Part One

'And I have filled this void with things unreal,

And all the while my character it steals.'

"Maybe what you need is to prove to yourself that you can do something. You know, embrace your own power, and all that crap."

Arya was making a precarious tower of cheese slices and crackers—at age twenty-nine, she was doing the exact same thing she would have done at age nine. Sansa watched with disgust and pride as Arya crammed the entire stack into her mouth, and then chewed vigorously, her cheeks puffed like a chipmunk.

"Like kickboxing?" Sansa suggested dismally. She looked down at her own partly demolished block of cheese, and the empty bottle of wine next to it. She'd have a headache, a dry mouth, and a bloated belly the next day.

Once upon a time, the idea of gorging on wine, cheese, and crackers would have been taboo. So determined to be a picture-perfect wife, so determined to have that Instagram body, Sansa would have daintily sipped her vodka soda, admonishing Arya: cheese gives you spots, and, no one can outrun a bad diet. She would have thought anxiously of the pre-cellulite she'd observed on her upper thighs during her routine obsessive inspection of all her imperfections, and turned away from the cheese.

Pre-cellulite, pre-cheese Sansa seemed like a very long time ago at the moment.

Arya let out a loud belch.

"No, idiot. Kickboxing in my little studio isn't powerful," she scoffed, flopping back gracelessly onto Sansa's plush white shag rug. "I'm thinking, like, a safari, or traveling round the world staying in hostels, or-"

"Those are things you do. Those are not things that I do," Sansa had pointed out primly.

Arya had looked pointedly between the cheese, the wine, and the frumpy cardigan Sansa was currently hiding herself in. "Point taken," Sansa said loudly as Arya climbed over her, tugging at her split ends. "Fine. Let's say we go traveling in hostels, or whatever-" she began, but Arya stopped her.

"No no no, there's no 'we.' This has got to be you. If 'we' do something exploratory together, it'll just be me doing all the planning and heavy lifting, and you'll be there complaining it's too hot, or whining, or scrolling through Ramsay's Facebook. If anyone goes with you, that's what'll happen, and you know it."

Arya had a knack for baldly stating things that Sansa would have preferred to be left unsaid.

Her little sister sat up again in front of her, looking remarkably like a puppy for someone who could bench three times her own weight. "You've got to do this yourself, Sansa! You've got to do something totally un-you, totally by yourself; something where you've got nothing and no one but yourself to rely on!

"You're not yourself right now anyway; I barely recognize you. You don't even have that old fake confidence you used to have anymore. You can't make any decisions on your own; you're convinced you aren't capable of anything. You need to remind yourself of your own badass-ness. You've got to move on from Ramsay, and this is how!"

Arya was kneeling before her, her big dark eyes pleading. Sansa felt a rush of gratitude and guilt. Through all of this crap, few had stuck by her: even Brienne was getting sick of her shit. "By the way," Arya added kindly, "you've got cheese in your hair."

Traveling abroad was out: divorcing Ramsay had more or less cleaned out her funds, save for her inheritance money, which she refused to touch. No pair of shoes or fabulous handbag—her greatest loves in life—had ever spurred her to touch that money, and she had no intention of starting now. The affordable compromise, she had decided, was camping. In her flat, with running water and WIFI, camping had seemed charmingly un-Sansa.

Now she was here, in a forest very, very far from any sign of mobile signal, weighed down by all of the camping equipment she had borrowed from Arya, Brienne, and her weird 'uncle' Petyr, who wasn't actually her uncle and was always giving her stuff.

In fact, it was Uncle Petyr, a successful barrister, who had helped her through the extremely complicated divorce proceedings. Accepting Uncle Petyr's help to escape Ramsay hadn't felt good, but had seemed necessary at the time.

Ever since then she had felt both beholden to him and defensive about the whole ordeal. He had refused to accept payment, insisting that they were 'family,' but Sansa, who was quite familiar with being looked upon with lust, thought that perhaps his motives had not been so pure.

