#eruhwrites

[eruherdiriel]

The wind beats against the tent. Sansa shudders, then begins to sing again, the words spilling out of her mouth and into the cold air of her and Brienne’s shelter. As if answering her song, a wolf howl rises above the wind that blasts through the frozen hills and wraps around the tent like an icy blanket. A ghost wolf, heard but unseen, she thinks.

After Brienne frees her from the Vale, Sansa sets them on a course north to the Wall, to Jon Snow.

Read A howl, a song on the wind on AO3.

Written for the Jonsa Halloween 2024 event. Prompts: 28 Oct., wolf, and 30 Oct., magic. @jonsa-halloween

A girl in grey, Sansa POV prequel to My eyes were wide open.

[eruherdiriel]

Not all tears are an evil

Jonsa ficlet Rating: T Universe: Post-canon, bookverse Other: Fluff and a bit of sadness, Jon POV, King Jon

Also on AO3.

“Why are you crying?” Jon asks.

Sansa is standing by the window of their bedchamber, wrapped in a large fur despite the warmth of the room. Outside, the sun has risen on what might be one of the final summer days before autumn. It has been a good season, bountiful and warmer than Jon remembers summer being when he was a boy.

“I am not,” she lies.

The truth is in the thickness of her voice. Jon hadn’t noticed the signs at first, when he opened his eyes to find her gone from their bed and then rolled over to see her by the window. There was no shake of her shoulders or sounds of weeping coming from her, not until she sniffled. That is when he knew.

Tucking his legs up and settling his feet on the floor, Jon reaches for his sleep shirt and pulls it on over his head so he is not entirely bare when he crosses the room. When he reaches his wife, he wraps his arms around her, her back against his chest, and presses his cheek to the side of her head.

He wants to ask again what upset her. She was coy but elated last night, when she told him of the babe, and then eager in their lovemaking when he did not know how else to properly convey his own happiness.

Did he miss some sign of her distress earlier, or did the feeling come after? He wants to ask. 

Instead, he waits.

“I was thinking about how my mother is not here to tell me what it is like,” Sansa says finally. “Having a child, being a mother. And your mother is not here either.”

“There are plenty of women at Winterfell who have had children. And Maester—”

“It’s not the same.”

It is not. He knows it, but he cannot take this reality from her, from both of them.

One of his hands drops lower from where Jon has his arms wrapped around her, and he splays his fingers across her belly, feeling what is not fully there yet.

“I wish they were here,” Sansa says. Fresh tears have sprung from her eyes, and desperation coats her voice. “All of them. Everyone we have lost.”

“As do I,” he murmurs into her hairline.

She twists in his arms until they are facing each other, then presses her forehead to his. She is so close that he can smell the salt of her tears. 

“I feel torn in two. I have you and now this child, but so many we loved are dead. It has been years, but it still hurts, and … those wounds may never heal. Every moment of joy will be tinged with loss, won’t it?”

Yes, he thinks, but Jon wants to say something more, something comforting. “At least it will be a shared grief. You do not have to endure it alone.”

This has happened before, he realizes. The day of their wedding, she had cried as they said their vows beneath the heart tree, and when Jon asked what was wrong, she said they were happy tears. He wonders now if the truth was more complicated, that despite their love for each other, she did not know or trust him well enough to speak the whole truth back then.

“I should be happy,” Sansa insists.

Jon lifts his arms so he can take her head in his hands, then leans back slightly so they may see each other better. “It is not wrong to feel sorrow. Or to feel two things at once.”

His own life has always been full of contradictions, so perhaps he is more accustomed to the feeling than his wife is. Highborn, but a bastard. Loyal to his brother and the Starks, but jealous that Robb was to become Lord of Winterfell and then was raised up as King in the North. And when Jon found out who his parents were, it stole from him Ned Stark as his father and Robb, Arya, Bran, and Rickon as his siblings. But it gave him Sansa as a cousin, then as his love, and finally as his wife.

Two things can be true. Joy and sorrow take flight together.

“You do not find my tears frivolous and weak?”

“Never,” he says, almost too sharply. “They speak to what we have lost. What you survived but did not let steal your tenderheartedness. Whether happy or sad, your tears are your strength, Sansa.”

A small laugh leaves her, then she leans closer and nudges his nose with hers. “You say the most beautiful things sometimes.”

