Chapter Text
There’s a bite to the air atop the Wall. It’s bracing after being shut up inside for so long with Val as they discussed matters of realm and region. Sansa shivers and pulls her furs closer about her, even going so far as to stamp her feet in a decidedly un-Queenlike manner. It’s been a point of pride for her that she’s born the harsh weather far better than her mostly-Southron guard. She is of the North still, no matter the style of her hair or the cut of her gown. But she cannot deny that she is cold.
“You fit well here,” Val tells her.
“You tease me.” Sansa’s accusation is good-natured, and Val laughs in reply.
“Not at all,” she says, then grins at Sansa. “Despite the way you fidget like a child to keep warm.”
“I’ve never experienced such cold,” Sansa admits. It strikes her how comfortable she is with Val; there are many with whom she’d not even express such a small weakness. Too many would only take such an admission as reason to seek out greater weaknesses. That’s something Sansa has learned the hard way.
“It’s worse out there,” Val says, waving her hand towards the wild expanse beyond the Wall. “I’ve seen men freeze where they stood.”
“Truly?” Sansa asks, amazed. She feels a bit like a child, like she did when Old Nan told her tales.
“Truly. Though that was in the worst storm I’d ever seen. Such a thing does not happen regularly.” Val spares a glance over her should at Castle Black. “More’s the pity, perhaps.”
“Why do I feel you’ve several candidates in mind?” Sansa laughs.
“Because you’re a clever girl. They’re better than they once were, but they do far too much leering for my tastes.”
Sansa can only grimace in agreement. She’s no longer used to such avaricious looks; most men have learned to hide such a thing in the presence of a Queen. But here at the top of the world, so far from everything, it seems these men have forgotten. It makes Sansa pull the mantle of authority more firmly over her shoulders, puts pure ice into her gaze when she looks at them. She refuses to be diminished by their lust. No longer is she a girl at the mercy of those who would use her. They cannot make her forget who she is by reminding her who she once was.
“Have you ever thought to leave?” she asks Val.
“The Wall?” Val asks drily. “Every second I’m here.”
“The North,” Sansa says with a laugh. “The Wall and all that’s beyond it. Have you never thought to leave and make a home somewhere else?”
Val gives an immediate shake of her head, no hesitation in it. “No. This is my blood. This is where I belong.”
A curious sense of relief curls through Sansa. She’d known Stannis offered Winterfell to Jon, and Val along with it. Jon had refused – of course he refused, he’d hardly be Jon if he hadn’t – but Sansa has wondered more than once if Val might have gone with him willingly, if she would have taken the life as Lady of Winterfell that might have been Sansa’s. She’d not expected to feel so territorial at the notion. It would have made no practical difference if Jon had claimed Winterfell, and taken Val as his wife. Nothing would be changed from what it is now. But Sansa knows that it would have mattered to her; Winterfell was hers to take or pass to Rickon. The choice of it is what mattered, the freedom to choose her own path. That is a freedom she guards fiercely these days.
Nor had she expected to feel so territorial about Jon. It’s more jealousy, really, though not the wistful envy she felt watching Jon and Arya reunite, nor the regret of seeing Rickon look to Osha as if she were his true family rather than Sansa. It’s not even the envy of another life, which she’s felt more times than she could count, all through those desperate days in King’s Landing under Cersei’s thumb and in the Vale at Littlefinger’s whims and mercies. No, this is the same, old-fashioned, blood-heating misery she’d felt when Jeyne Poole made eyes at a Lord’s son that Sansa thought of as hers. It’s a feeling Sansa never expected to experience again, and it’s more than a little disconcerting. It’s only that Jon and Val have such an easy way between them, a familiarity born of shared hardship. Val knows a Jon that Sansa never could.
She does not realize Val has left her alone with her thoughts atop the Wall until she hears Jon call her name tentatively. He’s standing at the other edge of the Wall, near the lift, Brienne behind him staring off into the distance to give her Queen some crude approximation of privacy. By the expression on Jon’s face, he’s called her name more than once.
“Jon,” she says in greeting.
“Forgive me, I’ve interrupted.”
“I was only wool-gathering. Please, join me.” She tilts her head in invitation. It’s on the tip of her tongue to say she’s missed him, but it seems a silly thing to say when she’s seen him each day they’ve been here. But she has not talked with him, hasn’t walked with her hand tucked in his elbow, hasn’t spent time merely silent in his company, as they’d done more and more often in Winterfell and on the road here. There’s something old-fashioned about the way they’ve gotten to know one another. It’s almost like a courtship, she realizes in surprise. But he’ll stay in Winterfell, and she’ll return to King’s Landing. Strange how such an idea makes her so heartbreakingly sad now.