Using Petyr to run from Ramsay had left her with a nebulous debt to the man, and the very sort of power imbalance she had been trying to get away from in the first place—the very sort of power imbalance that had crippled her with Ramsay. Grieving the sudden loss of both her parents and eldest brother had launched Sansa into Ramsay's arms, and the simultaneous failure of the little boutique she had had hadn't helped matters. Ramsay had been her savior at the time, and every bad thing he did to her just felt like her payment to him.

At any rate, Petyr had somehow learned that she was camping, and had lent her a fancy headlamp—why, in the name of god, did he own something like this?—and the thing took up nearly half her damn backpack.

"A flashlight and a rubber band would do just the same thing," Brienne had said skeptically, when she and Arya had been helping Sansa pack. The blonde had held up the headlamp disdainfully. "This is for spelunking."

"You won't even be near any caves. It'll only weigh you down," Arya had agreed.

"Good," Sansa had said fiercely, grabbing it and stuffing it in her backpack anyway, caught up in a rush of spite-filled energy. "It'll burn more calories. I've got to get this weight off."

"You've got to get a new body image, more like," Arya had grumbled darkly, which had spurred a shouting match that, as usual, only Brienne could break up.

Now she was cursing herself. Calories or none, the thing was bloody heavy. And as it was Uncle Petyr's, she knew it had to be quite costly, so she couldn't just ditch the damn thing.

The park was called Winterfell. When she'd pulled up to the sign this morning in her cherry-red two-door, the name had seemed like a good omen to Sansa. Winter had always been her favorite season, and as it was September now, the leaves were just becoming tinged with autumn, signifying the approach of winter. It had seemed auspicious—hopeful, even.

Things won't always be total shit, she'd thought almost brightly, as she had swung out of her car and faced the entrance to the woods, with the mountain looming above it. At least winter is coming.

That had been three hours ago.

Now the woods buzzed and swarmed around her, and she was sweating, her eyes stinging with a mix of sunscreen and sweat, and her back ached, and she might also be crying—she wasn't totally sure. Why would she be crying? It was stupid to cry. She really was so stupid.

Oh, and as the icing on the shit-cake, today was the one-year anniversary of her separation from Ramsay.

A whole fucking year later, here she was: fat, broke, jobless, and lost and crying in the woods.

This was not precisely how she had pictured her mid-thirties looking.

In the movies, she thought furiously as she swung a stick at the plants in her way, women had it so easy. Strength and self-worth came so quickly. Within a month they could leave their abusive husband and completely rebuild themselves and their life. Did movie writers not realize how much money it cost to do that?

She, by contrast, had needed the help of her dead mother's very rich, very creepy friend, and had spent the subsequent twelve months crying, forgetting to wash her hair, and spending any remaining cash on an extremely expensive therapist, who each week told her that there was nothing wrong with being angry at Ramsay, and then tactfully handed her a box of tissues.

It was like her identity, her self-worth, had been a very tall but tottering tower of Jenga pieces, very tall but lacking any foundation, and then people had just started taking away from her. Ramsay had been the last to take from her before she had collapsed completely.

She had gone from being Sansa Stark—the prettiest girl in the room, the girl whose future was bright and sunny, the girl who had over three thousand friends on Facebook and who spent every Sunday Instagramming her fabulous brunches in cute outfits—to being Sansa Bolton (her name had not yet changed on her legal documents).

Sansa Bolton was...this blobby crying thing who had suddenly come to hate romantic comedies, who no longer gave a flying fuck about shoes, who had almost no friends, and who now avoided having her picture taken as if the camera really could steal her soul.

And now she was a very sweaty blobby crying thing wandering the woods. She hated the woods. She hated nature. She hated camping.

Why was she doing this again?

Initially, she had had visions of herself having some sort of Eat-Pray-Love-type of epiphany out in the woods. She'd seen herself looking out wistfully on a cliff face, in perfectly coordinated athletic gear from Sweaty Betty. She had pictured lying in a spacious tent, surrounded by candles, writing deep, thoughtful, life-changing things in her cute journal.

