Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It was one of the stranger dreams he’d had, which was saying something, since Jon used to dream through Ghost’s eyes. His senses were human in this one, but his hands, small and smooth, were free of sword calluses, and the world around him loomed large in the way it would a child.

Because he was a child, but he was also him. Jon had caught a glimpse of his face in a washing basin. His dreams as Ghost meant he was never truly startled to see something else reflected back when peering into water, but the face staring at him was one he hadn’t seen in at least ten years. Solemn grey eyes, dark hair hanging down to his shoulders, and the rounded cheeks of a child of perhaps seven or eight.

“Jon?”

Jon shot to his feet, knees free of the creaks earned too young in cold and combat. The voice calling him had come from outside the door to what he assumed was his bedchamber. It was small but comfortably furnished, and the air was warm in the early morning hours without the aid of a fire, which meant it must be somewhere in the south.

“Jon!” the voice called again, much closer and with a hint of concern.

Jon hurried to the door just as it opened, to the pinched face of a woman in her mid fifties, dark hair pulled back into a severe bun, her dress simple and modest. She was as unfamiliar as anything else in his dream, and he stared at her blankly.

“Are you ill, child?” she asked, hand going to his forehead. “It’s unlike you to sleep late. The maester is waiting, go and join your brother.”

Brother? A dull ache settled in his chest at the memory of carefree days spent chafing under the tutelage of Maester Luwin with Robb, both of them preferring to be in the yard with Ser Rodrik instead. He had spent so much of his childhood longing to be a man grown, able to prove himself more than a bastard, only to find himself forever after missing those simpler days.

“I don’t want to go,” he said, half afraid that if he did, he would find Robb’s ghost waiting for him, and half hoping that it was.

The woman frowned, then took him by the hand. “What has gotten into you? You will take your lessons, or you will explain yourself to his lordship.”

Jon sighed and let her—and the dream—lead him down the strange halls. He caught glimpses through the passing windows of stone castle walls nestled within a narrow pass, craggy rock sloping upward on either side. It was an unfamiliar landscape, but he had spent very little time in the south, and most of it on dragonback.

They eventually arrived at a door on the third level that opened to a small library. The window there offered a sweeping view over the castle’s walls to a large, green valley expanding outward from the mountain pass. A grey-haired man with the chain of a maester cocked an eyebrow at the woman escorting him, his questioning look passing then to Jon.

There was another child in the room, already seated at the small oaken table by the window. Not Robb, though he hadn’t truly expected that in a dream so far removed from any of his memories. When the child turned to him, his first startled thought was Daenerys? The silver-blond hair was nearly as long as hers, but the subtle differences became plain the longer he stared. For one thing, though pretty, he was clearly a boy, and his eyes were a darker violet than hers, his hair a few shades paler. But they were enough alike they could have been siblings.

The boy stared back at him with a curiosity almost equal to his own, something sharp in his gaze as he scanned Jon’s face. The maester cleared his throat expectantly, and Jon hurried over to the empty seat beside him.

The other boy’s name was Raymar, he learned over the course of their lessons, which covered history so old yet so comprehensively that he was fascinated in spite of himself. The bones of it he recognized from his own lessons long ago, but his dreaming mind had fleshed it out with surprising believability, adding details and names to conflicts and squabbles during the reign of Jaehaerys I.

He stole the occasional glance at Raymar, catching the boy doing the same before pretending otherwise. Aegon, he decided eventually. His mind had conjured some world where his half-brother had lived, and they’d grown up alongside one another somewhere in the south.

They paused for lunch midway through their lessons, and after another two hours of tedious instruction in reading and writing, in which both he and Raymar easily surpassed Maester Donnel’s expectations, they were granted a break before afternoon weapons training in the yard.

Jon followed Raymar out the door and to the end of the hall, where the other boy halted, turning to him. “Did you forget that today is my name day?”

“Oh.” Even though he didn’t even know the boy, Jon felt a flush of guilt. “No, I’ve been distracted. Happy name day.”

