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A/N: To be perfectly honest, I’m new to this fandom and still kinda coming to terms with this ship and my feelings about it. But I opened a doc and this just came flying out. Hoping it will be a few chapters, but I’m not really sure how far I’ll be able to take things. This is a good intro, right? Please don’t leave.
Title & chapters from “Please Speak Well of Me,” by The Weepies.
Part 1: You Did What You Did, and That Was That
“Your sister’s at Castle Black.”
The words from Tormund hang in the icy air for a long moment, and as they make their way into Jon’s consciousness, he wonders if it’s the first thing he’s actually heard in over a year.
The winds blow so strongly up here, in the true North. He had nearly forgotten, the way the frosty howls could deafen you for hours at a time. He sometimes goes days without speaking, without hearing, without any sound around him other than the roar of a winter that would take more than a Valyrian steel dagger to kill. It’s a very different life than the one he thought he’d be living all those moons ago.
Not that he's been doing much living at all. He spends some of his time with the Free Folk, but their merriment starts to ring shrill and false in his ears after too long, and he’ll venture out on his own, riding a straight line in one direction until his horse can’t any longer, half-hoping the snowy gusts will sweep him away into nothingness.
“Cousin,” he corrects Tormund automatically. The bigger man just shrugs, and Jon realizes he's already saddling his horse for him, expecting him to venture south at the news.
He should, Jon knows it, but he can’t seem to make himself move from his spot by the dwindling fire. His heart is pounding in his chest, a two-beat to the sound of a name that fills every second of silence in his mind these days. He's afraid to ask, but he knows he must.
“Which one?”
“The scary one.” Jon bites back a smile despite the way disappointment flashes through him, sharp and shameful. For some, that wouldn't be enough of an answer, but he knows Tormund well enough to understand.
Arya . The chorus in his head quiets for a moment at the thought of her, how he's longed to see her as well. He’s longed for all of them, all the characters in the book of his tragic history that he left on a shelf somewhere south of the Wall. Arya, Bran, Sam, Davos…
When he pauses, the other name returns to fill the silence once again.
“She's brought the Lord of Storm’s End with her, too.” Tormund interrupts his reverie, and when Jon glances up at him, his brow is furrowed. “Still jus’ looks like a smith to me, though.”
Something kindles in Jon’s heart at that news, a surge of emotion he’d thought long gone, like a limb lost to frostbite. He wonders what it means -- if Arya’s back for good, if she and Gendry have run off together, if the six kingdoms have already turned on each other and they're looking to join his life of exile beyond the Wall.
Or, Jon realizes horribly, belatedly, perhaps it means something truly awful has happened.
He moves then, mounting the horse with barely a word of thanks to Tormund, riding faster then he has in too long to remember. Urgency is something that feels foreign after all this time roaming, and he tells himself that’s why his heart is hammering at the backsides of his ribs until it hurts to breathe.
After days or maybe hours, he passes through the gate at Castle Black and there she is -- forever the smallest and mightiest presence in a crowd of lesser men. She smiles when she sees him, though, and his panic abates, something inside him threatening to thaw.
It’s been a long time, but it was longer last time, he remembers. Even still, Arya leaps into his arms, and he catches her, just like he used to when they were children. Jon holds her tight for a long moment, wishing hopelessly for the time before they had scars on their faces and swords on their hips
“ Arya .” He smiles as her name scratches from his throat, and she returns it for a half-second before her face twists back like she’s smelling something foul.
“You look like pure shit.”
It only makes him smile wider. “It's good to see you, too.”
The gash above her eye has faded slightly, but he sees the angry pink pucker of a new one on the right underside of her jaw and fights a brotherly urge to hook a finger beneath her chin and tut at her for whatever it is she’s gotten into this time.
But when he looks over Arya’s shoulder to see Gendry standing proudly, he knows he’s not the only one looking out for her. It’s more comfort than he’s used to, and it feels odd in his chest. Still, he turns his smile on the other man, reaching out to clap a friendly hand to his arm.
“Good to see you too, my Lord.” Gendry rolls his eyes at the title. Jon remembers the feeling.
