls back on the couch and pouts up at Jon, but he ignores her and turns to Alayaya. “If you would, my lady.”

The room she leads him to is much the same as the one he remembers from years before, a great silk canopied bed set in the center. Alayaya takes his cup and places it on the sideboard before rejoining him. “It’s true you know. Dancy and I have danced between the sheets together before. If my lord likes I can still fetch her so we may share you between us.”

She slides a warm hand up his chest and for a moment Jon is just as tempted again to forget his vows, to bury his face in Alayaya’s neck and lose himself in the scent and smooth warmth of her skin, the comfort of another body. But he forces himself to shake his head and reach up to catch her wrist. “It’s not why I’ve come.”

Alayaya tilts her head to the side, eyes large and dark as they regard him. “Why have you come then, Ser Snow?”

“You said you meant not to mother any bastards last time.”

“And I have not.” Alayaya smiles faintly. “You spent your seed into my hand if I remember it well, my lord.”

“But if I hadn’t. You have other ways?”

Alayaya regards him calmly for a moment, then silently moves again to the sideboard. She opens a drawer and slips out a small, plain bottle she holds out to him as she rejoins him. “Moon tea can be taken for months after, but is easiest to stomach if drank soon.”

Jon’s mouth is dry as he reaches out and takes the bottle from Alayaya. He turns it between his fingers, looks up to find her gazing at him. “You still mean not to father any bastards, then?” She asks softly. “We are no curse, you know. We are a gift.”

Jon shakes his head, throat dry. More than anything he’s ever wanted he wants to believe Alayaya in that moment. But he knows it a lie, knows it deep in all he is. His birth was no gift for the father whose honor it stained, no gift for the lady wife whose marriage bed it insulted, no gift for the sister he has failed again and again and again.

He fumbles at his side for the purse he brought, but Alayaya smiles and shakes her head. “My mother would never allow me to accept anything from a knight of the Kingsguard, ser Snow. And you need not worry. None will ever hear a whisper that you were here. Your honor is safe with us.”

Jon shakes his head, a bitter taste in his mouth. “No. If any ask, tell them I bedded you.”

Alayaya regards him for a long moment before nodding slowly. “I will tell them that I was visited by Ser Snow of the Kingsguard.” A smile plays at her lips. “I will tell them you were fierce as a wolf between the sheets. That you rode me long and hard and well and that I have never laid eyes on a cock half so thick and long as yours.”

A bitter smile tugs at Jon’s lips. For a moment he wishes he could thank her, but she cannot know why he is truly here, and so instead her he leans forward and kisses her forehead. He turns before he can see her face, turns and leaves the room before he can be tempted once again to stay.

It is dark when Jon slips into Sansa’s chamber again. She sits in the same chair as when he left her and for a long moment Jon is not sure she has moved at all since the day before. She does not look up from her embroidery as he latches the door shut behind him. “One of my maids told me a funny rumor,” she says lightly, but Jon knows her well enough to know the false note to it. “She says lord Florent glimpsed you in a whorehouse.”

They shouldn’t, but the words sting. Jon kneels before where Sansa sits. She blinks at her embroidery but doesn’t raise her eyes. “I did,” he says. “I went to-”

“-I’m glad you could find some comfort there,” Sansa continues over him as though she can’t hear him, voice still firmly light. “I am. I may be trapped in this tower but that need not mean you must be too. What is it like to be able to come and go as you please? You and Arya could always do that, but not me. Even before this cage I’ve always just been an empty headed little songbird.” She laughs, high and bright and horrible. “I’m sorry you’ve had to stay here with me in this tower so long, Jon, truly I am. I know a man has needs, needs as your lady sister I can hardly satisfy. We are not Targaryens. Or Lannisters.”

Jon frowns and grabs her hands, forces them to stop their needlework. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you know? Cersei told me once when she was deep in her cups. She didn’t remember the next day but after Robert died she told me how Jaime has been inside her, how she only ever feels whole when he is. Perhaps that’s what it takes to keep a knight of the kingsguard from breaking his vows.” Sansa giggles. “What do you think, Jon? Would fucking me keep you true?”

The words catch Jon like a slap. He drops her hands. “That isn’t funny, Sansa.”

“No?” She rolls her eyes. “I could make you happier than she makes Jaime, you know. All the court says I’m more beautiful than her. I’d treat you gentler too, let you use me like one of your whores and never once complain. I’m sorry I have all these bruises, but you can give me one of your own if you want. Would doing that make it easier for you? Would it make fucking your sister sweeter? I want it to be sweet for you, Jon, truly I do, so sweet you’ll never leave me, so sweet you’ll strike me at even the thought of another man in me.”

There is a dull roar in Jon’s ears as he reaches up and clasps Sansa’s face between his hands, jerks her eyes back to meet his. “I will never strike you.” The words are sharp, short, harsh, but Jon needs her to understand, needs her to know beyond the flicker of a doubt. “And I will never leave you, Sansa. I swear that, swear it before the sight of gods and men, swear it by the old gods and the new. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever, not until I draw my last breath and the life leaves my body and the crows come to feast on my eyes. You are my heart, Sansa. You are all I have. Never doubt that. Never.”

For a long moment Sansa’s stares at him still with her horrible smile and then it crumbles and she collapses against him with a sob that wrenches Jon’s heart. He crushes her to him, presses his mouth to the top of her head as she shakes in his arms, sob after sob wracking her. Into her hair he murmurs promises and pleas and hoarse words he should have spoken long ago, and when his voice runs dry he simply holds her, holds her like he did all those years ago after Lady died, holds her as her sobs fade away and her shoulders eventually still.

After what feels like a long, long time, Sansa stirs and slips back into her seat, gaze downcast, eyes still red. Jon reaches into the pouch at his side and draws out the bottle, takes her hand and presses it to her palm. “It’s moon tea.”

Sansa looks down at the bottle. She shakes her head, voice whisper thin. “I told you, Jon. It will only happen again.”

“It won’t. We’ll find a way, Sansa. We will.”

A long time Sansa is silent, fingers turning the bottle between them. “I dream sometimes,” she says softly, haltingly, as though speaking will cause the memory to slip through her fingers. “I dream of being a wolf, of running under a white moon and black sky. In the dream… in the dream there’s always another wolf with me.” Her eyes find his. “A white wolf with red eyes.”

Jon’s throat aches. He reaches up, curls her fingers around the bottle of moon tea. “In my dreams I run with my sister. Swift and grey and fierce.”

Under his hand Jon feels Sansa’s fingers tighten around the bottle. Her voice is a whisper, faint and fierce. “We must be wolves then, Jon.”

Chapter Text

Over the next few days Sansa is sick more than not, and at least a half dozen times Jon must kneel beside her and gather back her thick red hair as she empties her stomach into her chamber pot. More often though she simply sits shivering as though with fever, skin pale and damp, a blanket drawn about her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she tells him on the third day with a weary twitch of a smile. “Lady’s in songs never look this dreadful when the knight comes for them.”

Jon shakes his head and kneels before her chair, hands her a cup of watered wine. “Dreadful or no you need to drink.”

Sansa rolls her eyes, but accepts the cup. Watered wine is all she can keep down, though she makes a face as she sips at it, and Jon feel for a moment uncannily like old Nan at one of their bedsides. Sansa makes another face. “The last time I was this ill that vale knight stayed at Winterful on his way to the Wall. My nose was runny and eyes puffy and I wailed into my pillow that I’d never be as beautiful as the ladies in songs.”

A smile tugs at Jon’s lips and he shakes his head. “You’ve always been beautiful, Sansa. It used to annoy Arya so when we were children.”

A tired smile teases Sansa’s lips. “And you, Jon? Did it annoy you?”

Would fucking me keep you true? Sansa blinks and looks down at her cup, smile slowly wilting from her lips. Neither of them have spoken of that night since, but the words still hang unspoken between them, an ugly bruise neither will touch, and Jon does not know how to answer what he knows Sansa meant as a jest. The truth is that even with hair lank and unwashed, face sunken and thin, Sansa is still as heart achingly lovely as she’s always been and the knowledge an uneasy stone in the pit of Jon’s stomach. He looks out to the window of her chamber. “What you said of Jamie and Cersei,” he says, “was it true?”

“I didn’t believe her when she first told me. I thought she was only drunk. But…” Sansa’s rubs her thumb along the lip of the cup. “It’s there plain as day, Jon. The way they look at each other, the way they used to slip away together when Robert would go hunting or hawking or whoring. Do you remember how hard Cersei fought when Tywin tried to send her back to Casterly Rock after Robert’s death? How strange that was? It’s always been there.”

It’s grotesque to think, even for Jaime and Cersei, but once Jon has it’s impossible not to see it just as Sansa said. He shakes his head. “Little wonder Joffrey is such a monster, then. It’s what they deserve.”

Sansa’s smile drops, face suddenly pale and young. “This is what I deserve too, Jon,” she whispers. “I know it is. They’re punishing me for what I’ve done. Maid, Mother, Crone. This is their punishment for what- for drinking- for stifling-”

“It isn’t.” Jon takes her hand, fingers cold beneath his, very aware in that moment of just how young Sansa truly is despite how poised she always is, that she is barely more than a girl in truth. She should be with a tall handsome lord, laughing and happy and with blue roses in her hair in a field somewhere, not here shivering in a lonely tower with you. He rubs her fingers. “And if it is their punishment, then fuck the seven. They aren’t our gods, Sansa. Our gods are the old gods of the first men and children of the forest, of tree and stone and weirwood, of the north.”

Sansa looks down at their hands. She takes a deep breath, squeezes his fingers tight, and nods.

On the fourth day Sansa’s shivering eases, and on the fifth she can keep down more than just watered wine and bread. On the sixth Jon enters her chamber to find her being attended by her handmaids, and she flashes him a smile as they fit her in a new gown of silk and samite that turns the blue of her eyes piercing.

On the seventh she rejoins the court.

None of the lords or ladies speak of her absence when they greet her, but quickly Jon realizes just how sorely Sansa has been missed. While she’s sat trapped in her chambers rumors have reached Kinsglanding of a dragon queen in the east gathering her armies to march for westeros: the last Targaryen they say she styles herself, Daenerys first of her name, rightful queen of the First Men and the Andals and the Rhoynar, intent to reclaim her throne with fire and blood. Each utterance of her name only worsens Joffrey’s temper, and with Sansa’s return both lords and ladies seem relieved to have someone other than the king to bring their pleas and concerns to. Sansa is courteous to one and all, a gracious queen with always a kind word for lords and servants alike. Slowly she eases back into court life.

