it's alright, i'm only bleeding

Account for the White Walkers RP

[stark-blood]

The snow makes them all look like monsters.

[stark-blood]

just damage control for a walking corpse like me | jeyne, robb

[gentle--hearts-blog]

“We’ve only been here a few days,” she says, “not long at all. At least a week’s worth, I’d guess, unless you’d prefer to move sooner. We’ve been trying to avoid some of the things, the beds, you know. For Sansa. Probably stupid to come back here, but we wanted to.”

She’d hated this house, beforehand, when Robb had brought her here, had sat her down as a stranger across the table and announced she was his wife. There had been photographs on the walls, years of them lined up (she’d put them away once they arrived here). Robb had been identical in nearly all of them, a stern faced little imitation of his father (not that he looked a thing like him, he never did). It was Catelyn she’d looked at, though, placed in the center of her five children with her chin lifted high, Catelyn who seemed raised like a queen amongst them.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to be like her,” she’d said in the car on the war home, her fingers tracing over the window.

“You don’t have to be like my mother,” Robb had said, “you don’t have to be anyone you don’t want.” He’d meant to be comforting, she thinks, but it had seemed like a consolation.

But she did want to come here, she did want to come back, much as she’d disliked it, wanted to pick up whatever was left of her husband in this place (how silly, to worry about measuring up to Catelyn Stark, how silly to think there was even time enough for it to matter).

She’d tried to hang onto him, hold whatever she could between the walls. And now he’s here.

It seems very empty.

[stark-blood]

Robb looks back at her across the threshold. She was always slight, always had an air of delicacy, but now she looks as if he could fit the span of her shoulders in the stretch of his hand. She looks the way he feels inside: hollow and sharpened, made fierce and old by the winter when the wind sucked the meat from their bones. For the first time since the Tower (he thinks... he can't be sure) he wishes it would end, wishes he didn't feel like he was thriving, sated on snow and ice. If it was harder now, maybe he'd have more ideas of how to fix things.

You can't save everything, he admonishes himself. He's done demanding that responsibility be placed on him and done with whining about the weight of it (he thinks... he can't be sure). Can't he at least help make it easier? If he's going to stay, he can't punish her, or Theon, or Sansa, or Ygritte, for his own decision. He'll think of something, somewhere they can go next.

"Hey," he says, because she's withdrawn into herself and he doesn't want to be alone again. He's not sure whether she hears him, but in a moment he closes the distance between them and puts his arms around her. It's different than hugging Sansa the night before. Jeyne won't break. He'll believe it even if she doesn't and even if he can feel her ribs under his fingers. He could say nothing's changed but that would be a lie (though some things haven't). I promise I won't leave. He could say it, but he's sure she already knows.

"Jeynie, I'm sorry."

[fireskiss-blog]

it only hurts if you say ow | ygritte, robb (jeyne, theon, sansa)

[fireskiss-blog]

He moves away, just slightly, and they’re not touching anymore.  It doesn’t break them apart, though; she still feels him just as closely as she did when his fingers were on hers, and when he lived inside her bones, eating her from the inside.  He knows her, she realizes, knows her without even knowing it himself, though she’s not sure how.

She feels nothing at all, there is only emptiness where the pain in her thumb should be, a great void of nothing where all that hope used to reside inside her gut, all eaten up by Robb Stark’s ghost.  His corpse is here, keeping her from bleeding out in the snow, and she wonders if perhaps he really is dead, just a ghost conjured up in some foggy, masochistic break with reality.  The real world was supposed to hurt, right?  So why can’t she feel anything anymore?

There’s snow and blood frozen against her fingertips; there’s ice sparkling in Robb’s hair.  They sit in the drift and say nothing for a moment.  She squints at the blinding light where the sun meets the frozen expanse the Thames and thinks that this is the hardest it’s ever been.  She doesn’t want to contemplate how hard it will get.

Her voice is quiet.  ”They’re fucking, and it’s his bed and not mine.  She won’t come to me.”  There’s the rumble of nausea in her stomach at the thought of it, the threat of tears against her pale lashes, already heavy and frozen.  No, she won’t cry in front of him.  She’d rend all her veins before that.

She could do it, easily enough; set the blade against her wrists and color the snow and it wouldn’t matter, of course, nothing would after that.  But she won’t.  However much they no longer want or need her, she’ll see Jeyne alive and safe before any of that.

Another whisper.

“I won’t.  You know I won’t.  I just—”  Something.  She wants something.  Anything.  A feeling, a kiss, a splash of color in this horrible landscape of white.  

[stark-blood]

It's as if someone's come and scoured all of the sentimentality from inside of her, leaving her cracked and raw and weeping. Robb stares at her, at her expression, fierce and resolute, with tears clouding her eyes. She had always had some semblance of joy in her before, a savage kind of happiness, but that's gone now... He doesn't want to think... but he does, that she was the one the Tower destroyed, more than any of the rest of them.

That's not fair you were never alone. You had my sister.

And Theon's been fucking his wife. Somewhere inside of him, that hurts, but maybe he's like Ygritte and he can't feel anything now until it rises to the surface. He realizes he doesn't care. Everyone has to stay warm. The choice of partners is redundant, isn't it?

She won't come to me.

Maybe he'll kiss Ygritte, if she's so lonely - would that make her happy again? She'd, at least, recoil like a tigress and there'd be something of her old self in there. But he doesn't want to kiss her - doesn't want to look at her even. She looks how he feels on the inside, red, white and windburnt.

He grasps her at the wrist, striking the snow out of her hand. For a moment, her fingers remain blank, exsanguinated, so he pinches her thumb between her fingers until the blood swells back into the opening and runs down her wrist. She flinches, and he's not sure if it's from the touch or the pain.