Raymar frowned at his response, the expression overly serious for a child. “It is not my name day, Jon. And if it were, it would be yours as well.” At Jon’s confused look he added, “We’re twins.”

Not just a brother but a twin? As dreams went, this one was an odd blend of the outlandish and the mundane, and he found himself suddenly impatient for it to end. “Does it matter?”

He started for the stairs, only to be stopped by a hand catching his arm. “Does it not?” the boy asked, gaze unexpectedly piercing. “Why?”

“Because it’s not real. It’s—”

“—a dream?” Raymar said, hand on his arm tightening briefly before releasing him. He looked stunned. “Do you mean to say you dream as well?”

Jon stared back at him, equally thrown. The other boy seemed to be implying that he believed this to be a dream, but as far as he knew, it wasn’t possible to share dreams. “Of course I’m dreaming. I don’t have a twin brother, I’m not a child, and I have never been wherever this is—”

“The Gates of the Moon,” Raymar said.

The Vale would explain the morning warmth, which had grown hotter as the day had progressed into afternoon. It had been on his mind, too, a topic of heated discussion with Daenerys given Baelish’s hold on the Eyrie and the credible rumors that his sister Sansa was being held there by him. Perhaps that was why his dreams had given him a sibling, albeit a long-dead one.

He started down the stairs, and he could hear Raymar move to follow. “Do you remember falling asleep?”

Jon’s next step faltered.

“I do not,” Raymar continued. “I was at Summerhall. There was a door I hadn’t noticed before, and darkness beyond it, save for a faint orange glow deep within that called to me. And when I walked through, suddenly I found myself here.”

“Summerhall?” he repeated, the first stirrings of doubt entering his mind. He had stopped at the ruins on his way back from Dorne, seeking the cache of dragon eggs that had been gathered there for the ritual that had doomed the palace and Aegon V himself.

He too could remember a door, and a calling within.

“This is a dream,” Jon said stubbornly, and he all but sprinted down the stairs.

He avoided Raymar for the next hour or so, weaving between the tolerant blue-cloaked guardsmen manning the outer walls as he took in the castle and its environs. The sight of the towering Eyrie to the distant north confirmed that this was indeed the Gates of the Moon, winter seat of the Arryn family, which meant the jagged mountain to its west must be the Giant’s Lance. Its current keeper, based on overheard conversations, was a Royce.

Eventually he found himself atop the northeast tower, staring at the evergreen forests high up on the mountains. They reminded him faintly of home, though the pines and spruce north of Winterfell rarely lost their dusting of snow, except at the height of summer. The blue-green needles here seemed almost naked without it.

“This is a dream,” he repeated to himself, peering over the parapet to the ground below.

But the dreams he could recall always wandered, logic twisting from one moment to the next such that nothing ever quite made sense yet there was never cause to question it. The march of time here felt real, each minute consistent with the last. Jon couldn’t remember dreams ever being quiet, allowing for reflection or even boredom, yet he had time aplenty for both here.

Jon leaned further over the parapet, safely out of view of the guardsmen on the ramparts below. You cannot die in a dream. He couldn’t remember who had told him that. Perhaps it had been Old Nan.

It would be, potentially, a very final way to be certain.

Arms closed around his waist then, startling him, and wrenched him away from the edge.

“Are you mad?” Raymar had found him, purple eyes wide with alarm. “If you think this a dream, then it will end soon enough, without the need for you to risk your life.”

Life was much easier to be cavalier about when you had already died, but he couldn’t exactly say as much. “I’ve taken more foolish risks than that.” Jon extricated himself with a frown. “Why should you care? You don’t even know me.”

“If we are truly here, then who would believe such a tale? They would think it a child’s imagination at best, and madness at worst.” Raymar met his gaze. “You are the only person who understands. We are, if nothing else, allies in this.”