It is not long before Joffrey strikes her again.

It is an almost pretty thing, a splotch of purple and red broken veins mottling the corner of her jaw like a splattered overripe fruit. But this time Sansa refuses to wait in her chambers for it to heal. Her handmaids dust it with white, and the next day she joins Joffrey as he sits as justice on the Iron Throne. He stiffens when he sees her, but even he isn’t foolish enough to order her away before the gathered lords and ladies. She graces him with a smile and inquires after his health as she takes her seat. He scowls in answer and turns away to bark for the next supplicant to step forward.

Even under the white dust the bruise on Sansa’s jaw is still plain to the eye, the edges ragged and yellow veined, but it is as though the whole court is suddenly blind. Not one of the lords or ladies note it when they seek Sansa out, not one asks her what’s happened or acknowledges what is before them, their eyes careful to slide away should they glance at it. Jon cannot understand it, how she can remain so courteous and gracious when all he wishes he could do is snarl his fury at each new foppish lord and preening lady.

Sansa only smiles when Jon voices his anger one night when it is the two of them in her chamber, lamps newly lit by one of her maids. “A lady’s courtesies are her armor, Jon. I told you something like that once.”

A knight has his battlefield, a lady hers. Years, it feels as though have passed since Sansa told him that, but Jon has never forgotten it, can still hear the lilt of her voice if he closes his eyes. It was the day she’d called him Stark. He tightens his fingers around the hilt of his sword. “They cannot be blind to what is happening.”

“They aren’t.” Sansa slips her needle through the length of silk she’s embroidering. “But he is the king. What can they do?”

Their duty. But Jon bites back the words. He knows he is no better. If you were you would have run Joffrey through the first time he struck Sansa whether she willed you to or no. “You shouldn’t forgive them.”

“I don’t.” Sansa’s eyes flash, fingers pinching the needle between them hard enough to turn them white. “Don’t ever think I do, Jon. I’ll never forget that all their oaths and honor meant less than nothing. But we need them.”

“For what?”

“No king can rule alone, not since the Targaryens lost their dragons.” Sansa lays aside her sewing. “Joffrey may be Baratheon and Lannister, but Stannis has no love for him and Tywin no patience. Without them he needs the lords at court whether he likes them or no, needs their purses and swords and voices. Without them he is only a child on a throne. While he sits it they obey him, but if his grasp weakens...”

Jon cocks his head to the side. “That’s all then? We wait?”

“We do. And we listen. To what they want, what they need, what positions they hope for their sons and what marriages they wish for their daughters. And when I can I murmur a word to a lord here and a lady there and sometimes their son squires for who they like and the marriage they want for their daughter comes to pass.”

Jon digests the words as Sansa takes up her sewing again and silence fills her chamber. The lamps lighting the chamber flicker lower and lower until eventually through the window the bells of the Great Sept of Baelor toll midnight.

Sansa draws a thread tight. “Joffrey will be here soon,” she says without looking up from her sewing, only the faintest wobble to her voice. “You should go.”

Jon clenches his jaw, but nods despite how it feels like shoving a knife in his chest knowing what will come when he does. He moves for the door, but lingers for a moment as his fingers brush the handle, looking back at Sansa seated by the window, hair in the lamplight the deep red of weirwood leaves.

She looks up curiously as her crosses to her seat, brow scrunching. “Jon?”

Would fucking me keep you true? The words ring in Jon’s ears as he presses his lips to her forehead in a swift kiss. “We wait,” he says, and turns for the door before he can see her face.

“I visited Chataya’s,” Tyrion announces to Jon a few weeks later as he and Jaime wait idly in their white cloaks outside the door of the small hall for Joffrey.

Jon raises an uninterested eyebrow. “How is Marei?”

“Lovely as always, but she told me a funny kind of tale. She told me she glimpsed a man of the kingsguard not more than a month ago in Chataya’s, a young comely knight with a sullen expression.” The little man adopts an injured expression. “You might have invited me, Jon. I thought you had no taste for whores.”

This is the path you chose. Jon grits his teeth as on the far side of the door a slow smile curves Jaime’s lips. “Why, your whore must be mistaken, brother.” Jaime says to Tyrion. “Jon holds his vows too dear to ever break them for some whore. A son of Ned Stark would never breach his honor so.”

“Perhaps it was a flight of fancy on Marei’s part, though she is rarely fanciful out of bed.” Tyrion shrugs, mismatched eyes studying Jon. “But that is not where her tale ended. She said despite how Alayaya has been telling all that the knight rode her long and hard and well that he was in her chambers only a few short minutes.”

Jon stiffens, silently cursing the little man and his japes as on the other side of the door Jaime leans forward, a lion at the scent. Jon forces himself to shrug carelessly. “Marei is wrong.”

“Not in this.” Tyrion tilts his head to the side, continues to study him, eyes shrewd, the moment stretching endlessly. Suddenly he grins. “You should just admit to it, Jon. There is no shame in only lasting only a few minutes, not with a maid as lovely as Alayaya. Perhaps I’ll visit her instead of Marei next time.” He jumps down from his chair. “I shall think on it as I grace the privy.”

Jon watches with teeth gritted as Tyrion waddles away. He can feel the weight of Jaime’s gaze on him, but refuses to look. Silence fills the space between them, the only sound the faint voice of Varys inside the small hall tittering of how the dragon queen in slaver’s bay is said to ride a dragon.

“How fares your lady sister?” Jaime’s voice is soft. “I heard she was ill only a month ago.”

Jon doesn’t answer. His fingers twitch, but he forces himself not to rest his hand on the pommel of his sword. We wait. He gives Jaime a flat, cool look. “A fever. She’s well now.”

“A fever? Not something she ate or... drank?” Jaime’s eyes glitter. “Come, you can tell me, bastard. I know you love your sister well.”

“Not half as well as you love yours.”

Jaime blinks and a slow, pleased smile curves his lips. “Oh, I do. A strange thing to love your sister, is it not? Love and cherish them, septons and maesters and all the world tell us, but not too close. Not like you would a woman, no never. Not like your would your lady wife. But protect them as though they were. Serve them faithfully, ride to their rescue, treat them courteously: but never ask for their favor, never ask for what the maiden in the tower offers up between her legs for the knight to save her. Well, you know what I say to that, bastard?” Jaime spits to the side. “I say fuck them and all they say.”

Jon wishes he could hate Jaime for the words. Wishes he could call him sisterfucker and think nothing more of it. And maybe once he could have, once when all he knew of sisters was Arya who never needed to be saved, once when they were children and all he thought of Sansa was a slip of a girl in a fine dress who always looked down her nose at him. But now, in place of hate or disgust, a strange kind of pity fills Jon as he looks at Jaime standing tall and golden in his gleaming armor. “That’s all Cersei is to you?” He asks softly. “A maiden in a tower to be won?”

The smile falls from Jaime’s lips, eyes hardening into flints of blue. “And what would you know of it, bastard? You’re a creature born of lust and can never understand what it is to have a trueborn sister. I am never more whole than when I am with Cersei. Together we came into this world, two parts of one whole, and neither gods or men can unmake us.”

Jaime spits to the side and pushes away from the door, stalks away with his white cloak streaming behind him as Tyrion passes him in the hall returning from the privy. The little man watches his retreating back a moment before turning an arched brow to Jon. “A quarrel among brothers of the kingsguard?” He clucks his tongue and shakes his head. “It is good your order does not accept women. Brothers are easier than sisters.”

Despite Joffrey’s loathing for any kind of ruling that day marks the first of many visits to the small hall in the following months. Whispers boil out from it until the Red Keep is abuzz with half heard rumors: that the dragon queen in Slaver’s Bay is on the march, that she beds with sellswords and barbarians and eunuchs alike, that she’s raised krakens from the depths, that three dragons soar above legions of freed slaves. Most scoff at that last, Joffrey sneers, Varys titters, but when she hears Sansa’s eyes turn thoughtful.

“Would it be so strange if there were dragons left in the world?” She muses to Jon. “Direwolves too we thought lost before you stumbled on ours.”

Ours. The wolf dreams still fill Jon’s sleep: loping beside his grey sister through glade and glen, the scent of pine and deer filling his nostrils, the fierce freedom. They’ve not spoken of the dreams since that night, but Jon knows Sansa has them still, sees it in the flash of her eyes, in the clenched angle of her jaw when her handmaids dust her bruises with white.

Instead of fading as most rumors do, the whispers of the dragon queen only grow louder in the weeks that follow, each new day bringing fresh news off Volantene galleys and Braavosi cogs: that she’s set free the slaves of New Ghis, scoured the pirates from the Basilisk isles, set sail for Volantis. With each new rumor Joffrey’s sneers turn less dismissive and more cruel. Day after day Jon stands guarding the foot of the Iron Throne as above him Joffrey sits alone and golden haired and brooding.

His temper blooms in new bruises across Sansa’s skin. Each night Jon kneels before her, tends her bruises with a warm cloth. She is no less silent than she used to be, but she no longer trembles, and even once in a long while offers Jon a wan smile that tugs at an ache deep within him.

He is tending a purple, mottled bruises on her collarbone when Sansa reaches up and wraps her fingers around his hand, gently lowers it. Jon glances up, an apology on the tip of his tongue for being too rough, but something in her face makes him pause. Her lip is caught between her teeth, eyes watching apprehensively. He turns his hand and catches her fingers in his, squeezes them gently. “What is it?”

Sansa blinks and looks down. She takes a deep, steadying breath. “I need something of you, Jon.”

“Ask it.”

“You won’t like it.”

“Ask it all the same.”

She does.

He doesn’t.

It is hours later, the sun fallen and their voices hoarse, when silence fills her chamber again. Sansa has not risen from her seat, but Jon has paced the length of her chamber half a hundred times and now stands before her window, all Kingslanding glittering out before him in a sea of flickering lamps. All the fight has left him, protests and arguments wrung out like a wet rag, and he closes his eyes as he looks out at the city, lets the cool night whisper across his face.

