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Author's Note: Alternate Season 8. Soft E. Dark.

Brine on the Tongue

They pause, afternoon light shifting in through her window like an accusation – a slant of clarity against their panting forms. "Then leave." (He doesn't.) - Jon and Sansa. What breeds in a house of wolves.

Her eyes are blue frost, ire-lit, meant to shame him when he brings a dragon queen to their door.

"And the rumors? Are you bedding her?"

Jon stares at her in the thick shadow of her chamber, the candles flickering sharply. "You said I had to be smarter."

She does not answer him. Does not need to. She reads the harsh bunch of his shoulders and the clench of his jaw – they whisper to her in wordless pleas.

Whatever it takes.

Sansa lifts her chin, settling back into her chair. She tastes the sickness at the tip of her tongue. "You will not lie with her here. Not here – in our home." She seethes it, hisses it.

But she does not need to –

Jon never had any intention of bedding dragons in a den of wolves.

Jon is home, and Arya hugs him.

He holds her, and holds her, and holds her.

He does not fist a hand in her hair or grip at her waist or sigh into the crook of her neck.

No – these belong to another sister. It's an instant, thunderous revelation.

Jon is home, and Arya hugs him.

He pulls from her embrace stiffly, throat dry with self-loathing.

"And Baelish?"

Arya offers a self-satisfied smirk. Her dagger stays sheathed – the blood has already dried.

Jon's gaze flits to Sansa, realization spilling like ink in water – a curl of darkness in the bleak winter light.

She folds her hands demurely over her lap. "He will no longer be joining us."

Jon's hands unclench.

Later, when he corners her outside her chamber, a hand at her elbow, need in his throat, she croaks out a tremulous "I'm fine, Jon."

He has her in his arms then, all fury and terror and blinding, stark relief, her nose buried in the furs at his throat. His fingers fumble in her hair, his chest heaving. "Oh Sansa."

"I'm fine," she repeats.

(She is, and she's not, and somewhere in between lies the truth of it.)

Daenerys takes his subtle retreat less like dissonance and more like distraction. There is a war coming, after all. He will look North, always North – to the dead.

Except he's looking at something else these days.

The thrum of blood beneath his sweet sister's throat, the part of her lips on a barbarous exhale, the rise of her chest with coal-hot indignation when Daenerys dismisses Lady Mormont's objections in the midst of a council meeting.

Jon cannot help the dark lilt of his lips when he sees his lady sister's tongue dart out to wet her lips – a scathing retort already brimming forth.

No, it isn't the dead that keeps him from Daenerys.

It is very much the living.

"Don't invoke her wrath, Sansa, for the love of anything you find holy." His eyes are dark and honest. Too honest. "Please."

She wonders if her eyes are honest as well – if he can see how his pleading pleases her in ways she should be ashamed of.

(But she can't be bothered with shame when the white-haired queen walks her halls in comfort and the wrath has grown too tart and vibrant on her tongue.)

Jon steps closer, and it is all too close for this argument, for this air, for this slowly degrading excuse she throws between them called propriety.

Like salting snow.

She licks her lips as she considers her answer and Jon is back to pretending he isn't watching every minute bow of her mouth.

"This fire and blood of hers may last us through the Long Night but it will snuff the North just as easily if we let it."

He doesn't answer her. Won't answer her.

They both know it – deep in their marrow – even if she is the only one to say it. The thought ignites her fury easily – like a brand behind her ribs, a bloom of resentment tainting her desire. She steps closer yet. The excuse of propriety lays at her feet, forgotten. "This is not a game you can win with flattery and pretty kisses. We have to prepare. We have to protect the pack. And Daenerys is not the pack."

Jon's chest heaves, and oh, how she wants to curl inside his breath and anchor there, to creep inside his lungs and scrape him out – so his only air will taste of her.

"She never was," he says lowly, like a dark secret let to air.

He's watching her mouth again, and suddenly Sansa realizes he isn't pretending not to anymore.

"There is a way," Bran says one day in the godswood.

