Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: This is my first Game of Thrones piece, so please forgive any failings. I hope you enjoy! Set post-Season 7.

Crook and Hollow

"In truth, they were Summer children once – Jon and Sansa. But not all those touched by cold fly South for the Winter." - Jon and Sansa. When the white winds blow.

"Welcome to Winterfell," Sansa says to Daenerys, and he does not miss the way her throat tightens when she looks to him then, her gaze as soft and polite as he knows her to be capable of – even when everything inside her is screaming otherwise.

"Welcome home," she says to him, and it should be warmer, he thinks. It should fill him with such fondness and such breathless tenderness as to remind him of what the Targaryen at his side is here for.

These frozen mountains, these snow-filled plains. This cold and vast landscape, these hills and this ice and the endless, endless white. This is not what the dead have come for.

He looks at Sansa.

She looks at him.

It is a heartscape as barren as the snow beneath his boots that he has returned to and he realizes all too suddenly that Winter has set in far deeper than he is prepared to face.

At the feast, Arya offers him the affection he had so missed at the gate, but it is corralled and measured – like the crinkle at her eyes when she smiles lightly at him, and the gentle pressure of her hand along his arm instead of a hug when he greets her, and the first cup of ale that she pours for him with a look of caution in her eye. Her smiles are not so wide as he remembers, and he cannot tell whether it is the dragon queen sitting two seats down from her that makes it so or not. Either way, Arya does not offer Daenerys a cup of ale, or even a scant look throughout the night, and perhaps he should be grateful it isn't more.

Bran is only present for the initial toast, and the next that Jon looks to him, his brother is gone. It is a thrumming loss that settles between his ribs, one he hadn't expected, and the absence is felt nearly as keenly as Rickon's. Because to have a brother, and yet not have him at all – Bran can hardly be considered 'present' and maybe that's the harder loss, Jon thinks. To see the face of the one you love – eating and breathing and living and yet – gone, regardless. Bran hadn't embraced him at the gate and Jon realizes belatedly – achingly – that it is an embrace he is likely to never receive.

And yet, through the music and the ale and the subtle haze of heat that suffuses the room, it is only Sansa that he has eyes for. She inclines her head to say something to Daenerys and the other woman smiles politely in response, nodding to those dancing on the floor. Jon watches the way Sansa's hands stay linked over her lap, her wine goblet left untouched, the soft flex of her throat when she stitches a tight smile to her lips – a smile Jon recognizes too easily. Suddenly, as though his gaze is felt through the room (and oh, how some dark part of him wishes it were so), she turns that cutting blue gaze to him as he stands speaking with Davos near the hall's entrance. His mouth goes dry, and Davos is blessedly silent, glancing back at the head table where Sansa sits staring at them. The music is loud and boisterous around them, and nothing has ever felt quite so suffocating. He blinks then, suddenly noticing the gaze of the woman next to Sansa, inclining his head slightly in Daenerys's direction, and then Davos is clearing his throat and he has never been so thankful for the man's knowledge of when to be silent and when to fill air and before he can think to even begin processing what he is saying, Daenerys is rising from her seat and he is moving toward her, knowing that it is a silent call for him, and all the while he catches the way Sansa turns her gaze back across the hall, her hand reaching for her goblet and she finally takes a drink – a long, deep swig – when she places her cup back before her, he is already at the table's edge, already close enough to see the stain of red wine glistening along her lips and Daenerys has her hand at his elbow and all he can think of is wiping that stain from Sansa's lip with the pad of his thumb and he – he –

"A bit warm for wine, isn't it, my lady?" Arya says to Sansa across the empty seat that should be Jon's between the two sisters.

Jon looks at Arya to find her watching him intently, and instantly – without reason or warning – he understands that she knows. She knows, even what he doesn't fully know himself.

But Daenerys is already tugging him to the floor for a dance and Davos has resigned himself to silence once again and Arya keeps her gaze fitted to the white-haired woman at his side and Sansa –

Sansa does not look at him for the remainder of the night.

Not once.