Sansa’s chair creaks and a moment later he feels the soft weight of her laying her head against his back. “Jon…”

Silently Jon turns and gathers her in his arms, pulls her to him. For a long time they stand like that, silent and still, her frame achingly slender against him, so fragile he might think she’d shatter if he didn’t by now know the strength within. “I won’t leave you,” he says eventually, voice hoarse. “Not here. Not with him.”

“It has to be this way. I won’t see the realm bleed. Not for me. The dragon queen- I do not know if she is a better ruler than Joffrey, but she cannot be worse. She’s broken the slave trade of Essos, and if she truly has dragons… she will come for Joffrey whether we will it or not, Jon. And with you the war could be quick. Clean.”

“Come with me then. We could both seek her out.”

Sansa shakes her head. “A knight might reach her, but a fleeing queen? Joffrey would scour every ship from here to Volantis to find me. It must be you, Jon, you and only you.”

“And after?” Jon forces the words past the weight crushing his chest. Because despite the oaths he swore, despite all he’s ever dreamed of and wanted, despite how it will break a part of him to leave her behind, in that moment he knows more truly than he’s known anything that whatever Sansa asks he will do, that he has never had a choice, not in this, not in her. You are my heart. “Once it’s done?”

“Come back.” Sansa tilts her face back, eyes shining as she gazes at him a long moment before rising to the tips of her toes, breathe tickling his ear. “Once it’s done come back to me, Jon.”

Chapter Text

It is easy enough for Jon to slip his white cloak. In the dawn bustle of the Red Keep a single man in a simple traveler’s brown cloak goes unnoticed, just another poor knight or squire hoping for a lord’s favor. Even if one of the servants recognize him Jon knows it will mean little to them, think merely that his white armor is being cleaned. It is stranger for Jon. Strange to stride the halls of the Red Keep without the weight of the armor he has worn every day for years. A cage he’s thought of it as for so long, but now free of its weight he feels naked.

Though he knew he shouldn’t tarry, Jon had lingered in his chamber in the pre-dawn dark looking down at where he’d laid out his white armor the night before. He’d run his fingers over the white enamel, tracing the scrollwork of the edges, rubbing his thumb over every dent and scratch he knows better than his own skin. For so long since coming south knighthood was all he’d dreamed of: a way to slip his bastard name, a way to prove false the whispers that have followed him all his life. What good was a knight who could not keep his vows? Simple the answer had always seemed to Jon, but he no longer knows, knows only that after today there would be no escaping his name, no escaping the whispers. What he does today will strip every scrap of honor from his name. Will prove right all those that sneered that the bastard could not be trusted.

Let it then. Jon clenches his jaw as he reaches the gate of the Red Keep. Only then does he pause, heart in his throat as he looks back at the high walls rising above him. He shades his eyes against the rising sun already beginning to paint the sky in splashes of orange and red, tries to seek out the tower of the queen, the window from which he’s seen Sansa stare out of a hundred times as the wind lifts her red hair.

Come back. Come back to me, Jon.

I will, Jon promises silently, and as he turns to leave the Red Keep, the beat of his heart loud in his ears, he hopes that of all his vows this one he will not betray.

---

A Tyroshi galley takes him across the Narrow Sea, a week of rolling waves and fickle squalls that keep Jon below deck much of the time, stomach roiling as the galley tosses to and fro. A few of the other passengers empty their stomachs until all the galley smells of vomit, but Jon clenches his jaw, refusing to join them. What kind of knight of the Kingsguard loses his stomach over a few waves, he thinks grimly, teeth clenched so tight he half expects them to crack, but he knows the answer. One who’s turned his cloak, one who’s betrayed his vows.

“Volantis?” The Tyroshi captain had snorted days before as they stood on the quay of Kingslanding and Jon asked him which of the ships at dock could take him there. “No ship sails there. The dragon whore has set her sights on it, determined on striking the chains from their slaves and washing the black city in dragonflame.”

The captain had leaned back and shouted something in low valyrian at one of his crew before turning back to Jon. “For a gold dragon you may come to Tyrosh with us, and from there find another ship to Lys. Perhaps one of their captains is foolish enough to sail for Volantis.” He’d given Jon a brusque look up and down. “But if pirates find us off the stepstones you fight, yes?”

Jon had nodded silently, and though he would have prefered it to the rains that rocked their ship and sent his stomach roiling, they meet not a single pirate before reaching Tyrosh late in the day. He finds an inn off the dock and sits in the corner of the common room as the light dies, listens to the idle chatter of the other westerosi, ears straining for any mention of a turncloak knight of the kingsguard, but he hears nothing. Word travels slow, he tells himself, but draws no peace from the thought. Slow or swift, the news will come. News of a knight of the Kingsguard. News of a knight who’s broken his vows and sullied his cloak.

And late that night, as sleep escapes Jon and he tosses and turns on the hard cot all a bronze groat could buy him, all the thoughts and worries he’d shoved down in the creaking hull of the Tyroshi galley seep to the surface. Will Joffrey’s temper flare in a fresh set of bruises across Sansa’s arms at word of Jon’s escape? You left her at his mercy, a voice in him hisses. You abandoned her when she needed you most.

I had to, Jon tries to convince himself, it was the only way. But it does nothing to settle him, nothing to ease the shame in the pit of his stomach.

Hours Jon tosses and turns. Only as his thoughts drift to Sansa does he find sleep: the sweet girl in a slim blue dress she’d been in Winterfell, the way even back then she pursed her lips at her embroidery when it wasn’t perfect, the deftness of her fingers with a needle, the touch of her hands in his, the quirk of her lips in a teasing smile, the feel of her warm in his arms, the tickle of her breath against his ear as she whispered come back to me.

---

From Tyrosh Jon sails to Lys, but no captains there is willing to set sail for Volantis, and so he is forced to travel eastward by land, the hooves of his horse clattering against the smooth black stone of a Valyrian road as he passes hills and fields and ancient crumbled stone sphinxes.

Three weeks he is on the road, and on the dawning of the fourth he catches sight of Volantis in the distance. Jon draws his horse to a stop as he reaches the top of a crest and looks down on Old Volantis, first daughter of Valyria, a city so huge it could swallow Kingslanding five times over.

It sprawls across the mouth of mother Rhoyne like a warm wet kiss, a massive bridge of fused black stone spanning the river to connect the two halves of the city like a stitch trying to draw closed a rotting wound. On the far side of the river, out of a labyrinth of alleys and temples and merchant houses rises a high a round wall of the same fused black stone as the bridge. The Black Walls, Jon had heard the Lyseni call them, the walls that enclosed those slavers of the most ancient blood. Thin tendrils of sullen smoke rise like grey fingers from within it.

And above the smoke circle three dragons.

Despite the cloying humidity a shiver runs down Jon’s spine. Somehow, he realizes distantly, he’d never thought that part of the rumors true. In the bowels of the Red Keep he’s glimpsed once the skulls of the Targaryen dragons of old, but it is one thing to see the bones of a beast long dead and another to see it alive and soaring, scales flashing and wings spread, fire and grace made flesh.

One of the dragons splits from its brothers as Jon watches. It coasts over the city, wings flapping lazily, it’s shadow flitting across the streets and courtyards and alleys below, and Jon can only imagine what it must be to stand under it as it does, to feel such an impossibly huge shape rush overhead. Over the mouth of mother Rhoyne the dragon flies, scales catching the morning light and setting them alight with pale flame.

And suddenly, with a certainty deep in some part of all he is, Jon knows the dragon is flying towards him.

His horse whickers and rears as the dragon nears, and Jon jumps down from the saddle as it rushes overhead, wind buffeting the branches of nearby trees to and fro as though in a gale, Jon nearly losing his feet. He barely notices his horse galloping away, too caught in watching as the dragon wheels in a wide circle and alights on the grass only yards before Jon. It is the palest of the three beasts that circled the city, white and serpentine, and its yellow eyes shine like discs of beaten gold as they fix on Jon.

A strange calm fills Jon as the dragon stalks forward on its wings like an enormous pale bat. He doesn’t turn away, doesn’t run, doesn’t flinch as the dragon circles him slowly, the heat of its breath even from feet away searing as that of a forge. He turns to follow it as it circles him, studying the dragon as it studies him: the white of its scales, the lash of its tail, the tilt of its golden eyes. Distantly, he wonders what Sansa would think of it.

The dragon comes to a stop, and Jon with it. Its lips pull back from its teeth in a silent snarl, fangs long as Jon’s forearm catching the light as it hisses , the sound a physical thing that slits Jon’s ears and pulls at his skin. He doesn’t flinch. Slowly, carefully, eyes on its gold one, he raises hand and touches the tip of its nostrils. White scales rasp beneath his fingertips. White as snow. White as Ghost. White as the cloak he once wore.

“He likes you.” A voice says from afar. “It’s rare for my children to come across a man they like.”

The dragon’s gold eyes blink, and only then does Jon glance away and up to the voice. So intent upon the pale dragon he never noticed the two others alighting on the field beside it, one black and one green. Astride the back of the black one sits a delicately built silver haired woman, a half dozen bells braided into the shining fall of her hair, eyes dark and violet and curious. Jon lets his still outstretched hand fall to his side as the pale dragon whips away to snap and hiss at the green one. “You’re Daenerys Targaryen,” he says, tilting his head back to look up at her. “The one they call Stormborn. The one they call Mother of Dragons.”

The woman regards him curiously. “And you are?”

“Jon.” Come back to me. “Jon Snow.”

---

“And if it is as you say?” The dragon queen asks coldly hours later as Jon stands before in the long hall of a Volantene palace. Though slim and delicate she is no less regal upon her throne then she was dragonback: a barbarian kind of queen though she seems to Jon flanked as she is by jackal eyed sellswords and Dothraki screamers and bronze clad eunuchs, a white lion cloak over one shoulder and a circle of dark Valyrian steel crowning her head. “If you are who you say you are then your father betrayed mine and plotted the murder of my good sister and her children in their beds. Why would I trust you?”

“Your father gave my uncle and grandfather to the flames and laughed at their screams as they were cooked alive.” Around Jon the mercenaries and Dothraki shuffle and mutter, and his fingers tingle for the hilt of the sword he gave up to the eunuchs when he entered their camp. But one sword against a hundred thousand Dothraki screamers will mean nothing, so he stills his fingers and doesn’t take his eyes from Daenery, only cocks his head to the side. “But that does not mean we must need be enemies.”

