Chapter Text
There was a new bruise on Jon’s face.
Sansa wondered if anyone else had noticed it. There were so many reasons not to, after all. His beard covered nearly all of the angry red mark, and bruises were so common in Winterfell right now. She had a keep full of wounded people, scarred and broken from a fight with their worst nightmares. Why should anyone look at Jon and see anything less than a hero? Why shouldn’t they assume he got that bruise in the battle? Who would dare harm him, the greatest living swordsman of Westeros?
She shouldn’t even have noticed, truth be told. But she had spent the better part of the morning staring at his face, at the way he talked to his queen, the differential way he was standing, making himself even smaller than he already was, less threatening, arms dutifully behind his back. She was trying to see, to figure it all out. Something was wrong. She saw the furtive looks and the careful platitudes, and she knew.
No, maybe no one else noticed. But she did.
Bile rose up in her throat, with the burn of angry, impotent tears that she was all too familiar with. She set her jaw, raised her chin, and willed her tears back down. Now was not the time. Jon was talking of laying a siege, and the dragon queen wanted to set sail with all her tired and wounded soldiers. All of Sansa’s, too.
“The men we have left are exhausted,” she said. Jon turned to look at her, his shoulders stooped and defeated. He missed the icy glare his queen sent her way. “Many of them are wounded. They'll fight better if they have time to rest and recuperate.”
The dragon queen did not like that, she could tell, but Sansa did not care. The men--including the Dothraki and the Unsullied--were under her care, eating from her stores and healed by her maester. She would not let them march off to another war when they could barely stand for the most part. She had seen the vacant looks and exhausted emptiness in their eyes, had helped them learn how to care for their wounds. Had the dragon queen even visited her men to raise morale? They are not pieces on a cyvasse board, she wanted to tell her. The long march South will kill them.
But Jon spoke up, glaring her like she was committing some crime by speaking up for the men who had suffered for them. His words were firm and brooked no argument, but she could not look away from the red bruise blooming on his cheek. She could not feel any anger, just a mounting discomfort. What has she done to you? His queen was smaller than he was, delicate as an exotic flower.
A dragon screeched outside, as if reminding her of its mother’s strength. She wanted to scream.
“The men will fight better if they are rested,” said Ser Jorah gently, waiting patiently for his queen to look at him. “We have too few numbers to leave men behind, your Grace. A few weeks of care, of warm food in their bellies… It might make all the difference in the battle to come.”
The queen didn’t say anything for a while, and Sansa began to hope. She was the breaker of chains, was she not? Any woman who had compassion enough to show to slaves had to be able to see to the welfare of her own men, surely. She might not trust Sansa, but she would have to trust her own advisors.
“I don’t need them complacent and well rested,” the queen finally said in the voice she perhaps thought sounded tough and commanding. To Sansa, it always felt like the voice of a petulant child. “I need them ready to battle, to win me the throne they owe me.” She looked at Jon, and he looked at the ground in a somewhat haphazard imitation of a bow.
We don’t owe you anything , thought Sansa. This is your kingdom that you protected, against death itself. She took a deep breath. Who manipulated whom?
“We will wait a couple of weeks,” the queen said finally. “In that time, I need reports on the men, on how many will be ready to march with us, and how many we will be leaving behind.”
And just like that, they were done. When Arya stood in Jon’s path, when she told him they needed a word, Sansa realized that she wasn’t the only one who had noticed the bruise.
“We needed her,” Jon said stubbornly, staring at the red leaves of the weirwood tree, and Sansa tried to feel the anger she usually felt when he said such things. But there was no anger, only pain. He had been laughing last night, grinning at Tormund’s drunken antics. What had happened? She remembered her own dark bruises, mapped out on her body like a gruesome painting, and set her chin. The ones he had gotten in the battle against the dead were likely gone by now. The Dragon Queen did not get to give him more.
This is my home. It’s ours. And Jon belongs to us too. No amount of dragons will make him truly hers.
“Jon,” she said, her voice quiet. “Why did she hit you?”
