Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: Set after Season Six, ignores Season Seven. Pre-parentage reveal. They fight it, or at least they try to. Mild sexual content.

Dark in Bloom

"His gravity wavers, the axis of his world tilted to the measure of her lips." - Jon and Sansa. The stain of desire bleeds slowly between them.

She is still copper-crowned and winter-poised, the Sansa from his childhood if he lets himself look long enough.

Yet he is still a Snow. King in the North, and still –

Bastards should never look long upon their lady sisters.

But this Sansa keeps his gaze and his smiles and his side.

This is not the Sansa from his childhood.

(And this perhaps, is why he allows himself to look a little longer – even when he knows he shouldn't.)

"He was taller than I remember."

Sansa stills her needle mid-stitch, glancing at him across from her. Shadows flicker over the lines of Jon's face in an amber dance that makes him seem all at once older and stranger to her. He shakes his head, wipes a hand down his face, looks to the floor.

Sansa settles her sewing in her lap. "Who?" she asks softly, and yet she knows.

"Rickon."

Her chest tightens at the remembrance –

(an arrow through the lung, blood dried in rivers down his chin, those Tully blue eyes peeled to the sky).

"We missed so much," she whispers to the flames, eyes never reaching his.

Jon folds his hands over each other and watches the motion. "Aye."

In the space between their chairs, Sansa wonders if maybe her touch would be welcomed, but it's a stony stillness that overtakes her instead.

"I don't want to miss any more," Jon breathes raggedly, and the sound that brews in his throat makes her swing her eyes to his.

It's not quite a sob, more a halting clench of air, his jaw clenching tight over the sound as though to cage it and Sansa is slipping from her chair suddenly, dropping her sewing without a mind to temper its fall, and her hands wind into his hair as she holds his face against her stomach. Neither of them question how easily his hands wind around her back and bunch in the wool of her dress or how quickly the tears make their way to his eyes or how desperate and lonely Sansa's gentle hushing sounds in the fire-lit space of her chambers.

They've missed too much already to question this.

Jon takes to the Godswood.

It was a mistake – to kiss her like that atop the battlements after they retook Winterfell. To brace his lips to her forehead and hold her there against him. To breathe her in and flex his fingers in her copper hair.

Jon swipes a whetstone down the length of Longclaw, the sharp hiss of it reverberating through the wood.

She hadn't moved away.

Jon stills his hand over his sword. Winter nips at him beneath the furs. His lungs are full of it.

(But she hadn't moved away.)

Another swipe of the whetstone.

It was a mistake to taste her.

Jon finds her in the crypts. She takes to them too often these days, her winter roses laid at their Aunt Lyanna's stone hands.

(She doesn't tell him that her recent fondness for the fallen Stark matriarch is a shared sense of caged regret and a harsh bitterness with those who caged her. She knows what it means to be trapped, to be helpless, to be lost. She wonders if maybe she would have liked their willful Aunt Lyanna had she known her.)

Jon passes the newly erected statue of Rickon, a hand-sewn handkerchief laying at his feet, the likeness of Shaggydog brushing the edges, and he allows himself a gentle smile at Sansa's handiwork. He passes Catelyn Stark, who once sat by his bedside on a long, cold night when his breaths came quick and shallow and his feverish mind had only thought he dreamt her.

He stands beside Sansa at the base of their father's statue. It seems wrong, even now – especially now – to remember how she had snuck into his bed wordlessly that first night at Castle Black and simply cried against his back, shaking with a terrible tremor, the force of which never left him. She doesn't shake anymore, doesn't cry. She's still, and cautious, and tight-lipped. She's a wolf once more, a dark shadow on the outskirts of familiarity, creeping in, nosing the snow, finding her way back.

Winterfell is her home, as much as it is his, and he wonders how long it will be before she finally starts sleeping without screaming. Until then, he keeps his door unlatched. Until then, he doesn't turn her from his furs.

This is his downfall, he knows.

But when she curls her fists against his back and breathes deep, whispers his name (and their brothers and their sister and their father), when she sighs like longing has made a home between her ribs –

He hasn't the heart to lock his chamber door to her.

"He hadn't thought to prepare us for this, you know."

Jon looks at her in the shadow of torchlight. "For what?"

Her brow furrows, the line of her lips pursing tighter. A moment passes. She swallows. "For a world without him."

"The next time we see each other…"

Jon wonders if it's some kind of cosmic joke the Gods are playing on him with that memory. He barely has the mind to keep the scoff from his lips when he remembers Sansa beside him.

She stares stonily ahead, her eyes on the still visage of their father. The masons hadn't done him justice.

(But then, this world hadn't done him justice either, had it?)

"I don't think he ever meant to leave us so soon."

She dips her head, acknowledges his words, knows the truth of them and still… still she mourns a father whose hands were always warm and who gifted her a tender doll in a haze of regret and who always told her to stand straight and look ahead – a father who placed honor above all else.