He once thought the Wall was the edge of the world.

He was wrong.

Jon stands now on the edge of something far greater.

He finds her in her solar, and she lets him in with a muted gaze, a silent acquiescence. When she turns back to him as the door shuts behind him, he simply looks at her, sighing with his whole body. It has just been so long. He feels the keen grip of her memory like an ache in his bones, even now, even this close. He moves to her. "Sansa." Her name – a promise.

A plea.

She stops him with but a shift of her narrowed eyes. "You brought her to Winterfell. To our home."

Somewhere else in the castle, Daenerys is settling into her chambers comfortably enough.

But that is not here.

And while Jon knows Sansa's anger will not be abated easily, he is just so overcome to finally be here, standing before her again, in the place he once called home.

(Still calls home, if only because she is here.)

"Sansa," he begins, a resigned shrug to his shoulders, an impish quirk of his lips that rattles her – and he knows it rattles her, because he sees the way her fingers flex over her crossed arms. "Are you not relieved to see me safe? To see me home?"

She swallows tightly, her shoulders bunching. "That is not fair," she breathes.

He steps toward her, arms outstretched. He makes it all the way in front of her before she uncrosses her arms to press a halting hand to his chest. "Jon." His name – a warning.

A plea.

He steps into her. Her touch along his chest was never sure enough to stop him anyway and they both know it.

"I'm home," he says once more, and he watches in fascination as her face crumbles before him, her lip trembling, eyes watering, a sharp, branding inhale stealing through her nose.

"That is not fair." The words are far less forceful this time, and she doesn't resist when he winds his arms around her and pulls her to him. Instead, she buries her nose in the furs at his throat, her fists pressing against his chest as though in protection, and she is taut with a dangerous seething, made tender only by her recent loneliness.

"I missed you, Sansa."

She doesn't allow him the privilege of her tears, but she lets him hold her, still.

She lets him hold her.

Not their brother.

Not their brother.

It steals the breath from his lungs, and for a flicker of a moment, Jon thinks he sees regret in Bran's eyes when he looks at him. But then it is gone, shuttered away by a distant glaze, a calm veneer that looks nothing like the young boy he had left once at Winterfell, all those years ago.

Not a bastard, he thinks.

As though it helps. As though is makes any of this any more palatable.

Sansa, he thinks. And Arya, and Bran, and – damn him – Daenerys.

When he lays in his bed that night, staring at the ceiling, sweating beneath furs he wishes he could drown in, he wonders if maybe this wasn't exactly what he had wanted all along.

In all the wrong ways.

And maybe just a bit of the right ones.

(He still dreams of red hair but this time, when he wakes, he doesn't smother the whisper of her name in his pillows.)

"You're getting quick."

"And you're getting old."

Jon goes to ruffle Arya's hair for her remark but she's already out of reach, and he's abruptly reminded that some things will never be the same. He doesn't know whether she is aware already, but he doesn't have the heart to tell her he is not her brother, and Bran has not indicated one way or the other. Arya offers him a quick lilt of her lips though, as they sit down on one of the benches lining the courtyard, breathing heavily from their recent spar, and it is enough. It will have to be enough.

Jon sighs, running a hand through his sweat-soaked hair, and there, turning from the ramparts is a flash of red hair and the imprint of Sansa's gloved hand along the snow-touched stone before she is gone.

Jon frowns, his shoulders slumping with it. "She's still angry with me."

"You bent the knee." Arya says it without accusation, but she isn't looking at him either, and in all this he wonders at how she still knows he's speaking of Sansa. But then, Arya knows a lot of things he questions these days and he doesn't think he'll ever rightly know how.

"It's a lot more complicated than that," he says on a huff, because it is easy to let the frustration bubble forth lately. It's all he tastes nowadays.

"It's not, really, not to her, at least."

"As though any of us will ever know what she's truly thinking."

Arya looks at him then, just looks at him, and it's far more unnerving than he expects.

"I told Sansa once that I'd rather die than betray my family." Her eyes grow dark and shuttered – alien. That Stark cold they were so known for.

