#I should do a queer flag dragon too cuz I like those colors

[cinimuffin]

Posting this year's Pride Dragon redraw on a random Thursday night in the middle of the month cuz why not? If you desire this fella on a shirt, or stickers, or what have you, it's available on my Redbubble

[blackholeofprocrastination]

So I came across these pics of Tom Hopper picking up sack of grains and boxes and stuff and I was imagining what if Dickon escaped to North/WF and Sansa gives him residence bc noone deserves to be burnt to death but obviously he has to take up an alias. He helps in restoration of WF. He totally falls in love w/ Sansa bc who wouldn't. She's the best. And he keeps calling her queen and highkey trying his best to make her smile or life easier for her etc. And he's muscled like a bull

Super buff Dickon throwing sacks of grain around Winterfell? You’re talking my language nonny! I’m fashionably late to the Dicksa party but here’s some silly ‘What if Dany Didn’t Barbecue Dickon’ AU fic for ya. (Ignores the shows current Stark Sister drama cuz…who’s got time for that nonsense?)

The Snow It Melts The Soonest When The Winds Begin To Sing

Winterfell has become a near constant raucous of shouts and sounds. 

Outside it’s walls, the Winter town is filled to bursting with smallfolk from every inch of the North, clambering to Winterfell for protection from the war and winter to come. Hovels and tents are thrown together alongside the existing thatch-roofed homes. Their camp is a lively one, men and women and children and livestock all huddled on top of one another. At night, their voices carry over the thick walls of the keep as they gather together, seeking warmth from meager peat fires.

For most within the keep, the flagging daylight hours are spent in the yard, the singing of steel upon steel ringing out as Brienne leads those who can hold a sword through their paces. Sometimes Arya is with them. She moves through the lines, quiet as a shadowcat, offering the occasional encouragements to soldiers and shepherd boys alike. 

More often Arya can be found in the smithy, perched on an anvil, watching the smiths with a queer almost forlorn sort of attentiveness.

She worries for Jon, Sansa suspects.

The first sledges bearing dragon glass had arrived two moon’s ago. Since then, the fires in the forge have been kept stoked at all hours, hammers falling in a steady rhythm, shooting off sparks as spears and swords and pikes are fashioned out of the peculiar black stone. Sansa prays it will be enough.

Inside of the keep it is no quieter. There are more mouths to feed than ever (and increasingly less with which to feed them). The kitchens are a flurry of wooden spoons scraping against great cauldrons of porridge and broth. Dough smacks against wide-planked wood tables. Roasts of what the huntsmen bring back from the Wolfswood crackle as they turn on great spits. 

What women who are not busy, armed with a spear or ladle, gather around the fire in the great hall, spinning and knitting wool, their heads bent close, their voices like a low hum of a beehive. Sansa watches them sometimes. It makes her heart ache, bringing to mind simpler afternoons spent sat close with Jeyne Poole, their noses buried in their stitching. 

There are days when the Lady of Winterfell wants to escape it all. Wants to hide away in the silence of the godswood (as Bran has done since Meera Reed rode out from their gates). 

Still, there are more days when she is grateful to be surrounded by the chaos and the noise. She had not thought to see this again. 

For so long, she had supposed Winterfell lost to her. Memories of direwolf banners draped along it’s walls, of the warmth from the fire in the Great Hall, of the courtyard just after a snowfall when the ground was fresh and new…they had been her comfort in those lonely years in the South. She dreamed of it. Prayed for it. Home.

It is a shadow of what it once was. There are too many ghosts that dwell here to be truly happy. She is grateful just the same.

Sansa is making her way to the Great Keep, having spent a tedious morning consulting with the head carpenter and mason on what is needed to restore the glass gardens, when a startling sound catches her attention near the granary.

At first she thinks it only the low murmur of men’s voices as they see to their work, but as she draws nearer she realizes it is something she scarcely believed she’d hear within these walls again. Singing.

“Afield, afield, afield, I be,When a maid did smile at me.‘Twas fair Jenny, the goatherd’s daughter,Sent to fetch a pail of water.”

Sansa used to pride herself on knowing all sorts of songs and stories. Not just the dark tales Old Nan would spin before sending them off to their beds or the songs her mother would sing when she brushed her hair. Sansa remembers how she used to plead with her father every time a singer or minstrel came to their gates, begging that they might stay just a sennight longer. Long enough that she might learn their songs by heart.

But this is song she does not know.

“My lady?” Podrick asks when she lingers too long at the granary door. Sansa offers the squire an absent smile.

“Would you see the steward receives the estimates for the glass, Podrick?”

“Right away, my lady.” Pod bows, taking the offered ledgers and scurrying towards the Great Keep.