(But then, maybe not – maybe not if he had lied in his last moments because then perhaps – perhaps family meant more than honor.)

She looks to Jon.

"He should have known, with Baratheons and Lannisters on the throne. He should have known to prepare us for this."

"Nothing could have prepared us for this." And he thinks Ygritte and the Black and a darkness he had not known until his lungs had stilled and suddenly, the world is far more daunting than before.

Jon squares his shoulders, his throat flexing as he turns to look at her.

Sansa keeps her gaze on their stone father instead.

"But Father knew we weren't alone. We'd never be alone."

It's an easy sentiment, he realizes, especially in the safe warmth of the Winterfell crypts, with guards all around their home who have sworn their allegiance again and again. It's an easy sentiment – when engulfed in safety.

So Jon reaches for her hand,

She lets him take it, watching him silently, unexpectantly.

"The pack survives," he whispers into her knuckles, eyes never leaving hers, and he watches how she softens at the motion, how she turns to face him fully.

The torchlight is harsh and erratic over her sharp-boned features but even in shadow, Jon can make out the subtle lilt of her lips.

"The pack survives," she whispers back, and the words seem to echo in the crypts around them.

Father and Rickon and many, many more. Stark blood sings through the stone.

Like wolves in winter.

They howl unto death.

She makes Arya's room ready. She makes Bran's.

It is their home still, wherever they are.

And she will keep the fires lit.

The Northern lords come to her with offers for her brother's hand. Their daughters, their nieces, their sisters. It is Northern pride that extends their hands, as it is Northern pride that makes her grant them audience.

Still, it is something darker, something sharper than pride that makes her curl her fingernails into her armrests.

In the end, a wolf will do her duty.

"To take the North is one thing. To hold it, another." Her words echo in the chamber.

Jon stares into the fire and lets her continue.

She huffs impatiently, her hands turning themselves over. He catches sight of the way she presses a soothing thumb into the crease of her palm, and he wonders when the motion started exactly. Had it been at Ramsay's touch? Or even earlier? Had it been at Littlefinger's whispers? Or Joffrey's acidity? Or earlier still? Had it been even at Winterfell, when he hadn't the mind to notice his lady sister in her heart-beaten fancy?

Jon shakes his head, staring into the hearth's flames.

Sansa sighs, and it seems to take all of her, because she stalks to her chair then, slumps into it with an impropriety that doesn't become her.

Jon glances to her out of the corner of his eye.

"The Northern lords will only keep marriage from the table for so long," she warns, and it is not the first, and still, he has no answer but a stony glower.

"Jon," she says exasperatedly.

"It isn't needed."

"Jon," she says again, this time like a plea, this time with the soft exhale of caution on her breath.

He looks at her then, and she must look away.

"We have more important things to consider. The dead are coming."

She doesn't argue him his point. Instead, she shuffles the papers atop her desk into an orderly fashion, the appeals and proposals and lineage reports tucked neatly away into the second drawer of her desk. "For now," she says.

Jon eyes her warily.

They each know it isn't a matter easily forgotten, and Sansa won't admit to the relief she feels when he rejects the lords' proposals.

It's petty of her, she knows, and selfish and sinful and small.

She looks out the window at her side, the white snow covering the hills she used to ride as a child, when the thundering of horse hooves beneath her used to be comforting.

She loves the North, always has. Even when she didn't think it loved her back.

Sansa's hand hovers over her second drawer, still dutiful.

They mine dragonglass. They fill the granaries. They secure the battlements.

Jon trains and Sansa sews, each knitting together a force of Northern endurance.

"I wish Arya was here," she finds herself saying one night.

Jon stills with his quill over his parchment, and from her place in the chair across from his desk, she sees the harsh lines along his mouth when it sets to frowning.

It's a strange desire, she knows, especially when she voices it so casually, but all at once, without knowing why or how, she remembers how Arya used to steal into her chambers at night when her dreams were too dark and the air was too chill. It didn't matter what petty squabble had transpired that day, what childish prank, what nasty spell of spite had overtaken them. When Arya pushed her chamber door open and stood at the foot of her bed, and when Sansa opened her arms wordlessly, and when her little sister climbed into bed and curled tight against her form and shook wordlessly in her embrace – Sansa remembered what it meant to be pack.

She remembers even now the night her father killed Lady. The way that Arya had clenched a fist in her sleeve at Cersei's order, the way her sister had shouted her fierce defiance of such cruelty, the way Arya's eyes had watered alongside hers.

She remembers how Arya had held her that night, through tears and snot and worse.

Yes, she misses her sister. And perhaps she always will, because even if she were to return, Sansa isn't simple enough to think it will be the same soul that left her.

Jon had come back from the dead. She herself had barely escaped death as it was. She doesn't pretend Arya wouldn't have faced much the same.

It is as much this new family, as the old, that she wishes for.

It is as much the familiar, and as much the stranger, that she hopes for in Arya.

(In herself even, if she lets herself linger too long on it.)

Jon hums his soft agreement, and she can't help but purse her lips in a frown.

