Work Text:
"Ghost."
The word comes to him in a silent plea, wrapping around him like smoke. He feels the familiar pull and relinquishes himself to it. Ever so slightly the edges of his vision blur, and he is no longer merely himself, but more.
He's drawn to the call, to the smell, but it's dark and cold and he is trapped. He throws himself against the wood and metal but it does no good and it will not budge.
He can smell blood – rich and metallic on the other side, outside. It hangs so heavy he can taste it on his tongue. But what scares him most is how familiar the smell is; that the smell is of his own pack, his man.
He throws himself against the door once more in vain. He snarls and bares his teeth, hackles raised. Man now makes things too strong for even him to break down. He scratches at the barrier until his claws bleed from the effort, but it's not enough.
The seconds spread into minutes, and it seems unavoidable now. The scent of blood is getting stronger and now is almost sickly sweet in the air. It's over a voice says in his mind. A voice that isn't his, but has always seemed a part of himself nevertheless.
I just wanted to do what was right.
But what did right and wrong ever mean to a beast such as a direwolf? He ate what he wanted, took what he wanted, went where he wanted, governed by no one and nothing but themselves. We were the kings of winter, that far-off voice says.
And they were, thousand of years ago when the winter winds blew. Back when the air carried that same queer, cold scent that it does now. It permeates his fur, down to his skin, where it prickles and stings, an abomination of nature and the gods – who have seemed to stop listening long ago.
And now – now – he was trapped while his man bled out alone in the snow. He’s sure now that a piece of himself is out there too, and suddenly he is afraid.
He throws himself against the blocked opening once more with the weight of his entire body. Two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and bone and fur ram against the iron framed door, and finally, blessedly it begins to crack.
He snarls in victory and breaks down the door until he can squeeze his body through. He finds his man in the snow, alone, surrounded by a halo of blood. He bows his head to his mans face, his muzzle scratching against the fur there. He is waiting to feel breath against his muzzle, waiting to hear the soft constant beating of his heart. He waits minutes, but no breath comes, no heartbeats move the still chest below him. How could he be dead, when he is right here? How could he be gone and not gone?
The wolf begins to growl and snarl as he paces around the body of his man, as the truth of what has happened dawns upon him. My man, my blood, my body.
The skin has gone cold and hard, but it doesn’t smell of death just yet. It still feels good to nuzzle up to him, to force his muzzle under his man’s hand for comfort, for assurance. He looks up at the dark, black sky, only sparsely scattered with flashes of bright, and for the first time since he was born he worries he is alone once more, adrift.
His muzzle turns to his man’s, and he softly licks the salt stains from it, wishing, praying for the gods to warm him once more. It does no good.
He moves to carefully lap up the blood from the wounds, as though it will help the blood to clot, help the wounds to heal; but instead he finds the blood already partially frozen, the wounds long ago having ceased to flow freely.
A shiver flows through his body as though he is drawing strength from the blood, as though he is somehow filling in a circle that had been left unfinished. The finality of it rushes through him, along with something else, something intangible, and he feels stronger than he has ever felt in his life, he feels complete. He breathes deep once more, nostrils flaring, taking in the scent, making a list in his mind of each man that had killed him, and in turn each man that will die.
I will kill those who killed you. By tooth or by claw, I will kill them all.
Anger and strength surge through his veins. And he is itching now, as though his skin is threatening to burst open and consume all that exists beyond them – beyond their small patch of ground, covered in frozen blood.
He lets out a loud, piercing howl – the first he has ever made, has ever found occasion to – and it echoes into the black of night. He can smell the fear in the crows around him, and they should be afraid.
Winter has come.
--
Jon awakes with a rush of air to his deflated lungs, with a surge of blood pumping through his body. At first it runs through sluggish, thick and clotted – but over a minute the blood thins, his heart speeds up, and his lungs reinflate. Its as though time has been reversed, damage undone; and it feels wrong, so wrong he wants to crawl back wherever he was pulled from. Wherever he was, he had felt warm and strong and powerful. Now he only feels cold and weak and utterly exposed, as though teeth are liable to snap round his throat at any minute.
Slowly, he feels heat return to his chest, feels his organs recover from atrophy and groan back to life. He is dimly aware that were his mind working properly, he would be in a great deal of pain. Instead, he exists for now in an ether, in a cloud just above himself; and he wants desperately to go anywhere but here.
"He’s breathing! Jon? Jon? Is that you?" a voice asks. It's garbled and far away, as though he's lying at the bottom of a washing tub. "Jon, are you alive?"
It's insistent, whomever it is.
"How is he alive?" Another voice hisses in the darkness.
