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unfortunatelysirius · 5 years

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Goodbye, My Love // Jon Snow

「 ❁ 」PROMPT 「 ❁ 」 When it comes to saying goodbye, you’ve always had trouble. But it becomes especially hard when saying it to Jon Snow. 「 ❁ 」AUTHOR’S NOTE 「 ❁ 」 I am SO bad at updating… all I’ve got as an explanation. *shrug emoji* If you guys want a reunion companion piece [season 6] then hey, just ask. Otherwise, here’s this chunk of trash for you all ;) [It’s honestly rushed, I apologize in advance] 「 ❁ 」WARNINGS 「 ❁ 」 Swearing, Angst 「 ❁ 」WORD COUNT 「 ❁ 」

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YOU MET JON SNOW ON YOUR FIFTH NAMEDAY. You had always lived in Winterfell with your mother and father, who were (respectively) the seamstress and blacksmith. You were lowborn, but respectable, with parents whose gifts were renowned throughout Winter Town. You were never put in the finest dresses or presented in front of hand-picked husband prospects, that much was true; however, you never wanted nor needed to be highborn to feel like your life had meaning. Your first meeting with Jon Snow had you smitten, even at such a young age. You’d been running around Winter Town, a crown of flowers in your hair, when you’d stumbled into something warm and fleshy—a human body. You squealed and fell, the stranger following suit with a kidlike grunt. Only when you’d managed to spit out one of the petals that had fallen into your mouth did you look up, eyes snapping into some sort of trance. There was a blue-eyed gaze locked on your own. “Hi!” you’d immediately said, not bashful at all. You grinned at the strange boy, near the same age as you. “I’m Y/N. What’s your name?” The boy’s face was flushed red, a look of embarrassment on his face. He stood quickly. And he stayed silent, continuing to stare, like someone might would a predator. “Hellllllo?” You tilted your head. “You’re not very nice.” The curly-haired boy shook his own head, defiantly silent. His eyes flickered away from yours and back towards the way he came—the way you were heading towards. When you went sideways to see from around his body, you saw what he was looking at. Eddard and Catelyn Stark, the Lord and Lady of Winterfell, as they stood on the railing of their tower. You were incredulous, to say the least, that this was what caught the strange boy’s attention. Was it why he was silent, too? “Why are you looking at them?” you demanded. “D’you wanna be a lord, too?” The boy snapped his head around to stare at you. “What?” he demanded, in a voice much too brusque to be a child’s. You giggled childishly. “Lord Curly,” you teased. “’Cause you’ve got curly hair, and I don’t know your name!” Though he remained alert and angry-looking, the boy finally caved. His mouth twitched into a grimace. “Jon,” he said simply. “Lord Jon,” you said. You smiled toothily up at him. “Bye, Lord Jon.” You pranced around him, sprinting in the direction you were going originally. And as you went, a stray petal untucked from your crown, and it was rushed backwards by the wind. It went and went, all until it fell at Jon’s feet. He picked it up. And he stared at it. What he wouldn’t admit to anyone, much less himself, was that he thought you were really, really pretty. As pretty as someone five name-days old could be. And he hoped he’d see you again. He really hoped he’d see you again.

It was three years and three moons later when you saw the mysterious Jon again. You were eight, hair reaching your waist and eyes ever so wide. You’d become curious and adventure-seeking, still carrying around that same naivety like a sleeve’s patchwork. You were hanging around the kitchens, stealing sweets your mother refused to let you have, just leaving when you caught a glimpse of a curly-haired boy. He was walking briskly. Was he angry? You dropped the biscuits you were carrying and went to pursue him.

“Lord Curly!” you cried, struggling to keep up. The boy was older and taller, his pace like that of a man running from a bear—only he was jogging. Maybe he knew you were following, even before you’d called out his nickname. “Lord Curly, please—stop running!”

He stopped abruptly. A bit too late, perhaps, as you rammed your nose directly into his back.

“Ouch,” you cooed, rubbing the offended spot, blinking. The boy had turned around in the time it took for the pain to disappear, and catching his bleary gaze locked you in place. In a very bad way, given his expression. “Are you alright?”

“I was,” he said coolly. Was that a hint at you being an annoyance? You never could tell with anyone, much less the brooding subject of your childish fantasies. “What do you want?”

��My, my, Lord Curly! I just wanted to speak to you.” You smiled.

“I’m busy.”

Your smile became a frown. “Oh? Doing what?”

Jon didn’t look very pleased that you were still there. He was an inch away from fleeing. He returned your frown and muttered, “I’ll get in trouble if we keep talking.”

You jutted out your lip and made a noise. A very inhuman noise. “Lord Curly, why do ya say that?”

He looked over your head at something in the distance. You knew it was the Lord and Lady of the castle, as that’s all that lay beyond Winter Town.

“You’re not Robb,” you stated. “So who are you?”

“No one,” said Jon in response. Quick—too quick. He didn’t want you to know.

You kept quiet in reply.