Does he know? Does he understand? Could he?

But then she catches sight of the too-tight grip he holds over the quill, and the harsh line that creases his brow, and the way the firelight illuminates the clench of his jaw.

Yes, she thinks. He knows.

They will never be who they were. At most, they are Stark, and they are blood.

The rest… is choice.

Sometime in the night, Sansa understands.

She chooses Jon all the same.

Jon is coming from the crypts when he first sees it. He stills in the opening, glancing up at the ramparts where Sansa stands overlooking the courtyard. Petyr Baelish is leaning against the rail at her side, saying something that makes her turn her head in dismissal. But then he smirks, whispers something else, and Sansa swings her dangerous gaze back to him, fingers curling along the rail of the ramparts.

Jon watches as Baelish reaches out and runs the back of a single finger along her curled knuckles, slowly, tauntingly, his eyes on the motion as he speaks still. Sansa stiffens, and he can see even from this distance the way her jaw tightens.

And then Baelish nods his farewell and leaves her, and she stands there staring out into the courtyard for many moments, before she turns to leave as well.

Jon curls his fingers along the stone wall, the scrape of it against his leathered gloves insignificant – practically useless.

Some nights he smells like cloves and harpseed oil.

Not tonight. Tonight it is ale and soiled snow.

Sansa rouses him from his shallow sleep in the chair before the fire. He glances up at her, exhaustion writ across his face, dark curls coming undone around his cheeks.

"Come," she says, urging him up. "To bed."

Jon grumbles his reluctance, but he follows her hands regardless.

Fine-boned and lined with grace. Hands of a lady.

Jon blinks beneath his slumber haze.

When he nudges his nose into the line of her hair with a rumbling sigh of contentment just before she dumps him atop his furs, she thinks perhaps it isn't with the hands of a lady that she would touch him.

She hadn't been at the council meeting earlier that morning, and it's midday when he opens the door to her chamber, a ready complaint already at his tongue, so he doesn't expect to find her with her shift pulled down to her waist.

Sansa yelps, a strange sort of gurgle escaping her lips as she turns swiftly so that her back is to him, curved and hunched in as she wraps her arms around herself.

Jon stills in the threshold.

"Your Grace!" Brienne shouts, sharp admonishment ringing through her voice as she turns from Sansa and unceremoniously shoves him back through the door, shutting it clear in his face.

He doesn't even have the mind to consider the lady knight's break in decorum as he stares at the closed chamber door.

It isn't until later, when he's sitting in the Godswood, Longclaw along his lap and whetstone in hand, that he can think beyond the image still lingering in his mind – the sunlit lines of her bare profile, the barely discernable curve of her breast, the dip of her waist. And then all at once he remembers the jagged marks of scar tissue running down her spine and along the bow of her hips when she had turned from him. Belatedly, he recalls the image of Brienne throwing aside some kind of balm, by the look of it, before she had pushed him from the room.

Jon's brows furrow into a deep, thoughtful line.

Sansa steps toward him in the snow.

He startles at her presence, standing abruptly, licking his lips as he fumbles over his words.

Her gaze is still Stark cold, still a winter blue.

"I'm sorry," is all he can manage.

Sansa continues to look at him, and then she sighs, glances around the wood, takes a seat along the log beside him.

Jon sits as well, hesitantly. "I never meant to – "

"I've slept beside you when my nightmares were darkest too often to fault you your assumption of closeness, but Jon," she stops, breathes deep, "You cannot broach the sanctity of my chambers, my privacy, so casually anymore. It isn't… proper."

"Of course. Of course, I never – " He sighs angrily at himself, rubbing a hand over his mouth. "Sansa, I'm so sorry. I won't ever do it again."

She nods, doesn't press him further, and he wonders if she'd have even approached him about the incident if Brienne hadn't also been a witness. But that bespeaks a baseness on her part that he wouldn't dare assume.

Jon sighs.

(He wonders if he's wrong to hope that he isn't the only one with a corrupted heart.)

"You saw," she says simply, not an accusation. Just a fact.

Jon swallows thickly. Yes, he had seen – enough, at least. Enough to make him clench tightly to Longclaw, enough to still him with breathlessness, enough to recognize the tight coil of desire he'd thought he could ignore.

(He came back wrong, he thinks. He came back wrong. Death had turned him into something vile. This isn't the man he thought himself to be.)

But then Sansa reaches up and presses a hand to the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, and Jon suddenly remembers the harsh white scar he had seen there, stretching down past her shoulder blade.

"You saw."

Jon tastes bile at the back of his throat.

Of course, Sansa isn't concerned with common impropriety. She said it herself, she's slept in his bed. She's clung to the tunic at his back. She's curled her form around his. She's let him witness her screams. She's borne her vulnerability to him – nobly, dearly.

Guilt racks him with a fierceness he feels down to his bones. How base, how degenerate of him. To see her first for her body, and only second for her scars.

He has to turn away.