At his look of surprise, she sighs and adds, “You don’t even realize when you are saying something sweet to me, do you?”

Whenever he tries, the words come out wrong, ungainly and inelegant. And while he was attempting to reassure her now, he was not trying to be romantic or sweet, yet that seems to have been what she heard.

“The other day, Arya told me you and I were perfect for each other because we are both romantics.”

Jon scoffs. “She did not.”

It has been three years since they wed, but Arya can still barely look at Jon and Sansa when they are at all affectionate with one another. She keeps a neutral face in public, savvy enough to understand that any derision toward their marriage could be disruptive to Jon’s rule, but as a family, she lets her true feelings be known. It is almost a joke now, and he wonders if that is part of why she keeps up her exaggerated gags, rolled eyes, and disgusted faces.

“She did. And she called us dramatic. The dramatic romantics.”

“That sounds more like her.”

Sansa smiles for a moment, then the edges of her mouth tip down again. “I wish you could have known your mother. She would be so proud of you, Jon. I never meant to suggest that my loss is greater, or that I think about it more.”

“I never thought you did.”

“Whatever we are, whatever we feel, we’ll do it together?”

“Always. Happy, sad, or both,” he promises. “Now come back to bed.”

Her head turns back to the window where the sun stretches over the castle walls, telling the time. “It’s late. We both have much to attend to today, my king.”

“As we do every day. Duty can wait for once, Sansa.”

She looks back at him with a lifted brow. “Can it?”

“Aye.”

Bending at the knee, he scoops one arm under her legs and the other around her back, causing his sweet wife to gasp in surprise. Her hands grab at him, and the fur around her shoulders slips, revealing more of her pale skin.

“Why bother being a bloody king if I cannot decide how to pass my days every once in a while?” Jon says as he carries her to the bed.

“That’s precisely why you are a good king! Sacrifice … being selfless … putting the people’s needs above your own desires.”

He frowns as he sets her on the featherbed. The fur falls all the way open. “A king must bring stability to his realm. Heirs are one part of creating that stability, and you are newly with child, my lady. Ensuring your health and happiness is critical.”

His queen is laid bare before him, but it is her eyes he cannot look away from as he braces himself above her—the deep blue of her irises even more pronounced by the red lines that run through the whites of her eyes, evidence of her earlier tears. “You might even say that it is my duty to the people to spend the day with you.”

She shakes her head and laughs, but when he kisses her, she kisses back, all her protestations gone.

[eruherdiriel]

“Are we really never gonna talk about it?” Arya snaps. “We’re all gonna pretend everything is normal and happy when Sansa just got divorced?” “Statistically, it is normal,” Bran says. “The divorce rate is something like—” “It’s not normal! Not for this family, and not for Sansa. True love, forever and always, that’s Sansa.”

Sansa and Jon get divorced, but fully untangling their lives is impossible.

Read You tend the ash, and I’ll tend the pine on AO3.

[eruherdiriel]

After ruin

Jonsa ficlet Rating: T Universe: Canon Other: Angst, Sansa POV

Also on AO3.

She watches him slide the knife from its sheath and test the sharpness of the blade against a callus on his left hand.

“Must you go?” Sansa asks. Jon is always going to war it seems, and this time he would march right into the dragon’s maw. “Daenerys has already killed kin to clear her path to the Iron Throne.”

Aegon Targaryen is dead, so proclaimed the letter that arrived not five days ago with news from the south. Dragon fire killed him, as it kills many in the Crownlands and the Reach these days. But his death occurred after a challenge, a mockery of a test Daenerys must have known her nephew would not pass. She offered him one of her dragons to ride and then commanded it to breathe fire on him, the letter said. When he burned, she said it proved he was a pretender and that her true nephew died nearly two decades ago in King’s Landing.

Sansa knows better. Targaryens are not immune to fire; she has felt the proof as she traced the ruined skin of Jon’s sword hand. And yet, she has also heard the stories of when they tried to burn his body after the mutiny at Castle Black. She still remembers how Satin would not meet her eyes when he spoke of it, out of both shame for allowing it to happen and for fear of how Jon rose amidst the flames.

“I am a soldier. The battlefield is where I belong,” Jon says. The blade sings as he slides it back into its covering. “This is how I serve the North.”

“And how you run from love,” she says softly. She had not meant to say the words aloud, and hearing them nearly stops her own heart. It is much too soon for such a sentiment, but once it is out, Sansa knows it is true. She loves him. 

