CLOSED ; You made a deal, and now it seems you have to offer up.

[clothed]

Who: Sansa Stark, various persons of interest.
What: Private conversations, ironing out some truths (and a pretty big lie).
When: September through October; includes test drive continuations.
Where: Milton proper + the outskirts.

Content Warnings: Will be added as they occur! Prompts in the comments.

Comments

[clothed]

You're my brother. If you tell me it is true, then I believe you.

[ she had never been kind to jon, she realises. she'd taken her mother's prejudices and worn them as her own, more the fool she was. she cannot rightly blame it to girlhood alone, even if jon might give her that kindness. no, she was old enough to know better. she knows this now, looking back on her treatment of him.

bastards can be cruel, she knows, but jon had always risen above it. as like their father in ways that perhaps her mother had never liked, because jon looked so like father when all but arya wore tully colours despite being trueborn.

oh, my dear mother, sansa thought in mourning. it's not jon's fault that father left so much of himself in jon's blood.

she reaches for jon's hand, grips it tightly in hers. ]

I only care that you're safe. Here. And alive. It's just us now. Robb is gone, and Bran and Rickon and— and Arya might be, I don't know. Father would not want us at odds.

I had heard of you being Lord Commander. Uncle Benjen would have been happy for you.

[northerndragon]

[He covers her hand with his and answers her with a solemn nod, one that, in its way, almost seems rote; it is somehow remote. Mayhaps she will understand why when she has spoken.]

I hope that he might have been proud, that I might have deserved any pride he had for me, and that he might have understood why I did what I did. There was a mutiny at Castle Black. Not long before you turned up -- a few days. I'd won the choosing narrowly, and the man who cast that vote, the old maester -- he was a Targaryen, and a good man -- he had died.

After I won, I had to make a choice. I knew it would divide the Watch, and I knew it would make some of the men hate me. And I knew it had to be done.

The things I've seen. Sansa, you remember Old Nan's tales. The White Walkers, the Long Night, armies of dead men and ice spiders big as hounds. I never saw the ice spiders, but the rest of it is true. That's what the Wall is holding back.

[clothed]

[ sansa's frown deepens the more jon talks. it had started wonderfully, and she had a rebuke ready — uncle benjen would be proud, he would be more than proud, just as father would have been if he had been around to hear it.

but what she hears her brother say is fantastical, bordering on unbelievable. old nan's tales are tales for a reason. cautionary stories for wilful girls and stubborn boys to go to bed as they are bid, to eat their carrots and onions, to do as they are told by their elders.

sansa knows jon would not lie to her. not about this. and isn't she keeping something from him, too? would jon believe her if she said that she could become a wolf in true? ]

Do you mean to fight them? You can't— You don't have the men. The Night's Watch is undermanned, I've heard it said, and you say they are divided against and for you.

Is the Wall compromised?

[northerndragon]

[He thinks to tell her to hold, but the words don't reach his lips. They will come to it, and he will not have to. And when she thinks on it, she will understand anyway. He doesn't wear Night's Watch blacks. He had been riding for Dragonstone. He had led an army against the Lord of Winterfell. Nothing the Lord Commander ought to be doing, though who would be taking his head for it? Only the Lord Commander or the Warden of the North, or the King on the Iron Throne. There's nothing funny about it.

Still, while his expression remains very inward, he gives a shaky nod, pats her hand.]

The Wall holds -- for now. But the Army of the Dead, the Night King -- they will find a way past it. I went to Hardhome, it's a village up north of Eastwatch, to treat with the Free Folk, the Wildlings. I had little choice. Any man of theirs who dies is another dead man we must fight, and they are harder than a living man to kill. Only fire kills them, or dragonglass -- obsidian -- or Valyrian steel. And they move faster than a living man, much faster in a fight. The Army of the Dead had been hunting the Free Folk in their villages, and they had gathered at Hardhome because they had lost a battle to cross the Wall.

Well, it came down on them there, slaughtered most of them and raised them up again as wights. I saw him do it; he did it as a taunt. Now the Night King's army numbers -- one hundred thousand strong, I would say.