(Not blue maybe, but cold all the same.)

Jon keeps her gaze, his throat going tight.

"I suppose we each have our own interpretation of betrayal," she says, standing then and sheathing Needle at her side.

He is angry suddenly, rising as well, and it doesn't help that he towers over her. He is still small in his former sister's presence, somehow. It is as much marveling as it is disturbing. "Is that what you think I did? Betray you?" He blinks, licking his lips. "You think I betrayed her?

"Did you?" Her hand rests easily on Needle's hilt, not threateningly, but leisurely. Enough to remind him that this is comfort to her now, this is safety, and he hates that this is what his family has become.

But then he stops, swallows tightly, realizes something. "You're still here."

Whether she thinks he betrayed them, or betrayed Sansa, or betrayed the whole North – whether Arya weighs the possibility of him as a threat – she remains. And perhaps that is the greatest reassurance she can give him.

"I'm still here," she repeats, tipping her head just slightly. And then she thrums her fingers along Needle's hilt once, gently, promisingly. "Winter is coming, Jon. Everything else is inconsequential." She turns and leaves him to the empty courtyard.

He wants to laugh. Instead, he drops back down to the bench and stares at the open sky. The snow never stops these days.

And still, she stays.

Jon smiles despite himself.

Mostly, he thinks he came back wrong. Some part of him left unhinged on the way back from darkness, like his soul caught on the threshold and the door still swings precariously behind him in the night, when he lies awake staring at the ceiling and imagining what it would feel like to run his hands through his once-sister's hair.

Mostly, he has learned to find her gaze across any room, and how to watch the lean curve of her neck without being spotted, and exactly at what point affection turns to yearning (it's the exact same point when she absentmindedly calls him 'Jon' amidst the heat of her anger, forgetting herself, before finishing with a clipped and stony 'Your Grace').

Mostly, he closes his eyes to the wild wondering of what her lips would taste like beneath the gentle urging of his own tongue.

Mostly, he thinks some doors are meant to stay closed.

"You look like him, you know, sometimes."

Jon raises a brow her way, his hand stilling the whetstone over Longclaw.

Sansa pulls her cloak tighter around herself and takes a deep breath. The crisp air of the Godswood soaks her lungs until the sharpness of it eclipses the remembrance of her dead father.

His headless corpse, drug through the mud like a threat.

"Like father," she offers in explanation, the words heavy on her tongue. She feels sick suddenly.

His gaze softens, the quirk of his lip all at once endearing and frustrating to her, but she doesn't catch the way the breath stalls in his chest for half a second too long at the words.

"Thank you, Sansa." His gaze flickers to the snow at her feet. Another swipe along his blade sounds in the quiet wood.

"Do not thank me for it."

She can abide most anything but this – this threat that walks through the halls of their home with deceptively white air and mockingly unburnt skin.

Jon furrows his brows at her, silent.

Her back straightens, her eyes falling to the snow. "You wouldn't want to look like father did – in the end."

If she's expecting him to say anything to that, she doesn't know what it is, or if she would even welcome it, so she doesn't give him a chance. She gets to her feet and stalks from the Godswood.

Jon storms from the council meeting after Sansa's departure, catching her in the hallway on the way to her chambers and she startles at his hand at her elbow, the way he doesn't speak when he pulls her along and directs her into her chamber, following her through with a slam of the door.

"What are you doing?" he seethes between clenched teeth.

She raises her chin, and damn her trembling fists because she's sure he's seen them and her pride will not allow a fissure in the façade, not now.

Not after everything.

"I'm doing what's best for the North," she retorts, teeth bared as well.

For a moment she thinks she can taste blood between her teeth, but that is just memory, and it's too insistent and too vibrant to mean anything good, not when Jon stands panting before her, his own fists clenching at his sides.