Jon begins to breathe regularly, relishing in the feel of air entering and exiting his lungs. Once, he took such things for granted, but never again. From now on, each and every breath will be a labour, until the day he is finally allowed to die.
In a rush, everything that he hasn't noticed comes into focus. It smells like cold and old blood, it smells like death and winter. He cannot open his eyes yet, but he feels bodies looming over him, smells them close, stinking of the acrid sweat of fear. He wants to bare his teeth, to defend himself, but he cannot yet. All he can do is lie there, naked and exposed, men clamoring over his meat, over his body.
How am I even here, how am I alive, a voice calls out in his mind.
The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives another voice answers, and now Jon is sure that Ghost is here with him still, that he’s been there all along, or has it been the other way around?
When feeling returns to his body, it is sharp and unrelenting. Every nerve is burning as though he is thawing from ice, from his fingers to his toes. It's like static, sharp and vibrating in the back of his head. He wants to scream out in pain, but still he cannot move.
"Jon? Jon, it's me Edd. I came back as soon as I heard word. Are you... gods how can I ask you if you’re alright? Would anyone be alright coming back from the dead? Seven Hells, you probably want to go back to the peace and quiet, gods know you won't get it here, not anymore."
Jon wonders if Edd can possibly comprehend just how correct he is.
"Lord Commander Snow, you need to open your eyes.” Jon recognizes the plain words as coming from Stannis Baratheon, hard and unyielding, like the ironwood door had been. But he had broken that down too eventually.
“Open your eyes,” a woman’s voice says, deep and seductive, and he slowly recognizes it as Melisandre’s. It’s a siren call, finally cutting through the fog and into his soul. And so he does. He opens his eyes, but still sees only blurs as he's not accustomed to the things that man sees.
"His eyes are red! Seven hells, they're red!" A voice cries out, and it’s vaguely familiar, the voice of a man he once knew, a brother who’d taken his vows in the godswood north of the wall.
Jon blinks, and the red is gone, though he cannot say how or why.
"Don't tell tall tales Satin, this is unnatural enough as it is,” Edd says, but his voice is wavering.
"I wasn't lying, they were red."
“Well they aren’t now, are they?”
Jon’s breathing is constant now, his eyes adjusting to the dim light, and he can curl his toes and wiggle his fingers. He can feel a cold draft of air slowly trickling along his chest, sending gooseflesh down his arms, and he wishes Ghost would climb up on this table and keep him warm. He wishes to bury his face in the thick, dense fur until he can pretend he is no longer so far away. Ghost lets out a quiet growl, and the sound calms Jon, sets him at ease. But he still can't speak, and he's afraid to try. Man sounds are too hard to make, and he doesn’t want to frighten these men any more than they already are.
"Jon, there was a mutiny. You were… you were stabbed by your own men, by Bowen Marsh, Wick Whittlestick, and several others." The voice of Davos Seaworth pauses. "We thought they killed you, Jon."
I know exactly who stabbed me Onion Knight, and I made a list of my own, Jon thinks. The only relief that will come of this will be that revenge can come by his own hand now, rather than by Ghost’s.
“All those deemed responsible lie in shackles in the ice cells, awaiting judgement,” says Stannis Baratheon, stern and terse. Jon inhales deeply, breathing in the scents that float through the air. All but one, he thinks, you’ve left one to run free.
He’ll amend that soon.
Another voice breaks through the din, it’s Edd’s dry candor once more. "He was dead though. We all saw it. He was dead for two days in this very cellar below the Wall. Ghost laid beside you the entire time, letting out the loudest, saddest howls anyone had ever heard. And all that time, not a man here slept, and the red woman, she did something…”
“He must not have been dead then,” muttered Davos Seaworth, unconvinced.
“This whole time we’ve stood here protecting your body –“ Satin wavers, “protecting you. Ghost has never left your side either."
How could he, when they were now two parts of the same whole?
Or maybe they always were.
--------
Sansa comes in the night, on a horse the color of freshly fallen snow, with hair dyed brown and dull, under the guise of a Stone.
She made haste as soon as she learned Jon was named Lord Commander, as soon as she knew he could grant her a safety beyond Littlefinger's grasp, beyond his unwelcoming gaze and lingering touches.
She is escorted by a woman who is less a woman and more a force of nature; a woman Sansa has come to trust with her life, and in turn with the future of the North.
This new responsibility is one she never thought she would have. Long ago, Winterfell and the North would have gone to Robb, to Bran, or to Rickon… but now the only one left is her – and her bastard brother Jon. She hopes that just as the trust she had put in Brienne over Petyr, that this decision to travel north – really the only decision she had left, the only choice she could have made that he would not have predicted, planned for – will keep her safe.