“So,” he asks, turning back to Arya, “did you find out what’s west of Westeros?”
She nods, with another grin. This one, though, flickers away too quickly for his liking. “Some of it, anyway.”
“And?”
“It’s...interesting.” Her eyes dart to the space behind her and back again, and Gendry stands up a little straighter. “But it doesn’t really hold a candle to what’s here.”
It’s not quite an answer, but it may be the best he can hope to get. It's sweet, to see her that sentimental, and more than that, Jon’s as happy as he’s been in years to have her safely back in the North.
“No candles to you, though. I’m afraid you’d catch.” Arya wrinkles her nose at him again. “What in seven hells have you been doing up here?”
“Haven’t been here, really,” he admits. “Mostly been up beyond the Wall.”
“I can see that,” she sneers, like he's somehow missed the other hints about his unkempt appearance. “You’re a true wildling now, are you? King of the Free Folk?”
“I’m not King of anything,” he bites back. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”
She glances around the yard then, letting the truth in his admission return things to a simmer. “What happened to Ghost?”
“Haven't seen him in a few moons.” Truthfully, Jon’s started to worry a little -- it’s the longest his wolf has ventured away since they returned to the Wall. So his next assurance may be as much for himself as it is for her. “He always makes his way back to where he needs to be.”
Arya quirks an eyebrow at that, and then gives him a sad look he assumes is either for him or Nymeria, wherever she may be.
“The lone wolf dies, Jon.” Ned Stark’s words have rung in his ears a few times in the last year, but they sound more dire coming from his daughter’s mouth. “You need your pack.”
“Yes, the lone wolf dies,” he agrees, and the spite and conflict inside him call back a different warning -- one he heard years ago at this very castle, “and a Targaryen alone in the world is a terrible thing.”
What’s left of the Castle Black kitchen does their best to throw something together for the Night Kingslayer and the Lord of Storm’s End come suppertime, and the both of them look expectedly embarrassed at even the attempt at ceremony in their honor. They’re a good match, Jon notices, not for the first time, and it makes him wish for another life where they had found each other in happiness, rather than whatever this is.
But his sullen brain betrays him then, wondering if this is the way it always had to be. Perhaps even the old gods saw it coming -- fire and ice and whatever’s left when the ash and snow had settled.
The evening’s mood lifts significantly when Tormund arrives with a small traveling party and a few large horns of ale and fermented goat’s milk to share, and the meager feast becomes a celebration with the lively raucousness of the Free Folk. It doesn’t grate at Jon the way it normally does, and he’s glad for it. He even catches himself smiling, more than once, and knows Tormund spots it too.
As the night’s dancing begins in earnest, he glances over to see Gendry and Arya deep in conversation. The young lord is nodding his encouragement and placing a comforting hand on top of where hers rests on the table between them, and it warms Jon’s heart even further. But when Arya stands and gathers herself before heading in his direction, dread creeps like ice back into his gut.
“Is there somewhere more private we can speak?” He nods dumbly, and leads the way.
Jon had protested for hours when they presented him with the Lord Commander’s chambers, but none of the men would hear it. He's even more embarrassed now, when they enter his solar and find it just as empty as he did all those moons ago. At least there’s a fire going -- he makes a mental note to thank the stewards for their forethought.
“We’re headed back to Winterfell in the morning.” He didn’t expect her to tiptoe around things, but still, Jon’s heart lurches at Arya’s abrupt announcement. He stops by the window, and doesn’t fully turn back to face her. “You’re coming with us.”
“You know I can’t.” He glances to his near-empty desk and back before he can remember to school his features, but it’s enough for her to follow. Arya crosses quickly, and picks up one of the twelve identical scrolls that sit in a neat line at the top corner of the otherwise empty surface.
“Seven hells, Jon,” she sighs when she unrolls one and then two, realizing what they are. “Are these really the only things you have in this whole bleak chamber?”
He shrugs. It might be sheepish, if that’s something his features can remember. Arya just rolls her eyes again, then narrows them at him.