"If you bring candles into your tent, you'll burn your tent down, not to mention asphyxiate on the smoke, you idiot," Arya had quipped, dumping the bag of Anthropologie candles out of her backpack. "And you need this room for your bedroll."

She had definitely not pictured this: her thighs chafing, her eyes stinging, her hair sticking to her temples and neck. How did she already smell bad? She had showered just this morning!

Her mood swung back and forth as she traipsed through the forest and contemplated what Brienne and Arya had told her about finding a place to set up camp sooner rather than later. She'd got angry, and told them off for being so condescending, and snottily informed them that she'd done plenty of research on the internet, thankyouverymuch, and that she already knew all about camping.

Of course, she had done her research—she wasn't a complete idiot—but it had all been bookmarked on her mobile, and now the pages wouldn't load without any signal.

So caught up in her inner ranting, she nearly walked over the edge of a cliff overlooking the river.

Sansa let out a scream and grabbed onto a tree before she skidded downward. She watched a few pebbles that she'd kicked up fly over the edge, and it took them a rather long time to hit the rocky, frothing waters below.

With the adrenaline coursing through her, her head felt hot and buzzing, yet strangely clear at the same time. She sank back onto her arse, her thighs trembling. She'd not been paying attention, and had nearly walked over the edge.

A metaphor! she had realized brightly. Perhaps there would be an Eat-Pray-Love-type of epiphany after all.

Even this far above the water, she could feel the cool air from the spray of the river. She decided she was going to walk along the edge of that river, on the lower banks, and feel the cold water between her toes. Her whole body was damp with sweat at the moment and nothing sounded better than just sinking into clean, icy water.

By the time she made it down to the lower banks, she was sweaty but exhilarated, and her back ached, and her lungs were raw. She unlaced her boots and peeled off her socks, and, not thinking, she stupidly set forth to stand in the water. She picked her way through the shallows, and stood on a mossy rock, so that the water was rushing over her feet. She looked back and realized she had nearly crossed the river.

The cold water on her hot, aching, sweaty feet felt better than sex, and yet, as soon as she thought this, she began to laugh hysterically.

She might say she'd not had sex in a year.

But then, she also might say she'd never actually had sex at all.

Of course the cool water felt better than sex. Everything that did not hurt felt better than sex.

She laughed until her sides ached at this thought, laughed until she was crying. Sobs that were far uglier and deeper than any that came out during therapy or wine and cheese binges erupted from her now.

They were a choking, gasping sort of soul-deep expulsion of grief: grief for all of the time that had passed, all of the wrong choices she had made, all of the things that she could not undo, and all of the things that she should have been.

It would have been a perfect moment of epiphany—the absurdity and drama of it—except that she heard a twig snap, and it shocked her. Her bare feet didn't have the greatest footing on the slippery, mossy rock on which she stood, and she began to slip. "Oh, shite," she heard a deep, soft voice say.

She startled and looked to her right, and on the banks there stood a very concerned-looking man with dark hair pulled back into a low bun. He was wearing what should have been a truly unfortunate khaki uniform, except he was sort of making it work. She was just thinking that she ought to inform him that man buns were one hundred percent over when she finally slipped and fell.

There was always at least one. What was it about camping that made people think they were going to 'find' themselves?

Jon had wearily watched the girl pick her way out into the river. Even from afar it had been clear she was in hysterics. He'd spotted her earlier, and it had taken a decent amount of work for him to find his way to her. He'd parked his truck hastily and had to hoof it the rest of the way to the bank, with Ghost tailing him closely. A sense of panic had driven him: he strongly doubted that the girl could swim, and the river was strong—far stronger than most people seemed to understand. He'd seen that river do some serious damage in his time as a park ranger.

She was now standing on a rock, laughing and sobbing like a loon. Jon decided it would be best to wait for her to finish...whatever the hell she was doing...before he called out to her and warned her. The girl clearly had never been camping before—and with the mental way she was acting, he wasn't entirely sure she'd ever been outside before, either.

