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“Of course you should still come for Christmas, honey,” Mrs. Stark had breathed into the phone, sounding for all the world like her oldest son had died all over again when Cat called to ask when she ought to mail gifts. “Ben and Ned are here, of course, and Lyanna is coming home. I think it might be nice for everybody.”
Cat is still sure that the Starks will want to be together on Christmas. Together alone, without Brandon’s fiancée.
But Mrs. Stark had been so sincere on the phone and Cat bought her ticket to Minnesota before Brandon died, and she didn’t really know how to go home and face her father’s emotional fumbling or Lysa and her new boyfriend. So, Cat goes.
And a flight and a five hour drive from the airport later, she’s still not convinced that she’s done the right thing coming to the same charming place where Brandon grew up. Where he’s buried, in the family plot in the woods around their home.
When she drives through the gates of Winterfell, it doesn’t even seem like the same place she remembers from her trip here in the spring. Everything is frosted over, softened by ten inches of fresh snow and heavy, laden clouds that promise another ten before Christmas is over.
Frankly, Cat thinks miserably, tapping her fingers against the steering wheel of her rental, it’s just the place for a grief-stricken twenty-five-year-old with no plan for her future.
*
Brandon’s younger sister, Lyanna, answers the door when Cat rings the bell, stomping snow off her leather boots and wishing she’d done what Brandon suggested and actually bought real winter clothes for the inevitable winter trips to Minnesota, instead of packing her insufficient, wool coat and a pair of unlined boots.
“Cat,” she says limply, looking her over with wide eyes and half a smile. Lyanna looks tired and sad, wearing an enormous sweatshirt from the artsy college she goes to. “Mom’s not – I mean. Ned!” Lyanna leans back into the house with the door open to call for her brother. When he sticks his head out of one of the doors in the hall, she waves him over and says, “Cat needs a hand getting her stuff up to the guest room.”
“Mom will be glad you made it safely,” Ned tells her in a quiet voice, not quite looking her in the eye when he picks up her suitcase and leads her up the wide stairs.
Cat remembers Brandon laughing about how serious his brother Ned was, but it hadn’t bothered her before, and it hadn’t seemed out of place at the funeral. But in all the months she and Ned have traded calls and emails about Brandon’s things, occasionally simply checking in on one another, she had forgotten that he looked so much like Brandon. Or maybe she just hadn’t noticed any of the times she met him in person. Ned on the phone doesn’t have any of the affectations that Brandon had, and it had been easy to think of him as Just Ned, and not Ned Stark, Brandon’s brother.
Still, his solemnity doesn’t seem out of place here, either, despite the tastefully festive decorations chosen to decorate the house. It doesn’t feel much like Christmas now that she’s spending what would have been her and Brandon’s first Christmas after the wedding in the space he left behind when he died.
The guest room is pristinely clean when Ned flips on the light and sets her suitcase beside the dresser and stuffs his hands into his pockets. The quilt on the bed matches the gray curtains and buttery yellow paint. On the nightstand is a note with her name written in Mrs. Stark’s old-fashioned handwriting and a vase frothing over with a floral arrangement that seems to account for the fresh, piney scent in the room.
It’s all too much for her, just for a moment, that these people, this grieving family, would try and accommodate the lingering effects of her own pain as she intrudes on them.
But of course she knows none of them will hear anything of it. “Take your time settling in,” says Ned in a voice meant not to bother, or maybe that’s just how he is. “My mother will be home within the hour and we’ll have dinner together.”
“Yes, of course,” Cat answers mechanically, her fingers tracing the petals of a white rose in the arrangement, barely avoiding pricking herself on the holly. She isn’t sure what she’s doing here, why she came to Winterfell.
“Thank you, Ned,” she finally adds, turning over her shoulder to find that he’s already gone.
*
Mrs. Stark – Lyarra, she insists when Cat says it for the third time over breakfast the next morning – keeps her busy during the days between her arrival and Christmas Eve. It was only activities at first, family dinners and trips to town, but Cat finally convinces her that she can be helpful, would prefer it if she weren’t filling the guest role.
We would have been family now, she catches herself on the edge of saying more than once. But they aren’t. They won’t ever be now.
Still, it’s a relief when Lyarra asks her if she wouldn’t mind helping with the last of the preparations for the Stark’s Christmas Eve party.
Cat can hardly believe they’ll still have a Christmas party, and she isn’t sure she really wants to spend a whole night talking about Brandon to a house of people who will only feel sorry for her, but she’s still privately grateful for the promise of a house full of people. Maybe, if she’s very lucky, at least one of the guests won’t realize who she is. Maybe just one conversation can be about her work back home, or about sports, or about anything else.