Jon reared back as though she had slapped him too. He looked ready to argue, to tell her she was wrong, and she understood that need, to deny you were in pain, to deny the lack of control over your own body. She understood it all. How far had the dragon queen gone, then? Was there a new map across his body too?
Jon didn’t insult her by denying it. Instead, he said something worse. “It doesn’t matter.”
Before she could think of what to say, Arya had grabbed his arm. “But this is her doing?” Jon was frowning, but she shook him by the arm, pulling him down till she could look him in the eye. “She did this, didn’t she, Jon?” Her tone was colder than the snow that surrounded them, colder than the long night had been. It promised retribution, not with fiery bluster, but with quiet, cold, certainty.
Still, Jon would not answer. Was he afraid to, somehow? The Dragon Queen would never know if he let them know the truth. Was he afraid for her, then? Afraid of what Arya would do to his beloved queen if she knew for sure?
“Arya,” he said, and his voice was so soft and so broken that Sansa wanted to weep. “You shouldn’t worry about me.”
His smile finally made tears spring to Sansa’s eyes. It wasn’t the sadness in his expression that bothered her, it was the weary resignation of a man who believed he deserved what was happening to him. She stepped forward, willing him to look at her. “How can we not? We’re family, Jon, the four of us. The last of the Starks.”
Jon started to say something, stopped, then started again. “I’ve never been a Stark,” he said finally. He wouldn’t meet their eyes.
“You are just as much Ned Stark’s child as any of us,” she insisted.
“You’re my brother,” said Arya, stepping forward to stand next to Sansa. “Not my half brother or my bastard brother. My brother. ”
Good, thought Sansa . Let Arya’s words penetrate that thick skull of his. But something was wrong, and Jon was shaking his head, and… there was something eating away at him. She could tell. It was in the way he closed him eyes, the way Bran urged him to make his own choice.
And then he made them swear never to tell any other living soul his secret, before changing their world forever.
No, thought Sansa absurdly, as Bran told them of a secret wedding and a prince born with the weight of the world on his tiny shoulders. This is nonsensical, a dream, a myth, a misunderstanding. But it wasn’t, she realized as Bran continued. She could feel Jon shifting behind them, could feel the agony coming off of him like heat off the hot springs, but she couldn’t look away from the inappropriately calm face of the boy who had once been her brother. He broke her worldview with calm, measured words and cold, hard facts. It was true, all of it. Only the truth could have so much detail.
Arya turned away first, when Bran was done, when the world had splintered into a hundred jagged pieces only to stitch itself together with a threatening secret hiding in the folds. Sansa turned too, her mind both blank and too full of thoughts.
Jon was looking at the ground, his shoulders bunched, his gaze shifting on the snow. Waiting to be told he’s not a Stark, not worthy of us. The fool.
“Do you want to summon a dragon and melt me where I stand?” Arya asked, her face serious, her head cocked like she was asking Jon on his preferred form of refreshment.
“No!” Jon hadn’t been looking at them, but now his head whipped up, his face shocked. “I… Arya, I would never-- ”
“Gods, Jon, you’re stupid enough to be a Targaryen, that’s for sure,” said Arya with an eyeroll. “I was joking.”
“Joking?” Jon didn’t seem to understand the word.
“You’re a trueborn Stark,” said Sansa. “Born to a Stark, in wedlock. You’re not a bastard.” Instead, you’re the heir to the iron throne, the man who can end Daenerys’ reign before it even begins.
“I… I’d much rather be Jon Snow.”
“Good,” said Arya, rushing forward to hug him. His arms clasped around her as if she was the only thing tethering him to the world, as if his very life force sprouted from that connection. “As long as you finish my sentences with me, you’re my brother.” This time when Jon’s face crumpled into near tears, Sansa’s own tears slipped free to flow down her cheeks.
She made herself smile. There would be time enough to worry about him and his queen later. “Well, it has a lot less syllables, at least.” Jon looked at her over Arya’s shoulder, and nodded. There was a quiet acknowledgement of the fact that this was complicated, that there were questions and problems to tackle. Soon. But not now. Right now there was only one thing she wanted to make clear. “You’re one of us, Jon. We are the last of the Starks.”
This time he didn’t argue.