And what a pair they make, she thinks. The wolves never left the North, not really. She had one slumbering in her chest the whole while. She felt its fangs at her ribs and its snarl lodged in her throat and now, with the dragon queen sleeping sound in her home and the dead at her door and Jon – honorable and forthright and good Jon – Jon her brother (her brother, she reminds herself) standing steps away – steps she won't allow herself to take – now she feels the wolf's howl in her lungs and she is parched and drowning all at once, she is quaking in her own skin, she is lonesome at night and exhausted by day and nothing feels right anymore, nothing but the muted heat of his gaze or the sound of her name on his tongue or the way his hand fits to her waist so easily now or –

"Sansa."

She blinks at him, mouth tipping open, but nothing comes.

"I cannot marry Daenerys."

In truth, it settles the rage in her heart – but only minutely, only enough to let her breathe again, to let her speak. "It is a good match. A necessary match." The words come out easier than she expects, and she only hopes that he will think so as well.

He frowns at her, a gruff noise of frustration raking along his throat when he runs a hand through his hair. "I'm not a Targaryen," he mumbles as though to himself, and it stops Sansa.

Because he was. He is. As much as he was a Stark, and it is pointless to pretend they don't each know at this point. And maybe her wide eyes give her away, maybe her quickly pursed lips and the flutter of her lashes and the way her chest heaves – maybe just the way she cannot take her eyes from him, gives her away.

Jon narrows his eyes at her. "You know."

She only swallows. Only steps back further into the room. But Jon follows.

"You know," he repeats, this time a growl, this time stepping so close she must back into the desk and grab at its edge behind her to steady herself.

"I know you are a Stark. I know – "

"But not the right Stark," he answers, and it's clear now that he was not the first that Bran had spoken to on his parentage.

She isn't sure whether that was a mistake or not, but the pain on Jon's face is enough to make her regret ever hearing it in the first place.

Jon sets his shoulders back, looking out the window at their side, at the stark, white Winter beyond, and then he draws his gaze back to Sansa's, eyes dark and heated and everything she has learned not to trust in her time, except that this is Jon and Jon –

"You should have been the one to tell me," he says, before turning to leave, and at the sudden clench of her heart, she knows he is right. Maybe because he trusts her. Maybe because she loves him. Maybe because they each know – painfully and wrongfully – what it means to live in the dark (and to die in it, too).

Maybe because she would have held him when he cried. Maybe because they each know this, even when they wish they didn't.

Maybe because she wouldn't have let him walk from her – not like he does now, with a slammed door and stilted silence between them.

Maybe because she would have kissed him and not regretted it.

"I don't want to lie to you," she says when she finds him atop the ramparts.

He sighs, never turning to her. "Then don't."

She swallows tightly, stepping up beside him. "I was hurt. I'm still hurt, but… I know you are, too."

He still doesn't look at her, his eyes catching on the snow as it falls over the hills instead.

Because to look at her is to make it real, to look at her is –

He looks.

She is not his sister.

He tells himself this when he walks from her and hears the first inkling of a sob catch the wind behind him.

"You think too much about the 'after'," Arya muses, running her forefinger along the map stretched out over the desk.

Sansa sighs and raises a brow her sister's way. "Someone has to."

"Someone has."

Sansa eyes her warily.

"Jon," Arya says simply, her eyes still on the map at her fingertips. "It's not a pretty plan. It's not likely one we'll survive to test out, anyway, but – it's a plan. For 'after'."

"Daenerys will not let the North be."

"Maybe with a Targaryen ruling, she will."

Sansa's eyes narrow.

Arya huffs, finally looking at her sister. "Do you trust him?"

Sansa scoffs. "Of course, I – "

"I'm not talking about with your life," she intones harshly, punctured with a steady stare that makes Sansa shift in her seat.

"Speak plainly, Arya, I haven't the time for your games."

Arya smirks at that, and for a moment, Sansa is filled with the sudden remembrance that this is her sister and she loves her, even when it is the hardest thing in the world, and even when she doesn't think she loves her back and even – even now, when she rattles her with questions she hasn't bothered to think important before now.