So what Free Folk we were able to save, we made an alliance with them, and they were given passage through the Wall. It was a choice between that and fighting them as dead men. They are only people like you and me; they have not betrayed us. Those, at least, add to the Watch's strength.

[But he says it darkly.]

You can well imagine that some of the men did not like it. It is why they mutinied. Lured me out into the yard with some false story that someone had seen Uncle Benjen, then named me traitor. They had not gone to Hardhome. They had not seen one hundred thousand dead men, walking and killing.

[What he does not think to concern himself with, so much, is whether or not she has the strength to hear this story. He knows she does. He knows what she has endured, and he knows that she has heard it before. And he knows that it is a relief to her to know that Bolton is dead -- that she has that to carry her through it, at least, that it had been her to give him to the hungry dogs. Much of the rest of this tale is better than what he is telling her now, though if things had been just a little different, she might have arrived at Castle Black only to be returned to Bolton by Alliser Thorne. He doesn't know what would have become of Brienne of Tarth and her squire. The thought is cold in his belly; he imagines it will be cold in Sansa's, too.]

[clothed]

[ familiar names, and a fair handful unfamiliar too. sansa's hold on jon's hand tightens with every mention — how long has it been since she's heard about places from home? names she wished someone else might speak to her and out loud, instead of her telling them to herself like a prayer.

jon paints an awful for her. mutiny. she knows what that leads to. she knows what actions are demanded of men who cause it. she's not so unlearned now as to miss what jon is leading her towards.

mutiny. his men thinking him a traitor. ]

They killed you. They must have, they — they killed you.

[ so it really is just her, in the end. no family left living, no friends or lieges to count on, only the lord baelish and the enemies who might let her live in exchange for the north.

i will not cry. i will not weep. i have shed enough tears. ]

And Uncle Benjen is himself dead, too, isn't he?

[ why ask? if the men south of the wall are migrating south, then what chance does their uncle have? dead men walking and wildlings south of the wall. the night king. why does it not scare her?

because nothing else is more terrifying to her than this: ]

We're the last of the Starks.

[northerndragon]

Aye, they killed me. They put a knife in my heart. I was dead on a table in my quarters for a night and a day and another night, they said.

You know of those priests of the Lord of Light -- there have been a few down south. Some of them can bring a man back from death, I don't know how. Don't think they know how, either. A priestess had come to the Wall with Stannis. She raised me.

[His expression remains flat and tired. Some men seem to wish to make a legend of this story; Jon doesn't. It's the worst thing that ever happened to him. The dying, but what came after, too, waking up shivering and terrified. A man isn't meant to remember dying -- the betrayal, and all the warmth leaving him.

He is relieved that Sansa has not reproached him about the Free Folk, at least.]

So I woke on that table in my quarters to find that my allies held Castle Black. When I had the strength to do it, I hanged the men who killed me. Just four. I was ready to make another move when you rode in.

Benjen, though, he's been gone since not long after I came to Castle Black.

cw: mentions of SA

[clothed]

They were wrong to have done it. You're Lord Commander, they chose you, they—

[ where is the honour, if even decisions made by votes cast are betrayed? cravens exist in many places, but this is beyond it. sansa burns for her brother. she is born of ice and snow, born at the end of winter and heralding the start of spring — but as she listens to the injustice her brother had suffered, she is alight within, incandescent in her rage. ]

Stannis Baratheon was who Father had wanted sat on the Iron Throne. [ the rightful heir, she had heard said. ] You gave them a kinder death than they deserve.