Perhaps that’s the point of having the party in the year both Brandon and his father died, Cat thinks. Maybe it helps them to have just one normal tradition to keep.
“Lyanna and Benjen usually help me get ready for the party,” says Lyarra while Cat neatly ties a starched apron around her waist. “But she’s been a bit withdrawn since she came home from school, and Benjen...”
No surprise, thinks Cat while she measures out cups of flour into the giant sifter. Lyanna is a junior in college and Cat’s sure that Brandon’s death is still affecting her. She hadn’t been able to get home in time for the funeral, after all. Cat hasn’t seen much of Benjen, either, but he’s only seventeen and he hasn’t left for college. Being home isn’t anything special for him, and anyway, Cat is selfishly glad she doesn’t see much of him: like Ned, looking at Benjen is too much like looking into some twisted mirror of her past. Like looking at Brandon when they met in her freshman year of college.
“I don’t mind helping,” says Cat, a little dully. But even this is a small comfort to her. Cat’s own mother died when she was a girl, and she has no memory of this sort of quiet coexistence, sharing a task. She hadn’t been old enough before, and she had to take on so much herself after.
The first hour is mostly quiet, but they fall into easy conversation by the time Ned appears in the door, shaking snow out of his scarf with his head down. Lyarra looks up at him and laughs, setting aside her spoon and throwing a towel at him. Ned’s expression flashes astonished surprise before it turns to an easy, low sort of laughter.
Between the two of them, it’s the first time Cat has heard any of the Starks laugh since she came. For a bare instant, she feels betrayed that they can laugh when Brandon is dead, and then she remembers that it’s been almost nine months and she decided some three months before that she didn’t want to be devastated forever.
She smiles, soft and a little belatedly, and then holds out her hand for the towel. “I can take that,” she offers, holding her hand out to Ned.
“I’ve finished with the salting,” he says when he hands back the towel. “No one should have trouble getting in and out tonight.”
“Go shower,” Lyarra laughs, waving him off. “Cat and I are almost finished.” But when he’s gone, Lyarra smiles after his back and dusts off her hands.
“This must be really hard for you all,” Cat offers, looking back at the smear of flour on the countertops. She rests her hands on top of it and smiles wanly.
“We manage. Ned’s always been so...” Lyarra smiles a little. “Well, I suppose it’s no surprise he’s trying to take care of us all, even though we don’t really need him to.”
She looks at Cat with a curious expression that Cat doesn’t know how to read, but then it passes as quickly as it comes when Lyarra claps her hands together. “Well, would you look at that? Already done with all this and there’s actually time for us both to clean up before the party.”
Cat helps her clean up the kitchen, thinking of Ned and his long, solemn face, quietly taking care of things at home for his mother. When they’re finally finished, Lyarra beams at her, taking both of Cat’s hands into her own.
“I’m glad that you came, Cat,” she says with such earnest warmth that Cat can’t help believing her.
*
To her enormous surprise, no one at the party mentions Brandon to Cat, except with a nod of respect to let her know that they know who she is. She understands it to mean that they’ll only talk about him if she wants, and Cat finds that she doesn’t want to. Instead, she drinks wine and has a lively discussion about economics and laughs, really laughs, for the first time in so long.
Benjen talks cheerfully about his aspirations to attend one of the military academies for college while Ned watches him with a half-smile over his beer. Cat vaguely remembers that Ned wanted to go himself, before he took a sports scholarship in Colorado. And even Lyanna seems to enjoy herself, laughing in the corner of the family room with Maege Mormont and hugging her knees to her chest between sips of her soda.
And Cat finishes the night feeling warm and golden and weary. She waves Lyarra away from the dishes and out of the kitchen, pushing back the sleeves of her sweater on her way back to the sink.
“You know, you’re supposed to be one of our guests.”
Cat turns, but Ned is smiling as he says it, neatly rolling his sleeves up to his elbows as he does. And since washing dishes alone is far from her favorite chore, Cat passes him a towel and fills the sink with warm, lavender-scented bubbles. They work in easy silence, Cat washing andand Ned carefully swaddling each dish in the towel before putting them away.
“It was a nice party,” Cat says at length, trying to remember if Brandon ever said anything about his family’s Christmas traditions. But he’d always come to hers, when a hundred Tully cousins descended on their family farm, and never said anything about what his family did at home. So, when she hands off the last dish to Ned and cleans out the sink, she asks, “Is it always like this?”
“Usually a little more lively,” Ned admits. “More bonfires.”
Cat laughs, despite herself. “It’s snowing!”