But, like a young doe, she heard something crunch under his boots, and startled.

When she turned to look at him, her copper hair fanned out and caught the last bits of sunlight, and for one horrible moment his heart sang with perfect agony. Across the bank their gazes locked.

Ygritte.

But the eyes were different, and Ygritte would have known better than to stand barefoot on a river rock, anyway.

And then the girl slipped and fell into the river.

The way her pack exploded was truly spectacular. Tent, tin can, knickers: all of it seemed to magically spring forth from her pack and scatter among the river rocks. She was also pretty sure she had broken her arse.

She sat dazed, in the water, feeling it rush over her shoulders, wondering if she was dead, when she heard some loud swearing.

Man-bun was walking along the rocks over to her with a sureness and ease that seemed like magic. The mossy, slippery rocks might as well have been flat gravel under his boots. He seemed like a god—like he could walk upon water.

Stars winked before Sansa's eyes.

She was pretty sure she'd broken her bum.

Could one break one's bum? Was that possible?

And now Man-bun was crouching on the rock before her, silhouetted by the dying sun, and she had never seen someone look so beautiful. He had dark, warm eyes, and strong hands, and a pretty mouth—just shy of being too pretty—and he was looking down at her, seemingly edged in gold by the sunlight. Growing up she had loved fairy tales more than anything and right now it felt a bit like she was in one. She was a damsel in distress, and he was her knight, coming to rescue her.

My hero, she thought warmly.

"Your stuff's going to float away. You'd better get up and pick it up," Man-bun said, so helpfully, and the spell was abruptly broken.

This was the real moment of epiphany: she was sitting with a possibly-broken tailbone in a river in the middle of the forest, her expensive camping equipment—none of it actually hers—scattered about the river, all of it likely ruined, and some random man-bun was looking at her like she was mentally challenged. Worse yet, she'd actually had the audacity to think of him as some sort of knight in shining armor.

She was always the fool, always broken, always running from the fists of one man to the arms of another.

This was, if there ever was one, a wakeup call.

"Oh my god," she blurted out, and found herself covering her face. She knew her eyes were puffy, and now she was completely soaked. How must she look? No wonder he was looking at her like she'd lost her mind.

"I'll help you," he said with no small amount of resignation. He whistled, and an enormous dog—it looked like a wolf—leapt from the banks and dove into the river. Sansa would have been terrified of the dog, except that it reminded her precisely of one she had had growing up: her beloved Lady. The dog resurfaced, its jaws locked around a pair of her knickers.

They weren't even nice ones.

Maybe she could just sink under the water and float away and never see Man-bun ever again.

But alas, she must move on.

In strained silence, soaked and weak, she picked about the river, snatching up everything that had come out of her pack. Man-bun and his dog helped her.

"You don't need to help me," she told him when she reached the stony banks, unable to quite meet his eyes, as she dumped Uncle Petyr's headlamp on top of her bedroll, which was now soaked. The enormous dog was peering interestedly at it.

"It's...my fault," the man said without much conviction, but the matter was clearly closed anyway. He was likely some sort of park ranger, she realized, stealing glances at his uniform—and the lean muscle moving beneath it—as they worked. He was perhaps her age, perhaps a few years older, and his hands and forearms were heavily scarred.

In moments they'd retrieved everything. And now it was getting dark, and everything she had on her was completely soaked. Including her mobile.

Not that she'd had any signal here, anyway.

And she was at least four hours away from her car.

On the banks, she turned to face him. Her mother had raised her to have good manners, and she was ashamed that she'd forgotten them. If she had nothing else, she ought to at least be polite. Humbled, she held out her hand to him.

"Thanks for your help. Obviously, I am a total camping pro," she said wryly, as his large, scarred hand enveloped hers. "I'm Sansa."

"Jon," said Man-bun. Sansa had to stop herself from grinning. Can I just call you Bun, though?