Sansa's hands curl into fists atop her lap. "Some days the scars ache more. Brienne helps me those days. I don't trust any other with my body."

I don't trust you, she doesn't say. But she doesn't have to. She shouldn't trust him with her body.

She shouldn't trust him at all, he realizes.

"Is that… is that what you were…?" His throat flexes. He clears it.

Sansa nods, fists unfurling in her lap. She looks down to her open palms. "Ramsay's hold still lingers, in some ways." She says it like a caged thing.

He's alight with something dangerous then, a fury that itches beneath his skin. "You cannot collar a wolf," he says firmly, without knowing the words are on his tongue.

Sansa blinks up at him.

They sit staring at each other for long moments, and then Jon finds the strength to curl his hand along hers, setting Longclaw in the snow against the log beneath them.

Sansa's jaw works tightly, her lashes fluttering in something Jon cannot recognize, but then she's curling her fingers over his, and she's nodding, and that's enough.

She presses a tender hand to his brow, lighting her fingertips along his own scars, and he closes his eyes, steals a tentative breath in the silence.

(But is he wrong, to see her scars second? Is he wrong, to see her first?)

Jon opens his eyes and finds her watching him in contemplative quiet.

He leans forward, catches himself, watches the almost indecipherable widening of her own eyes.

"You cannot collar a wolf," he says once more. This time with the ragged breath of want. This time with the sudden realization that it is want that he feels.

"No," she agrees softly, barely a whisper in the wind.

Jon narrows his eyes at her.

"No, you cannot."

He realizes, belatedly, that he would have kissed her. He would have kissed her and not regretted it –

But he also realizes she would have let him.

And that changes everything.

(Because he knows now that she shouldn't.)

Sansa glances out of the window in her room. Dawn is a creeping, hesitant thing. A sliver of orange lights filters into her room and she tucks a braid behind her ear.

In the light, everything is ever-clear.

She catches her reflection in the bronze mirror across from her – wool-wrapped and frowning.

In the light, everything is shadow-stricken.

"Send him away," Jon says testily.

Sansa turns to him in the shadow of the crypts, sighing. Moments ago, Lord Baelish had walked from her presence, his whispers still lingering in the stone. Somehow, she knows Jon had been watching for his retreat, waiting to confront her.

"Baelish – " he begins.

"Lord Baelish," she corrects, turning to him fully.

Jon heaves a laborious sigh.

Sansa glances to their stone father a moment, and then moves to step past Jon. "Have you forgotten he is Lord Protector of the Vale?" She catches his grumble as he moves to walk alongside her. "Have you forgotten he's the reason we're here? I haven't, and he certainly hasn't. I cannot send him away, Jon – more importantly, I won't."

Jon grabs for her arm, stops them. "He will demand more than he should." His eyes narrow at her. "Unless he already has."

Sansa's gaze turns away.

His hand curls along her arm. "You never should have wrote to him."

Her gaze snaps back fiercely. "I would do it again. A hundred times over."

If I fall, don't bring me back.

"Sansa."

She pulls her arm from his grasp. "For now, we need his support. We need the Vale. I knew the cost then, and I know it now."

He stares at her, realization blooming beneath his skin. He steps toward her, voice low, watching as she steps back, a hand going to the stone wall behind her. "Sansa, what have you done?"

"I've made no promises," she bites out. "But be sure, Jon, yours is not the only hand the lords are seeking for marriage." His eyes flash in the firelight, but she presses on, swallowing tightly. "I will do my duty to the North."

Jon scoffs, stalking away from her, glowering in the faint torchlight. He looks back at her, and she is still braced against the wall, chin high, that damn fire-kissed hair like a wave of shadow.

(Sometimes he thinks of what it is to lose his hands in such a shadow, to kiss the fire himself.)

"He can't have you," he says finally, a low rumble.

Sansa's chest heaves with indignation. "It is my decision."

"And you've made the wrong one."

Her nostrils flare in her fury. "Don't be stupid, Jon, we can't remain so inflexible."

He stalks back to her at the insult, meets her dangerous glare with one of his own. "You're not a bartering chip, Sansa, you're the Lady of Winterfell for fuck's sake!"

"Yes," she seethes, "and have you ever once thought of what it means to be the Lady of Winterfell?"

He stills, breathing heavily, smothering the craving that lances through him when he watches her mouth work over her heated words.

"Because I have. Ever since I was a little girl, I learned what it means to be a lady, where my value lies, how best to serve my house and my people and my liege lord."

She spits the last words distastefully, but her scorn makes her no less beautiful in the firelight and Jon doesn't notice how he leans ever closer, or how she doesn't step back, the air raking through his lungs at the unconscious motion. He can see the flex of her white throat when she gathers herself.

"You once said that you would do anything to protect the North, to protect me. And I am trying to do the same, Jon – so help me – I am trying to protect what I love, just as dearly as you are. I will not do nothing, simply because I can do only a little. How dare you demean that decision by trying to rail over it!"