But as she stands in the courtyard of the castle that is barely even a castle, she wonders if she is in more danger than ever before. It is empty and broken down. Everything is in disarray, and the air smells of mildew and decay, like rushes that have seen a winter and summer without being changed and have long since begun to slowly decompose.
She greets Ghost first, scratching his fur in that place behind his ear that he likes, and he gives out a contented grumble low in his chest. Sansa swears she hears it echo off the walls and looks up to see Jon standing twenty feet away, and it is almost as though it is coming from him as well.
Now that she has looked up, she is troubled by what she sees before her. The men here are gathered round them in a circle, standing stock still and wide-eyed. They stare at her like she is a specter, and at Jon like he is a god, or a demon. He is dressed all in black; lambskin breeches dyed black, wool and mail and boiled leather all covering his chest, and surrounding his body is the black cloak of the Night's Watch.
He is a shadow of the boy that Sansa last saw in Winterfell; yet so very much larger, as though the sun has stretched and twisted his form against the walls.
Now that he is a man grown, he looks so much like father that it pulls at her heart, and she tries to push all the fear and trepidation from her mind. For so long, she has had nightmares of princes with blonde hair, of men with small pointed beards that smell of mint and camphor, of men that reek of ale and desperation. Now, she focuses on Jon; on his hardened, weathered features, on those dark grey eyes that seem to be seeing everything that is unsaid, and the small smile that has broken across his face. She begins to walk towards him, as he does the same, closing the short distance between them as though in a daze.
He reaches out and pulls her into his arms, and she pushes herself back into him, so thankful that she is finally home, back in the North. She leans in, expecting to smell that familiar scent of leather and pine that always followed Jon around when they were younger. Once, she had turned her head up at such simple smells, wishing for a man who smelled clean and sweet as a rose. No longer though.
Jon’s body is so cold though as she wraps her arms tighter against him, hoping to commit his scent to memory, to block everything else out. And while he still smells of leather – rich and earthy and somewhat wild – all else has ceased to exist, except the smell of cold that almost burns her nostrils as she breathes in. She finds herself shivering in his touch.
His arms wrap around her waist and he dips his head down into the space between her head and shoulder. He leans into her and she feels him breathe in the scent of her hair. She feels suddenly self-conscious, wondering how she could possibly smell of anything but dirt and sweat and dried tears after two months of travel on the backroads. But he is slow and careful, taking his time to breathe her in. His face nuzzles into her hair, like Lady once did a thousand years ago, and she feels a strange warmth wash over her. Welcome, she thinks, I feel welcome, and loved, like I am home.
Yet, there is something so different about Jon, something she can't define. It feels now that he is less a man, but more something else.
"Jon?" She asks with trepidation. "Jon, what happened to you here at the wall?"
He pulls away slightly, though keeps his arms set around her waist. She disentangles her arms from him, resting her hands on his arms. He's so cold, almost too cold.
He looks sad now, rueful. "More than I could tell you in just one night, I'm afraid."
But that would be true for her too, and they're not the same people they were at Winterfell.
She looks away from his gaze as she thinks of all the things she has done to stay alive, all the insults and slanders, and to be married off and then carted off by yet another man who decided that she was something to be owned.
But that isn't how Jon is looking at her now. No, the way he is looking at her, she is sure no one has ever looked at her before. He's looking at her like he has found heaven, or peace, or at least a breath of fresh air; and that look is so dark, so penetrating, she feels herself blush.
Jon looks at her, an eyebrow raised at her reddened cheeks. He glances down at her hands on his arms, and his eyes narrow slightly in curiousity. He relaxes his hold on her just a bit, and breathes out heavily, chest heaving. Sansa watches it rise and fall, mesmerized by this eternal dance, and by the shabby black furs that now cover his body.
She feels instantly sorrowful, wondering if he has suffered as much as she has, or maybe worse? Her hand reaches up to hold his cheek in her hand, to try to see if the Jon she once knew still resides behind those dark grey eyes. The feel of his beard against the palm of her hand is arresting, rough and comforting in turn. He leans into it, letting her hand cradle his head. All of a sudden, this movement, this small gesture, feels improper. Her breaths stalls in her lungs, her heart skips a beat, and she could swear he has noticed that too.
Jon is different, but some part of him is the same, must be the same. Sansa wants to pull her hand away from him, and simultaneously wants to thread her fingers round his face and bring it closer. She wants to study this new man that stands before her, where a boy once stood; she wants to commit every wrinkle to memory, intrigued and fascinated by him.
"I'm glad you're here, I'm glad you're safe" he sighs, letting one hand card through her hair. "No one will ever hurt you again."
And the way he is looking at her – reverential and possessing – she believes him, but she's not so sure if it's a promise or a threat.
-----------