The dragon queen regards him flatly, violet eyes impossible to read. One of her Dothraki steps forward, hand resting on the pommel of his curved sickle sword. “Blood of my blood, let me take this one’s head. It is known no traitor may be trusted.”

“It is known,” intones another of the Dothraki.

“A waste of flesh.” One of the sellswords leaning against the wall grins, finger idly curling his blue mustachio as he does. “Give him to your dragons, my queen.”

Daenerys holds up a slim hand, and both Dothraki and mercenary fall silent. Her violet eyes move over Jon coolly. “Tell me, why should I not listen to my advisors? Why should I spare a bastard and turncloak?”

Still a bastard, even here half a world away. “Because I know his plans. Aegon the Conqueror united the seven kingdoms with only three dragons, but not without roasting thousands on the battlefield. I can offer you another way. A way to unseat Joffrey quickly and bloodlessly and make you loved by all Westeros for it.”

Daenerys tilts her head to the side. “And what could this king have done to make you betray him?”

“He struck my sister.”

Daenerys arches a silver eyebrow as off to the side one of the sellswords barks a laugh. “That’s all?”

“Every night.” It cuts Jon to lay naked and bare Sansa’s pain here before these barbarians and sellswords who have no right to it, but he knows this is the only way, knows that Daenerys must believe him beyond the shadow of any doubt. “Every night Joffrey graces her with the bruises of a royal temper. You ask why I would betray him? That is why. He is a vain, cruel child and unfit for the throne.”

Jon sweeps his gaze at the court around him, the screamers and sellswords and eunuchs, a long, cool look that refuses to flinch an inch. All the hate and helpless anger he’s pushed down deep inside him for so long he lets seep into his gaze, turns it cold and savage. Bastard. Faithless. Traitor. The words are old dull bruises, but Jon no longer feels them, no longer cares who spits them at him. I did not leave you defenseless before a monster to be cowed by sellwords and barbarians.

He turns his gaze back to the dragon queen. Call me what you will. I may be a bastard, and I may be faithless, but not in this. Not to you, Sansa. “I do not know if you are a better queen than Joffrey. I pray you are, but you cannot be worse. And if after I help you unseat him you see fit to take my head or send me to the Wall or feed me to your dragons then so be it. If that is the price I must pay to see Joffrey off the throne and my sister safe then I will gladly pay it a hundred times over.”

For a long time Daenerys is silent, violet eyes studying him, the Dothraki by her side shifting their weight while the eunuchs stand still as though carved from stone in their bronze armor. “The dragon must have three heads,” she says finally. “Aegon had his sister-wives to ride beside him, but I am only a young girl and have no husbands or sisters or wives. Many of my Dothraki and sellswords have tried to mount Rhaegal and Viserion and each has been met by dragonflame. Never once have my children accepted so much as the touch Viserion did yours. You wish to keep your life, son of Eddard Stark? Mount Viserion. If he does not toss you from his back then you may ride with me to unseat this king you hate.”

Chapter Text

The morning dawns wet and humid, air fetid and sickly sweet, the cotton of Jon’s shirt sticking to his back as a pair of Unsullied soldiers march him beyond the city gates to where Daenerys stands watching her dragons tearing at a half dozen freshly seared bull carcasses.

The Unsullied stop a pair of paces behind Danaerys, stamping the butts of their spears against the ground to announce their presence. She does not turn to greet them, eyes on her children. Of another world she seems: eyes a deep violet in the morning sun, hair long and bright as though spun from silver itself, cheeks fine boned and delicate and steel.

A scion of old valyria that was, Jon thinks silently. He steps forward until he is beside her, and turns his own gaze to her dragons. The green one bites a hunk of flesh and tears it from the carcass as easily as though it were wet parchment, flame lapping between his teeth. And these fire made flesh.

“Which do you wish me to ride?” He asks.

“Whichever will let you.” Daenerys casts him a long, measuring glance, the tilt of her face effortlessly regal. “The black is Drogon, for my husband that was; the green Rhaegal, and the white Viserion. Both named for my brothers.”

The pale one tears one of the seared bulls in two and drags the carcass away from his brothers. Jon clenches his jaw, the pulse of his blood loud in his ears. There’s no use in fear now, bastard. You’ve come too far.

All three dragons raise their heads as Jon begins across the camp, three pairs of eyes like molten gold fixing on him. Fire seethes in the nostrils of the black one, but it makes no move to loose it, and Jon forces himself to ignore it and meet the eyes of the pale one. Viserion, he reminds himself.

Viserion’s neck, long and serpentine, curves as Jon stops before him, feral and unblinking gold eyes fixed on him. Slowly, carefully, Jon reaches out a hand to touch his scales, runs his hands over the white scales like he would a horse. Scales hot as forge-fire rasp beneath his fingers as they twitch over muscle, but Viserion does not lash out, and Jon holds tight to that knowledge as he reaches up and jumps onto the joint of neck and wing.

Viserion hisses, and before Jon has a chance to fully find his seat, vaults into the air, wings spreading wide and air whistling past Jon’s ears. Terror and joy fill Jon as the ground below pulls away sharply, gone in a heartbeat as Viserion’s wings beat and take them higher and higher until it the camp below is a green field littered with figures small as grains of sand.

Wind whips at Jon’s hair, and he can feel his eyes tearing up at the sting, but he has never felt more alive. A grin tears at his cheeks, heart beating against his breastbone in rhythm to the flap of Viserion’s wings as though they were one, silent and powerful and whole as though a part of him had been cut out long ago and only now found again.

A long soaring circle he and Viserion make around Volantis before alighting on the courtyard before Danaerys again. Jon leans forward, pats Viserion’s neck, and cannot himself from grinning down at Danaerys. “Is that flight enough to spare my life?”

Daenarys gives him a long, measuring look. “For now.”

---

They stay in Volantis a few days more. Some of the newly freed slaves decide to leave with Danaerys, but most stay behind, taking the halls and palaces of their former masters for their own. They raise their voices in cheers as Danaerys flies over the city a last time, the black wings of Drogon stark against the blue sky.

Jon watches from the ground as their cries fill the air, a pair of Unsullied standing a few paces behind him, faces impassive and spears straight. Since his flight they have shadowed him everywhere. Guards, Danaerys had called them, and it had been on the tip of Jon’s tongue to ask whether they guard him from knives or escaping, but he’d remained silent. It doesn’t matter. Not if it returns me to you, Sansa.

Half a thousand ships Danaery’s fleet must be, and from a dozen cities, but even still they are barely enough for her armies, each groaning under the weight of thousands of Unsullied and Dothraki and freedmen. The largest ship, a flat decked Quartheen galley immense as the Red Keep itself, Danaery’s takes for her own, deck cleared for her dragons to prowl. Inside are a palace of rooms, and a chamber larger than the one he had at the Red Keep she gifts to Jon.

He spends little of his time in it. Each morning Danaerys has him join her in long looping flights over rippling blue waves and the craggy shores of Essos, she on Drogon and he on Viserion, white and black shadows soaring high overhead as the wind whips their hair and Jon’s fingers grow numb even in his gloves. Still a fierce joy fills him as they fly, the same beat in his chest as that first time. With each flight he can feel himself settling deeper into Viserion’s saddle, feel the pale beast grow more responsive to his commands until at times he cannot tell where he ends and where Viserion begins, cannot tell whether it is through man or dragon that he looks down at the world.

“You love her then?” Daenerys asks one day after a long flight as she jumps off Drogon and peels off her gloves. “Your sister?”

Would fucking me keep you true? Jon eyes Danaerys impassively, face still tingling and half numb from the whipping wind. “Why do you ask?”

“You spoke of her when first we met.” Danaerys finishes peeling off her gloves and splashes her face with the bowl of water one of her freedmen offers her. She wipes it dry with a silver and gold cloth. “You said every night your king graces her with bruises. That that was proof enough for why you would turn your cloak and betray him.”

“Would it not for you?”

“I have no sister.”

“You had a brother though.” Jon runs his hand along Viserion’s scales. “You said he was named for one.”

“Viserys.” Jon glances over to see a strangely wistful expression on Danaerys’ face. “I loved him, but he was a cruel creature. He spent too long running from the Usurpers hired knives, fleeing from city to city, and it turned him mad. It was he that sold me to Khal Drogo for an army. When I begged Viserys not to marry me to him, he took my face between his hands and smiled at me and told me he would let all ten thousand Dothraki and the horses of their khalasar mount me if it was what it took to return our home to us. And when Khal Drogo used me poorly he never raised a hand to stop him.”

Drogon’s head curves beside Danaerys, yellow eyes gleaming balefully at Jon, and she absentmindedly lays a hand on his head as she gazes out at the waves in the distance, lost in her thoughts. I’m sorry, Jon thinks of saying, but he knows just how little and worthless the words are. And Danaerys is not one to take kindly to pity.

“My brother was not like you, Jon Snow.” Danaerys turns her gaze to Jon, eyes thoughtful. They linger on him a moment before rising to Viserion, tracing the way the pale dragon’s white scales glitter in the sun. “It’s right that you ride him. Together we will rain ruin on the Usurper’s son. And when that is done we will free your sister too.”

---

In the heat of midday Danaerys always retires below deck to deal with the sundry duties of a queen. Jon stands off to the side beside her sellsword captains and freedmen and bloodriders. Now and again she raises her voice and ask his opinion of one matter or another. Each time Jon answers simply, puts to use all he learned standing silent behind Sansa all those years in the Red Keep, wondering if this is some sort of test.

Days slip by and slowly Danaerys takes to inviting Jon back to her chamber afterwards. Warm gold light flickers along the walls as she reclines under a white lion skin and sips wine from far in the east that sits queer on Jon’s tongue. They talk of her rule in Slaver’s Bay, of Joffrey’s strength and follies, of his armies and hers and where the two will meet. 

And when they’ve each had their share of wine she tells him of her childhood in the Free Cities, of crossing the great grass sea in Khal Drogo’s khalasar, of her march through Slaver’s Bay and the long and bloody war to keep it. In turn Jon tells her of Winterfell and Kingslanding and the Red Keep. Sometimes it is on the tip of his tongue to tell her of Sansa, of long afternoons in her chambers watching thread turn to song between her fingers, of her teasing laugh and warm smile and blue eyes, but never does. It is not hers to know.