Arya stills her whetstone over Needle. Sansa's fingers curl into her thighs.

Their brother is staring skyward, the rustle of red weirwood leaves stealing the light from his face. He is so enviably young. He is so tragically old.

Sansa's throat tightens in unspoken grief.

Arya shifts in her seat, a skeptical brow raised. "Daenerys won't go down easy."

"No, she won't," Bran agrees lightly.

"We'd have to be careful," Arya hisses, her hand tightening over Needle.

"Very." Bran's eyes meet Sansa's.

She barely breathes during the exchange. Behind her mind's eye she sees calloused palms and a scarred brow and eyes like coal.

Bran's stare is damming enough to make her turn away. She does not notice the half-moons her nails have dug into her thighs until she is sinking down beneath her bath water that night, Jon's name staining her lips – brine on the tongue.

And suddenly she finds she is through with 'careful'.

Jon hisses at the press of her hand to his hip. "Sansa, don't."

"What do you want?"

A beat, a steady, warring breath – a draw of air against heaving lungs.

"What do you want?" she asks again, her whisper slipping between the juncture of his neck and shoulder.

His own fingers (not fine-boned, not delicate) wind into her hair and claw at the small of her back, dragging her into the harsh curve of his body like a threat. "Something wrong," he breathes along her jaw, his tongue daring a taste.

It's her undoing.

And his.

She pulls his face to hers, kisses him with the greed of wolves, her teeth sinking into his bottom lip, and his groan fills her mouth – he's drinking her in, lapping it up. His fingers tangle in her skirts, frustration making him tear at the fabric and she rocks back into him, claws at him with a feral need, a shudder bracing them against the wall and neither knows who trembled first or who's hand stole away where until suddenly his fingers are crooked up into her heat and her teeth have released his lip and her head lolls back against the cold stone and she's panting and breaking and half-crazed with the searing, ripe shame of it.

Jon sighs against her lips. "We shouldn't."

(They should.)

"Kiss me," she commands.

A sharp, clattering inhale. Jon's fingers already tugging at her laces. "I won't."

(He will.)

They pause, afternoon light shifting in through her window like an accusation – a slant of clarity against their panting forms.

"Then leave."

(He doesn't.)

The dragon queen keeps her violet gaze on the space between Jon's shoulder blades, a lance of heat dancing from her eyes even from across the hall.

Sansa's nails curl into her armrests. "Are you enjoying the feast, Your Grace?" A rasping desperation.

Daenerys grants her a mild glance, a perfectly piqued brow her only answer.

Sansa swallows back the bite, her teeth rattling in her skull. "I know the North can seem bleak to newcomers, but you may learn to love it yet."

A sharp-toothed smile graces the other woman's face. A shroud. A shadow in the corner of her mouth like the whip of a dragon's tail. "I daresay you may be right, my lady." And then Daenerys is back to watching Jon – openly, her back arching subtly against the worn oak of her chair, settling into something like comfort atop her stolen Northern throne.

Sansa exhales slowly and stiffly, releasing her tight grip of the armrest, claws curling back beneath her wrathful skin.

It isn't Daenerys' legs that Jon will be between that night, after all.

It isn't Daenerys' moan that will reverberate off the walls of Jon's chambers when his tongue brings her to a sharp and ruthless completion.

"This isn't a game," Arya threatens. Her hand has always lingered too comfortably on Needle for Sansa'a taste.

"I don't know what you're talking about." It's an easy lie – too easy.

But Arya does not call her on it. She only curses beneath her breath, her eyes glancing out past the courtyard, catching the sight of Jon and Daenerys crossing the ramparts.

Winter never ceases at Winterfell.

And they are still salting the snows – ice-slicked and lethal.

One false step and it all comes crashing down.

Sansa closes her eyes and breathes deep. It was never the game she wished to play, but she knows it well enough now to chance at winning.

Jon does not catch her eyes from atop the ramparts and she does not expect him to.

Winning was never a bloodless affair, after all.

Sometimes he falls asleep against her breast.