Jon grinds his teeth, fingers curling with some sort of anxious need. "It can't be Baelish."

"Lord Baelish."

"Oh, fuck Lord Baelish," he nearly bellows, gripping at her forearms and pressing her back against the wall. She startles at the contact, until she regains herself, eyes narrowing so quickly he almost misses it – but he doesn't give her the chance to speak. "He's a man, Sansa, a very dangerous and clever man, but a man, and as a member of the species, let me tell you something – his is not the kind of attention you want, believe me."

"I know what men can do," she grits out lowly.

"Do you?" He presses into her, his body a taut line of fury – not close enough to brace his chest to hers but enough to feel the heat of her.

(Enough to know she feels it, too.)

Sansa's mouth opens, trembles, closes all too abruptly.

Jon watches the motion, one hand rising up from her arm to trace her jaw. "Do you truly know what he wants to do to you?"

Sansa keeps her silence and her stillness.

His fingers dip along the smooth expanse of her throat, transfixed by the way her breath hitches, the way the torchlight flickers over her skin like a mirage. His hand edges along her high collar. "Do you know how he would touch you? How he would fuck you? How he would bare your ripened skin to his hands, how he wouldn't be gentle?" He licks his lips, eyes fixed to her pulse point. Something rumbles in his chest at the whimper that leaves her. His other hand has slipped to her waist, pressing her back into the wall almost as though to keep her from him. "Do you know how he wouldn't hesitate to taste you, to smother your protests with his own mouth, to take from you – again and again? Do you know how he would ruin you? How he would make you think you loved him for it?" His voice catches, the words barely a growl as they leave his lips.

A strangled gasp escapes her throat, her hands fisting in his tunic, and Jon blinks back into awareness, his chest heaving against hers, his eyes snapping back up to her own unblinking blue ones. His hand retracts from her throat, his body leaning back half a breath away. "It could never be him," he whispers like a promise, or a warning.

Sansa's eyes are hard once more, even as her breathing deepens. "It isn't up to you."

"I am your King," and oh, how he hates that he has sunk this low. How he lords this over her.

(A vindictive, venal need, but wolves have never left a soft-mouthed bite.)

Sansa's hands slip from his chest and he feels the loss instantly. "You are not my keeper. You are not my husband."

"I am you brother," he grinds out, and the self-hatred couldn't be more ripe.

"Half-brother," she corrects.

Jon stills, a swift, disbelieving breath raking from him.

She cannot look at him then, eyes drifting past his shoulder, and sometime in the minute that passes, Jon finds the strength to finally step away.

(The distinction would have ignited something of hope in him once, but now it is a sharp brand of distance the world settles between them – a chasm he thinks may never be crossed.)

Sansa smooths her hands over her skirts, one hand resting reassuringly against her stomach, back straightening. "You cannot collar a wolf," she says lowly, almost regretfully, and then she is turning from him once more, walking from the crypts and never looking back.

He stares at the space she once occupied, wondering if it isn't the firelight, but instead, her own visceral warmth, still lighting his skin with fierce longing.

Half-brother.

A cage by any other name.

He is Jon Snow, and she is Sansa Stark, and they will always sit three feet apart. He sees this now when they head the long table in the Hall of Lords. He sees this when they sup together in her chambers (when she allows him still). He sees this when she settles into the chair beside his desk with her sewing, as though it has always been thus.

Because he is Jon Snow, and she is Sansa Stark, and he should have known this from the start.

Three feet, always.

Sometimes he wonders what she would say were he to cross it.

(But then, her mouth would be too otherwise occupied to scold him.)

They learn to look without looking, to touch without touching, to speak without speaking.

And Jon learns how to want without wanting.

(He doesn't, really.)

"Jon."

She's found him, it seems.

He doesn't answer her as he stares over the white hills from his look atop the ramparts, the wide stretch of winter blanketing the North as far as he can see.

Sansa pulls her cloak tighter to her, shuffles her weight from one foot to the other. "I miss you, Jon."

He closes his eyes, and he could laugh. He really could. She has never shied from the bluntness of truth, her own especially. "You shouldn't," he finally breathes out, because he has no other answer for her.

She has no rebuttal though. Only silence. Maybe because she recognizes the selfishness of such admittance.

He turns to her then. She turns as well.

"I shouldn't," she echoes hollowly. "And yet…"

He can only sigh, only think back to the white hills and their glaring simplicity. He rubs a hand down his face. "It's cold. We should get you inside."

He moves to escort her back along the battlements, but she stops him with a hand in his cloak.

"Jon."

"Sansa, please."

She bites her lip, looks at him a moment longer, and then finally nods her acquiescence. She lets him take her inside.

The cold never leaves them.

Sansa watches him from her place beside him at the head table. The Northern lords are filtering out through the hall after the most recent meeting, and she finds the smile slow and bewildering as it sets upon her lips.

"I could teach you, you know," she says teasingly, but with just the right touch of heaviness to make him glance at her.