They’re the only items of value he’s acquired in this last year, the only things he’s found himself with a need to keep. Once a moon, a raven arrives from Winterfell, with a pardon in his name from the Queen in the North. A young, sharp-faced man he keeps accidentally calling Edd used to save them for him, to hand-deliver when he returned from beyond the Wall. After a few turns, though, the lad seemed to realize they wouldn’t be heeded, and began to simply leave the new ones with the old for Jon to find upon his increasingly infrequent returns.
He knows he only saved them because she wrote them herself.
“You’re coming with us, anyway,” Arya repeats. He notices she’s not been posing it as a question. “Special occasion. There’s to be a fancy royal wedding, and you’re invited.”
The name that usually fills his spaces returns then -- only now, instead of a whisper, it’s a roar.
Sansa .
Sansa’s getting married. Sansa’s made herself a proper royal match. Sansa’s going to take another husband, and he’s meant to go and watch it happen.
Jon's not certain when she became the echo in his brain, not certain when his heart had turned, like leaves changing in the fall. But it has.
He’s thought often of all of them, the surviving Starks, but they each mean something different, each occupying a different place within him. Bran is his vision, a reminder to keep more than his eyes open as he travels the wild lands. Arya’s his compass, forever angling towards true North.
And Sansa, she's his heartbeat.
At the start of his exile, the ache in Jon's chest was an unknowable black -- like the charred remains of a fallen city, the scales of a lost dragon or the widening eye of a queen gone mad. Now it’s red -- the last embers of a dying blaze, a pool of blood on an icy stone floor, hair kissed by fire sat beneath an iron crown. Black to red. Perhaps he's more of a Targaryen than he ever thought possible.
The only thing he is sure of anymore is what he sees in his mind’s eye when he thinks of the word “forgiveness.” It’s come to him not infrequently over the past year, and it’s always Sansa, on the dock in King’s Landing, asking if he had any left for her.
He hadn’t given her a proper answer then, still too stupefied by the way his world kept upending itself and yet somehow, never landing him on his feet. He wishes he could have told her that he forgave her the moment Tyrion had told him what she’d done, before he knew if he'd ever see her face again. He wishes he could have stood in the Great Hall when the North crowned her their rightful leader. He wishes he could have mustered the courage to send just one raven back to Winterfell.
It might take him a full minute to realize Arya’s still speaking.
“Jon.” She sounds exasperated. It’s a tone he remembers well, despite everything. Perhaps it was even longer than a minute. “It’s my wedding. Gendry and I, we’re getting married.”
The sudden relief is so strong he can taste it, sliding thick and intoxicating across his tongue. It renders him stupid with his words -- or in his case, more so than usual. In the time it takes him to cobble together half a sentence, Arya makes her way through twenty or so different expressions, from exhaustion to disbelief to something that almost looks like mischief, and back again.
“What?” he stammers. “Why did you--”
“I needed to see your face,” she answers in that way of hers that only poses more questions.
He swallows heavily, telling himself it’s not a gulp. “Thought you were done with all that.”
“I don’t wear faces anymore,” she half-explains, quirking one side of her mouth up. “Can’t help studying them, though.”
He can only imagine what she’s learned from looking at his just now -- gods, she probably understands more than even he does. A change of subject is his futile attempt to distract them both. “Last I heard, you turned down his offer.”
Arya gives him that look, the one that says she knows he’s being purposefully stupid.
“I'm not the same person that I was a year ago, Jon.” Her tone is obvious, but softer than he expects. “None of us are.”
Nothing's ever been truer than that, has it? A year ago, he was a traitor, a kinslayer, a man whom even death couldn't keep from lining up at the start of each new war. Now he’s not sure if he’s anything more than a lone wolf beyond the Wall.
And Arya, brave and bold, she’s something else now, too.
“You’re going to be a Lady,” he says with a smirk. She doesn’t match it.
“I’m going to be myself. Always. I came back home for what I want, and what I want is to be with Gendry.” This is a practiced speech, one she’s given before. Maybe to Sansa, he thinks idly. “Who’s anyone to say what that has to mean?”