He shrugs and closes the dish cabinet. “You don’t notice the cold as much when you’re drinking in the snow.”
“Northerners are a strange bunch,” she declares firmly, taking back the dish towel and folding it on the counter.
Cat was sure that she’d find it awkward to talk with Ned, but it’s anything but when he isn’t silently observing the rest of his family. He takes down two wide-bowled wine glasses and pours for both of them – Cat notices that it’s the same deep, rich red wine she’s been drinking all night – and beckons her into the cozy living room where the fire has burnt to its last log.
“Your mother says you’ve been taking care of everyone here,” she ventures carefully, once she’s settled into the cushions with her head resting on the plush cushion. “I thought – you said in April that you were planning to stay in Colorado. Your friend Robert was starting a business.”
Ned doesn’t answer at first, staring at the fire with a deep crease in the center of his brow. He shrugs at last. “I was planning to, then.”
She thinks of a hundred things that changed after Brandon died, and a hundred more since the funeral, even. She’d considered moving somewhere that didn’t make her think of Brandon when she opened her eyes every morning. She’d thought about leaving and changing her name and never looking back. It didn’t surprise her that Ned had changed his mind, too.
So, she asks, “What changed?” Cat watches his eyes search the fire with a grim set to his mouth.
“I realized my place was at home,” he says with more warmth than she’s come to expect from him. From anyone, really. When he looks up at her, his gray eyes – darker than Brandon’s, she realizes, categorizing it as one of a thousand ways Ned is a universe away from his brother – go light with something she doesn’t recognize. For a moment, Cat thinks that Ned didn’t really mind moving home to take up the family business the way Brandon had minded it.
Cat swallows, and Ned says, “I have the feeling you don’t really want to talk about the past right now.”
“Not particularly,” she admits with a half-swallowed laugh. “Why don’t you tell me about what you’re doing here now?”
He does. And when he finishes, he asks a few careful questions about Cat’s life back home and she tells him about her job, Lysa’s strange boyfriend, her father’s loneliness. The fire burns out and Ned refills their glasses, and he tells her stories about his life in Colorado and Cat tells him about college. Brandon is in most of them – after all, Brandon has been part of her life since she was eighteen – but it doesn’t hurt so much to talk about him.
Cat realizes that sometime in the last eight months, surely when Cat wasn’t paying attention, she’s healed more than she thought. The ache is there, but like scar tissue instead of a bullet wound. A phantom thing that lingers long after the wound has closed. She doesn’t feel like her grief needs to be covered up with Ned, like she does when it seems like everyone is only waiting for her to get over Brandon’s death.
And rather more to the point, thinking of the present instead of the past, Cat feels more like herself than she has in ages. Ned is quietly funny, not in the uproarious way that Brandon was, but subdued and dry, a slow smile creeping on his face when he makes her laugh. And by the time the clock chimes two in the morning, Cat is actually surprised to find that she’s sat more than three hours just talking with Ned.
“We should go to sleep,” he says finally, rubbing his hands over his knees. “Although I doubt Ben and Lyanna will be waking us up at six like they used to.”
Cat nods, uncoiling her legs from underneath her and reaching for their empty glasses, long ago abandoned on the edge of the table. She rinses them and leaves them to be washed in the morning, and follows up the stairs toward their rooms.
Just when she rests her slim hand on the cool doorknob, Cat stops herself and calls, “Ned?” after him. He turns instantly and makes a quiet, subdued noise when she gives him a quick, tight hug.
“Good night,” she adds, realizing that her face is flushed warm from the fire and the wine and something more, and hurries into her room without another word.
*
Despite the late night, Ned is awake and has already finished his first cup of coffee with his mother by the time Cat comes downstairs on Christmas morning. She flashes them both a quick smile when she pours a cup for herself and sits next to Lyarra, opposite Ned.
“Ben and Lyanna are still asleep?”
“I haven’t seen them yet,” Lyarra answers with an indulgent smile. “But I might go wake them up myself if they don’t come soon.”
“They won’t get breakfast if they don’t come,” says Ned dryly and brings Cat the milk and a spoon for her coffee. She doesn’t remember telling him how she takes her coffee, and she’s sure that she and Brandon were together for six years and he never had the first idea how she liked it.
Cat mixes up her coffee and lets herself be taken away by Ned and Lyarra’s conversation about some neighbor or another who came to the party the night before. It’s a strangely comfortable way to spend the morning until Ben and Lyanna emerge into the kitchen in their pajamas, yawning and blearily pouring coffee from a fresh pot.