Jon sighs heavily, rubbing a hand down his face as he settles deeper into his chair. "Teach me what?" he asks wearily.

Sansa cocks her head at him, her smile wilting. "You know the battlefield, Jon, I've never denied you that. But I know people. I know the court. Southern and Northern alike."

Jon stares at her, blinking hard, and then he grinds his teeth, shaking his head. "You want to teach me the great Game, is that it?" he asks incredulously.

The hall is quiet now, emptied of the Northern lords and their retainers. Sansa taps a nail along the wood table before them. "You say it like it's something you choose to play. Like you aren't in it even now." She throws a meaningful glare his way.

Jon grumbles, straightening in his chair. "And what would you teach me, hmm?"

Sansa stands suddenly, her hands going straight to her sides. "How not to blunder through marriage negotiations for one."

Jon growls, his hands curling into fists along the table top. "We don't have time for that, you know this."

"You're worried about the Night King," she answers in a huff, continuing when all he does is nod, "But what you don't understand is that a political marriage is exactly the kind of thing that will grant us the military support we need in such a fight."

"The entirety of the North has already pledged to us."

"The North isn't enough, you said so yourself."

"Then why even bother entertaining their proposals when you don't mean to marry me off to a Northerner?" He rattles the question off angrily, spitefully, and he doesn't even realize he's stood as well until he catches the muted heat of her gaze flickering briefly, just breaths away from his.

"Because we have to show that the option is on the table. We have to show our consideration."

Jon scoffs, turning away from her. He stalks several paces away, pauses, stalks back. "I'm tired of these games of yours – "

"They aren't my games, they're – "

"We're at war, Sansa, this is serious."

"And I'm being perfectly serious when I tell you that you can't just charge in like you did after you got Rickon killed!"

Jon stops, staring at her, chest heaving.

She stills as well, mouth opening in a silent 'o', her breath hitching for a moment.

In some small way, he'd always wondered. When the cavalry had charged and the wildlings flooded the field, had it been him? Had it been his mistake?

Sansa reaches for him, but he takes a step back, stumbling. She stops, holds her hands to her mouth. "Oh, Jon, I didn't – that's not…"

Jon looks to the floor, and then to the table, finally back at her. "I've made mistakes, aye."

The low rumble of his voice has her trembling suddenly, her face pinched tight. "You didn't get Rickon killed," she whispers suddenly, desperately, because she needs him to know. She needs him to know.

She doesn't blame him. She never has.

"He was dead the moment Ramsey had him, you said it yourself," he answers her hollowly.

It doesn't help the guilt – for either of them.

"But the rest was me. The rest… was me."

"Jon," she breathes, hands outstretched, and this time he doesn't step back, lets her hold his face between her palms as she braces against him.

"You're right," he says finally, the resignation slumping his shoulders with the admittance.

Sansa shakes her head, her throat tight. "That's not – it isn't…" She stops, swallows, schools her features into something she can control. "Let me help you."

He looks at her then, truly looks at her, and Sansa is taken aback by how not like their father he suddenly looks, how dark and how fine-boned and how fervent he looks. "Let me help you," she whispers again, and she tugs him to her, wraps her hands around his shoulders and clutches him with an intensity she hasn't felt in too many ages.

Jon's hands shake at his sides, unsure.

In the end, he doesn't embrace her.

In the end, he doesn't know how else to stop making mistakes.

He slips up. Takes a blow to the cheek during sparring practice when his eyes flick to the way Lord Baelish presses into Sansa's side as she watches from the ramparts. The mark bruises quickly, smarts even worse, and that night he doesn't have the heart to rebuke her when she comes to his chambers with a cooling salve.

He sits along the bed, elbows over his knees, hands dangling without purpose. He sighs, and it takes his whole body.

Her hand is gentle on his cheek, urging his gaze upwards. She sees now, she sees. He is just so tired, so battle-worn and flagging. He's borne the North bravely, with a weary set of shoulders that have only wanted rest.

"Oh Jon," she whispers, fingers cool along his brow as she steps between his knees, and nothing could have been more damning.

His hands reach up to her hips suddenly, pulling her flush against him with a ragged breath of exhaustion, his unwounded cheek pressing into her stomach. She stumbles at the motion, a short, soft yelp escaping her lips, before her hands settle along his shoulders, and then move tentatively into his hair.

His hands slide deftly along her back, anchoring her to him as he breathes against her.

At some point, it all begins to blur – the image of her as a child. Some red-haired, haughty slip of a girl. Some wounded songbird, some half-shadow of a dream.

(He hadn't always been a crow, himself, and wouldn't stay such, it seemed.)

All at once she is lithe as willow-reeds, elegant and full-grown and branded like a Northern winter. All at once it is not so blurred.

He swallows tightly.

Sansa pulls from him, just slightly, enough to keep her touch along his face as she looks down on him, enough to let his hands slide to her hips in what shouldn't be ease, but always – invariably – is. "Oh Jon," she says again, and he closes his eyes.