Jon holds a hand up in defense. “I just can’t believe you’re actually marrying.” She sighs again.
“I don't believe that the world owes me anything.” He almost laughs at how wrong she is. Westeros as it still stands owes her everything it has to give. “But change is slow, and our time isn't promised. I'm going to make my life into what I want it to be, and I’m going to fight anyone who tries to stop me.”
It’s hard not to believe in her. He can picture it, Arya sparring with her troops during the day and wrestling her gaggle of wild babes in the evenings. A kingdom led by love and cunning and the strategy of survival. A castle where the Lady carries the swords and the Lord forges them for her.
“There isn’t time enough to stand still, Jon,” Arya adds, softening again. “Or, ride around in circles, or whatever it is you've been doing up here.”
She turns to leave, but he's mulling all of her words over and it takes a while for things to come back into focus. When he does meet her eyes, she’s watching him closely again, and he wants to ask what it is people keep seeing in his expression that gives him away.
“Arya--”
“We’re headed home first thing tomorrow. The three of us.” Then she does smile, finally. “And I'll be expecting a proper congratulations in the morning, you absolute dolt.”
She’s through the door before Jon has the chance to stammer an apology, or his belated well wishes.
He doesn’t sleep that night. He barely even tries, laying down for just a few heartbeats before accepting how futile it will be. Winterfell. Sansa. Home . For a brief moment, it’s too much, and he thinks of running, of saddling up and fleeing back through the Wall before Arya can realize he’s gone.
But the feeling passes, quicker than he expects, and a familiar memory returns to take its place.
On his last day in the Red Keep, the Hand of the King had paid a final visit to his cell as he was preparing himself for the journey North. Tyrion didn’t look any happier than he had on the day he handed down the sentence, but his voice was stronger, and his words of advice rang clearer in Jon’s muddled mind.
“The most heroic thing we can do now is look the truth in the face.” Sansa had said that, Tyrion told him, before pulling a dagger from her cloak and preparing to fight the risen dead in the Winterfell crypts. The image had burned itself on Jon’s brain immediately, but it’s her words that have come back to him time and again as he’s served his time in the far North.
“They’ll call you a traitor, Jon Snow, and you may find your only comfort in the knowledge that you are also a hero.” Tyrion had spoken with his usual confident calm, though Jon found it brought him little more comfort than it did when they first met. “That will be your armor now.”
They had parted ways then, with a familiar nod. Jon didn’t bother mentioning that he was hoping for a life, or even just a few moments, where he didn’t need an iron plate to protect what little was left beating in his chest.
Look the truth in the face. Maybe Arya’s right. Maybe it’s time now.
Newly revitalized, Jon spends the few remaining hours preparing for the trip, as best he can. He takes a proper bath, trims his hair and his beard, freshens up his furs, and packs what he can salvage from the Castle’s meager stores.
When the light of morning finally breaks, he returns to his empty solar and throws eleven of the scrolls into the dying embers of the fire, lingering only to watch them catch. The one he saves -- tucked into his breast pocket as he descends to prepare the horses -- had come a few moons back, with three extra words scrawled at the bottom of the standard pardon.
They were still in Sansa's hand, but scratched slightly sideways -- hasty or frantic or fraught with something else he couldn’t understand. He remembers spending a few selfish moments tracing them over with his finger, as if somehow he’d be able to touch her through the parchment. Now, he presses them close to his heart for the journey back to Winterfell.
Please come home.
He waits until they're a few hours in the ride -- long enough that he won't be able to convince himself to turn back -- before he dares to ask. “Does she know you came?”
“No,” Arya admits. “I’m hoping she’ll be too busy planning to be angry.”
“Angry?” Jon's already beginning to panic at how readily he’d agreed to make the journey, and looks back now to try and catch a glimpse of the Wall, like a comfort. “She’s the one who's been sending me pardons.”
“And still you stayed away.” There’s so much that remains unspoken in that accusation, but it’s nothing Jon hasn’t already leveled at himself.
“I didn’t--” He starts to stammer out an apology that he knows will need some work before they reach Winterfell, but Arya heads him off.