Whatever he feels in return, it is enough for Jon to run from her, just as he runs from his parentage. If he is fighting, he doesn’t have to face either thing. He doesn’t have to think about his mother dying after she birthed him and living her final months hidden away in a tower in Dorne. He doesn’t have to explain why he lets Rickon fall asleep against one side of his body and Sansa fall asleep against the other when they tell her baby brother a bedtime story. He doesn’t have to explain why he stopped letting Sansa come to his bed when she has nightmares, but she knows it happened after the morning she woke to feel him pressed against her, his hand wound in her hair and his breath warm on her neck.

He doesn’t have to explain why, when she tended his wound after fighting the Others and began to cry at the damage to his body that showed how close she came to losing him again, Jon lifted her chin with one hand and told her not to weep. Told her that he survived. That he could survive anything if it meant coming home to her. And then he kissed her tears away, his lips pressed against one cheek and then another before finding the curve of her mouth.

Her words to him now make Jon still, his back toward her, and he stays silent for some time. Sansa holds her breath and waits. Jon is always making her wait.

Jon, and the gods. And because of that, she has learned to be patient, learned through waiting to escape King’s Landing, and then waiting to escape the Vale of Arryn, and still she waits for Bran and Arya to come home.

“I do,” he says, head cocked slightly in her direction but still not facing Sansa. “Love you. But my love would only ruin you.”

This time, her heart does stop; she would swear to it.

If only Jon had stopped speaking after saying, I do love you.

“Ruin? You know nothing of love if you think it would ruin me.”

Now Jon turns. “Sansa, I’m—”

“A bastard?” she snaps. “A Targaryen? A deserter from the Night’s Watch? How many times must I tell you I do not care about any of those things? I care about how you treat your friends. How you respect me and make me feel safe. I care about how you’re the only person left that I can talk to about Robb, even though it hurts. I care about how you do your duty as a soldier despite how I know you want nothing more than to find out if Bran and Arya are alive and to search for them.”

He sighs and scrubs a hand over his face.

But Sansa has more to say, so she continues before he can protest yet again. “When we find love in this world, we should cling to it. How much love does anyone know in their life? I once had a mother and father and siblings who loved me. And they are gone except for Rickon, swept off by war and violence, and that is ruin, Jon.”

His eyes soften, and finally he leaves his half-packed saddle bag and walks over to her. Then Jon takes her face in his hands, and for the heartbeat that he studies her, Sansa thinks he is going to give her what she wants���he will kiss her and say he is going to stay. But instead, Jon tilts her head down and presses his lips to her forehead, and the vision is dashed.

“This is all I can give you at present,” he whispers into her hairline. “My sword.”

Why, she wants to scream. Why can’t you stay with me?

But she knows why. The qualities that would keep Jon from her and drive her ire are the same ones that helped make her love him.

“And after?” she whispers.

Her head is tucked into his neck, but she can hear the frown Jon must wear when he speaks. “Let me deal with our enemies. Then we can talk about after.”

It is only half a promise, but she will take it, will hold it tight to her chest while she waits for the wars to finally be over.

[eruherdiriel]

Lying is easy for her now, like a bird lifting its wings to fly. She watches one do just that, flapping around the small enclosed space of the rookery, full of other ravens and droppings and stone perches. Knowledge is freedom for the birds; no matter the weight of the words they carry, each scroll is an opportunity for them to fly in the open sky. I must do the same, use what I know to set us all free.

A maiden returns to her snow castle, and a boy remembers how to be a man instead of a wolf. At Winterfell, they would be safe but for a mockingbird and emerging desires.

Read Bird on the wing (9 chapters, 61k words) on AO3.

[eruherdiriel]

It's been one year since I posted on AO3 for the first time 🎉. To celebrate, I'm sharing my first fic because I didn't post it here at the time.

The first time it happens, they've been married three moons. She wakes in the night, the taste of chains in her mouth. Swipes her tongue around, looking for the source, a tear, a split. There's nothing. But the tang is there—faint, receding, but present. She hadn't imagined it.

Strange dreams begin to haunt Sansa's sleep.

Read In the blood (1k words) on AO3.