Because he would hear it again. He would hear it at his ear and against his throat and into his mouth, if he could. He would hear it in gasps and pleads and moans. He would hear it always, and only unto him, if only he could.

And then the wet press of her lips against his cheek has his eyes snapping open once more. She moves tenderly along his face, at his temple, the bridge of his nose, his beard-covered jaw, his lips.

His lips.

It's quick and soft and chaste. Smothered affection. Almost a sob.

She stills over his lips when she realizes what she's done, her thumbs braced against his cheekbones as she holds his face.

Jon's breath stills in his chest, his hands curling tight to her hips, fisting in the material of her dress. He blinks up at her, her hot breath still fanning his lips, and he thinks maybe he gives something away, because she sucks a sharp breath in, watches him in fascination, and before he can rock into her with his own need, she presses her lips softly back against his.

His gravity wavers, the axis of his world tilted to the measure of her lips.

Only but a moment.

He pushes her back gracelessly and she stumbles with alarm, his hands still melded to her hips. But there's a much needed space now between them. This space, this air – this chasm he has grown accustomed to.

Breathe in, breathe out.

(Half-brother, king, cage – there is no room for more between them.)

"Go," he rattles out, chest heaving.

Sansa blinks furiously at him, her hands hovering in the air.

He curls his fingers into her hips painfully, notices her wince, finally pushes from her. "Get out," he nearly yells, eyes closed.

She breathes harshly in the quiet that suffuses the room, staggering back mindlessly. And then she turns and flees, slamming the door behind her, her salve and wet cloth laying forgotten on the floor in her wake. Jon looks at them against the cold stone for many moments, and then he drops back against his bed. He covers his face with his hands. He steadies the raging breath in his chest.

He remembers that he had promised to protect her.

Even from himself.

He doesn't join her for supper anymore. He doesn't look at her when they sit the long table in their meeting of lords. He isn't in the Godswood when she goes searching for him.

But he's in the walls, still. In the air and snow and smoke.

He fills her lungs, even now.

She grows tired of this avoidance.

(Never a soft-mouthed wolf.)

"This isn't a game," he says to her, anger lighting his tone as she reclines calmly back along her seat. The Northern lords filter out from the hall.

Such a barren, empty room. Such little air.

"I'm not playing at anything," she seethes back.

Jon whirls on her, stilling his furious stalking.

It is reckless, she knows, to invite his wrath. But she has grown anxious with his silence. Daenerys Targaryen has landed at Dragon Stone and Sansa proposes a venture South. It's rebuked easily enough, as she expects, but Jon has finally met her eyes.

"You said you'd never go South again," he says warily.

"So you do listen to me sometimes?"

Jon scoffs, looking away. His hands curl along the back of his vacant chair.

Sansa's tone softens, her hands folding together over her lap. "Jon, this can't go on."

He raises a cautious brow her way.

Sansa sighs, rising from her chair and coming to stand beside him. He straightens at the proximity. "You're my brother and I – " She catches the way he flinches at the word, but she stands her ground, reaches up to grasp his face between her gloved palms.

His eyes widen at the familiar contact but he doesn't break away.

"Jon," she whispers gently, and she thinks she might do it again.

She thinks she might kiss him.

As she leans forward, one of the side chamber doors opens and a servant girl enters to snuff the candles and douse the main fireplace.. She blinks at the quickly parting Starks, and then her eyes are downcast again, closing the door with hesitance.

Guilt flares in Jon's chest and he turns from Sansa without a second thought, storming out.

She stands there with the silent servant girl across the hall, just breathing.

She would have.

She would have kissed him.

(She wants to again.)

He finds himself staring at the white expanse of her wrist when she reaches for a glass, and the subtle arch of her neck when she glances through a window, and the barest upturn of her lips when she addresses the lords.

Jon sinks beneath the bath water with a groan.

"Why won't you look at me?" she demands.

Sansa confronts him in the hall outside her chambers, where he meant to pass unnoticed. But she has missed their companionable nights together with his presence by the fire and she wants so much more than she ought to now, to simply remain silent.

(They howl unto death, after all.)

She stands with her hand on her open door, watching as he stops with his back still to her. His cloak is dark and heavy – his cloak is hers, even now.

Her chest tightens at the familiar sight.

And then he looks at her.

Perhaps it would have been easier had he never died, had she never married Ramsay, had they never known the darkness long enough to welcome it back when it came to their beds in the guise of desire.

But that is not what is, and Sansa has learned to separate the lasting from the transitory, has learned to anchor her treacherous heart to a steady shore – she has learned to love what she loves.

Foul though others may call it.

(Yet in the deepest parts of her, she knows such love could never be foul.)

He has no answer for her, so she steps carefully closer. He watches her steadily, his body taut with a wary stillness. She swallows back that tart slice of unease and folds her hands gracefully before her.