Christmas with the Tullys is raucous and loud, with heaps of wrapping paper and miles of ribbon and long, probing conversations from her cousins about things too personal to be dissected by someone she hardly speaks to the rest of the year. Brandon had fit in well there, but Cat is surprised how well she fits in here, with this subdued, small affair that somehow doesn’t lack in affection.
When Cat opens her gift, a new coat that suits the weather in Minnesota far better than her wool coat, Lyarra laughs and explains, “So you won’t need to freeze on all your visits to us.”
All her visits, Cat thinks warmly, and hugs her tightly. As if she has every reason, every right to come to this place every year, like she’s actually been made family despite the twist of fate that snatched it away. And yet…
The morning slips past them far too fast, and then the afternoon. Lyarra starts dinner and Cat quietly takes Ned aside.
“I’d like to go see him,” she says very quietly, as though mentioning Brandon will break the aura of happiness that’s settled over her and the Starks. “I’ve never seen his grave.”
Ned takes her.
The family plot is deep in the woods and Cat remembers that it was muddy and wet in the spring, and the ground had been too soft for her to go then. But now it’s snowy and peaceful now, and the snow glitters magnificently under the weak mid-afternoon sun. Ned carries some of the greenery decorating the house and walks like he’s made this trip a thousand times already. They don’t even speak when he hands her one of the two arrangements he brought with him, and Cat realizes, yes, of course he’d want to bring something for his father, too.
In the distance, a mass of snow slides from a tree and lands on the ground with a soft noise that echoes for the silence in the little graveyard.
“I was sure this would be the worst part,” she admits softly when Ned finishes dusting snow from the headstones and adjusting the greenery on his father’s grave. “When I came up here, I thought it would hurt too much. I thought…” Cat doesn’t finish, but Ned looks up at her with such an earnestly expectant look, his forehead wrinkled up and his eyes fixed on hers, and she allows herself to finish.
“I thought you and your family would think I was intruding.”
Ned doesn’t rush to comfort her, or tell her that of course it’s not like that. He looks back at the new graves and sighs, “I hope you don’t feel like that now.”
“Not in the least,” she says immediately, folding her arms so she can keep some of her body heat. She should have worn the new coat. Cat wants to tell him that it’s easy with the Starks, like they’re family like they should have been, but it seems strange to say it to Ned, somehow. Like it wouldn’t tell him the thing she actually wants to say to him.
They take a longer way home, circling out of the woods and along the edge of a lake frozen hard. She wonders out loud why there isn’t snow on top of the ice, and Ned laughs, explains that he swept it off so the kids who live nearby can go skating on it. Cat stops to look out at the surface, and of course she can imagine Ned quietly working out in the cold so that some kids might be able to skate on it.
“The four of us used to go skating nearly every day in the winter,” Ned explains slowly, following her gaze. But when Ned looks, it’s as if he’s looking into the past. As if he can still see the Starks in their childhood, zipping across its surface. “My dad telling Mom not to worry about us, that he’d never fallen through the ice growing up. I wasn’t as fast as Brandon or as good as Lyanna, but we had much fun together.”
Cat pulls her scarf higher over her mouth and looks out at the surface of the lake with naked longing. “I’ve never been ice skating,” she explains with a half-smile. “I’m sure I’d break my neck.”
“Not if you’re careful,” Ned tells her and when Cat looks up at him, her fingers frozen in her tangled scarf, she realizes that she recognizes the expression on his usually solemn face.
Oh, thinks Cat when something once familiar flips in her stomach.
She wonders if this is some new, horrible stage of grief, where she transfers all her feelings for her dead fiancé to his brother. But she feels like something has been lifted from her, like she’s dropped a heavy pack at the peak of a mountain. The thing that kept her in her and Brandon’s old apartment, even what made her come all the way to Minnesota, even though she thought it might only make things worse.
It doesn’t feel like some shoddy simulacrum formed by grief. It feels like the real thing.
“I should,” she begins, but doesn’t know what to say, so she swallows the knot in her throat and laughs a little, shoving her hands down into her coat. “Your mother was right. My coat isn’t really made for this kind of cold. Will you walk with me back to the house?”
And Ned – dear, kind, quiet Ned – bends his head in her direction, acquiescing with a smile and a nod, and leads her home without question.
*
Ned is scarcely around for the next two days, although Cat doesn’t think he’s at all the sort of man who would run and hide because something feels uncomfortable. And things aren’t uncomfortable, really. While she’d been repulsed at the idea of dating some four or five months before, her vehemence has softened and dissipated.