“Jon, you should know. She’s… different now.”
He watches his breath catch in the frosty air, and waits for her to continue. Of course Sansa’s different now. Arya had said it herself, they all are. But he hears the uncertainty in her voice, and knows there’s more she’s trying to tell him.
“She’s a good queen. And she’s still Sansa, in there somewhere. But she’s been all alone for a year. And before that, too. She’s changed.”
Alone. For all Jon has thought about Sansa in the last year, he's never pictured her alone. He’s imagined the Northmen raising their swords to celebrate her reign, pictured her days full of meetings with advisors and lackeys she'd manage with smart precision. But he never thought of her at night, never allowed himself to see her retiring to her chambers, and so he never considered what happens when the Queen in the North becomes Sansa Stark again, for a few hours in front of a private hearth.
He hopes she has people she can trust, people who know her when the crown comes off. But deep down, he realizes that Arya likely speaks the truth. It unsettles him, the thought that she's been just as isolated as he's felt amongst the Free Folk -- surrounded by life and still, so very alone.
“When she sees you,” Arya continues carefully, “she might not--”
“No, I don’t expect she will,” Jon cuts her off before she's even finished her thought, but his bitterness can only be directed inward. He’s spent a year atoning for his sins, but Tyrion had suggested ten -- and even that seemed meager, compared to what he's done. Whatever it is he's seeking at Winterfell, he knows enough at least to understand he doesn’t deserve it.
“It’s not all to do with you, Jon,” Arya fairly snaps, cutting through his brooding. “Are you listening? She's not the same since we left her behind.”
And they did, didn’t they? After those dark, horrific weeks of war, Sansa went home, but no one went with her. She gave everything for her people, and lost what was left of her family in the process.
“Is she alright?”
“I don’t know,” Arya admits, and that might scare him most of all. “I don’t know what it is, exactly. But she's...”
“Some of the smallfolk have taken to calling her ‘Old Stone Jenny,’” Gendry offers.
“And I’ve boxed the ears of anyone I’ve heard say it,” Arya answers fiercely, shooting a glare at her betrothed. “Don’t think I can’t get you, too, even on horseback.”
“Old Stone Jenny?” Jon’s mind feels slushy as he turns over Arya’s warning, looking for clues like worms beneath river rocks, not certain he wants to find them.
“Like the song,” Arya reminds him. Jon only recalls bits and pieces. The ones who’ve been gone for so very long, she couldn’t remember their names. “They say she’s made of iron and ice -- still as a statue and surrounded by ghosts.”
“Probably don't help that she spent most of her first year rebuilding the crypts,” Gendry chimes in again, and this time, the look Arya gives him is simple and sad. Jon’s stomach turns over at the thought of Sansa being tasked with laying generations of Starks back to rest -- and building new tombs for the ones who had loved her the most.
He barely knew her as a girl, and so many of his early memories are shrouded now in a thick fog of mortality and blood magic. All of Jon’s thoughts of Sansa are newer ones, from after her escape and his rebirth, when they found each other at the Wall. But it must be even more jarring for Arya, to see how the evils of the world and the pressures of power have forged her a sister so different than the one she once knew.
“We stayed for almost a moon before we came to get you, and she had barely started to thaw by then,” she says sadly, looking off into the distance like it pains her to recall. “Even for me.”
Jon doesn’t have to imagine, there’s still so much he can picture like it’s happening in front of his eyes. “I remember how she was after Ramsey,” he offers as a comfort, though it sends a chill up his spine just to think of it.
He call still see the way Sansa would jump every time one of the doors in Castle Black latched too loudly, remembers the way she’d cower at a stray shout from the yard. When they returned to Winterfell, he would watch her spine go straight when anyone leaned in too close, saw her dig her fingernails into her soft palms when an over-familiar lord would bend to kiss her hand.
“She steels herself, but still she flinches,” he says, almost to himself. Past Arya, he sees Gendry nod in recognition.
“I tried to hug her,” he admits with a shrug. “When we told her about the betrothal.” He doesn’t finish the story. He doesn’t need to.