He was still peering at her with concern, like he wasn't entirely sure she could even walk on her own. "You're going to freeze with these wet things. Do you know how to build a fire?" His voice was hesitant, halting. He was trying not to insult her.

You've got to do this yourself, Sansa! Arya's words came back to her.

"Y-yeah," she said now, though it took her whole being not to just burst into tears and launch herself into his strong, capable arms.

She'd never really trusted herself. She'd never really thought she was capable of more than putting on pretty dresses and taking pretty pictures.

She'd been a tottering tower of Jenga pieces, built of nothing but compliments and 'likes' on Instagram.

She needed to rebuild herself again.

"You actually know how to build a fire?" he confirmed now, eying her skeptically. He crossed his arms over his chest.

"Okay, fine," she shot back. "I don't know how to build a fire, not precisely, but I probably can figure it out. I've read about it."

Fire-building was among the things she had so dutifully researched and bookmarked on her mobile. She thought she remembered the main bits.

"Or I can show you before Ghost and I take off," Jon suggested. "The nights get cold here."

Sansa held her chin up with as much dignity as she could possibly muster, given the circumstances.

"That would be helpful," she said levelly. "Thank you."

"Do you have your campsite chosen?" Jon asked, as Sansa crammed her sopping wet things into her pack. Sansa felt her face flush. "That would be a no," he confirmed under his breath, stalking further up the bank.

"I've got it," she said loudly, to his back. Jon paused. His wolf—er, dog—was staring plaintively at her, his head cocked. She bit her lip, feeling defensive, but that quickly melted away as she suddenly saw herself as he must see her: an inept, emotional girl being cruel to him simply for trying to help her. "Seriously, sorry for taking up your time," she added quickly. "I'm a novice, yeah, but I'll figure it out."

Jon looked back over his shoulder at her.

The girl had clearly been crying—for about two years, by the look of things—and her hands were shaking as she attempted to fit a ridiculous-looking headlamp (clearly not hers) into her backpack.

Dammit.

"This is no time to be a hero," he warned her. Jon himself had been told this very phrase more times than he could count in his life, and even as the words rolled off his tongue he felt a strange connection to her. Standing there, sopping wet and clearly upset, her soul was familiar to him. Forgive yourself… For whatever it is you think you've done wrong, for however you think you've failed, just forgive yourself, he wanted to tell her, as he often wished he could tell his younger self.

She smiled, but it was less of a smile and more of a painful stretching of her pale lips. She looked exhausted, ghostly, like the life had been bled from her.

"I'm obviously no hero. But I've got this," she said, more like she was speaking to herself than to him. Ghost looked a little unconvinced, but Jon knew a stubborn will when he saw one. It took one to know one, after all.

"Alright..."

"But you were right; I don't know how to build a fire," she admitted hastily, "So if you could just sort of…run through the basic principles," she continued, fidgeting.

"Well, you won't want to build it right here. Let's find you a campsite," Jon said gruffly, turning away from her.

Ghost regarded her with ears pricked with interest, and Sansa flashed him a hopeful smile. Ghost waited for her to reach him, and then the dog walked dutifully by her side. It was, to say the least, a little flattering. "He likes you," Jon observed as they picked their way back into the forest.

"Probably now that I smell like the woods," Sansa deduced wryly.

"Or the river, at least," Jon shot back, from up ahead. He had been teasing her, but with his back to her, and with his gruff tone, it had been hard to tell. Even as her embarrassment peaked she was warmed by his kindness and his stilted efforts to make her feel more at ease.

For a few minutes they trekked up a steep hill in silence, which she now realized was a foothill of the small mountain looming over the entire park. She was embarrassed by the growing stitch in her side. She had never been this out of shape in her life.

"Here's your spot. It's a nice clearing, still close to the water, and the ground is flat," he explained as they finally came to a grove, surrounded by tall evergreen trees.

Sansa dropped her pack, feeling tears spring to her eyes.