But Ned isn’t really around to talk, and so she helps Lyarra with the post-Christmas chores she has around the house. She proofreads Benjen’s college application essays, spends hours reading in the Stark’s comfortable library while snow comes down outside, and she thinks.
Cat is too old at twenty-five, too sensible by far, to fall headfirst into some sort of foolish infatuation with Brandon’s brother simply because she misses him. And, anyway, she thinks that Ned isn’t the sort of man that sweeps someone off their feet with flashy gallantry.
No, it’s not at all like that, is it? It just is.
Cat wants to be around him for all the things that make him who he is, and Ned looks at her like she pulled the sun up in the sky. The idea is a little surprising. A little shocking.
What would everyone back home think?
But Cat doesn’t actually care what they’d think. Hasn’t she done enough of that, covering over the unpalatable, raw parts of herself when they’re inconvenient, to last a lifetime? Cat suddenly doesn’t want to live like half a widow for the rest of her life. She has a rest of her life, and a chance for something new.
And what would be the harm in letting myself find out what that is?
*
Two days before New Year, Ned scratches gently at the door to the library mid-morning. Benjen and Lyanna are still asleep, and their mother has gone to town for some event or another, and Cat retreated to the enormous, cozy chair by the window with her coffee and a book.
“Are you busy?” he asks, and Cat carefully marks her place before waving him inside.
“Not at all,” she says, although part of her wishes that she were, if only because her heart is pounding too loudly in her chest. She sits up a little straighter, and then frowns a little when Ned beckons for her to follow him. It’s only when she comes out into the hallway that she realizes that Ned is wearing his coat and scarf.
“It’s going to snow again tonight,” he explains, leading her through the house to the side door. “And it won’t be easy to skate until the storm passes.”
“I don’t have any skates,” Cat blurts out instantly, although she also doesn’t know how to skate at all.
“I found an old pair of Lyanna’s,” Ned explains, gesturing to a second pair of skates that he lays over his shoulder. “They might be a little big, but with a pair of thick socks, they should be fine.”
Cat’s heart swells her her chest, thinking of his story on Christmas, and then she’s pulling on her shoes and the new coat before she can think twice. “Will the socks keep me from breaking my ankle?” she asks when she straightens her hat.
“No, just your neck,” Ned answers, dry and flat. Cat gives a surprised yelp of laughter and watches a shy, crooked smile tremble at the corner of his mouth. They don’t say anything for a long, long moment while she studies his face, and then she nods to signal that she’s ready.
When they came out to the lake on Christmas, it had seemed like a much longer walk than it is when Ned takes her there and helps her tie on her skates tight enough to keep her ankles stable. Cat is seized with a rush of terror when she sets her first foot on the ice and the blade slides too smoothly along the surface.
But Ned has his hand firmly on her elbow, and then the other just at her waist, keeping her upright and steady. He doesn’t speak, not even to reassure her, but Cat feels secure enough when he shows her how to move, rather like inline skating, which Cat hasn’t done since she was a girl.
She decides that she won’t be doing any tricks, jumps, stunts, or fast skating anytime soon, but it takes her only a few minutes and a couple of near-misses before she can skate without holding Ned’s arm like a vice. It’s not long after that she can move freely, though Ned never stays more than a few feet from her. Close enough to catch her if she starts to fall, she realizes with a rush of fondness.
Cat skates to a wobbly stop, and standing still on the ice is so much harder than moving, but Ned is there in a second, with his hand steadying her again. Cat turns toward him and catches herself from sliding down to the ice, gripping his forearms and letting herself drift toward him.
“Ned,” she says and hopes there can be no mistaking what she means. “I’m not wrong about all this, am I?”
His answer is the sweetest thing she’s heard, sweeter than summer rain. “No,” he says so solemnly that her heart bursts with it, with how seriously he takes everything about her. “You’re not wrong.”
Cat wants to reach for him, but she’s afraid of letting go of him. And so Ned fumbles with his glove, shoves it in his pocket, and for all Cat is worried he’ll freeze without it, his fingertips blaze with warmth when he cradles the nape of her neck under her scarf. He’s tender and cautious and Cat allows her to think for one brief second that he’s nothing like Brandon, nothing like she was sure she wanted, and maybe it wasn’t what she wanted then.
But then Ned brushes his thumb down her jaw, his eyes dark with a hundred unknowable emotions, and Cat finds herself hoping has the chance to learn what each of them are, to recognize them on sight and know just how to answer them.
She knows before he lifts his eyes to hers the question he wants to ask. It hangs between them, the only warm thing suspended in the air around them. The only thing between them now.
“May I kiss you?” he asks, with the same breath of air Cat laughs and says, “Please, Ned.”