[eruherdiriel]

Jon doesn’t know why he came to the game. Everything about the high school gym is overwhelmingly loud—the squeak of the players’ shoes across the floor, the yelling of the teams and fans, the rock and synth-pop songs that blare over the loudspeaker anytime there’s a break in the game. Last school year, you couldn’t have paid him to come to one of these things. And yet— “Why are we here again?” Sam asks. “School spirit.” It’s a terrible excuse, one Sam sees through easily.

For the @jonsa-valentine event. Types of love: Storge, Agape, Philia, and Ludus.

Read Songbirds (one-shot, 9k words) on AO3.

[eruherdiriel]

Homecoming

Jonsa ficlet Rating: G Universe: Canon, bookverse Other: Arranged marriage, Sansa POV

Also on AO3.

Banners appear on the horizon, the emblem invisible to her at first as the standards fly straight out behind the men who hold them, but Sansa does not need to see the fabric to know who has arrived. Ghost had been beside her in the Great Hall as she met with a group of serving women when he chuffed and sprang to his feet. The direwolf had only to look at her and she knew. They had climbed the stairs in the keep until they reached the battlements, Sansa following Ghost as he walked her around to just above the East Gate. Together, they watched over the hills to the south and east of the castle, waiting for any sign of him—for Jon and his host, riding home from a gathering with new southern rulers.

The standard bearers slow their horses, and the banners relax into a gentler movement. She can see the great beast on them now, white against a grey background. While it looks the most like a direwolf—like Ghost—it is something new, with a scaled belly, long talon claws, and feathery wings—a wolf, a dragon, and a crow all in one. Ivory weirwood trunks and limbs with bright red leaves encircle the beast to complete the design, one of Sansa’s own imaginings. With their marriage, Jon could fly the Stark banner, the grey direwolf that hangs off the battlements of Winterfell even now, but he had refused.

Ghost moves back toward the stairs, and she follows to await his master in the yard. Her palms sweat in her light leather gloves and her heart pounds. I have not been this nervous to see Jon since our wedding night.

Once her husband is through the gate and off his horse, they greet each other formally. Nervousness continues to bubble inside her as they proceed into the keep and his bedchamber, where a bath awaits him. 

She leaves him there to wash off the grime of a hard ride. He frowns as she goes, no doubt sensing her disquietude. Why must he see through me? she wonders.

Perhaps his ability to do so is the very reason she finds herself in this situation.

Later, when she sees the servants taking the dirty bathwater away, she returns to his rooms. The first soft knock returns no answer, so she tries again, firmer this time, and he bids her enter. 

Jon is standing straight when she opens the door, but Sansa can see the exhaustion behind his eyes. Once again, their greeting is proper. Then they fall silent, as he waits for her to explain her presence.

There are words Sansa is thinking of trying out on her tongue, ones she has never spoken to Jon before. The alliance their marriage built is so very fragile still, and affection was never part of the promises they made to each other or their people. It grew anyway, at least for her. Scarier than recognizing that is the fear she harbors that he does not feel the same.

But Sansa is brave, so she walks closer to him and twists her tongue to form the words.

“I missed you,” she says, eyes cast down. Her disposition does not prevent her from seeing his eyebrows shoot up. With them, her own walls rise. She lifts her chin as well, no longer wishing to appear demure.

“I mean to say, Ghost missed you, and I missed having you to negotiate with the wildlings. Tormund Giantsbane is the crassest man—”

Jon halts her words as he reaches out and pulls her into his chest, his nose drawing a line up her neck as he breathes in deep. Almost like he wishes to inhale me, she thinks. “I missed you as well, my lady,” he says in her ear, and sparks shoot down her back from where his breath tickles her skin.

Sansa believes him, Seven save her. After everything, her trust in people having been trampled by a cavalry of cruel men and women, this is all it takes: an embrace and seven simple words. Only his embrace, and only his words, she promises herself.

She relaxes into his arms, content for the first time in a long while.

[eruherdiriel]

He’s one building away when he sees her—auburn hair in two neat French braids, a grey peacoat on, and hands in green fleece gloves holding a shopping bag that looks heavy. Sansa Stark is walking up the steps of the triple-decker, leaving a sleek, black sedan idling by the curb. Ned or Robb would come inside, so it must be Catelyn who drove her over. Flustered, Jon jogs the rest of the way and reaches the steps just as Sansa raises a hand to ring the buzzer. “Hey,” he says, and she stops her motion. When she turns to him, Sansa’s eyes go wide. “Are you all right?”

