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He sees her and his heart almost stops. She is more of a ghost even than him, a remnant of another life. Beautiful things do not belong in Jon’s world, not anymore.
He walks towards her like he’s walking in a dream. He is aware of his feet making prints on the falling snow, but he cannot quite believe it’s real. He can’t believe she’s here.
She is older, now, than when he last saw her, but she looks, as she stares back at him, as young as he feels.
I have missed her, he thinks and is almost surprised at the thought. They were never close as children. But seeing her here, alive , his chest aches. He is not prepared for the extra pain.
She smells like snow and rust and grips his cloak with a fragile, steely kind of strength. He can feel the scrape of her fingers against his back, a promise: I’m not letting you go. This is an oath I will not break, he thinks, grips her back just as tightly.
.
She is an unreal creature seated beside him, wrapped in his cloak, pale face shining in the firelight. She has grown beautiful, he thinks, as tall as him and willowy, with blood red hair and a jaw set with determination.
He cannot believe he used to think of her as weak, a frilly, ornamental thing. Time has changed her. Or maybe it is that he never really knew her that well to begin with.
She looks over at him suddenly and he does not quite remember how to smile. It has been awhile since there was anything worth smiling about.
She makes him feel, for however briefly, like a boy again. He has so often now felt himself an old man in a boy’s body, it is a feeling he is unprepared for. She keeps catching him, bewilderingly, off guard.
.
It is only, later, that he allows himself to think of the way that she had fit, miraculously, perfectly into his arms. He does not think he had ever hugged her before. Had not, in all the times he had thought of her over the years, ever imagined it. Yet seeing her, bleached white with cold, eyes when they met his scared and brave and full of the same longing that had lived in Jon’s chest since they left Winterfell, it had seemed like the most right thing.
“We were children,” he tells her when she asks for his forgiveness, a long since given thing.
But they are not children any longer and he does not know what to do with this sister in a woman’s body.
.
“Let’s leave this place,” he says, and again, again , she surprises him with disappointment marring her face. He does not know why he expected her to be happy.
“We have to go back,” she says, “We have to take our home back.”
It has been so long since he’s thought of himself as having a home.
“There is nothing for us here but death,” he says.
He looks at her and he sees five years worth of pain writ upon her skin. They are not so different, he and she. Creatures of an earlier time.
She leans her head into his hand and her face feels delicate and fragile against his palm, cheekbones soft like a bird’s.
“Aren’t you tired of always fighting?”
“Jon,” she says, and it’s as if he had forgotten that was his name. “We have to-”
“Come away with me,” he says. “Please.”
“They deserve to be punished,” she says and he could fall in love with the fire he sees there, in her eyes, harsh against the planes of her face.
“Yes,” he says simply. “But don’t we deserve to be happy?”
She does not answer him, but her shoulders deflate and he knows that he has won.
.
A fortnight later they board a ship for Lys.
.
Sansa is quiet on the journey over.
“Do you wish we had stayed?” he asks her one day. He has shed his winter cloak and he feels strange without its weight on his back. He does not feel lighter for its lack.
“No,” she says, her eyes on the waves.
He cannot tell if it is the truth or not.
.
They do not talk about what has befallen them since they last met. They speak only of their childhood, though it is a delicate dance they play, skirting around each other's wounds.
They speak of Old Nan and lemon cakes and the old gods. They do not speak of Rickon, rotting in Ramsay Bolton’s dungeon, or Robb, murdered at his own wedding, or Ned or Catelyn or Bran, wherever he may be.
Once, haltingly, Sansa had asked him, “Do you think Arya-” but she cut herself off before she could finish.
Jon does not force her. He has had enough of dark things.
.
“I am sorry,” he says, but he has already seen the long, sloping pale skin of her back where her chemise has fallen, has already witnessed the harsh, ugly scars. He finds himself surprised again. He wonders if she will ever stop surprising him.
Her eyes, more than anything, are sad, when they meet his.
“You would have seen them eventually,” she says. Her voice is flat. They do not talk about their pain, he remembers.
“Sansa,” he says.
“It is in the past,” she says, wraps the blanket tighter around her. It reads like a dismissal.
.
In his dreams, he touches the skin of her back, presses his mouth to the wounds there. She shivers under his touch.
“Jon,” she whispers. Ygritte had never sounded vulnerable like this, he had not known it was something he desired. And yet, all of him aches.
He wakes, hard and straining, in his cabin and he wonders if this, this yearning, is his punishment for leaving. Sister, he reminds himself, though it has been so long since he has thought of himself as anything but an orphan, she is your sister.
.
The sun is warm in Lys, warmer than anything Jon has ever felt. They shed their winter clothes and let the sun touch their pale skin.
“Does it bother you that people can see?” he asks her, almost, but does not touch the largest scar stretched across her shoulder blades. He is not sure if he imagines her leaning back into his touch. Her hair has turned almost golden in the sunlight.
“Yes,” she says. “But I am not ashamed anymore.”
.
“Should we change our names?” she asks him, their first week there. Soon they will need to be hunting for jobs. The scant amount of money between them was hardly enough to book their passage.
“And what should I call you?” he responds, almost drunk from the sun and lack of responsibilities and her. “Gwendoline? Rhaella?”
She flinches and looks away. He has not discovered yet, what is a wound for her. Sometimes it feels as if it is everything. He would protect her, if he could. He would have her smile, again, at him.
“No,” she says, softly.