Jon wonders if there’s a space in the crypts now for everyone who left her. He wonders if there's one for him.
He turns back to Arya, who still seems lost in her thoughts, and decides to leave her be for a while. But after an hour or two more of riding, his curiosity gets the best of him.
“Why did you need to see my face?” He knows she’ll understand what he’s asking. But she just gives him that look like he's being stupid again.
“The last night we were there, she finally started talking,” she tells him, even so. “And then it was like she couldn’t stop. She talked about the past -- about Mother and Father, Robb and Rickon. She talked about how strange it felt to have Bran gone -- even when it used to feel like he wasn’t really there at all.”
The ache in Jon's heart has a name now too, the same one that's been echoing in his mind all this time. How selfish he’s been, to think that he was the one suffering the most.
“She even talked about the future,” Arya keeps on. “She's got a new idea in her head now about heirs for Winterfell, though gods know how that’ll even be possible.”
It's Jon’s turn to flinch at that, and when he glances at Arya, she has a shameful grimace on her face, like she hadn't meant to say that part aloud. Sansa never spoke of it, not to him at least, but another thing he’s never forgotten is the look in her eyes when she told him she wouldn't go back to Ramsey alive.
“Of course, any children Gendry and I have will be Baratheons, not Starks. So, no help there,” Arya spits out, moving past the uncomfortable moment, but her ire is reserved for the lob she aims in Jon’s direction. “A parting gift from your queen.”
To his credit, he barely flinches at the mention of Daenerys. “She’s not anybody’s queen anymore.”
Arya’s eyes narrow at him then. He should have been expecting this, at least. “Yes, and you never told me what changed your mind about that.”
“Something Tyrion said.” It’s all Jon offers. He doesn’t tell Arya that it was she, and not the Hand, who had been the first to make him realize where Dany would set her sights next. He doesn't know how to say it without giving away a truth he’s never looked in the face. “It wasn’t ever going to stop.”
“Sansa knew that.”
He doesn’t need the reminder, but accepts it as part of his penance. “Aye. I should have listened.”
“She never talked about you after we said our goodbyes that day,” Arya picks back up, like she half-knows all of his secrets anyway. “Not then, and not now. It’s like she can’t, or won’t. I thought maybe if you--”
“If I what , Arya?” Jon interrupts, suddenly incensed by the uncertainty of what’s facing him at the end of this ride. He can't save anyone, he never could. All of his efforts seem to end in failure and flames. He starts to say as much, but Arya won't hear it.
“You’ve been up there torturing yourself, and she’s been doing the same down here. The world’s moving on in peacetime, and somehow, the two smartest people I know are still at war.”
Jon just sighs. There’s little relief in her insight, not when it seems like her solution lies on the other side of his most daunting battle yet.
“I knew I had to bring you back to her,” Arya adds, softly. “I’m just not sure what’s going to happen when I do.”
It’s the most straightforward she’s been with him about anything. As the gates of Winterfell come into view, Jon only wishes it came as more of a comfort.
He hears Sansa’s voice before he sees her.
She’s in the Great Hall, discussing logistics of the upcoming celebrations with one lord or another, when they arrive. Jon's grateful for Arya’s plan to sneak in and avoid the fanfare of an official entrance, because it affords him a few moments to take her in candidly, as the Queen in the North.
He sneaks in the servants’ entrance in the back, down the narrow hallway he and Robb used to duck into to sneak nips of wine during feasts, several lifetimes ago.
Jon can't make out the words at first, but even just the overtones of her cadence echoing against the familiar granite soothe him in a way that shouldn’t be possible. He’s longed for that voice, he realizes just how strongly as it washes over him once again.
And then he sees her.
She’s as beautiful as he remembers, and so much more, red hair cascading across her Stark grey dress with a black wolf draped over her shoulder. She wears a crown like she was born for it -- she was , his stupid brain whispers -- and sits in the direwolf throne like it’s the only place she’s ever truly belonged. The rightness of it all brings Jon a sense of peace he’s never felt before.