As soon as she had stepped into the clearing, she had felt that she had crossed some imaginary line. Although she had never before been camping in her life, although she could hardly remember the last time she'd even been in the woods, she felt like this place belonged to her, and she to it.

I'm home.

Jon was staring at her warily. "Alright?" he prompted, in a tone that suggested he really, really wanted her to say yes.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm good," she said, her voice growing stronger.

And in fact it was the truth.

"…Right. Well, first we'll want to collect material for the fire. We're looking for pieces of kindling: small twigs and bark that look dry. Then we'll get your fuel wood," he instructed. "You can set up camp there, after you've built your fire."

They collected kindling and wood in relative silence, save for when Jon had some instructive point. Ghost even helped, staying by Sansa's side and carrying branches and twigs in his jaw.

When they had collected everything, they knelt in the dirt as Jon showed her how to start the fire. He was so matter-of-fact about it that she forgot her shame and embarrassment for the time being.

He just wanted to help her, and he wanted nothing in return.

It was truly dark when smoke began to issue from the little pile of kindling and wood, and Sansa let out a cry of delight. "I DID IT!" she squealed. "Look, that is a proper fire!"

Jon tried not to laugh at her.

"...Right. And you know how to set up your tent?"

He was still looking at her like she was part lunatic, part child.

"I can figure it out. Go home, or go save some other first-time camper—I've got it," she reassured him, buoyed by her success.

He peered at her skeptically and she felt her face grow warm. She was suddenly too aware of everything: too aware of the fact that her deodorant had clearly not held up, too aware that he was an extremely handsome man saving her. She looked away, hoping he couldn't tell how flushed her face was, and she heard him shift forward, getting ready to stand.

"It can be a little eerie at night, but these woods are safe. My cabin's just down that way, at the bottom of the hill. If you do run into any real trouble, I'm not far. Try to hang your food out of reach and, whatever you do, don't sleep in the clothes you cooked in."

They got to their feet. It was an uncomfortable moment. The fact that Jon had witnessed such an emotional episode for her hung between them, connecting them yet also drawing attention to the distance between them.

She had not been a dainty damsel in distress for him to swoop in and save—she had been a woman in the middle of uncontrollable grief, and she was keenly aware that she was too old, and no longer pretty enough, to get away with such absurd displays.

"Thanks, really. For everything."

They were silent. Jon sensed that Sansa wanted to say more. He could see her struggling, and he knew it was most courteous to give her time to speak, though he feared she might launch into a tear-filled speech. Anything but that, he prayed. He'd never been very good with tears.

When she looked up again, though, her eyes were bright, as blue as the center of a flame, and her coppery hair caught the light, and his breath was stolen away again. "I used to run my own business," she said now, taking him by surprise. "I tend to forget that I actually am capable of doing things. I'm sure it looks like I'm a complete idiot, but I'm not. So don't worry about me. I'm not..." she paused, searching desperately for her words, "...I'm not helpless."

"I didn't say you were helpless," he replied. "I just didn't think you knew how to build a fire. …Well, good luck, then."

His hand twitched: he had been about to cuff her on the shoulder, and had realized, a beat too late, that it would be odd to do such a thing. He saw her bright blue eyes take in that tiny, restrained motion. Oh, fuck it. He'd always been awkward, especially around women.

Without another word, he left abruptly, inwardly cringing.

Ghost lingered, and she couldn't help but scratch the enormous dog behind his ears. He nuzzled against her leg, and then bounded after Jon into the darkness.

Jon got back to his cabin, still filled with misgivings that he told himself were misplaced. In spite of Sansa's strange crying-laughing, and that epic spill into the river, it had quickly become obvious that she was sharp. She had quick, capable hands, and had caught on quickly. It had taken almost no time to show her how to build a fire.

She was clearly clever and competent. She would be fine, even if she were a first-time camper.

He told himself, repeatedly, not to worry.