"Forget what comes next, whether that means a marriage in the North , or a rebellion in the South, whether that means any or all of us living to see it in the first place. I'm asking if you will follow him. Against the dead. Against Winter. For the North and for yourself. For me. I'm asking if you're going to trust in father's words, trust in the pack."

Sansa stares at her, clenching the quill in her hand, the ink dripping in a wide, dark bloom along the letter she had been writing.

"We have to trust each other."

She had wanted to believe it then. She had believed it then. She had seen him at his best and at his worst and in the end –

In the end.

"You should have been the one to tell me."

(the lone wolf dies)

He is a Stark, as much or even more than she. As Northern, or even more than she. He is blood. He is family. He is Jon. He is the one whose warmth she had turned to in the wake of her nightmares, the one who marred his knuckles with the blood of her husband-captor, the one who laid the North at her feet, the one who loves her, even still, the one who comes home to her.

"I'm home."

Sansa licks her lips, steadies her breath.

Arya leans back in her chair, eyeing her sister. "So, are we pack, or not?"

In truth, they were Summer children once – Jon and Sansa.

But not all those touched by cold fly South for the Winter.

He doesn't have more than a moment's notice after uttering his low 'come in' before Sansa barges into his room, shutting the door behind her with finality.

"You said we needed to trust each other." The words tumble from her lips, breathless.

He remembers the exact way the snow had fallen over the ramparts that day, and the exact weight of her hand-sown cloak on his shoulders, and the exact point where the warmth of her brow beneath his lips became unbearable.

And he remembers the words. Always.

"I did." He rises from his desk, walking around it to stand before her expectantly.

She grips her cloak tighter to her, takes a long, deep breath, and sometime in the wake of its release, he understands what she is here for.

"Then this is me, trusting you," she says.

She could have rallied the northern lords against him. She could have defied their resident white-haired queen. She could have set her wrath upon him in a hundred different ways.

Instead, she comes to him like this.

Daring and vulnerable and pack. His pack. Unquestioning. Unshaken.

The lone wolf dies. And she will not leave him to this Winter alone.

Jon finds his hands in her hair before he knows he has moved to her. He doesn't let himself think about the way her startled breath fans across his lips, or the way she presses back against the door with a subtle arch, or the way her hands are trembling when they wind themselves around his wrists.

He presses his forehead to hers and releases an exhale of long-held relief. "Thank you, Sansa. I… I need you with me on this." He gulps, closes his lids, flexes his fingers in her hair. "I need you."

He only hopes she doesn't recognize the ring of longing when he says it.

He only hopes she does not see how lost he had been before she came to him.

"No lies?" Sansa asks, fingers dancing along Ghost's back as he lays at her feet.

"No lies," Jon reassures her, his hands gripping each other as he leans with his elbows on his knees. The Godswood is stark and white and barren before them.

A long moment of contemplation. Until, softly, unaccusingly: "Then why?"

Why did you bend the knee? Why did you abandon the North? Why did you give away all that we fought for? Why did you taint your bed with her ilk? Why did you promise a heart that wasn't yours to give?

Why did you think you had to do this alone?

She doesn't utter any of these questions, but they are there all the same, bleeding their presence into the snow at their feet. He hears them in the deafening silence.

Wiping a hand down his face, Jon sighs, and then he straightens, and when he looks at her, he thinks he'd almost rather she ask him these questions. This acute betrayal is only made worse by such vagueness. And he means to give her answers.

Not lies.

(the pack survives)

"Because the dead will overrun us otherwise, and that is fact," he begins, and then doesn't stop (even if he could), "Because we cannot afford another enemy in the South. Because the world still trembles under the threat of dragons. Because she would not move a foot without the assurance of utter devotion, and because it was easier to play her heart than I ever thought I'd be capable of, and because… because I was lonely and she was lovely and because… " He stops, swallows –

(no lies)

– "Because she wasn't you."

If she understands what he means with that last breath, she gives no indication, her throat flexing only minutely as she stares at him, her hand retreating from Ghost, her eventual, gentle nod only damming him more.