And on the nights when both their wine cups have ebbed low they sit in comfortable silence, the creak of the ship and lap of waves against its hull faint as they watch the flicker of light against the walls.

“If your sister should carry Joffrey’s child,” Danaerys says one night, breaking the silence. “It would-”

“She isn’t.”

Danaerys blinks, slow and serpentine. “If she should-”

Jon cuts her off with a sharp shake of his head. He meets her eyes, holds her gaze for a long moment. “She isn’t. I left her with enough moon tea for that.”

Danaerys blinks again. She tilts her head to the side. “Is there anything you wouldn’t do for your sister, Snow?”

A strange thing to love your sister, is it not. Unbidden Jaime’s words rise to Jon’s mind. The taste of them is bitter, and Jon stares down at the wine dregs at the bottom of his cup. The question shivers through Jon, echoes in some hollow in his chest that can never be filled, and he tosses his head back and drains the wine cup without answering Danaerys.

---

A wolf dream comes to him that night, the first since he left Kingslanding: through pine and oak and brush he lopes, grey sister racing beside him, the moon hanging huge and round and silver in the sky above. Around them leaves rustle in the wind and a strange scent fills the air like freshly fallen rain. Upon a long grey rock he and his sister skid to a halt and throw back their heads to howl up at the moon, long and keening and lonely, a question without words.

Come back, murmurs the moon in answer. Come back to me.

---

They curve north around the Disputed Lands, a fleet of ships six hundred strong and stuffed with sellswords and freedmen and Unsullied, envoys from Lys and Myr and Tyrosh sailing forth to hail the Mother of Dragons.

The envoy from Lys is silver haired and slender and promises her that their magisters have freed every slave in the city in celebration of the Breaker of Chains; the envoy from Myr assures her of the same and boasts that the celebration of the newly freed slaves fill the air with song that can be heard miles off shore; not to be outdone, the Tyroshi envoy sweeps off the queer hat from his head and bows so low his green mustachios touch the deck as he swears that the Archon of Tyrosh in his wisdom has struck the shackles from their slaves and sent chests of gold and silver to thank her for showing their city the folly of its ways.

Danaerys listens to each politely. She accepts their gifts and muses to them that once she has won back her throne she will have to fly to their cities to see the joy of their former slaves. All three envoys pale at her response, but only bow low and assure her that their city will be honored to greet her.

“Slavers all of them,” she tells Jon later as they stand on the deck of the ship looking out to the faint shape of the shore in the distance, his Unsullied guards long gone. Her lips twist with disgust. “The same fat men as the wise masters of Slaver’s Bay. They think me only a young girl, foolish enough to believe them. But there will be time enough to visit their cities once I sit the Iron Throne.”

Jon leans back on the rail of the deck. He studies her: studies where she stands facing the wind, silver hair streaming behind her in the salt wind, face regal and fierce and is otherworldly as though she were the ship’s figurehead turned to flesh. “Why take such care?” He asks, blunter than he should. “If you mean to take the Iron Throne, why free the slaves of cities you will never see again?”

Though he half expects her to lash out, Danaerys merely smiles faintly, sadly. “I was a slave once. Not in name perhaps, but I was sold the same as one. No man or woman or child should be bought and sold like that. They are my children, all the slaves of this world.” She shakes her head. “I fought for them in Mereen for six bloody years: the Sons of the Harpy, the Wise Masters of Yunkai, the Spicer’s Guild of Quarth, the khalasars of Morro and Jhaqo and Bharbo. Each I drowned in Drogon’s flame, but always more came. Valyria may have fallen long ago, but its slaving spirit will never rest. Essos will never be free of slavers. Not unless I wish to burn all of it to the ground and be queen of ashes and charred meat. But Westeros… Westeros is my home, and perhaps it can be a home to my children as well.”

Jon turns and rests his forearms on the rail of the deck, gazes out at the sea shoulder to shoulder with Danaerys. Is it such a strange thought? Nymeria and her ten thousand ships did the same once to escape the slaving might of old valyria. She wed Mors Martell and sent seven dornish kings to the Wall in gold chains.

“We should not fly Drogon and Viserion any longer,” he says abruptly. “There’s a better use for them.”

“What use? These free cities may have been cowed for now, but it is good for their slaving masters to know the fear of a dragon wing sweeping overhead.”

Jon shakes his head. And he tells her: tells her the plan slowly formed in the back of his mind since the first moment he saw Viserion soaring high above Volantis.

Danaerys listens silently, and when he’s done casts him a curious glance. “It seems I gained more than simply a rider for Viserion when I spared your life, Snow. We will do as you say.”

---

A week later they siege Dragonstone.

Into the salt spray the Unsullied splash in under the dawn light, a shield wall five men deep, but no knights or bannermen sally forth from the great looming shape of the castle rising high above them, battlements cutting the sky like knives of fused black stone, the twisting shapes of stone dragons dancing across its parapets and merlons.

In the dawn light the Unsullied begin to erect a wooden palisade, but Jon does not join them. Instead he stands on the deck of Daenerys’ ship, hand resting on the pommel of the sword he left Kingslanding with, eyes turned to watch the blue sky. The day is fair and cloudless, and it does not take him long to find what he is looking for: the black speck of a raven jumping into the sky from the highest tower of Dragonstone.

The match is struck. A shiver prickles through Jon as he watches the raven streak westward toward Kingslanding. And now the fire catches.

---

Joffrey answers five days later with a fleet seventy strong: dromonds from Kingslanding, carracks from the Reach, and even kraken-prowed longships from the Iron Islands.

“Keep Rhaegal’s chains tight,” Danaerys orders as she pulls on a pair of supple leather gloves and strides across the deck to Drogon. Around her freedmen rush to stash spare cargo below deck and lash down sailing lines. “Once he tastes flame on the wind he will want to loose his own and won’t know our ships from theirs if let into the sky.”

The almond skinned Unsullied Jon has come to learn is named Grey Worm bows his head in a nod. “It will be done as you say, Khaleesi.”

Danaerys climbs astride Drogon and begins to strap herself into his saddle. She casts Jon a swift glance. “They did as you said they would. So close packed they’ll be kindling for each other once one is alight.”

“We still have to take care.” Jon doesn’t take his eyes from the horizon. Tension like a plucked wire thrums beneath his skin as he gazes out over the waves to the faint shape of sails in the distance. For all his hours in the training yard, for all his skill with a sword, for all his years standing guard in the Kingsguard, this will be the first time he’ll fight a true battle. Don’t let me fail you now, Sansa. “A stray scorpion bolt was all it took to fell one of Aegon’s dragons.”

“You worry too much, Snow.” The hint of a grin twists Danaerys’ lips, fierce and feral, and she tightens the last strap of her saddle. “You are sure your king will be among them?”

Jon nods. He prays he’s right, prays he knows Sansa well enough. You were always cleverer than me. It would take little urging on her part to convince Joffrey that no true king would stay behind from battle and let others defeat a foreign conqueror come to usurp him. A foreign conqueror whose tales of dragons were false. After all, if she had such weapons why would she siege Dragonstone and not simply use them to take it? “King Robert’s Hammer is three hundred oars strong,” he answers Danaerys. “Joffrey will have taken it for his own.”

Danaerys nods and dips her head to murmur in Valyrian. Drogon’s legs coil and heave and he lets loose a roar as he surges upward, sound filling the air as his vast winged shape fills the sky.

Beneath Jon Viserion shifts, white scales rippling over whipcord muscle, restless to join his brother in the sky, to rip and tear and roast, to loose the flame Jon can taste sweet as though it were on his own tongue. Fire made flesh, Valyria of old had called its dragons, and in this moment Jon understands exactly how true the name is, the furnace heat burning beneath scale and muscle, the power rippling beneath him.

Seven save me, Jon prays to gods that are not his own. But when he lets his eyes shut he sees not the seven, but Sansa: face soft in the evening light, eyes blue as mountain springs as she tilts her face up to him, red hair playing in the breeze as she cocks her head to the side and meets his eyes with a faint and curious smile. What is it, Jon?

Jon opens his eyes, kicks his heels, and Viserion surges into the sky.

Chapter Text

The sky is a dark and weeping wound of red sunset and black smoke when Jon descends on King Robert’s Hammer.

Alone among the fleet that had sailed forth from Kingslanding it stands untouched by flame, a great plow of oak and timber among a field of charred and smoking hulks. Not a single arrow greets Jon as he alights on its deck though, Lannister soldiers throwing down their swords. A few take the knee. All have seen the fire that has consumed the ships around them, are half deaf from the blast of flame, any loyalty to their king consumed in the inferno around them.

And too they feel the shadow of Drogon’s wings overhead as Danaerys circles the ship in lazy spirals.

Jon jumps down from Viserion, gritting his teeth to keep his legs from giving out beneath him. He cannot show weakness now no matter he wishes he could sink to his knees and close his eyes and never open them. He knows what he would see: the flash and plume of dragon flame, the numb furnace heat of it against his face, the taste of Dracarys on his tongue. Better one battle than a hundred, Jon tells himself. Ruthlessly, he shoves down the rising tide of sick threatening to choke him. Better one slaughter than a war of them.

“I thought never to see you again, Snow.” A voice rings across the deck. Jaime Lannister, white armor tarred with grey ash carried by the wind, pushes his way through the crowd of soldiers. There is a sword in his hand, naked steel bloody under the red sky, and a hard smile on his lips. His eyes glitter as his gaze moves over the vast serpentine white shadow that is Viserion. “And now the bastard traitor returns with a dragon.”

Once Jaime’s words would’ve stung Jon, but the blast of dragon flame is still behind his eyes, the dull singing heat of it against his skin. “Where is he?” He asks in a soft voice that nonetheless rings across the hall. “Where is Joffrey?”

“Why? Have you come to beg his forgiveness?” Jaime offers Jon a mocking smile. “I’ve killed one dragon before, you know. I can kill another.”

“You killed a mad old man. This one breathes flame. Where is he, Lannister?”

“Your king, you mean?” Jaime shrugs. “We Kingsguard swear an oath, you know. And some of us stand by that oath.”

“As you did with Aerys? Is Joffrey any better a king than he? I know you have no love for him.” Jon clenches his jaw, teeth aching as though biting stone. “He won’t be harmed. Not by my hand, and not by Daenerys. You have my oath on it.”