Jon begrudgingly let himself entertain the notion this time. He had been plucked from death before, would it be so strange to be plucked from one life to another? And if somehow he truly had become a child again and been plopped into a Vale castle with what was clearly a Targaryen for a brother, then what?

The Others had been defeated, but the North, though secure, had been shattered—Robb dead, his surviving brothers too young to rule alone, his sisters both lost. The Iron Throne was far from settled. His ties to kin on both sides tugged him in every direction: Sansa in the Vale, rumors of Arya across the Narrow Sea. Daenerys and the dragons, working to unite Westeros once more under Targaryen rule.

He had sacrificed love for duty again and again, until the great threat of the Others had been eliminated. There had seemed to be, at last, a chance to pick up the shattered pieces of his family and forge something new from it. If he was to have any hope of doing so, then they needed to find a way to reverse what had been done.

“You think we might find answers back at Summerhall,” he said finally, having reached that conclusion on his own. If a door had led them here, then perhaps that door could take them back.

Raymar nodded. “You were there?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I saw the same. A doorway leading into darkness.” That they had both been called to it the same way spoke to another force at play. “We were lured here. Why?”

“I do not know,” Raymar said with a frown.

“Or this could be a dream,” Jon said, partly because he believed it, and partly to see how the other boy would react. He had expected irritation perhaps, but instead, Raymar’s shoulders tightened, the smile that played across his lips faintly bitter.

“I doubt it.”

The certainty in his voice was enough to make Jon doubt himself. “Why?”

Raymar turned slightly, gaze going to the distant Eyrie. “My dreams are rarely so kind.”

Their afternoon lessons were miserable in a different way. Jon, who was never without a sword at his side, had taken some comfort in even the wooden practice swords handed to him and Raymar by the castle’s master-at-arms, Ser Perkins. But his body was a child’s body, and instincts honed over his years with the Night’s Watch proved more a hindrance than a help.

His only consolation was that Raymar seemed equally frustrated, though the other boy hid it much better, shouldering the sharp insults hurled their way with impressive grace. Jon had to bite his own tongue more than once, both in defense of himself and his newly acquired brother. Ser Perkins seemed to view their clumsiness as born of either inattentiveness or mischief, and they both gathered quite the collection of welts before he dismissed them.

It left him with pent-up anger and no outlet afterward. Raymar deserved none of it, and Ser Perkins had easily sidestepped his swings. To his utter mortification, the anger settled in his chest as a half-sob, and he swiped furiously at the hot tears that sprung up with it. It was a child’s anger, quick to rise and quick to ebb.

Raymar mercifully gave him a few moments to compose himself, turning his back to Jon as he removed the padded training armor, though he left his hair in the long braid he’d gathered it into for their lesson.

“You must be a skilled swordsman,” Raymar said as Jon wriggled out of his own armor.

Jon shot him a sharp glance, looking for any signs of mockery, but he found none, just a quiet curiosity. “I spent half our lesson in the mud.”

“You would not be so furious if it were a common occurrence.” The boy brushed wisps of sweat-damp hair from his forehead. He hesitated, then added, “It was frustrating.”

“We will drill,” Jon growled. “Every morning before lessons, and between lessons, and in the evening before bed, until we have mastered ourselves and can wield a blade as before.”

There was a trace of surprise in Raymar’s expression, perhaps at the unexpected zeal, that gave way to a small smile. It brought a strange warmth to his chest, and Jon found himself smiling back.

“Quite a skilled swordsman, then,” Raymar said dryly, “to be such a tyrant of a taskmaster.” He scanned the training yard, presumably for Ser Perkins, then disappeared into the armory, emerging with their wooden practice blades. “We will be needing these, I suppose.”

He tossed one to Jon, who managed to catch it, despite his senses insisting his arms were half again as long.

“Come,” Raymar said. “We’ll need to wash up before supper.”

While Jon had been brooding on the tower, as Raymar put it, his brother had spent his time taking stock of their circumstance. They were orphans, as best as Raymar could tell, kin to the keeper of the castle, Allard Royce, and living here as his wards. Allard Royce was nephew to Lady Royce, who held the family seat of Runestone.

