Work Text:
One. Two...
Every step forward birthed a heavy chain.
Three. Four. Five…
Chains around his wrists.
Chains around his ankles.
Six. Seven. Eight. Nine…
Chains circling his arms.
Chains circling his legs.
Chains snaking around his entire body.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen…
Chains pulling tight.
Chains digging into his skin.
Chains squeezing the breath from his lungs.
Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen…
Chains around his neck.
Chains choking him.
Chains suffocating him.
Twenty…
Jon was walking his freedom away.
The invisible bonds crushing his body and threatening to buckle his knees beneath their weight would never let him forget. Duty compelled him to stay. In the South. Despite the North calling to him.
The cold. White. An ancient castle. Winter. Red hair. Red hearth. Wolves. Dark hair. Like his. Laughter. Warmth. Family. Pack.
His heart would not allow him to run. The Seven Kingdoms would crumble. To nothing. Its people die out. Should no Targaryen sit the Iron Throne.
…He did not feel like a Targaryen– Dragon’s blood ran through his veins. Only his now. And thus, the unwanted burden fell unto him.
“Love is the death of duty.”
“Sometimes, duty is the death of love.”
It was the latter which always rang true for Jon.
Kissed by fire hair, trembling lips, hitched gasps, three arrows loosed. Two small uncertain smiles, fleeting hope, empty blue eyes, a cooling body.
Bells ringing, fire raining down anyway, horror, a song of pained and terror-stricken screams, innocents burning, a burgeoning resolve, a dark throne room, empty, desolate, like the streets outside, a righteous gleam in purple eyes, scarcely concealing the madness shining through, a kiss of love, a kiss of steel.
This time, it would not be a person’s love Jon would lose to duty, but his own love for living. Or had he already lost that? Years ago. When his sworn brothers’ knives pierced his flesh – “For the Watch.” – when he awoke from nothingness with a vital piece of himself missing, leaving nothing in its wake but an empty hole where something important used to be, should be.
Had he ever loved living.
As Jon entered the dark abyss that was to be the rest of his life, he wondered, distantly, as though through the mind of another, if anyone south of the Real North even cared about what would happen to him in the gilded cage they were forcing him into...
No.
They didn’t care.
Not even what was left of his fam–
The Starks.
A proven trueborn he may be. It did not matter. He would forevermore be the Bastard of Winterfell to Westeros. Something that had no feelings worth considering. Something to be used. Then discarded. Thrown away. Like nothing. Worthless. A weapon. A tool.
From prince to bastard to King in the North to bastard to prince again and now… King of the Seven Kingdoms.
He didn’t want this, didn’t want a throne, a crown, didn’t want to be king.
He just wanted to go back…
“You’ve got the North in you. The real North.”
…Home.