"Tell me what I need to do. How do we get back to the way things were?" She isn't sure whether she means before her instinctive kiss, or before Castle Black, or before all the years that cut them down to less than who they last loved each other as. All she knows is that any of it is better than this… this self-imposed winter, this drought of warmth between them.

This ache that reminds her only the pack survives.

"I don't know if we can go back. If we even should," he finally says on a resigned sigh.

It makes her eyes water instantly, but she sucks a sharp breath through her nose, keeps the tears at bay. She blinks back the wetness until it is as though it never was.

"Please, Jon," she says, reaching for him.

He steps from her reach.

It hollows her out like nothing she could have imagined.

He seems to see the drowned horror on her face, his own going soft. He closes his eyes and shakes his head. "Sansa, listen to me – "

"Was I wrong to kiss you?"

Jon's eyes snap open, his mouth clamping shut and then thinning into a tight line. He glances down the hall behind her furtively.

"You were hurt and then so was I and I didn't know how to show you and when I kissed you – "

He takes her by the elbow, a huff of frustration leaving him as he drags her back into her chambers and closes the door. She stumbles in his hold, bracing back along the door. "Jon."

"Sansa, you can't – you can't…" He sighs, rubbing a hand down his face, never relinquishing his hold. "There are eyes everywhere. And I won't have you tarnished further."

She shakes her head. "It was just a kiss. Just… just a kiss." She stops, swallows, tries to steady her breath. "Robb used to kiss me all the time. A brother can kiss his sister, can he not?"

Jon looks at her darkly, almost angrily, and then he presses further into her, his hold on her elbow tightening. "That was no brother's kiss," he says tightly, and he watches as she sucks the air between her lips like a brand.

Sansa opens her mouth, shuts it. Opens it again.

And oh, but he would take it, that shuddering mouth – those pink, parted lips.

"I don't want to kiss you like Robb used to kiss you," he says finally, his voice a hoarse whisper between them.

Sansa stares at him, eyes wide, but there's a blooming realization tainting her skin, a faint blossom of eagerness that steals beneath her breath, and she finds herself pressing into him before she has time to question it.

Jon nearly hisses at the contact, rocking against her unconsciously, and they stumble back a step, one of his hands still gripping her elbow while his other braces along the door at her back. "Sansa," he says warningly, and she takes no heed of it.

"Then how do you want to kiss me?" she asks, chin tilting upward.

Jon blinks at her, staring hard, his breath coming in heavy pants. "Sansa," he says again, and it is less a warning this time. More a plea. More a breathless growl.

"How do you want to kiss me?" she repeats, one hand tentatively settling along the back of his neck, and she revels darkly at the way he inclines his head toward hers instinctively, reacting to the pressure of her hand before stopping just before her lips.

"Is it how I want to kiss you?" she asks, chest heaving, fingers flexing in his hair. The subtle groan that leaves him emboldens her. "Is it long and slow and breathless? Is it with teeth and tongues and the heat of wolves? Is it the way I imagine when I touch myself beneath my furs at ni– "

It's with desperation, as it turns out. It's with his mouth slanted roughly against hers, a ragged exhale of delirium raking through his lungs when he presses his tongue to the seam of her lips. It's with a groan of satisfaction as his hand on her elbow slips down to her waist, yanking her tightly to him, even as he presses her back against the door. It's with a thrumming growl when she opens her mouth to his and it's with the heady thrill of need when she slides her own tongue deftly against his.

It's with the moan he drowns her in when she sucks at his tongue. It's with his fingers bunching in her skirts and his knee pressed between her thighs. It's with his tongue in her hot mouth and her hands in his hair and his hips pinning her to the door when he sinks his teeth into her bottom lip and her gasp – her yelp –

It's with his ragged pants and the keen whimper that leaves her when he pulls from her, locks eyes with her, shares her breath and her heated gaze and the space between their wet, swollen mouths like that too-familiar chasm now.

It's with… regret.

The kind that makes him push from her suddenly. The kind that has him wringing his head in his hands, his chest heaving, his mouth still slick with her taste, and just a glance – just a single, barely-there meeting of the eyes – and it's her chamber door swung open violently. It's him stalking from the room with a painful bunch to his shoulders and his hands fisted at his sides.

It's with rage and longing and the instant flare of wolfish greed.

It's with knowing she would let him take her – again and again and again.

In the end, Jon still keeps his chamber door unlatched, and though it is a small comfort, Sansa finds she needs no other.

"This will be our ruin," he says darkly, his last hold on caution seeping out into the cold with a weary sigh.

Sansa steps toward him beneath the red shade of the weirwood, her boots crunching in the snow. The high walls of Winterfell's towers are but shadows behind them, a haze of grey in a stark white winter.

He should have known there was no un-tasting her.

"Then ruin me," she whispers back.

And so he does.

She is still copper-crowned and winter-poised, but she is no longer the Sansa from his childhood, not when she gasps breathlessly against his bruising lips.

Their mouths are stained with their need, all teeth and tongue and snarl –

(the heat of wolves)

– Greed is dark in bloom this season.