“What good is a bastard’s oath?” Jaime weighs the sword in his hand. “I always knew we would meet on the field of battle one day, Snow.” His eyes glitter as he looks over Viserion. “Will you face me without that beast of yours? Sword against sword? Kingsguard brother against kingsguard brother?”

“I was never your brother. Move aside, Jaime. Live to see Cersei again.”

“And what will my sweet sister say when I return to her? What will she say when I tell her I let her son be roasted alive by some bastard and his dragon whore from the east? Will she thank me for it, do you think? Open her legs and urge me inside her?” Jaime’s smile is hard, eyes flat and dead. “No, bastard. I think not. Your sister may love you for slaying her child, but mine will not.”

Above Drogon circles and below waves lap against the hall of the ship, gently rocking it. Jaime looks behind him, westward over the waves to Kingslanding. “Will you face me sword to sword, bastard?”

Once Jon would’ve drawn his sword in answer, met Jaime’s steel with his own like a knight in a song, once when he had nothing but honor to live for. When he was nothing but a bastard boy who desperately wished to be more, when he would’ve given anything he had to have the taint washed from his name. Before he had anything else.

Before Sansa.

Jaime whirls and springs across the deck, and Jon answers with a word, the sound of his voice lost to the roar of fire as Viserion opens his jaws and looses a blast of flame.

---

Afterwards the crew drag Joffrey up to the deck, stripped of his sword and gold armor and bound hand and foot. His eyes go round as he catches sight of the smoking body on the deck before Jon. “I’ll have your head for this, bastard,” he spits, “you and your whore sister both.”

Jon looks coldly down at Joffrey as the Lannister sailors dump him onto the deck before him. Stripped of his crown and throne he looks nothing like a king. Years of anger shoved down again and again fill Jon as he looks at Joffrey, bubble up like mud between cobbles, every bruise that has ever bloomed across Sansa’s skin before his eyes, and the sudden unfairness of what Joffrey has taken from her rips Jon’s breath away, the laughing and smiling girl he’d crushed beneath his heel for no other reason than because he could.

Behind Jon Viserion hisses, the sound slitting his skin. The urge to loose flame pulses through Jon’s veins, a drumbeat in his blood. He can taste the sulphur on his tongue; the sweet blister of flame it would be so easy for Viserion to loose on the pink golden haired thing writhing before him, to breathe in and relish the taste of charred meat, to-

Come back to me. The words are soft as silk, soft as Sansa’s voice, soft as the brush of her fingers across his cheek. Come back to me, Jon.

It would be right to end Joffrey here and now, watch him dance and scream as flame consumes him. It would be right. It would be just. But it would mean war. It would mean Jon could never come back.

“I am the rightful king,” Joffrey is babbling, flecks of spit flying from his lips. “Touch a hair on my head and all the realm will rise against your dragon whore. Her dragons will be nothing before the thousands my grandfather raises. He will drown her in swords, will slaughter her eunuchs and butcher her dragons and sew her whore head to-”

“Do not fear, your grace.” Jon interrupts, voice an icy blade that cuts through Joffrey’s babbling. “Danaerys does not mean to take your head. In her wisdom she’s ordered me to take you to the Wall and allow you to take the Black.”

“And why would I do that, bastard?” Joffrey laughs, high and sneering. “And how will we reach it? A hundred thousand Lannister swords lie between here and the Wall. They will free me long before we reach it.”

“A thousand or a hundred thousand swords,” Jon says in a voice cold enough to blister skin, striding forward and yanking Joffrey to his feet, “make no difference beneath dragon wing.”

Joffrey struggles, trying to slam his shoulder into Jon, but the move is panicked and clumsy and Jon answers by driving his elbow into the side of Joffrey’s head, a savage pleasure coursing through him at the crack of bone on bone.

Not one of the Lannister sailors move to stop Jon as he drags a weakly struggling Joffrey back across the deck to Viserion. It makes Jon’s skin crawl to even touch him, but he heaves Joffrey atop Viserion and lashes him to the horn of the saddle like. He jumps up behind him and belts himself into the saddle before kicking his heels and urging Viserion up into the sky.

Wind whistles by Jon’s ears as Viserion gains height, the deck of the ship pulling away swiftly and dizzyingly until it’s nearly lost among the smoking hulls scattering the water around it. Jon joins Danaerys slow banking circle. The wind whipping by makes it impossible to speak, but they trade a nod between them. Danaerys breaks her circle and Drogon’s wings beat the air as she pushes him west towards Kingslanding.

Come back to me, whispers the wind. But he can’t. Not yet. And so instead of following Danaerys, Jon turns Viserion north.

---

Over rocky coasts of crashing waves and smooth black sand Viserion flies, his wings eating the miles beneath them, covering in days the distance that should take weeks. The first day Joffrey struggles until his wrists are raw and bloody from struggling at the ropes around them, spitting and screaming curses and threats at Jon, but when Jon does not answer and his voice turns hoarse he stops struggling.

All day Jon spends in the saddle, face numb and stinging from wind, alone but for Joffrey and Viserion and the small ant-sized figures that sometimes scatter below when they catch sight of Viserion’s white wings. They keep to the coast, soaring above Gulltown and the Vale and the Fingers. Each day the air is chiller than the day before, and each day the land beneath Jon returns to the one he left so long ago like peeling paint from a wall, snow blanketing the ground in white and trees turning to tall pines and broad leafed oaks. North they fly; north over White Harbor and the Dreadfort and Last Hearth, north over villages and abandoned holdfasts and still blue lakes until far in the distance Jon catches sight of the glittering white ice of the Wall.

The sun is setting as Viserion alights on the ground before Castle Black, snow hissing and melting beneath his talons. Jon’s boots keep away the worst of the slush as he jumps down from Viserion and frees Joffrey, pulling the prince unceremoniously from the saddle. Joffrey staggers and stumbles, and Jon pushes him to his knees, clamps a hand on his shoulder to keep him from rising.

And then, facing Castle Black with Joffrey on his knees and Viserion at his back, Jon waits.

Three black clad figures are what Castle Black eventually spit out. As they cross the snow swept ground Jon picks out the differences between them: one is fat and round and with a maester’s chain around his neck, another a knight before the black if his haughty bearing is any sign, and last the tall figure of Benjen Stark.

The three brothers of the Night’s Watch stop before Jon, the fat one’s eyes wide and round as he stares at Viserion above Jon, the dragon’s neck curving serpentine as he studies the three men with his gold eyes. Benjen tears his eyes from Viserion. “Jon?” He says warily, studying Jon’s face as if he does not quite believe it. “How…?”

“A long story.” Jon pushes Joffrey forward into the snow. “I’ve brought you a new recruit.”

“I’ll never speak the words, bastard,” Joffrey spits, legs trembling as he pushed himself to his feet. “You can’t force me. I’m the king.”

“You will. You will take the black, because if you do not, I will wash you in dragon flame.” It is easy after so long in the saddle and days without true sleep for Jon to unfocus his eyes and see through Viserion’s. The dragon’s pale neck curves like a snake as it loops to fix Joffrey with its golden gaze. “And you will take the black because you are a coward, Joffrey. You always have been. We both know that. So choose: dragonflame or Wall, fire or ice.”

Joffrey’s mouth gapes like a fish on land, working soundlessly. He licks his lips and glances at the Wall, then blanches when his eyes flit to Viserion. “I won’t.”

“You will.” Jon’s voice is cold despite the taste of sulfur on his tongue, the searing heat screaming to be loosed. “Or you won’t, and I will finally hear you scream for all you’ve done. Choose flame and I will gladly watch you dance as your skin blackens and blisters and bursts for what you did to Sansa.”

Joffrey’s mouth continues to work soundlessly and Jon jerks his chin at Benjen and the other Night’s Watch men. “You should take his grace back to Castle Black before he wets himself, I think.”

Chapter Text

A week Jon stays at Castle Black, just long enough to see Joffrey kneel in the sept and spit out an oath to the seven to serve the realm, to forsake all lands and titles, to never sire sons or know a woman’s touch.

“You might take the black yourself.” Benjen says to Jon as Jon saddles Viserion, breath misting in the chill morning air. “If the Lannisters should defeat your Targaryen queen they will take your head for what you’ve done.”

“They’ll try.” Jon looks out at the walls and tower of Castle Black, the black brothers giving him and Viserion a wide berth. In another world this would have been my life. The thought is a strange one: to never have gone south, to never have been knighted, to never have grown to know Sansa. Who would I be if I had stayed? “But it will not come to that.”

 “I hope you’re right.” Benjen studies Jon as he would a stranger, careful and distant.  I am a stranger to him, Jon realizes suddenly, the thought a dull stab. Stranger and turncloak, dragonrider and traitor. “For your sake.”

Jon nods silently and pulls himself up onto Viserion’s back. He turns his voice hard. “If Joffrey deserts I will find him. Tell him that. Tell him that no matter how fast or far he runs I will find him.”

Benjen nods, and then there is nothing else to be said. Viserion spreads his wings and leaps into the sky.

---

All day and all night Jon flies, Viserion’s wide wings coasting along the cold air, and come the dawn Jon catches sight of Winterfell, the sky orange and purple as the sun rises behind it. Around Winterfell a great host of tents has been raised, men already beginning to wake and stumble out among them. All the strength of the North Jon recognize them as, the flags flapping below too small to make out but for their colors: Bolton pink, Umber red, Karstark white on black.

Jon guides Viserion in three long, lazy circles around Winterfell. When he’s sure they’ve been seen, the figures within the castle’s courtyard scurrying like ants from a kicked nest, does he guide Viserion to land in Winterfell’s courtyard, alighting before the figures hurrying back and forth have a chance to do more than gape up at the white winged shape above them.

The gathered Stark bannermen do not flee, though most stumble back and grab at swords and spears. Jon jumps down from Viserion and fixes the nearest with a steely gaze. “Where is lord Stark?”

“Jon?” Tall and broad Robb has grown since Jon left him all those years ago, face that of a man instead of a boy, but his red Tully hair is unmistakable as he strides forward. He glances at Viserion as though he doesn’t quite believe what he’s seeing, and Jon has the urge to stride forward and embrace him, the brother he has not seen for so many years. But before he has a chance to take a step, Robb’s eyes flick from Viserion to him, a hard distant look in them. “They said you’d broken your vows and turned your cloak, but I didn’t believe it. I told father that it must be a lie, that you would never betray the realm for some mad Targaryen queen.”