“Sansa,” he says.
She does not respond.
“Sansa,” he says again, wonders if it would be wrong to press a kiss to her exposed shoulder. It would probably be wrong. He wonders if he could do it anyway.
.
Jon gets a job repairing sandals. He finds that he is not very good at it. Sansa, too, proves to be a disappointment at menial labor, but they make enough to pay the rent on their little house and to put food on their table, so he supposes that it doesn’t really matter how good they are.
One night, he brings home a bushel of lemons. He had been walking through the market and the smell had reminded him of her. They had shipped them from Lys for her, he remembers, when they were children.
“They’re still your favorite, right?” he asks her.
This time, it seems, it is he that has stunned her. He still cannot get over her, long pale limbs, freckled by the sun, her dress airy and translucent enough that he can see the curl of her waist beneath the fabric, the roundness of her breasts.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, they’re still my favorite.”
It is just mid afternoon, but they set aside their work to make the lemons into cakes. Sansa mixes the dough with a seriousness that Jon privately finds adorable. She is not much of a cook, he has discovered.
“You have something.” He gestures to her face.
“Oh,” she raises her hand to her cheek, something young and vulnerable in the motion.
“No, here,” he licks the back of his thumb and touches the corner of her mouth.
Her eyes are big on her face, pupils blown wide. A strand of red hair falls across her cheek. Jon is thinking about kissing her. Jon is imagining that she would taste like lemons and sugar and Sansa.
“Got it,” he says, steps back.
.
“Have you ever been in love?” she asks him.
At Jon’s suggestion, they have started taking walks every morning. Eyes follow Sansa wherever she goes these days, and how could they not, Jon wonders, even her scars, which criss-cross across her back and arms, seem seductive. Maybe that’s just Jon.
“Yes,” he says.
And then after a moment, “Have you?”
“No,” she says shortly. She is not watching him, and he finds himself wishing, desperately, that she was. “Is that not funny? Three engagements and I’ve never been in love.”
They walk a ways more.
“I thought that I loved Joffrey,” she says.
“You were young,” he offers.
She hums in agreement.
“Did she love you back?” she asks.
It has been too long since Jon has thought of Ygritte.
“Love was hard for her,” he says.
A fishmonger offers them wares. A woman cries out to someone down the street, the sound echoing off the alley walls.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Why?” she asks, turning to him. She does not look like a winter creature anymore, dappled with sunlight and golden. He wonders if this is how they saw her in King’s Landing, wonders how they did not bow before her feet.
“You deserve to have been loved,” he says.
.
Sleeping every night beside her is something like torture. The drag of fabric across skin, the soft sounds of her sleep, the exhale of her breathe in the muggy room. He is unused to such soft seduction. He finds it intoxicating.
It is the nightmares, though, that haunt him the most. She tries to hide them from him, Jon knows, her cries muffled by her pillow. Jon does not know if he should comfort her or not. He thinks she might think it is because he thinks her weak.
Still. One night she wakes up screaming and he can’t help himself.
“Sansa,” he calls.
Her limbs are a clawing, frantic thing, her face pale and tear stained and terrified.
“Sansa,” he tries again, pulls her, scrambling and strangely young, into his lap.
Her breathing is erratic, her heartbeat fast and birdlike against his chest. She wraps herself hesitantly around him, thin and fragile. He runs his fingers in what he hopes is a soothing gesture through her hair.
“I’m here,” he says, because he has nothing else. “I’m here.”
.
He does not ask her if she is happy, if it is getting better, if she misses Winterfell, the long, drafty hallways, the way the snow fell over the courtyard. They might feel better to speak of it, Jon knows, but he does not think either of them have ever learned the knack of confiding well in others. It was not a skill that had been prized in their previous life. Yet, each day they begin anew. Each day he feels less and less like Jon Snow. He thinks maybe that’s a good thing.
.
He comes home from the shop one day, to find their little house lit by candlelight, Sansa perfumed and standing before him. The clothing style of Lys is necessarily bare, Jon knows this, but the creation Sansa wears is a gauzy, ephemeral thing that causes Jon’s throat to dry. He is unsure where to rest his eyes.
“Come,” she says, takes his hand in hers. Her hand is small and dry, calloused and peeling from the herbs she uses to wash the laundry. He almost prefers it this way. “Today would be your twentieth name day. We should celebrate.”
He lets her push him gently into a chair, though perhaps he should not. Her hands on his shoulders do not feel like a sister’s should. He definitely should not allow her to climb into his lap, perfumed hair falling over his shoulder, gauzy, damning dress, trussing around her thighs. But he can’t seem to stop himself.
“Sansa,” he murmurs. Her lips drag along his throat. His hands have found the skin of her thighs.
Her hum reverberates against his adam's apple.
“Sansa,” he says again and it’s too close to a moan.
“What?” she asks.
Sister, he wants to say.
“We shouldn’t.”
She does not taste like Ygritte had, like rust and salt and cold. She tastes like honey, like sunshine, like Sansa.
“I want to,” she says into his mouth, rocks down onto him. And Jon does not know how to deny her.
.
“Do you think maybe we could live out the rest of our days in peace?” she asks, later, after, when they are lying together on Jon’s small bed.
She looks so beautiful now, he thinks. Skin warmed red by the sun, eyes made soft by the candlelight. I do not care, he thinks. Gods help me, but I do not care.
“Yes,” he breathes. “Yes. I think we can.”