Jon made himself a small dinner and watched, through the little window over the sink in his kitchen, as the sky turned murky. Then, rain was lashing against the windows, and Ghost was pacing fretfully, pausing every few moments to look at him reproachfully. Jon scowled back at Ghost and continued about cleaning up his dishes, even as the rain pounded harder on the roof.

But it was one thing to be a first-time camper—even a very clever one. It was quite another to be a first-time camper in an epic storm.

She'll be fine, he insisted.

He was always being told that he had a white-knight complex, and this was, he told himself, a perfect example. There was absolutely no need to go save her—the worst that could happen was the girl would be a bit wet and uncomfortable.

Her camping pack would be a little heavier in the morning, and she'd have to troop back to her car, hungry and aching from sleeping on the ground, but then she'd go back to what was undoubtedly a glossy London life.

She had a look of money about her—old money—and Jon's situation was such that he had come to be able to recognize such things at quite an early age. Once upon a time it had made him burn with jealousy, but time, experience, and his career in Afghanistan, had peeled away that gnawing insecurity, leaving him with the core of who he was.

For all of his jealousies as a child, he had never really wanted money, just love. It had taken Ygritte to really come to terms with this, and once awash in Ygritte's love, he had stopped caring about money and status at all.

Ygritte. He still had Ygritte's things lying about, and luckily the only people who ever saw the inside of this cabin were people who knew him and therefore knew, intimately, just what he had lost.

People always told widowers and widows to move on, that it was what the other person would want, that they had plenty of life left, and so on, but no one had bothered to tell this to Jon. It was just as well: these words would have been wasted. Jon had not altered his life by his grief; rather he had continued living in just the same way, only his days were a little darker, his nights a little longer.

To Jon, 'moving on' would look no different than how he lived his life now. What was he going to do, take a bloody pottery class? No, he had had his one great love. He'd met his soulmate, and the ten years that they had had together had been more perfect than most people got in fifty years of marriage. He felt she had been taken too soon, but he could not measure the amount of time that would have been enough.

Maybe seeing Sansa's red hair was making him think of Ygritte again. For a moment, with her back turned to him, he had almost been able to make himself believe she was back: like being on a stopped train and having another train pass beside yours, you can almost fool yourself into thinking that your own train is the one moving.

He had known, however, that it was impossible. Jon was above all practical and knew that had not been and could not be Ygritte. He wasn't one to fall prey to illusions and wishes. But to let himself believe it, just for that split second, had been so tantalizing.

It was why he never drank, and refused to have alcohol in the cabin. One night after Ygritte's passing, he'd gone out with old army friends and had unintentionally become thoroughly drunk. The oblivion that had followed, however short, and however painful later on, had been so seductive that he had privately and immediately sworn to never drink again. The prospect of having some peace from missing Ygritte had been a siren song that he knew he lacked the strength to resist forever, and too many nights alone in his cabin, with no life purpose other than to look after the woods—a mindless endeavor, most of the time—would eventually wear him down.

"Don't tell me you're still whinging about that girl," he snapped at Ghost, who was whimpering at the door. Most of the time, Ghost was curled up at the fire, and could not be pulled away from his cosy spot unless meat was promised. "It's just a bit of rain and wind. The worst that'll happen is she'll be wet and unhappy, and she was already wet and unhappy," he added, feeling strangely defensive.

Jon got himself ready for bed. Fastidious in his routines—he had learned so in the army—he carefully flossed and cleaned his teeth, and folded and hung his clothes properly, and turned out the lights and got into bed. Ghost stood in the doorway of the bedroom, staring at him balefully, as Jon tried to get comfortable.

A flash of lightning briefly illuminated the room like daylight, and then a crack of thunder shook the cabin. Jon thought of dead branches falling, of tents being torn away in the wind.

"Fine," he snarled at Ghost, as he threw himself out of bed. "Fine. We'll go check on the girl."

Sansa was rather glad that Jon had not witnessed her eleven attempts to put together her tent, but it didn't matter how long it had taken her. Now she was inside her tent, cozied against the pouring rain and hammering thunder.