"I see," she says, eyes drifting down to her hands where they now lay bunched in her lap, her thumb rubbing uneasily along her knuckles, and suddenly he realizes he's not the only one who thinks some doors must stay closed.

But he gives her this silence.

And she keeps it.

He leaves in a matter of days. To fight the dead, with the dragon queen beside him. And while Daenerys has kept her distance since the revelation of Jon's parentage, it does not ease the worry in Sansa's heart. Targaryens are not ones to settle. She will come for the North when the war is won. She will come for their home, if not for Jon as well.

Sansa raps on Jon's door, heaving a sigh. She clutches the bundled cloak in her hands, and when he opens the door and lets her inside, she steps through with an ease that is perhaps a touch inappropriate for her station, and for his. But she has slept in his bed before when the nightmares were too much, and he has fallen asleep in the chair before her fire, and if that doesn't make their chambers each other's at this point then she doesn't know what does. This is her home, and she will not abide discomfort here any longer. No matter whose chambers.

"I've sewn you another," she says as a greeting, thrusting the cloak toward him.

He takes it gently, with a reverence that pleases her, and all at once she realizes that this is their way. A cloaking before war. One last attempt at warmth, at protection, before the night comes, before Winter sets in. This is what it means to love between them.

She finds her eyes are wet without her bidding, and before she can wipe them, Jon's hand is at her cheek, his thumb brushing along her cheekbone, eyes focused on hers.

"To keep you warm," she tries, more a hiccup of words than the steadiness she craves.

He steps closer, the light quirk of his lip signaling his gratitude, his eyes never leaving hers. "You always have," he answers, a brush of his thumb lighting along her cheek with the words.

She pulls a tight breath through her lips and doesn't miss the way his eyes flicker to her parted mouth, for only a moment, for just the hesitant pull of a breath and then back to her eyes.

It does her no good to pretend she hasn't traced the line of his lips herself. They already promised each other not to lie.

Jon's hand dips down along her jaw and then her neck, slowly, almost reluctantly, and she stops breathing altogether. She blinks furiously at him, watching his eyes trace the movement until his hand has come to rest against her collarbone, his fingers lighting along the stitched image of the wolf she had sewn to her dress those many months ago. She realizes, distantly, that she wears the same dress as when she had given him the last cloak, and it is too hard to admit to herself that she had donned it with purpose.

She isn't ready to name that intent. Not yet.

"I still like the wolf bit," he says lowly, almost as a forgotten breath, and then his fingers move across the stitching, edging the length of her collarbone. "It suits you." He swallows then, licks his lips, eyes trained to the image along her breast, and the sudden rise and fall of her chest is what finally drags his gaze back to hers. He inclines his head toward hers, lids fluttering almost closed, hand still stretched along her collarbone and she very nearly finds herself leaning into him, her hands moving for his shoulders when a knock against his door announcing Tyrion has him jolting back, his hand retreating from her with enough quickness to remind them just how unseemly such closeness should be.

It doesn't stop the heat from flushing over her chest and up her neck though. It doesn't stop the way her throat has gone dry or the way her tongue has pinned her exhilaration to the roof of her mouth or the way she steps aside with a whisper of 'Your queen calls' tinged with an accusation she isn't entirely sure shouldn't also be directed at herself.

But he says nothing when he leaves her, only offers a final lingering glance, the kind that has her hand reaching up her dress to light along the wolf at her breast.

The same wolf at her ribs, howling.

He takes the cloak with him.

Jon renounces his claim. To the Iron Throne. Even to the North. And in the midst of the hollering that deafens the Great Hall, Sansa's eyes swing dangerously to Jon. He is already looking at her though, and she has to look away or she will not be able to curb this anger any longer, this righteous fury.

She had said she would trust him. And she does. But she does not want to live in a lonesome Winterfell. She does not want to live in a home that he cannot also call his. She is the Lady of Winterfell, yes, but she wants to be his Lady of Winterfell, and perhaps she just wasn't ready for that realization until now.

Later, when she corners him in the hallway to his chambers after the feast, he is already sighing, already war-worn and tired. She knows he is ready to rest. She knows this. But she can't help wanting him to fight for it, just this one last time.