The words sting, but Jon forces his voice even. “I did what I had to. Joffrey was a worse king than Danaerys will ever be.”

“And Sansa?” Robb’s eyes flash. “What do you think will happen to her? Do you think your foreign queen will be merciful to a traitor one? Did you think of her at all before you ran off?”

There’s no way for Robb to know: not when he’s never been south, not when all he knows of Sansa is a raven now and again, a formal missive or three, but fury still fills Jon. “ Everything I’ve done is for her,” Jon answers coldly. “You have no idea what I’ve given for her.”

“Was breaking your-”

“Stop it, both of you.” A slim and dark haired figure slips out from the circle of bannermen and moves between Robb and Jon. Arya glares at Robb, then pivots to look at Jon. “I knew you would come,” she says. For a moment it seems like she’s going to run and throw her arms around him just as when she was young, but something bitter flickers over her face. “You have to talk to father, don’t you?”

Jon nods.

“He’s in the main keep.” Arya purses her lips as she looks up at Viserion behind him. “Can your dragon be left alone?”

---

In the warm of his father’s solar Jon tells them of all that’s passed in the years since Ned and Arya left for the north, forces himself to push the words between his teeth. He holds little back: tells of Sansa’s bruises and silences, of Joffrey’s follies and tyrannies, of his own journey eastward and Danaerys Stormbon, Mother of Dragons and first of her name. Ned listens silent and impassive to all Jon has to say, Robb clenches his jaw tight enough to crack teeth, and Arya is pacing back and forth in the room like a cat in a cage by the end.

“The Wall is too good for Joffrey,” she snarls as soon as Jon’s voice trails away. “You should’ve roasted him alive, Jon.”

“Arya,” Robb snaps, but his own face is tight. He glances at Jon, gaze guarded and curious. “Why didn’t you?”

“If I had it would’ve raised every sword from Kingslanding to Casterly Rock.”

“They’ll rise all the same for Tommen.” Robb’s face twists in an ugly expression. “And to think we were to ride to his aid.”

Despite the weariness of flying all day and the lulling warmth of the fire blazing in the far wall, Jon forces his voice strong as he turns to his father. “Wait to march south. A week, perhaps two. That’s all I ask. A raven will come from Kingslanding before that.”

Ned doesn’t answer immediately, eyes studying Jon in the same distant and unreadable way as Benjen’s had, and the same knife as before stabs through Jon, no longer dull but keen and cruel. I’m still your son, he wishes he could plead, I did what I had too. But he is a man grown and it is too late for petty reasons or excuses.

“Do you ask,” Ned says finally, “or does Danearys Targaren?”

Jon draws himself up, uses the last of the strength in him to meet his father’s hard grey eyes. I did what I had too. “I do, father.”

Ned studies him another long moment, then nods. “So be it.”

---

The raven takes less time than Jon thought to arrive, its black wings sweeping over Winterfell’s walls the next day. It bears word from Kingslanding, and in his father’s solar, Jon listens beside his father and siblings as maester Luwin reads out a decree from king Joffrey himself: that in penance for his father’s betrayal and crimes against the Targaryen royal family he has taken the black in atonement, and that Danaerys Targareyn is now the rightful queen of the Seven Kingdoms.

Jon studies the red and cracked wax of the king’s seal as Luwin speaks.

All he hears is Sansa.

---

Another letter comes a few days later. It bears no seal, only a few scant words inked in a graceful hand. Kingslanding is Daenerys’, it reads. She’s to wed Tommen. Stay in the north, Jon.

---

Weeks turn to months, and each day brings new word from the south: that Dorne and the Reach and the Stormlands have pledged themselves to Danaerys. Bitter rumblings come from the Westerlands, but Danaerys flies to Casterly Rock to treat with Tywin and his war is done before it is begun. In the weeks that follow one by one the northern lords disband from around Winterfell, folding their tents and returning to their holds and keeps and castles.

Jon stays at Winterfell as Sansa’s letter bade him. It is strange to walk the halls of the castle he once called home, to speak to those he once knew. But it is sweet to speak to Arya again, to muss her hair even though she’s grown taller, to call her little sister and see how skilled she’s become with a sword. To see how tall Rickon has grown and speak with Bran, now a maester of the Citadel, and meets Robb’s Karstark wife and little Rickard, his shy and Tully haired son.

Meeting the boy brings a smile to Jon’s lips, but it is a small, sad thing. It should be you here, Sansa, he thinks silently. Not me.

---

Months pass, and each morning Jon takes Viserion on long, slow flights beyond Winterfell’s walls, pine and oak blurring beneath his white wings, cold wind whipping Jon’s face.

Ned is waiting in Winterfell’s courtyard one day when he returns, long and impassive face tilted upward to watch Viserion’s descent. He holds out a scroll to Jon as he jumps down beside him. “It names the Starks as warden of the north,” he answers Jon’s questioning look. “It pardons me for my part in the rebellion and confirms all my lands and titles.”

Jon nods as he unravels the scroll, fingers still tingling from the whip of wind. “I had Danaerys swear she would.”

“I know.”

Jon raises an eyebrow as he looks for himself over the words inked across the rough vellum. “She said so?”

“She didn’t need to.” Jon glances up to see his father studying him. Whatever he’s looking for he seems to find, gaze moving to where Viserion coils behind Jon. “It’s past time I told you.”

“Told me?”

His father gives him a long, sad look. “Of your mother.”

---

For hours they talk: of a rebellion and a mad king, of a song of ice and fire, of Lyanna and Rhaegar and a tower called Joy. When their words have run dry Jon leaves his father’s solar and crosses to the rookery. He writes a short, swift letter, rolls it tight, and hands it to maester Luwin.

Jon watches the raven take flight, black wings flapping as it speeds into the sky and turns south. He stays watching the sky long after the raven is vanished, the cawing and crowing and chatter of the rookery around him a distant crackle. And who am I now, Sansa? A part of him whispers silently, an aching pang in his chest. Who am I to you? Who was I ever?

---

Danaerys letter in answer is short. It affirms him as her blood and heir until such time as she has issue of her own. Jon gazes down at the scroll for a long time, paper rasping beneath his fingertips as he wonders how many of the words are Daenerys’ and how many Sansa’s.

---

That night, for the first time since he came north, Jon dreams of being a wolf again. The old familiar scents and smells fill his nose, the same thrill as he runs beside his grey sister, the same silver moon dipping to watch them.

Come back to me, it murmurs. Come back to me, Jon.

---

It’s been nearly half a year since he came to Winterfell, Jon aloft on Viserion, when he sees a procession making its way up the Kingsroad. He circles it twice, taking in the red and black snapping pennants of the queen’s colors, before taking a long looping flight back to Winterfell.

He lands in the Winterfell courtyard just as the gates have begun to grind open. With wind numbed hands he drops down from dragonback and stands watching as through the gate a pair of dothraki ride. Jon’s heart pounds in his ears, but he finds himself unable to move as behind them trundles a wheelhouse, wheels churning the frigid ground as it comes to a halt inside the walls.

Sansa does not see Jon as she steps down from the wheelhouse, and for a long moment Jon can do no more than simply stare as she shakes out her skirts: chest too tight to breathe, heart thudding against his ribcage, unable to do more than drink in the rosy flush of her cheeks and muted fire of her hair and wide blue of her eyes, how young and hesitant she looks as she tilts her head back to stare at the high towers of Winterfell above her, here in their home for the first time since they searched for Arya in this same courtyard so many years before.

Behind Jon Viserion shifts, scales rasping, and Sansa’s eyes fly to him. She catches her bottom lip between her teeth on an indrawn breath, face draining of color. Her eyes snap to Jon.

And before Jon can react she is running across the yard, throwing herself at him and he’s sweeping her up in his arms, clutching her to him, the sweet and spring scent of her filling his nose, the shape of her soft and warm and achingly slender in his arms, all the rest of the world lost to him as he buries his face in her hair and murmurs a hundred meaningless words into it, a broken litany of apologies and promises and pleas.

“I’m sorry,” he realizes he’s whispering again and again, throat burning, tongue tangling over the words, “I tried to come back to you, Sansa, I did, but I couldn’t, I-”

“You did what you had to, Jon.” Sansa pushes him back just enough to stare up at him, eyes a blue he’d thought he’d never see again, shining fierce and wet with tears. “You did what you had to, and we’re home now, Jon. We’re home.”

Chapter Text

Later Jon remembers little of the morning but for flashes: Arya embracing Sansa like the two had never once fought as children, Robb grinning and lifting her by the waist to twirl her in a circle, Bran half rising from his chair to embrace her, Catelyn clutching Sansa to her as tears streamed down her face. Through it all Jon stayed at her shoulder, every time he’d begun to hang back Sansa’s hand finding his and tugging him close beside her.

But it is only hours later, before the flickering fire of Sansa’s chamber, that the two of them are truly alone again.

One by one the other Starks had drifted away: Arya first, yawning and complaining, followed by Rickon pushing Bran’s wheeled chair, then Robb and his Karstark wife with little Rickard asleep and snoring faintly on his shoulder. Ned and Catelyn left last, Ned clasping Jon’s arm as Catelyn embraced Sansa a last time, whispering words into her hair too soft for Jon to make out. Finally they too had left though, leaving only Jon and Sansa and the yellow flicker of fire along the walls.

Sansa curls in a chair a few feet from Jon, her red hair burning in the firelight as she watches the fire with half lidded eyes. She stirs eventually, eyes tilting to Jon, and he realizes he’s been staring, though for how long he does not know.

“I thought Danaerys would order me south again,” he says quietly, the first words he’s spoken in hours. “For Viserion if nothing else.”

The ghost of something passes over Sansa’s eyes. “Did you want her to?”

Jon shakes his head and leans forward, forearms on his knees, hands idling playing with his empty wine cup. He can see it still sometimes: the swirling gold and red and orange of dragonflame as it washed over Joffrey’s ships, feel again the roar of flames oven-hot against his skin, the crack and scream of wood as ships burst in gouts of flame like ripe red berries beneath a giant’s heel. “If I could I’d never go south again.”

