Chapter Text
She was with Maester Luwin when it happened. They were checking some accounting – or, better, they were faking it. Catelyn had spent two days going back and forth through the castle, worrying, organizing, yelling, all trying to smother the excruciating fear which had taken hold of her heart. After she had lectured Arya for expressing her worry about her brother too many times (for being worried about the bastard brother as well as her trueborn one, whispered a merciless voice in her heart) Luwin had declared the necessity to run through the castle’s accounts, and the opportunity to do it together. That had the desired effect to force her to put her mind to something other than all the horrible things that could have happened to her firstborn. It was a futile task – the counts were perfectly in order, she knew it all too well, but it was better than spending her time watching the horizon, asking herself when, who, in what condition would have come back…
Her husband, the Lord of the Castle, could not help her in her fears. He too was out there, searching for his elder trueborn and his bastard son, lost after a storm separated them from the rest of the hunt group. Two lonely lost boys in the wild – and how much can she trust that the bastard's presence would be a boon instead of a burden for her son? – she couldn’t help but wonder – while she didn’t believe that Jon Snow, only fourteen years old, could have kinslaying in his heart, she couldn’t trust that he would be able to protect his slightly older brother either… even less that he could understand why the heir of Winterfell should be protected at the cost of his own life.
Especially considering how Eddard was raising the boy, alongside his trueborn children, like he was one of them, like he had the right to stand by their side like he had noble blood in his blood. Other men would have kept their bastard apart from their family, would have given him a job in the castle, or at most would have entrusted him to some minor vassal. But, no: Eddard Stark had to flaunt the stain on his honor and humiliate his wife forcing her to watch him every day while he treated his trueborn half-brothers as equals and was being attended to by servants like he was higher in rank than them.
Perhaps it was these thoughts to influence her in those frantic moments when it happened, guards hurrying in Luwin’s quarters to claim his help was needed, while just after them the bastard was struggling, sustaining a basically unconscious Robb, both bloodied, but only her Robb incapable to reckon his surroundings. And maybe that was what rekindled her anger, because she could certainly let both of them enter, Luwin would have most assuredly cared about his future Lord first, it was most certainly Robb the one who seemed more in need of immediate help, but something in her heart rebelled against the idea that this bastard, this parasite whom her husband introduced in her house to poison her existence and mock her position of Lady of the Castle – my Father gave him the men he needed to fight his Rebellion, and he repays him dishonoring me just after our wedding, and forcing me to see his indiscretion’s product alongside our trueborn children – going around freely as an equal to her Robb, a real brother to the heir of Winterfell, and she stopped him while he tried to enter the Maester’s study: “We’re handling it from now” she said, moving for the guards to take Robb from his arms to take him more quickly to the Maester. She ignored the uncertain way the men watched her and continued: “You wait out there”, she said.
The boy stared at her bewildered: “But I…” he stuttered, and this positively enraged her, because how dared the bastard protest? What did he want, that the Maester would treat him first?
“Silence!” she raised her hand as to physically stop him. “The master must cure the heir of the North’s wounds, now. Don’t waste his or my time with your nonsense, bastard.” She hissed, then turned her back to him and closed the door behind her. Yes, that was fine. Maybe she had been a bit too harsh, but at least that way he would perhaps learn his place, at last. Ned had cuddled him too much for his own good; it should not have fallen to her the task of teaching him what was expected from a boy of his station, but no one could say that Catelyn Tully shied from her duty. Luwin would treat him as soon as he’d finished with Robb. And maybe it would be better to train someone else to properly treat wounds, she thought. After all, it could have happened again that two of the boys had gotten hurt at the same time.
But when Luwin finished examining Robb and concluded that the worst wound was a bad (but not particularly dangerous) blow to the head and some minor wound which hadn’t bled much, a pang of horror gripped her heart: if it wasn’t all Robb’s, the blood they had on… She hurried out to call the bastard in, only to find the corridor outside Luwin’s quarter absolutely empty, only a bloodied wall and some track on the floor.
The boy had left.
Wounded like he probably was, he left.
How could he have leaven? Why? she asked herself, and then she understood. In her fury, she had locked out the boy without reassuring him that the maester would have treated him as soon as possible (and why should she have stated aloud such an obvious thing? what kind of simpleton would have needed such an obvious thing spoken aloud?), and the boy had thought…he had thought she meant for him not to be medicated altogether? He had thought that she meant to leave him there to bleed… to die, maybe?
For a moment the stupor paralyzed her, leaving her incapable of thinking. What kind of person the bastard thought she was? Did he actually think that she would… a boy, her husband’s son, her children’s half-brother, a wounded boy in her castle, and he thought she would have left him untreated? What kind of monster did he think she was?
“Lady Stark?” Luwin’s voice, behind her, was hesitant. “Where is Jon Snow?”
“We must find him,” She said, panicking. “We must.” And soon, before the situation went out of control. The story that would spread would be that she had chased him away from the Maester's quarters without even asking him if he was wounded.The last thing she wanted was Ned and her children angry with her because that idiot boy had foolishly convinced himself that she wanted him dead. Shouldn't be so difficult, she thought, when he was exhausted and bleeding.
But apparently Jon Snow had uncanny resources for a boy in his condition. When they told her where he had been found, she shivered. And for a moment, for some reason she herself couldn’t fathom, she felt to be the monster that the boy clearly believed she was.
Because from Luwin's quarters Jon Snow had walked, staggered, and then actually crawled, into the crypts of Winterfell, to finally faint right under the statue of his aunt, Ned's sister, Lyanna Stark.