She looks like everything he’s been yearning for and nothing he was expecting. She looks like the kind of queen they’ll run out of parchment writing songs about.
She looks so beautiful, Jon almost forgets to hate himself for thinking so much of it.
He tries to be as stealthy as possible -- no one else in the hall seems to notice his arrival -- but as soon as Sansa concludes her business with the lord, sending him away with a beatific but fleeting smile, her eyes turn to lock on his.
“Jon.” She says his name softly, but it rings in his ears, and then there’s nothing left for him to do but present himself officially. He walks on shaky legs to stand before her, ignoring the mumbles that start to fill the hall as the Northmen recognize his presence.
He means to call her “Your Grace” or “My Lady.” Even just her name would have been better. But the new honorific rolls off his tongue, like something he’s been waiting to say his whole life.
“My Queen.”
He knows he’s watching too closely, because he catches the ways her blue eyes widen a little. But she doesn't say another word until he moves to drop to his knee.
“Don’t-- ”
It's so soft, he wonders if he imagined it, but when he glances up to meet her eyes, Sansa looks almost pained. It only lasts a second, though, before she’s straightening her shoulders and sharpening her voice to a command. “Please, stand.”
Jon has no idea what's happened, and the rest of the hall seems equally frozen in confusion as he rights himself before their queen. Is she going to throw him out? Tear up his pardon and send him back to the Wall? Is she truly that unhappy that he's come?
Or, Jon wonders, meeting Sansa’s eyes again as a flash of something hot curls in his belly, is it that she can't stand to see him on the ground before her without thinking of the last queen for whom he bent the knee?
He only realizes the silence between them has stretched on too long when it’s broken by a flash of white fur that brushes right past her side before bounding down to where Jon stands awkwardly.
“Ghost!” Jon crouches down to pet him, glancing to his left to seek out Arya, who gives him a knowing look that nearly makes him scowl in return. But he’s too glad to see his companion alive and well to mind much that her question at Castle Black had been some kind of test. “I should have known this is where you’d be.”
The wolf’s ear has healed nicely, and the patches left over from the Battle of Winterfell have filled in as best they can. Jon glances up from greeting him and catches Sansa very nearly smiling at them, but it doesn’t last.
“He’s been here for a few moons.” Her eyebrows furrow and she comes as close to a frown as he thinks she’ll allow herself. “I thought--”
She doesn’t allow herself to finish the idea out loud, but Jon understands all the same. She’d thought he sent him. She’d thought the wolf was his way of being with her when he couldn’t.
Gods, he’d give anything in the world to be able to tell her she was right.
“No.” Awe and regret flood him in equal measure as he shakes his head at the beast, who looks positively docile as he returns to sit at the queen’s right-hand side. “But it seems like he knew where he needed to be.”
In the past, Jon likes to think, something like that would have broken through the ice between them. But Sansa sits stoic and still, looking almost through him. The only evidence that she's not a statue from the song is her hand reaching up to card calmly through Ghost’s fur.
For a moment, she seems so much to him like Lady Catelyn -- or perhaps it's just that he feels that same nagging sense of failure that had always followed the Bastard of Winterfell around this very hall. Iron and ice, Arya had said.
“Will you be staying for the wedding?” the Queen in the North asks him then, casually, as though she doesn't care either way. Her voice that has crystallized back to the formal. It's impossible to remember how he believed he wasn't going to ruin this
“Of course.” Jon almost smiles, looking over at where Arya stands, Gendry positioned just behind her. But they’re both watching Sansa, with expressions that betray more worry than he thinks they would probably want.
All she gives any of them is the slightest of nods, turning back to Jon with that same fake smile she gave the lord before him. He feels ill with how wrong this has gone so quickly, but she allows no time to fix it. “I’ll have someone show you to your chambers. Winterfell welcomes you.”
And that's that.
The corridors of the Great Keep seem colder than he remembers, and the servant, whom he doesn’t recognize, won’t look him in the eye as she walks him towards his old chamber. There’s barely more than a bed, a chair, a set of drawers, and the sound of his rattled breath echoing around the room, but it still feels more like home than the quarters he left behind at Castle Black.