Sometimes she doesn't wake him.

Sometimes she imagines that the break of dawn through her window slits is far more daunting than any army of the dead.

"We have to stop," she says.

"We do."

Sansa narrows her eyes. She doesn't think he's even heard her.

(She knows he hasn't heard her – not when he's driving into her and she's sobbing into his shoulder with the need of it).

Jon meets her gaze.

Hers meets the floor.

"I wish you wouldn't look," she tells Bran, knuckles white, voice steady.

A slight quiver of his brow, a sharp, considering blink. Mouth parted as though to speak but nothing comes.

Her eyes catch sight of the weeping weirwood, red shade glinting off the snow at her boots.

"I stopped looking a long time ago."

And you were so beautiful – in your white wedding dress.

Her back steels suddenly in the frost.

She tucks the memory of Jon's bruising mouth back between her ribs – brittle, floundering.

Arya eyes him darkly, a twist to her lip that breeds distaste. "We are not Lannisters," she says like an accusation.

Or rather a curse.

But Jon has no rebuttal, because it's as true a statement as it is false and somewhere in the middle of that lies his ruin.

He doesn't even blink when he answers her. "I know."

That night, Jon takes Sansa roughly, dangerously, her back scraping along the cold stone of the floor where he hadn't a mind to lay down furs before he was touching her, tasting her, sliding his tongue against her fine-arched collarbone, sucking her pulse point between his teeth, the salt of her skin lingering at the back of his throat, so that when he swallows – when he gulps down that heady, frantic need – she follows him all the way down.

"We are not Lannisters," he mutters into her neck – incoherent, sweat-slicked.

Sansa grips at the stone beneath her, never minding that her back will be raw and rapture-scraped in the morning, never minding that her sister will ask after the marks along her neck with contemptuous eyes.

"Then don't fuck me like a Lannister," she snarls in answer.

Jon bares his teeth, calloused hands hiking her thighs higher up his hips, spreading her further, hollowing her out. When he comes inside her with furious, ragged grunts, his hips snapping into hers so forcefully the flesh on her shoulder blades breaks along the stone beneath her, her cry of release echoes at his ear like a howl – white-hot and delirious.

Afterwards, he runs his fingers over her broken skin and whispers his apologies against her temple –

sorry, so sorry – Sansa – you're so – never meant – Sansa, Sansa –

His teeth at her shoulder.

He isn't sorry, as it turns out, because he does it again the next night.

(She lets him.)

The dead are almost here. Daenerys graces a gentle hand along the underside of Drogon's jaw and Sansa is inexplicably bereft at the sight.

"No one understands them like I do. No one understands their power and their magnificence and their tragedy."

Suddenly, Sansa sees a mourning mother beneath the dragon mask. But her teeth have already set in. Her fire-breath has already tasted air. Her wings have long been spread.

The grave has already been dug.

Sansa promises:

When the dead come, the dead will greet them.

Sansa lights candles in the crypts the night before the end. His shadow finds her just as she blows the match out.

"I'm not your brother," he says without preamble.

Sansa blinks at him. The match is still hot at her fingertips – a searing reminder.

(Their stone father watches them even now.)

"Bran, he…" And then the rest follows. Flowing out of Jon like a torrent, and she can't breathe, vibrating in her own skin, the match now ash in her hands.

"I'm not your brother," he repeats, suddenly closer, his eyes impossibly dark.

But here's the truth: it wouldn't have mattered.

Because she has long seen his war-worn visage behind her closed lids and she has long known his leather-lined musk lingering past her door and she has long since drifted her trembling fingers down, down, down in the dead of night when she can smother the choke of his name in her pillow.

The truth is –

The truth is.

Sansa thinks of the dark stain that was Baelish still glistening over the grey stone of the Lord's Hall. Sometimes she presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth and tastes copper.

A gnash of teeth. Her bite – swallowed back.

Her skirts brush over the dulled crimson stain as she walks from the hall.

(She finds that dragons bleed as well as mockingbirds.)

And theirs will always be a house of wolves.