“Truly?” Sansa looks down. “You told me once that Winterfell had never been your home, that as a bastard-”

“I was wrong.” Jon laughs, unable to keep out the bitter note. “I was young and sullen and knew no better.” The laugh dies as he gazes at the fire. “Winterfell will always be my home,” he says eventually, “even if I never truly have a place here as a Targaryen.”

“You do.” Sansa reaches for his hand and clasps it tightly. “Don’t ever say you don’t, Jon. Your dragon blood- I don’t care about it. In all the ways that matter you’re a Stark, Jon. You’ve always been a Stark. And you’ll always have a place here.”

Something hitches in her voice, and she swallows. “It’s what I asked her for,” she says softly, hesitant, unsure. “Your aunt. I asked her to let you stay in the north. To let me come back to you. That was my price for everything I did for her. For convincing Tommen to wed her, for quieting the lords in their anger, for all the letters I wrote on her behalf. That I could come back to you. That we could stay here in the north. I know- I know I should’ve asked if it was what you wanted-”

She makes to pull away, and Jon catches her fingers in his, squeezes them fiercely. “It was,” he whispers hoarsely, a raw warmth blooming through his chest as he gazes into her eyes. “It is.”

---

Months pass. Each morning before dawn Jon takes Viserion for long flights over pine and brush, snow glittering in plains of diamonds beneath them as it catches the rising light. And each morning Sansa is standing in the yard when he returns, red hair whipping around her face at the stroke of Viserion’s wings as he lands before her. Each morning she smiles at Jon as he jumps down, takes his arm, and together they make their way to the main hall to break their fast on oats and honey and bread piping hot from the ovens.

Arya joins them sometimes, though each time with a queer look. She’s not the only one puzzled by their closeness, Jon knows. It’s there too in the knit of Robb’s forehead when Sansa laughs at something Jon says, the purse of Catelyn’s lips when Sansa touches his arm natural as though it were nothing, Ned’s slow blink when they invariably sit beside each other at meals. Much of Winterfell whispers at it. The way they never seem to be apart, the way they walk the halls together, the way he spends hours in her chamber even late into the night.

Jon cannot bring himself to care. Not after the Red Keep, not after his journey east, not after their year apart. All that could ever make him leave is if Sansa wished him to. And she never objects to his presence, always taking his arm and tucking her cold hands against his side as they walk the castle halls.

It still startles him sometimes, how different she is here in Winterfell: the softness in the blue wool of the dresses that fit her fine as any silk ever did, the play of her weirwood-red hair in the cool breeze. There are no purple and blue and yellow bruises to mottle her skin, the only blossoms that flush it the pink of her cheeks when she laughs with Robb’s Karstark wife or plays with little Rickard or catches Jon watching her. A vague heat tingles through Jon each time she does, but he does not look away as he once might have.

She deserves so much more than he can ever give.

---

Word trickles slowly up the kingsroad of the Dragon Queen’s reign: there are angry rumblings from the lords of the westerlands, but much of the realm seems content under her rule, the freedmen she brought with her raising new town and villages all across the crownlands.

One day a raven comes from the south announcing that lord Garlan Fossoway is to come to Winterfell. Jon frowns when he hears. “What would a reacher lord want this far north?”

Sansa tilts her head to the side. They are alone in her chamber, light spilling in from her window. “He expects to court me, I imagine.”

“His raven said that?”

“Not in so many words. He’s the first, but won’t be the last now that enough time has passed. Joffrey may not be dead, but taking the black is the same as death to a wedding vow. And though I may be a king’s widow, I’m still the daughter of a great house. Cousin to a dragonrider and the queen’s own blood, at that.”

Jon snorts. “Precious little that means.”

Sansa casts him a curious glance. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“I’m still who I was.” Jon shrugs. “Bastard Stark or bastard Targaryen, I’ll always be Snow.”

“No, I didn’t mean-” Sansa frowns and sets down her embroidery. “Jon, you know you’ll have suitors of your own soon, don’t you?”

Jon pauses. The thought is strange, foreign. For so long as a knight of the kingsguard he’d never thought to take a wife, and even as a child he’d never thought any woman would want some lord’s byblow, even if that lord was Eddard Stark. He shifts from one foot to the other, feeling suddenly foolish. “I hadn’t,” he admits. “I’m still a bastard.”

Sansa rolls her eyes. “To the royal family, and a dragonrider in your own right. Every maid in the seven kingdoms will come to court you, Jon, each more lovely than the last.” She picks back up her embroidery, voice lilting strangely light. “You’ll have the pick of any you like.”

Jon feels his cheeks heating though he doesn’t know why. He looks out Sansa’s window, turning his thoughts back to Garlan Fossoway’s raven. He expects to court me. He cannot imagine Winterfell without Sansa, without her laugh and voice and red hair, the castle somehow thin and dreary. But-

“It’s good,” he says abruptly despite the sudden hollow in his chest. “The reacher lord. You deserve happiness, Sansa. Deserve a tall and handsome lord who will make you laugh and give you all you’ve ever wanted.”

He expects Sansa to answer something clever or with another roll of her eyes, but after a moment when she says nothing, Jon looks to see her gazing down at her embroidery, fingers still. There is something uncannily familiar in that stillness, and Jon is crossing the room before he has a chance to stop himself, kneeling before where she sits just as he had a hundred times in her chambers in the Red Keep. “What is it?” He asks, tilting her face to him, very aware of how slim and delicate her jaw is under his fingers. “Tell me, Sansa.”

“I don’t want that lord.” The eyes Sansa turns to him are strangely fragile, as though with a wrong word they could shatter. “What I want- what I want is to never leave you, Jon. Not in this life. If I must marry, and if we truly are only cousins and you a Targaryen besides- I know for so long we’ve thought of each other as brother and sister, but if we were to- to-” Sansa swallows. “It would be strange for a time. I know that. But we could make each other happy, I know we could. Don’t we deserve that, Jon?”

Jon’s throat scrapes as he swallows and takes her hand in his. Perhaps it’s his dragon blood, perhaps it’s that they were never close as children, perhaps it’s that after all they’ve been through there are no walls between them any more, but the idea doesn’t fill him with disgust like it once might have. A strange feeling blooms through his chest in its place, warms and fills and hollows him all at once. “Jaime and Cersei…”

“What they did was wrong, but this doesn’t have to be. And if it is- you stood beside me when no one else would, Jon. All those fine knights and lords, not one raised a hand to stop Joffrey, not one could meet my eye. But you never looked away. Never wavered. Never ran.” Sansa squeezes his hand, eyes shining fierce. “You’re the only one I trust, Jon. You and only you. Is it so wrong that I should want that always? Want you beside me always?”

Jon looks down, throat aching. Cold and alone he’d felt in the year they were apart, as though a piece of him had been cut out without her voice and smile and twitch of her lips when she teased. Distantly, as though gazing at a far off horizon, he wonders how long he’s loved Sansa. Before or after she returned to Winterfell? Before or after he learned they were cousins? Jon shakes his head, knowing the answer doesn’t matter, and rubs his thumb against the side of her hand. “You could still have me beside you even without this, Sansa. I will never let any harm come to you again. And if you don’t wish to marry again I swear by the old gods and the new you’ll never be made to.”

Sansa’s face stills like a doe frozen in a glade, only the bob of her throat as she swallows betraying its stillness. “And if I said I still wanted you, Jon?” Her voice is barely a whisper. “If I said I’ve wanted you since that first moment I came back to Winterfell and saw you in the yard? That I don’t know how long I’ve wanted you?”

“Then I would tell you I meant what I said all those years ago.” Jon swallows, throat tight. “You are my heart, Sansa. You are all I have. All I want. If this is what you want, if you are sure-”

“-I am,” Sansa’s fingers tighten around his, “gods but I am Jon-”

“-then I’m yours.”

The sudden silence rings through the chamber. In it Jon gazes up at Sansa. Her lip is caught between her teeth as if on an indrawn breath she’s afraid of letting go, as if breathing out will shatter her. Jon’s heart throbs loud in his ears and he tugs her down, rests her forehead against his, skin warm and tingling. For a long time they stay like that, breath mingling in the cold, giddy and stone-still at once.

A smile tugs at Jon’s lips. “Arya won’t like it.”

“She won’t, will she?” Sansa giggles, girlish and bright, the sound almost startling. It’s a sound from a different life, a sound Jon hasn’t heard in years, not since they were children, not since before they went south, but in that moment Jon knows he will do anything to hear it again, knows he will spend all his life chasing it.

He shakes his head. “She’ll understand someday. I did.”

Sansa giggles again and they draw back. The sound fades as they gaze at each other. Every dip and curve and dimple of Sansa’s face Jon traces with his eyes, fills himself with the blue of her eyes and flush of her cheeks and shy of her smile. “I’ve loved you for a long time, Sansa,” he says hoarsely. “Gods forgive me, but I have.”

Sansa touches his cheek, fingertips a whisper. She smiles faintly, fondly. “There’s nothing to forgive, Jon.”

---

Years later the singers write songs of the White Wolf of Winterfell and his lady wife, of how after the day they wed they were never parted again. Anytime the wolf was called to Kingslanding he would fly dragonback with his lady wife behind him, and even years later during the Lannister rebellion she came with him west as he and queen Daenerys rained flame and ruin upon Tywin Lannister and his rebel lords.

But those times prince Jon and lady Sansa ventured south grew few and far between as the years passed and the realm prospered, preferring to stay in the cold north that was their home. Beloved by smallfolk and lords alike was lady Sansa, and if her lord husband was thought to be brooding and silent there was no denying the warmth in his eyes when he looked at his lady wife, the laughter that only she could tease from him, the smile that pulled at his lips when he drew her into his arms.

Three children they had, hail and hearty babes that grew into a pair of redheaded daughters and a silver haired son with the same long face as his father. Children of their own they had, and it was said that in prince Jon and lady Sansa’s later years Winterfell was filled with the running and shrieking of children at play, the two watching with quiet smiles as Snow and Stark mingled.

And even as they grew old, strands of silver threading lady Sansa’s red hair and prince Jon’s beard salting with grey, the two were often seen together walking Winterfell’s godswood or battlements, snow falling white and soft around them. And when death came for Jon, quiet and in the night, Sansa tarried behind only long enough to ensure that his bones were laid to rest in the crypts beneath Winterfell.

“This is where he belongs,” was all she would answer when asked, “this is his home.”