That’s a dangerous thought, and Jon shoves it away with the others. He tells himself it’s exhaustion and delusion that has him smelling lemon and lavender -- there would be no reason for her to have been here -- and presses his fists to his eyes, suddenly and utterly drained by the journey and the loss of a hope he didn't even realize he was still carrying.
Just as he moves to close and latch the door and the day behind him, though, he hears a rustle in the corridor and then, gods , his name in that voice again.
“Jon .” There’s a flush to Sansa’s cheeks as she materializes before him. But she couldn't have rushed after him -- that wouldn’t befit a queen.
He clutches at the door frame as he takes her in, like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. “Your Gr--”
“Jon, please, ” she whispers before he can finish, and suddenly he's back to being the man who can deny her nothing, from his mug of ale to a battle fought in their family's name.
She's right in front of him now, not up on some untouchable throne, and it's easier and harder all at the same time. He can see the uncertainty written across her face, the way her pulse flutters at the slope of her neck. Her hair is different than he's ever seen it, straight and smooth, but still stunning in his eyes, and he takes in a painful breath when he notices the direwolf detailing on her crown. Muddled as she makes him, though, his lips know just what to call her.
“Sansa .” Her eyes well up as he says her name, and his grow misty as well. He wants to pull her into his arms, to bury his face in the fur that drapes across her shoulders, but Arya's warnings are clear in his mind and so he leaves his arms at his sides, hands balling into fists.
“I’m sorry,” she says then, and he assuages her worry in an instant, though he hasn't the faintest idea what she's apologizing for.
“It’s alright.”
“I didn’t even know what to call you in there.” She sounds baffled by what was barely a blunder. He wonders if it’s the first she’d made in a year on the throne. It wouldn’t surprise him in the least. “I was surprised, I didn't meant to--”
“Sansa, it’s alright,” he says again, unable to stop saying her name after such a drought and unable to keep a smile from his face she steps past him into the room. “I’ve had about enough of titles to last me a lifetime. It’s good to be nobody once again.”
She turns on him, pursing her lips at that, and he tries not to stare at them for too long. But then her hand comes up to cup his cheek and Jon’s breathing stutters to a stop. He can’t remember if she was wearing gloves in the hall, but if she was, they're gone now. He tries and fails to suppress a shiver at the feel of her skin on his, from the slight chill of her fingertips to the warmth of her palm.
“You’re not.” His eyes slide open to meet hers at the fierce words. He hadn't realized that he'd closed them. “You’re not nobody, you never were.”
Here she is, the women he remembers. Not the queen on the throne, but the last Stark in Winterfell -- the best of all of them. She’s fierce like Arya, brave like Robb, wise like Bran and wild like Rickon. She’s everything, and she just gives it away like this.
“It’s good to see you, Sansa.” Jon knows he can’t give her much, but he can give her the truth. “I--”
He pauses and she draws in a breath, leaving the air too thin between them. There's a million things to say here, and he can't find one, suddenly lost in the familiar blue of her gaze.
“It’s just very good to see you,” he repeats, and he sees the smile in her eyes before it touches her lips, but he’s still not ready for the way it makes his entire chest seize up.
The hand on his cheek snakes around his neck and then she’s hugging him, fully and fiercely. He follows her lead, banding his arms around her back, trying not to notice how a sound that might be a sob escapes from where there once was space between them. The hunger and fatigue and anxiousness of his journey fade away in her embrace. Every question he has about past, present and future can wait. Holding her is the only thing there is.
They’re wrong about Sansa, they all are. Jon was sure of it the moment Arya tried to tell him, and he's even more certain now. There’s nothing stone in the soft curves under his hands, no ice in the hot breath that puffs against his neck. There are no ghosts in this keep tonight, there's only life in the words she presses into his cloak as their arms pull each other tighter.
“I'm so glad you're home.”
A/N: I’ve never been much good at multi-chaps, but I’m hoping this one has at least one more in it, from Sansa’s POV, if people are into it. Thanks for reading, and come say hey on Tumblr!