[ would it shock him? to hear her say something so base, so cruel, would it turn him away from her? she doesn't much care to take the words back. she had been kind and loyal and she had done what she was taught to do. how had she been treated in return?

betrayed in the last moment by the capriciousness of a bastard king. beaten for robb's victories against the enemies of her house. bartered and traded and made to lie to advance the interests of a man who was never her friend. violated in her own home as men who swore oaths to her father spat in his memory.

she doesn't know anything about fighting, but she will be steel within all the same.

with a ragged sob, sansa sets her bowl aside, and jon's, and pulls her brother into her arms. her hands are shaking; she curls them into fists, hides them against jon's back as she embraces him. ]

You cannot die again. I don't want you to. I won't forgive you if you do.

this is really a terrible GoT info dump with cw ultraviolence

[northerndragon]

[He allows himself to be embraced, and he hugs her in return, although he is much more used to her presence now than she is to his. There had been the events of this tale, then moons spent traveling the western coast of the North, gathering support and armies, visiting places like the Shadow Tower and Bear Island and Deepwood Motte. Then there had been Winterfell itself: not just the relief of winning a last stand, but the smaller relief of a home and good stone walls after all that travel, all that time in tents.

He is relatively certain that he'll probably die again, but he sets that aside for a time. He is relatively certain that they all will. No one needs to hear that, in truth, not even when they press him to it in an argument.]

The men who led the mutiny were the men who lost the choosing for Lord Commander. I know why they did what they did -- it was what they thought was right. But the North must act as one, now, if we're to have any chance. We can't fight amongst ourselves. We can't spare the men to fight the Free Folk, or die against them, and we need the Free Folk on our side. I would as soon have had the mutineers alive and fighting the dead, but they made their choice.

[He sounds inestimably tired, still.]

Watch vows are for life, and I gave my life. I am not Lord Commander anymore, but the man who is, he's a good man. You came in, wanted me to help you take back Winterfell -- well, I didn't want to. I was tired of fighting. But Bolton sent a letter full of threats, to you, to Rickon -- he had Rickon, then -- and to me, and to the Free Folk. So we traveled the North for a time seeking what support we could. There wasn't much: many feared Bolton would skin them alive, and he had the Karstarks and the Umbers. I feared that what happened to Stannis would happen to us, that the weather would turn against us. The numbers were bad, even with the Free Folk fighting for House Stark, and Bolton killed Rickon at the start of the battle, right at my feet. [His face twists as he says it.] Things were going badly when the Knights of the Vale turned up and routed Bolton's men, some arrangement between you and Baelish. Not much to say about the battle after that. I pursued Bolton back to Winterfell and we killed him there.

[clothed]

[ it's a lot to take in. her future — would it still come to pass? would knowing it now change how it will be?

we killed him there.

does she bloody her hands, then? does she become a wolf-bat, does she kill him with a spell like all those stories claim she did with joffrey? it would be deserved of ramsay to die horribly. he should die several times over, not just for the horrors he'd visited upon her but for all the people he's tormented. for the girls he'd hunt. for the old woman he'd made an example of, whose only crime was remembering the girl that sansa was.

tell me how he dies. tell me it was cruel. tell me i had nightmares about it.

sansa doesn't say any of it, chooses to hold her brother close instead. ]

Rickon was dead the moment he had him. He would never let a trueborn son named Stark live, not if he wanted to keep his claim of Winterfell through me. [ her poor rickon, her baby brother. had theon told her the truth, then? is bran still out there, still alive? she'd called upon lord baelish — what had it cost her? ] What about Bran? We have to find Bran. Theon said he——

He must be out there. Alone. When we get back, we have to find him.

[northerndragon]

That's what you said about Rickon then. But I tried to save him. I did what I could.

[He shakes his head, remembering his young brother dying at his feet. He had tried so hard, made the horse run at its fullest gallop. He would never have been fast enough. There would always have been an arrow for Rickon, always at Jon's feet.

But when he hears what Sansa is saying, his eyes grow a little more wild, and he shakes his head harder.]

No. Bran is lost to us. Bran went north of the Wall. My friend Sam, Samwell Tarly, he met him at the Nightfort, where he crossed. He was traveling with a boy and a girl, and Hodor, and Summer. Sam said he gave them dragonglass for protection, but that was years ago, back before Robb died, and a little bit of dragonglass would never have been enough for their little group. Nothing can live there, not with the White Walkers. Wherever Bran is... he is dead, or he isn't Bran anymore.

I'm sorry.