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Robb lay on his back, one arm tucked behind his head, the other draped heavily over Jon’s waist. He was staring up at the ceiling, tracing the patterns in the plaster, his mind turning over the strange duality of their existence.
Here in Winterfell, heritage was everything. It was carved into the stone, woven into the tapestries, and buried in the crypts below. You couldn't walk ten feet without bumping into a thousand years of Stark history. It was grounding, heavy, and undeniable.
In King’s Landing, heritage was a costume you wore to galas. The city was a sprawling, metropolitan blur of glass and steel, a melting pot where Dorne met the Reach met the Free Cities, and everything was homogenized into a slick, expensive paste. Their penthouse was luxurious, yes; it was a marvel of modern architecture with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the Blackwater Rush, but it had no memory. It was a container for their present, not a connection to their past.
And then there was Jon.
Robb knew the broad strokes, of course. He knew Lyanna Stark—his fierce, terrifying aunt—had taken her son and fled the political snake pit of the capital to raise him in the misty, merchant-city anonymity of Braavos. He knew Rhaegar had visited, a silver-haired ghost haunting the edges of Jon’s life. He knew the arrangement: eighteen years with the She-Wolf, and then the Dragon would come to collect his prince.
But he didn't know the texture of it. He didn't know the smell of the house with the red door.
"Tell me about it," Robb said suddenly, his voice low in the quiet room. "The house in Braavos. I've only ever seen the address on the packages my mother sent."
Jon shifted, resting his chin on Robb’s chest. His violet eyes went distant, looking past the heavy oak furniture of Winterfell and seeing something salt-stained and sun-bleached.
"It was... loud," Jon began, a small smile tugging at his lips. "Not city loud. Ocean loud. The house was right on the water, near the Ragman's Harbor but far enough away from the fish markets that you didn't smell the guts. It had a red door. A bright, cherry-red door that my mother painted herself because she said the fog was too grey."
He traced a circle on Robb’s skin.
"The kitchen was the heart of it. It had these big, drafty windows that looked straight out onto the bay. I spent half my life in that room. I’d sit on the counter and watch the Titan in the distance, waiting for the ships to come in. Sometimes, if the tide was right, you could see dolphins. Little pods of them, jumping in the wake of the galleys. I named them. There was one with a chipped fin I called 'Snout'."
"Lyanna cooked?" Robb asked, trying to picture his aunt, a woman who could reportedly out-ride any man in the North, wearing an apron.
Jon laughed, a bright, genuine sound. "Gods, no. Mother was a hunter, not a cook. She could track a deer through a blizzard and skin a seal in ten minutes, but if she tried to roast a chicken, it would end up charred on the outside and raw in the middle. She had no patience for it. She said fire was too slow."
He rested his cheek against Robb’s warm skin.
"So I took over. I was maybe... eight? I started with eggs. Then stews. Braavosi seafood stew is complicated. You have to layer the shellfish just right, but I loved it. I loved the chopping, the timing. It was the one thing I could control. Mother would come home from 'business'—which I later learned was mostly intimidating local merchants into better deals—smelling of salt and rain, and I’d have dinner ready. She’d look at the table, then look at me, and say, 'You have too much dragon in you, little wolf. Too much finesse.' But she always ate seconds."
Robb tightened his arm around Jon. He could see it. A small, dark-haired boy in a big kitchen, standing on a stool to stir a pot, trying to create order in a house run by a wild woman.
"And your room?" Robb asked softly. "What was that like?"
Jon’s smile softened into something wistful. "Safe. It was on the second floor, facing the sea. It had a balcony with a wrought-iron railing that rusted in the salt air. My bed was... excessive. Mother compensated for the lack of father by drowning me in soft things. I had so many pillows you could barely find me. And plushies. Direwolves, dragons, krakens. I had a seal named 'Shadow' that I slept with until I was sixteen."
He paused, his voice catching slightly.
"When my father came... the deal was eighteen years. On my eighteenth Name Day, the car came. A black SUV with the Targaryen crest. I had two suitcases. I couldn't bring them all. I remember standing in the middle of my room, holding Shadow, and realizing I had to choose. I left him on the bed. I cried for three hours on the flight to King's Landing."
Robb felt a pang of fierce, protective anger at Rhaegar, at the arrangement, at the sheer unfairness of ripping a boy away from his sanctuary. He kissed the top of Jon’s head. "We'll get him back. I'll fly to Braavos myself and get the damn seal."
"It's okay," Jon whispered. "I have you now. You're warmer than a plushie."
He was quiet for a moment, listening to the wind outside.
"There was an easel, too," Jon confessed, his voice turning shy. "By the balcony door. The light was perfect there—that grey, diffused northern light. I painted. Hours and hours, just... mixing colors. The sea is hard to paint, Robb. It's never just blue. It's green, and grey, and black, and sometimes purple."
"You painted the sea?"
"Mostly," Jon said. "And Mother, sometimes. When she was in the backyard, hanging the laundry on the line. She hated doing laundry. She’d look so angry at the shirts, snapping them in the wind like she wanted to fight them. I tried to capture that—the storm in her."
He hesitated.
"And... I painted other things. Embarrassing things."
"Tell me," Robb urged gently.
"Knights," Jon giggled, burying his face in Robb’s chest again. "I was a lonely omega in a tower, Robb. It’s a cliché for a reason. I painted... stories. A knight in dark armor, riding a horse that looked suspiciously like a direwolf. He was always galloping past my tower. Sometimes he’d stop. Sometimes he’d look up."
"A knight?" Robb teased, though his heart was hammering. "Did he have a name?"
"No," Jon murmured. "He didn't have a face, either. I couldn't get the features right. I just knew he was... strong. And that he was coming to get me. It sounds so stupid now. Like a fairy tale."
"It's not stupid," Robb said fiercely. "It's prophecy."
He rolled Jon onto his back, hovering over him, framing Jon’s face with his large hands.
"You painted me," Robb whispered, awe in his voice. "Before you ever knew me. You were calling me."
"Maybe," Jon admitted, looking up at him with those wide, violet eyes. "I didn't bring the paintings. I left them there, with the plushies and the red door. I thought I had to grow up. I thought King's Landing meant no more fantasies."
"We're going back," Robb decided then and there. "Next off-season. We're taking the jet. We're going to the house with the red door. I want to see the kitchen. I want to stand on that balcony. And I want those paintings, Jon. I want to see the man you were waiting for."
"He looked a lot like you," Jon smiled, reaching up to trace Robb’s jaw. "But you're better. You're real."
"I am," Robb swore, leaning down to kiss him. "And I'm never letting you leave your plushies behind again."
For a long time, they lay there in the silence of Winterfell, the ancient stone castle holding them tight, while miles away and years ago, a boy in a room full of soft things dreamed of a wolf who would one day come to take him home.