Sansa watches him leave before pushing through doors. Several men are occupied moving sacks of barley and oats out of sledges and wagons into the granary. They are Southron men. Soldiers, some of them even knights.

She has no illusions to why they are here. They are meant to be a gift of goodwill from this dragon queen. And while Sansa knows the North will not be so easily bought (no matter what Jon might have promised), she is not in a position to refuse the additional hands and stores that came with the arrival of the Reach men to Winterfell.

She is startled when she sees their commander is among them. Dickon Tarly is a difficult man to miss. He is easily the tallest man in Winterfell (taller than Brienne even), as well as broad and comely. Striking. The sort of man one can’t help but notice.

His arrival at Winterfell has proved a disruption to her household. More than once, Sansa’s come across a serving girl neglecting her duty in favor of idling by the practice yard, pink cheeked and giggling while the Reach knights train. And though Sansa has given her share of stern warnings on the matter, that hasn’t stopped a few of the bolder ones from batting their lashes at the young lord while serving him supper in the Hall.

Once, Sansa might have also looked on him with admiration. But Sansa is not that girl anymore. She has known the ugliness of this world, seen it lurk behind pretty faces, and she wants no part of it.

“A plea, a plea I made with she,That she might linger there with me,She offered me a drink of water,Did Jenny fair, the goatherd’s daughter.”

She’s close enough to pick out his somewhat unpolished baritone amidst the singing. It is a pleasant sound. Warm and deep and cheerful.

Sansa watches him with curiosity. She knows he is now the lord of Horn Hill. His father was sentenced to dragon fire, a fate the young lordling is said to have barely escaped. And his elder brother, Jon’s Samwell, is a sworn brother of the Night’s Watch, and unable to inherit his father’s seat. Yet for all that, here he is with his common fighting men, singing and shouldering sacks of barley alongside them and seemingly happy to do so.

Winter has come but you wouldn’t know it from inside the granary. It is stifling, much too close to the hot springs which heat the walls throughout the keep. Already the snow has melted in Sansa’s hair and the fur mantle that had barely kept the chill from creeping into her bones outside, now seems absurdly heavy. 

Many men have removed their cloaks and tunics, stripping to the waist. Sansa is long past being scandalized by such things. Still, something uneasy settles in her stomach as she watches Dickon Tarly heft another sack out of a wagon. Sweat slicks his skin, rivets leaving visible trails down the sharp lines of his chest and stomach.

Muscled like a bull.

That’s what she’d overheard one of the serving girls say when Sansa had caught them hovering near the practice yard. Sansa thinks she’s beginning to understand what the girl had meant now.

She feels even more uncomfortably warm than before. She should go. But before she can retreat back to the keep, she is noticed by one of the Reach knights.

“My lady!” he hails, pausing in his work to offer her a bow. The sentiment is echoed by the others, as dozens of eyes turn to her.

Sansa insides churn, as she cannot help but feel she has been caught doing something she should not. But that is foolish. This is her keep. She may go where she likes.

“Please!” she says. “I did not mean to interrupt your work. Carry on.”

She is relieved when another chorus of ‘my lady’ is murmured around the room and the men all return to their tasks…all but one.

“Lady Stark, is there anything you need?” Lord Tarly asks, crossing towards her. He has hastily pulled a tunic over his head, but the ties are undone revealing a stretch of collarbone that Sansa tries tries to keep her eyes from focusing on.

“No…no,” she stammers, feeling foolish. “I heard the singing and I…no.”

Silence stretches between them. She hopes that Lord Tarly will return to his work as the others have done, but he remains.

“That song,” she says, when she’s gathered enough wits and courage to speak again. “I’ve not heard it before.”

Color floods the lordling’s face, as he ducks his gaze away from her. Sansa is not the only one to be caught out, it seems.

“It’s from home.”

“Oh.”

“The smallfolk…they sing it when it’s time for the haymaking.”

There is a bashful smile on his face that leaves Sansa’s traitorous heart quickening in her chest.

“And what happens then?” she asks. “To your goatherd’s daughter?”

He is flushed to the tips of his ears now, Sansa notices with some amusement, and from the way he will no longer meet her eye, she suspects the answer must be something he deems too bawdy for a lady’s ears.

“I’m not sure I remember,” he mumbles, confirming Sansa’s suspicions.

“Pity,” she shakes her head in disappointment, fighting the sudden urge to smile. “I’m very fond of songs.”

He blinks, thrown for a moment. Good.

“If that is true, my lady, then perhaps…” he pauses, something uncertain and eager dancing in his eyes. “perhaps you would honor me with a song someday?”

She smiles for true now.

“Aye, my lord. Perhaps.”