“You look quite at home up here,” he says, oblivious to the tack of her thoughts. Despite the sadness still curling in her breast, Sansa smiles, pleased.
“Val told me much the same,” she says. “I think you both humor me.”
“Not at all,” he protests, but she waves it away.
“With my hair? I stand out like a flame amidst all this ice.”
“It’s lucky.” Hesitantly, he catches one long streamer of her hair in the loop of his finger, holding it in such a careful way that Sansa is instantly reminded of their childhood together, how they danced around each other, perpetually unsure how to relate. “They would call you kissed by fire here.”
A look crosses his face, a shadow of remembered pain. She considers asking him of the source of it, but decides to leave him his secrets, as he has left Sansa hers.
“I confess, it is strange sometimes to look at you and see a woman grown,” he says after a short silence. “Not always, but you’ll say something you might have said once, and I’ll turn to look at you and be surprised not to see the little girl who never let her hems get muddy.” Sansa smiles at him, knowing every bit of her fondness for him is writ large on her face.
“My hems have had quite a lot of mud on them since then,” she says, “so to speak.”
“You are still the lady you always were.”
“There are different kinds of ladies,” Sansa answers easily. “I imagine Val has had muddied hems a time or two.”
“Or two hundred,” Jon laughs. “How are you finding her?”
“You were right. I like her, very much. I like everything here.” She pauses and considers the men she spoke of with Val. “Well, most everything.” Jon looks curious, and she knows if she told him, he would be upset and protective, that he would do what he could to shield her from those men and any others. But she doesn’t need his protection; the desire is enough.
“Had we more time I would take you farther north still. There’s a grove, Sansa, that’s so beautiful… I thought of you when I first saw it.”
“You thought of me?” she asks, absurdly pleased. He only smiles in answer. Warmth unfurls beneath her breastbone like a new leaf. When they’d first begun their correspondence, she’d been ashamed at how infrequently she truly thought of him over the years. It was only with time that she realized how much he was in her mind, how she’d unthinkingly patterned herself as Alayne on him – not just to help her be brave, but in his quiet strength, and his belief in the goodness of people even in the face of overwhelming bad. He was always there in her mind, though she’d not realized it. Always in her heart. No matter how far apart they were, she in the south and him here, guarding the north.
“Do you miss it?” she asks suddenly. “This part of your life?” Jon considers a long moment, his brow knitting into a slight frown.
“Sometimes,” he says, and he sounds like he’s surprised by the answer. “So much of it was terrible, but there was good as well. And I felt like I belonged.” His expression becomes wry and he rolls his eyes a bit. “Until they tried to kill me, that is. It seemed…simpler somehow. I know that it wasn’t truly, but it seems that way now.” Sansa nods. She understands such feelings. But it pains her to think of Jon here, far from family, alone and isolated. As isolated as she was in the Vale, a girl who became bastard-brave, just like him. Impulsively, she tugs a glove from one hand and sets it on his cheek, his skin cold against the relative warmth of her own. He goes still, his eyes wide and fixed on hers.
“You were not made for this life, Jon,” she says, her voice thick with emotion. She’s a bit embarrassed by her candor, but she can’t seem to stop the words that crowd on the back of her tongue. “There is too much love in you. It would be such a waste.”
“Sansa,” he says, his voice equally thick. He covers her hand with his own, pressing it against his cheek, the leather cold on her fingers.
“Come with me to King’s Landing.” The words are hanging in the air between them before she even realizes she’s saying them, but she knows the instant she hears them that she means them. Jon holds her hand tighter to his cheek and closes his eyes for a long moment.
Without opening them, he says, “Do you ask me as my Queen?”
"No,” she says. “Nor do I ask as one who was once your sister." She lets anything else she might offer unsaid, knowing that if this is right, he'll understand what she does not say. He opens his eyes and searches her own. Then he tugs her hand from his cheek and holds it to his lips, his breath warm on her knuckles.
"Yes," Jon says at last. "I’d go with you anywhere."
Few words have ever given her such joy. They are grinning at each other like fools, she realizes, but it feels too lovely to stop. His hand is warm in hers and when she squeezes it, he squeezes back. Snow is beginning to fall; it scatters through his black curls, on his cheeks and eyelashes, like that long ago day she left Winterfell. Sansa smiles. Some things are simple after all.