Jon and Sansa—how touch evolves between them over the years.

Read Touch me, I'm going to scream (6 chapters, 20k words) on AO3.

[eruherdiriel]

Duty

Jonsa ficlet Rating: T Universe: Canon, vaguely bookverse Other: Marriage of convenience, Queen Sansa, Sansa POV

Also on AO3.

Sansa finds him under the heart tree, Longclaw across his lap and a whetstone in his hand. He looks so very much like Father it hurts and makes what she is about to say all the more disconcerting.

“My queen,” he greets her, then returns to his work.

“My prince.” She spares Jon any further pleasantries. They will not change what she has to say. “The North needs heirs. I need an heir. We cannot ignore that forever.”

Jon’s hand stills, and though he does not look up, she can see his face become guarded.

“We’ve done our duty.”

Sansa holds in a sigh at his intentional obtuseness. “It takes more than once, Jon.”

“Aye, it can.” Finally, he looks up, but he keeps his eyes from locking with hers. “I thought to give you more … time, before we made a second attempt.”

Their wedding night had been a stilted affair at best; she had trembled, he had frowned, but they had seen it through. Sansa had tried not to think of the men who had touched her before, or how surely Jon was willing himself to think of the woman who came before her. 

“You’ve had me once. Surely another time will not be so different,” she snaps. It won’t be different. Your kiss will always taste of duty, and I will never give myself wholly to anyone. But some childish dream buds inside her at times, when he offers her a hand as they walk over icy ground or when he scowls at men who overlook her authority. 

Regaining her composure, she continues, her tone softer. “You leave soon. We cannot afford further delay.”

It’s not just about heirs. Sansa does not know how long Jon will be gone, only that she dreads the absence for the awkwardness it will engender in his return. It would be better to become accustomed to his touch now. And what if he does not return? Despite everything—the oddness of a match to a man she once thought her bastard brother, who is the opposite of everything she once wished for—Jon has been a better husband than any of her former suitors could have been. No one else could love the North and Winterfell as well as she does. And if he gets her with child, perhaps she could forestall another marriage if he falls in the war against his Targaryen aunt.

Jon eyes her. “Would you want children even if it was not your duty?”

The question startles her. No one has ever thought to ask me. Bearing children was always expected of her, a sure part of her life. But yes, she has dreamed of a family, and she wishes for one still.

“I want children.” Then, because she honestly does not know, Sansa asks, “Do you?”

She wonders how much Jon has allowed himself to even consider the idea of a family. Since they reunited, she has seen a glint of desire in his eyes for things he never should have wished for—for Winterfell, for a title—but Sansa also knows he has denied himself. “Winterfell belongs to my sister Sansa,” Jon had said when the Northern seat was offered to him. Learning that had caused another bud of hope to emerge in her, though she tried to temper it.

His answer comes swiftly. “Yes.”

Sansa’s tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. She swallows, trying to bring moisture back so she can form words again.

“Then we both get something we want. It shall not merely be duty.”

Jon purses his lips as if in disagreement but doesn’t refute her. His eyes drop before he speaks, resuming the work of sharpening Longclaw. “I’ll come to your chambers tonight then, your grace.”

She nods, then remembers he isn’t looking at her anymore. “Tonight,” she says before turning away and attempting not to run from the godswood—not to run from him. It would be unbecoming of a queen, and she is not afraid of him.

All day, her tummy flutters for nothing: when Jon’s fingers brush her back as she sits in the chair he has pulled out for her, when his eyes meet hers to communicate silent agitation as Lady Cerwyn complains about troop commitments, and when his fist taps on the door of her chambers in the evening.

“It is only us here, my queen,” Jon says before they begin. “No one else.”

Is it? she wonders. Along with their ghosts, surely the nobles and smallfolk have a presence with them in this act. It is for them, for the assurance of her people that she and Jon strive for an heir. And for ourselves, and the family we both desire, she reminds herself. Then her husband says something else, something that makes her heart stutter.

“Let me make it good for you,” he whispers between kisses. “Let me try.”

She should not allow his words to plant a seed in her heart, but the look in his eyes is needful and vulnerable in a way Jon so rarely allows himself to be seen. Sansa finds herself nodding, letting him kiss his way across her body, letting him rid her of her shift, letting him touch and kiss her in ways that start to feel nothing like duty.