"This isn't what I wanted," she says, eyes imploring him to look at her.

He doesn't. "But it's what's right. The North should have been yours from the start."

She understands now that he doesn't intend to survive the Winter. She understands now that this is his goodbye. But she won't have it.

"It should have been ours."

He looks at her then. "Sansa, don't." There is a dangerous thrum to his voice.

She doesn't care. "It isn't too late."

Jon rubs a hand down his face, looking off to the far wall, and without warning or explanation, she suddenly realizes that this is how he protects his pack. His family. And maybe that is the only way to reach him now.

Sansa steps closer, her hand curling in his sleeve, and the air seems to shift between them, the sudden flick of his dark gaze to hers more like a warning than anything but she holds tight. She steadies the howl in her lungs. "If Winterfell is mine, then it is just as much yours. We are Starks, you and I, and you…you are my brother," she whispers in hopeful trepidation.

He stares down to where her hand grips at his sleeve, and then back up at her. He leans in, mouth parting, and then halts as though forgetting himself. "I'm not," he says in answer, low and guttural.

(He wasn't her brother when he wore her cloak and he wasn't her brother when he braced his lips to her forehead and he isn't her brother now – now when he is half a breath away from kissing her and never looking back and yet… and yet he braces a hand along her shoulder, almost as though to hold her from him.)

He is impossibly close. Close enough that she can smell the ale on his breath. She licks her lips. The motion does not escape him.

"I'm not," he repeats, this time rougher, like something angry has seeped through his tongue, out his throat, to taint the air.

Her fingers curl tighter into his sleeve, and she is angry and hollow and spiteful all at once, she is aching and empty and craven, she is reminded – instantly and without reprieve – that she had chosen to follow him, even in this. She is reminded how they had promised not to lie to each other –

"Sometimes I wish you still were."

– and she is reminded that she has broken promises before.

He stares at her heatedly, his breath still ale-spent, his throat still anger-tight, and then he grips her face in his palms and she gasps at the suddenness of it, stumbles back against the stone wall until he is braced chest to chest with her, panting against her, brows furrowed as he grinds his teeth in something akin to desperation.

It is better this way, she thinks.

(She knows it is not.)

"If I could have you, I would," he pants against her lips, his fingers digging into her hair, and it is the closest they've come to naming this brutal, threatening tangle of emotion between them.

It stills the air in her lungs.

"But I cannot," he finishes lowly, with the hidden ache of someone who knows such lose keenly.

And he does, she believes. In Ygritte. In his Black brothers. In the family he had once called his, if only by halves.

Nothing in his life has ever lingered long enough for him to call his. Not truly. Not even this life.

(Not even the last one.)

Sansa sobs against him, instant and breathless, her hands bunching in his tunic, holding him to her. "Don't do this," she pleads.

He looks at her for a long moment, long enough to make her think – deliriously and desperately – that he will stay.

That he will stay hers, and here, and hers.

Just hers, please, just that.

It's the only thing she's ever wanted.

(Just a stupid, little girl who never learns.)

"I leave in the morning," he says, breaking from her with a swiftness that has her chest heaving with labored breaths, her hands still held mid-air, gripping at the place where his chest had been braced against her and when he walks from the room, her hand-sown cloak along his shoulders, she finally lets herself fall. Her knees hit the stone and it doesn't hurt near as much –

It could never hurt near as much as –

In the space between their lips, in the breath they almost shared, Sansa finds all the reasons she can never wish for a Summer without Snow.

She cannot say rightly whether he is hers, not yet, but she knows now – undoubtedly – that she is very much his.

With every crook and hollow. With every wounded piece of her.

His.

"You love her, you know, more than you'll ever admit to," he tells Arya that night when the feast has quieted down and the warriors have gone to their lovers and every soul in the North is spending their last hours before dawn living (because tomorrow they may be dying and the dead will never know their fierce hearts, not ever).

Arya raises a brow at Jon over the rim of her tankard.