Jon pulled his cloak tighter around his neck and face, body twisting around. His back was to you, his curly head of charred hair the framework of his identity.

He was like a shadow and a puzzle, conjoined together to make one very difficult game. You were eager to be his friend, keen to know him better—but he kept disappearing. It’d been over three years since you seen him last. And now he was the one running away.

“Bye, Lord Curly!” you called out to him as his footsteps echoed into silence and his head of curls were no longer seen.

Jon had hoped to see you again.

But Catelyn kept watching.

And she didn’t want him to have any friends.

So many years passed. You got taller and curvier, growing into yourself, until eventually you stopped changing at fifteen. Your fifteenth name-day was a tremendous affair, with the Lord and Lady themselves in attendance. Jon wasn’t there, to your disappointment. You hadn’t seen him since you were eight. It’d been so long, too long, enough to make you forget he ever existed. But he plagued your memories, he haunted your dreams. His name was always on the tip of your tongue. The cusp of a breath.

You’d danced with several boys, wearing a flower crown on your head. Every boy was worse than the last. You always pretended they were Jon, even though you held no picture—hardly even an inkling—of his current appearance. How did he look now, with the two of you older and less naïve? You were sure he’d chiseled out. He probably looked more a man than your own father did, the child that he was.

You wanted to stop being eaten alive by questions. You wanted him to appear on a white mare and take you captive in his orbit. You wanted to fall in love the old-fashioned way, the against-all-odds way, with someone your parents would not approve of. You could not care less. You didn’t give a shite what they thought. All that mattered was finding someone who could give you a happy ending.

That was over a moon ago. You were beginning to feel like you’d never see him again.

You walked out into the snow atop your balcony on a crisp evening, wearing another crown of flowers. You were dressed in an evening gown—feet barren and your hair crowning your face. You’d spent the day dreaming about Jon, and crossed Winter Town over six times, desperate to see the boy again—even if he held no recognition for you. What were the odds that he’d appear? To you, chance was nothing; this was all fate. Whether you’d find him again, you knew not. You knew next to nothing on fate’s plans.

You felt the world was in your hands and odds were in your favor, however. There was a feeling in your gut, a feathery weight, that kept you lifting, refusing to let you land. You were not grounded. You were airborne.

What did this mean?

It meant having hope in naïve fantasies.

Your hair blew around your face, masking your vantage of the navy sky. The moon was a hair away, right above your head, crowning you Luna. It was glowing translucently. It was calling for you to give up your games. But you—really, honestly, truly—refused to leave this for children until you found Jon again. Until you saw his face. Until you knew his coldness for what it was.

Curiosity is a killer. As is love.

You knew it so, but that did not make you any less reckless.

A rustling sounded from below. Could this—be it? You thought maybe. You brushed your windswept hair from your eyes, glancing downward.

From the dark shadows emerged a shape. A lean, muscular shape, clad in black—or maybe that was the darkness. He was threaded with it, wasn’t he? When a glint of moonlight bounced off the shadow’s raven curls, you knew it so.

It was Jon.

“Jon?” you whispered aloud, just to be sure. This fantasy come to life needed cemented.

The shadow moved closer, bringing with him sudden light. It was like a scene from a fairytale, with the ruggedly handsome knight coming to rescue his damsel. Though, this one was much darker and much less renowned than what you’d normally expect; the princes in your books were blond, blue-eyed, and sunlit.

A new perspective, you declared it. Jon was perfect in your eyes.

The boy in question coughed. “Yeah, it’s me, Y/N.” He was silent for a while thereafter, as the two of you stared at one another. Then he said, “I’m sorry for how I’ve made you feel.”

“Sick with longing for a man I know nothing about?” You smiled, though wearily, and laughed at him. “I assure you, there is not any remorse.”

Jon sighed. If not for the crisp air, you wouldn’t have noticed it. “Lady Stark has no kindness in her heart for me. I am a bastard, you see—”

“I know what you are, Jon Snow,” you said. “And quite the contrary to what you think, I don’t care.”

“Y/N, I’m a bastard—”

You snorted, as unladylike as could be. “And I’m not highborn. So why would I give a rat’s arse?”

Jon looked uncertain, glancing between you and the way from which he came. “I came to apologize, Y/N, not to start anything—”

“Lady Stark is a bitter, middle-aged woman, Jon,” you said. “And I’m quite the opposite. I assume you like that. Why else would you come back here to woo yourself into my good graces?”

There was an intensity in the air. It made you want to scale down the balcony and take Jon for your own.

Jon seemed quite puzzled, like he couldn’t tell what to think of you. At last he said, “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“Then let’s not get caught.”

From this view, Jon seemed like he was considering what you said. You decided not to give him time to take back his visit and his words. You hopped up on the edge of your balcony’s wooden posts and curved your body to face the entrance to your bedroom. You gripped the posts tight, and dropped down a few feet.

Jon hissed, “What are you doing, Y/N? You’re going to hurt yourself!”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” you grunted, using your limited view to catch what post to drop to next. Eventually you reached the last available post and you realized that you needed to jump down. “Jon, I have to let go.”