[eruherdiriel]

Jon doesn’t join them, but he watches. He watches Sansa’s shifting smile—a real but pained one for Jeyne Poole, a tight one for Beth, a fake one for Jeyne’s new boyfriend she’s never met before. He knows what the creases in her face mean, has watched her from across a room for years, learning the subtle changes.

When Sansa moves home from the Vale, Jon finds himself navigating secrets and their newfound friendship.

Written for the @jonsa-halloween event. Prompt: 30 Oct. Weapon - Costume - Ghost.

Read Your crimson hands all over me (two-shot, 10k words) on AO3.

[eruherdiriel]

Pumpkin

Ficlet for the @jonsa-halloween event. 28th Oct: The Stranger - Pumpkin - Full Moon Rating: G Universe: Modern

Also on AO3.

They leave the party together. Jon tells himself it doesn’t mean anything—she just doesn’t want to walk out alone. Nevermind that they both grew up in Winterfell and could navigate the town blindfolded. Nevermind that this is a safe part of town; it’s Halloween, and people in Winterfell are enthusiastic about the holiday. Maybe too enthusiastic.

So he doesn’t just leave the house with her; Jon ends up walking Sansa to her car—which is parked in the opposite direction from his—because you never know when you might run into overzealous trick-or-treaters or occult-obsessed school girls who think they might be real witches.

“Well, this is me,” Sansa says, stopping at her grey Honda Civic.

“I remember,” Jon chuckles. She had asked him to come along when she bought it a few months back, saying she didn’t know anything about cars and it would be helpful to have him along. In the end, Jon may have pointed out issues with a few of the used cars she was considering, but it was Sansa who charmed the salesman into a discount of 300 gold dragons.

Jon waits for Sansa to take out her keys, but she merely shuffles her feet and then looks at him. Why is she looking at me like that? Now that he thinks of it, she’s been a bit off all night, clasping her hands behind her back like she does when she is uncertain but wants to appear composed, laughing too late at jokes like she wasn’t paying attention, staring—

She breaks into his thoughts with a laugh, the one she fakes when she’s nervous. Why is she nervous?

“Look at that,” she says, holding up her phone screen for him to see the time. “Midnight.”

Then she’s dropping the mobile into her purse, leaning up on her toes, and pressing her lips against his, and Jon’s brain just … goes blank.

“Wrong holiday,” he says, like an idiot, once she’s pulled back from him.

Sansa laughs, and suddenly he doesn’t care if he sounds like an idiot if it makes her laugh—her true one, a mellifluous tune emitted from her slightly parted mouth, front teeth showing and her bottom lip stretched full.

“Well, maybe I wanted one kiss before I turn back into a pumpkin.”

“Pretty sure that’d make you the carriage in this scenario.” This time, it’s on purpose. He wants to make her laugh again. When she does, it gives him the courage he needs.

Tangling one hand in her hair, the other pressed lightly on her back, he brings her back into his space and kisses her. 

The front door of the house slams shut; someone else is leaving, and they wolf whistle as they walk out, causing the kiss to end.

“Oh gods.” Sansa giggles and buries her head into Jon’s chest. It’s such a small thing, her step toward instead of away, but it makes his heart catch.

“Go on a date with me?” he asks.

She leans back to look him in the eyes before she nods.

[eruherdiriel]

A late (🫣) entry for Jonsa Week 2023, prompt reunite/snowflakes.

She hesitates, then reaches for his free hand, his other still tangled in Ghost’s fur. Their palms meet, hers warm against his chilly one, and the relief that rushes through him at her touch almost makes him close his eyes and forget the throbbing pain. “Do you remember what happened?” All he recalls are knives in the dark and cold, bitter cold.

It is in dreams that Jon begins to remember who he is.

Read My eyes were wide open (two-shot, 10k words) on AO3.

[eruherdiriel]

Hooves are not what wake Jon in the middle of the night, pulse racing and hands clammy with sweat. It’s fire. Orange and angry, eating away at houses and shops and shacks in his dream. Even now that he is awake, Jon can still taste burnt flesh on the back of his tongue. The wounds from his brother’s mutiny and Drogon’s gouge, frozen only hours ago, burn white.

War leaves everyone broken, Jon perhaps most of all. Sansa finds even peacetime requires letting go.

Read The poor thing in the road, its eyes still glistening (one-shot, 17.5k words) on AO3.