She ought to have been scared but, perhaps, it was this little grove's strange power: she felt as though she were being held tenderly, in a way she had not been touched since she was a child.

Sleeping alone was still a luxury and a relief. And yet, at the same time, it was a gnawing emptiness, too. She hated herself for how she missed the feel of a man's body pressed up against her, hated that she ached for the symbolic presence of Ramsay, even as she shuddered at the thought of someone ever touching her again.

The sleeping bag, however, was better than she had expected. She was wrapped up in it tightly, protected from the chill and from the rain, and somehow it was more comfortable than her bed in her flat. She felt safer, out here in the wild and wrapped up in her sleeping bag, than she did in her flat.

A kind of peace overtook her. She hadn't expected it, but the exhaustion of the day—no, of the past decade—seemed to come over her in the most satisfying weight.

Here she was, mostly fine.

She had got plenty of help, of course, but there was nothing wrong with that. She had asked for help and gotten it and now she was in her own tent that she had set up herself, her belly full of food she had cooked herself, and she had, for the first time, no wish to crawl through Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat, looking for mentions of Ramsay. He seemed, from this magic place, totally inconsequential to her. What he did, where he went, whom he dated: none of these had any meaning to her life.

All of her life, she had been told she was beautiful, and as a little girl, it had been mostly all she had cared about. Arya had been the clever one, and Sansa had been the pretty one. When they had been children, even teens, she had felt superior to Arya, and then, as they had finished university and started their own lives, the balance had abruptly shifted.

She had suddenly become keenly aware of her own frivolity, of the silliness of her fashion degree, of how much she relied on men to take care of her. At university she had been attached to Joffrey; even as he antagonized and humiliated her she had sought his approval desperately, and it had taken shamefully long for her to realize just how toxic he was to her.

Then she had opened her boutique, which had truthfully only been possible due to her father's fortune. Then her parents and Robb had died, and running the boutique had become her life. And when that had gone belly-up—because the last thing London needed was yet another boutique with a tiny selection of trendy but costly and ubiquitous clothing—she had devoted her life to Ramsay, and in return he had ripped her apart both mentally and physically.

The after-school specials and the adverts on the underground always taught you that the abused women often had no way out, and Sansa had looked upon those adverts and felt like a fraud, with her expensive clothes—purchased by Ramsay's money—that covered up the bruises and scrapes. She'd never been able to tell anyone the real extent of what he had done, mostly because she had been so ashamed. With her inheritance and means, she could have left at any time.

So why hadn't she left?

Most nights, the question, 'why didn't I just leave?' could keep her up all hours, but on this night, for some reason, the question seemed silly. She had been so young when she had fallen into her relationship with Joffrey, and the resultant shame of that relationship had started a terrible cycle that she hadn't found any escape from until now.

Everyone else in her family was doing more with their lives, but she had stayed the pretty little rich girl.

But now, she'd managed to set up her tent and cook her food, and she was here now.

You're a slow learner, she told herself, but you do learn.

You did leave, eventually.

And with a yawn, she drifted off to sleep.

Ghost hopped into the passenger side of Jon's pickup truck eagerly, and Jon hastened into the dry warmth of the car as the rain pounded down. It was raining so hard that he couldn't even see the end of his drive where it met the road.

"This is all a big waste," he informed Ghost as he started the truck. Ghost was peering into the rain diligently, and Jon rolled his eyes and pulled onto the road.

He drove slowly up the hill, squinting into the inky darkness, trying to gauge where he was in relation to her campsite. Maybe she wasn't even there anymore. Maybe she'd gone home, back to her London life. Maybe she had given up on the woods.

He should have known better than to take his eyes off of the road.

When he looked back, he saw the ghostly figure of a deer on the road, and without thinking, without even knowing what he was doing, Jon slammed on the brakes and felt the truck swerve off the road and into the darkness.

Disclaimer: Game of Thrones and its characters do not belong to me.