“Y/N, stop, no. You’ll get hurt.”

You smiled largely. “That’s why you’ve got to catch me!”

Your hands lost grip on the balcony.

You fell down, the wind gusting in your hair. You were flying, a raven born of air. You didn’t think about the consequences, not the possibility of death or severe injury, brain only centered on the beauty that being airborne was; and the idea you had a prince of darkness to catch your fall.

You roughly hit Jon’s rock-hard body, his arms coming to envelope you, the both of you falling into the snow. He grunted, and you squeaked. You had only dreamt of a proximity this close, and having him as close to you as he was now—

You flipped around to be chest-to-chest with Jon.

“I’m gonna kiss you,” you said abruptly.

Jon blinked in surprise. “Oh. Um. Okay.”

You pressed a small peck on his lips, without an actual response.

Jon stared up at you, his cheeks a rosy red. His nose, too. He looked shocked, like he hadn’t expected you to actually kiss him—but then you did, and he didn’t know how to respond. How to think, even. This beautiful art-piece of a human-being, kissing him and touching him like they couldn’t care less what his namesake was.

Jon surged forwarded and kissed you hard, much more assertively than you did him.

You squeaked again, finding this roughness, this ferocity, such a difference from your own faint touches. He was gripping your body like nothing ever had, holding you close and center, with the snow just a background accessory in the face of his body heat, and his kiss—fuck, his kiss.

It was otherworldly.

Eventually, you found this had to stop.

“Jon, Jon, stop—my parents!” You giggled against his lips.

“Fuck the town. Fuck everything, Y/N,” Jon said, leaning back to stare at you. “We’ll have our own town. Our own world. I’m Lord Curly, right? You can be Lady Flowers.” He placed a delicate hand on one of the flowers in your crown.

This direction was so different from where you’d thought it’d go. You thought Jon would use you then discard you like a used towel, and you’d let him because you liked him that much. You had learned to take what you could get, regardless of how hurt it put you in the process. Jon wanted this as much as you, right? So you thought it’d be foolish of you to say no.

You pushed yourself into him and got lost in the midst of frigid wind and falling snow, giggles and growls muffled under the pale light of the moon.

The two of you, for the better part of a few years, were rather invested in keeping up your connection. You’d hide out together and kiss, talk about your hopes and dreams, curse Catelyn Stark and her bitterness; all the while, you fell more and more hopelessly in love. You were once enraptured by Jon, thinking of him as the most honorable man you’d ever met aside from Eddard Stark, his father. But now, it was love.

Eventually, it caught up to you.

Catelyn Stark discovered your forbidden romance when she’d passed by the two of you kissing once. At once, she put a stop to it. She demanded Jon not to see you anymore, forced you all to put the shenanigans in the past. She knew who your parents were, and she disapproved of their child intermingling with a bastard. So much so, she went to your door a fortnight after you had last kissed Jon—and told your mother as she answered the door that you were in relations with her husband’s bastard.

Things got steadily worse after that. Your mother and father began fighting, as your mother did not like what you’d been doing while your father couldn’t bear telling you that you were wrong to love who you loved. Your mother would sleep alone in bed, your father made to sleep outside.

Jon never appeared again. He went moons without speaking to you. You felt like things were getting progressively worse, that the love of your life had been snatched away—

And then the King visited. And you learned from Robb Stark, who knew of your relation to his half-brother, that Jon was leaving for the watch.

You had to say goodbye.

Like you had two left feet, you clumsily left your mother and father’s abode, hurrying to the stables where Robb claimed Jon would be. You were terrified, thinking he had already left. This was the man of your dreams; if he left without giving you a deserved farewell, you wouldn’t know if you could forgive him.

You knew you wouldn’t forgive him.

You were flying through crowds of townsfolk, your legs aching and stomach receding into itself the longer you went, the farther you got. Eventually you reached the stables.

You stopped at the very edge of the entrance, peaking through. Your gaze swept past horses as they quietly moved their heads downward and ate from their haystacks. At one point, your sweeping gaze faltered, and you realized what had happened.

Jon had left you. He left without saying goodbye.

You didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.

You knew this day would come. Jon would get tired of running, and he’d get tired of feeling worthless, and so he’d put an end to both. He’d run until he got to a dead end. He’d fight until he was worth more than anything in the world. He’d do all he could to be something more than Eddard Stark’s bastard.

It meant throwing away your memories.

It meant leaving without uttering a single goodbye.

It meant letting your love be just as it was.

Never meant to last.

Jon kept running and running and running. He would run until his legs turned to jelly. He’d pant until his eyes rolled back with exhaustion. He’d scream and fight until he got where he wanted to be—somewhere new, somewhere different, somewhere not Winterfell.

(You couldn’t come with. Why couldn’t you come with?)

The running would stop.

(He never wanted to leave you.)

He only wished it didn’t mean losing the thing he’d loved most.

I love you, Lord Curly.

I love you too, Lady Flowers.

FIN.

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