"Your sister, that is," he clarifies, as though it needs clarifying.

She rolls her eyes, setting her ale down, and even with her legs drawn up along the table and Needle fitted comfortably at her side, and the way she licks the ale from her lips – even still – Jon knows his sister (his dear, little sister – and oh, how cruel the past has been) is afraid.

"Our sister," she corrects.

"Your sister," he insists, eyes set on hers.

She thrums her fingers along the table, once, twice, looks off to the far wall. She does not give him any further answer, and maybe that is answer enough.

"Bran says – "

"I don't care what Bran says," she bites out, gaze snapping to his. "You're still my brother."

It isn't, perhaps, the kind of farewell he had expected this night, but it is the one he will keep close.

"Thank you, Arya." Because it is the only thing worth saying to that. The only thing that matters. Jon lifts his own tankard of ale to his mouth.

Arya huffs mildly, arms crossing over her chest, before she peers at him out of the corner of her eye. "You love her too, you know."

Jon stills his mug at his lips, gaze flicking to hers. She watches him meaningfully.

"More than you'll ever admit to," she finishes, and maybe he should have seen this one coming. This is Arya, after all.

And while she only lifts her brows in a subtle challenge, grabbing for her mug of ale once more, it is all he can do to turn his gaze to the window, watch the snow pelting the stone.

It is all he can do not to run to her.

Sansa.

Winter suits her far more than he is comfortable with, and this, perhaps, is the cruelest cut of all.

Sansa greets the dawn with a tight-lipped frown, her eyes catching sight of a bird frozen on the bough outside her window. It falls to the earth, dead.

Sansa resolves never to be a little dove again.

(Never a stupid, little girl.)

They say their goodbyes at the gate. Daenerys is already riding ahead, and Bran has returned to the Godswood. Ghost pads nervously at the snow, settling only when Jon's hand rests along the nape of his neck. Arya grips Sansa in a fierce hug, doesn't let go. It is only when Sansa's first sob catches the air that Arya pulls back abruptly, gaze turned from her, the wetness along her eyes blinked back as though it had never been, and then she is bowing, a slight incline of her body, a graceful, tender lilt of her lips and then she is gone, and Sansa wishes she had held her more, laughed with her more, loved her more. But they are ladies of Winterfell, and they will do what they must, and this is yet more that she loves her for.

"Sansa."

She turns at the sound of her name on his tongue, more a croak than anything.

She had welcomed him home, in this very courtyard, not so long ago.

"I wish…" He stops, bites his lip, releases it on a ragged huff of air. "Gods, I wish…"

"I know," she says simply. And he halts, staring at her, his hand gripping Longclaw's hilt too tightly to be comfort, and then she sighs, closes her eyes, whispers the words she's held to her beaten chest for too long. "I know because I wished for it, too."

Jon opens his mouth, closes it, watches her in keen disquiet.

She smiles at him when she opens her eyes again, and it has been so long, and then her hand is at his cheek, and it doesn't matter what eyes are watching them in this wide and open courtyard, it doesn't matter that his Targaryen aunt is waiting beyond the gates, or that the dead are ever closer, or that Davos is watching with disapproving eyes. It only matters that she is here, before him, and she will be here in the after.

This she promises.

"When the snows fall and the white wind blows, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives."

He watches her, breathless.

"So I will be your pack, Jon. And you will come home to me."

He has no answer for her, none but his hands cupping her cheeks and his mouth slanted to hers and the desperate, yearning thrill in his chest that revels at her taste.

She whimpers against his lips and he draws back instantly, horrified, remembering how men have touched her in the past and how he has always wanted more for her and how he had always promised to protect her and yet – and yet she is pressing into him herself now, her own mouth parted against his, her hands fisted in his tunic and Winter has never felt so warm, so promising.

He tastes the snow against her lips and wishes for nothing but this, nothing but –

"I'm home." And he is. He well and truly is.

More than Winterfell, more than Stark, this is what he returns to.

They were Summer children once – Jon and Sansa.

And Summer children they will be again.