They were twins, as Raymar had alluded to before, with Jon the elder of the two, and their eighth name day was roughly four moons from now. Trueborn, since they were both called by the Redfort surname, though their exact relation to Allard was unclear. The maester had referred to him as their cousin.

The castle itself was in a flurry of preparation in advance of an expected visit from Lady Royce, with apparent pressure on both Maester Donnel and Ser Perkins to ensure that Jon and Raymar conducted themselves well in her presence.

Allard Royce was a somber-faced man in his mid twenties who took them both to task at supper for Jon’s tardiness earlier in the day, as well as their purported misconduct during weapons training. For some reason, most of his ire fell on Raymar, whose expression went still during the lecture, gaze fixed on the man. It seemed a dance the boy was accustomed to, one careful response following another, until the man’s disapproval waned.

It was an odd position to find himself in. At Winterfell, Jon had been the one singled out for any transgression involving him or Robb, forced to endure Lady Stark’s reprimands in stony silence. Here, he found an unexpected sympathy for Robb. It was uncomfortable to be on the other side of it, watching someone else shoulder the brunt of the blame, and it was all he could do to bite his tongue throughout.

The rest of supper was relatively peaceful, most of the murmur of conversation between Allard and his wife, Lynda, who was visibly with child. Jon was grateful to escape back to his room, which had turned out to be their room.

“Why does he dislike you?” Jon asked, only to realize almost immediately that it was unlikely Raymar would know either.

The other boy seemed to give the question some thought regardless. “Perhaps I challenged him in the past.”

It was an insecure man who could be successfully challenged by a child of seven, Jon thought privately. “I should have said something,” he said, regretting it now.

“Better that you didn’t. It was rather tame, as rebukes go.” A  wry smile rose on his lips, though there was a touch of melancholy behind it. “It seems I am to be a disappointment wherever I go.”

“Here,” Jon said, grabbing their stashed practice swords from beneath the bed and tossing one at him. “We can disappoint each other for the next hour.”

“Oh.” Purple eyes blinked at him with dawning realization. “You were in earnest about the late night drills.”

Jon set the pace for their training, something his time as a brother of the Night’s Watch had prepared him for well, though Raymar was far better trained than the raw recruits he had drilled the basics into. Jon started them both out progressing through various guard stances, followed by simple strikes and counterstrikes against air.

He finished the session with a handful of bouts, albeit at half-speed. It felt silly, and he could see the same rueful self-consciousness on Raymar’s face as they struck and countered, but neither of them stumbled over their own legs, or over-reached badly enough they would have lost a limb to live steel.

“Better,” Jon said at the end. They both were out of breath, even at the more leisurely pace, and a startled glance at the candle revealed it had been not one hour but two. “We’ll continue in the morning.”

Raymar shot Jon a beseeching glance. “We have lessons in the morning.”

“Early in the morning,” Jon said, unmoved.

He saw the protest gather on Raymar’s lips, only to be swallowed by a rueful smile.

“What?” Jon asked, curious about what had prompted it.

“You remind me of someone,” he said. “A friend, equally driven by the sword.”

“By the sword, or good sense?” he retorted.

Raymar laughed, the high pitched giggle of a child, and then looked so startled by the sound that it set Jon off in turn, the absurdity of the situation lending an edge of hysteria to their laughter. By the end of it, his sides were aching, and he felt lighter as he readied himself for bed.

The room was dark and the night quiet once they snuffed the candles and settled beneath the blankets. 

Neither spoke, but Jon was sure the other boy’s thoughts mirrored his own. It feels so real. The soreness from their bouts in the yard, the soft fabric of the blanket on his skin, the warmth of another body next to his.

He closed his eyes, clinging to the hope that when he next woke he would be back at Summerhall with this a fading memory, but in his heart he knew he would not be so lucky.