"God, you're an idiot," he grumbles. "You need to get that sewn up fast. What was the fucking point of that?"

[stark-blood]

your city is a wilderland | stark mansion | open to sansa, robb and theon (jeyne, ygritte)

[wicked-bloods]

She doesn’t want to look like their mother. The comment twists inside her, presses up against her ribs and stomach and hurts.

“Of course I’m worried. I thought you were dead and now you’re cold and thin and-“

I can’t help you. I can’t fix you like you fixed me. We’ve made the best of it, but sometimes I want to be weak.

Her mouth shuts, and there is one deep breath before she says, quietly, “Just sleep, Robb. You need it.”

With anyone else she would have left, to save a shred of the strong face she had put up, but with Robb she could slide her back down the doorframe and sit across the opening.

“I’ll stay here.”

[stark-blood]

He swallows bile rising in his throat. He wants her here and he doesn't. In the night he might thrash out and bruise himself on the brass railings, but if she were here, at least she'd be able to stop him. At the same time, he didn't want to frighten her. Dead and cold and thin. She was already half-way there anyway.

His head was swimming again but he refused to lie down just yet. 

"Okay," he said. "okay, I want you to stay. Stay."

In the dark, her eyes looked glassy and determined. Robb slides off the bed and yanks the quilt out from underneath the corners of the mattress. He's not sure he'd even be comfortable with something over him, trapping him. He goes, unelegantly, over to her and drapes it over her knees without touching her. His sister stares at him, inquisitively.

"Night then," he says, turning back, already curling over in preparation to fall back against the mattress.

[fireskiss-blog]

it only hurts if you say ow | ygritte, robb (jeyne, theon, sansa)

[fireskiss-blog]

She doesn’t flinch as he touches her, is too rooted by the smell of the blood and the vast expanse of white to even blink. His fingers close round hers, and between them there is nothing but red snow and the sharp, shared stab of betrayal.

She doesn’t flinch.  She drops the knife in the snow and moves her other hand atop his as he says her name.  They stare at each other, both made haggard by death and life and cold, their breath (somehow still there) fogging the air between them.  She thinks, perhaps, he understands it, the sense of suffocating horror at Jeyne and Theon and how they grip each other in the dark.  Her eyes sting and she looks away, refusing to cry until the tears freeze against her pale lashes, and are gone, nothing more than bright reflections fluttering at her cheeks.

His smile is big, too wide for his shrunken face, his teeth sharper than she remembers.  She thinks, for just a moment, about kissing him, driving her teeth through his bottom lip until they clash and spitting his blood into the snow just to get him to stop smiling.  When she laughs, it’s as thick as her blood clotting between their fingers, bitter.  Oh, you are a fool, Stark.

“You don’t have to.  You only have to watch.  They think I can’t see the way their bruises mirror each other, or hear them in the dark.”  She doesn’t mention how he’d been her constant companion, whispering in her ear as she caught Jeyne’s muffled whimpers through the walls in the empty house.  She doesn’t love you, Ygritte.  She’d rather him eat her grief than climb into your bed.  She’d stuffed her fingers in her ears and murmured the Scottish her mother had taught her until there was nothing left, and Robb’s ghost calmed enough to let her drop into sleep.  He kissed her forehead, and said I’ll see you when you dream.

“I hate you,” she says, and presses their fingers together.  ”I hate them.”

I love her.

“It should have been me.”  The last, a whisper, barely audible over the wind clattering the branches of the barren trees.  She can’t imagine the world will ever be green again, or that she’ll ever feel the warmth of blood.  Everything is cold, frozen, and the dead are clamoring to turn them into corpses.  She tilts her head back, sighs.  As above, so below.  Nothing but white.

[stark-blood]

Robb draws back, his fingers slacking on the wad of pinking snow pushed between her fingers as she presses them against his. He tries to read her face, but he's not sure why. His sympathies have eroded slightly in the time spent staring to the blank. He confuses anger with grief now, he learned that last night. She's bleeding and she's saying words and there's something dead and icy behind her eyes.

Maybe it should have been, he thinks, but now his eyes are picturing bruises and are there bruises and where are they and why can't he see them? There are red cracks in her lips and her eyes are inflamed from the wind. The snow makes them all look like monsters. She's lying. She has to be lying. She hates him. She'd say anything. 

"You're lying," he says again. She doesn't really hate him. And they're not fucking. He's not smiling anymore.

His stomach feels like it's trying to drill a way out through the bottom of his chest. The cold seems to stick to his skin, clogging it up like mud, so he's suddenly hot beneath his father's clothes.

"It should have been you? Really?" When he blinks, it feels like he's waking up from a long sleep. His lids are heavy, not willing to open. "You look at me. You're jealous of this? I'm dead. You want to die? No one's stopping you."

[stark-blood]

just damage control for a walking corpse like me | jeyne, robb

[gentle--hearts-blog]

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he says, almost awkward. He’d asked her after their second night together about her parents and he had sounded almost exactly the same when she’d told him her father was dead. He hadn’t been sure how to respond, she thought—of course, then, he’d been almost a joke, part of a lineup of five she’d seen in the papers smiling next to their stern father and elegant mother. He hadn’t understood, had only been able to offer his blundering sympathy when she told him about her father. And now he has found his father himself, had the smiling white-toothed lineup cut away. They are, if anything, more alike now, made equal by the death of their city, the rot of it. It doesn’t help, though, not really.

And then he is asking for a fire and her breath is almost knocked out of her. She hadn’t really been expecting him to listen to her. He’d seemed so stubborn before but just like that, he’s agreed to stay and it’s a relief and on some level, a shock. He does still listen, she thinks. Perhaps this is good. Perhaps it means he hasn’t entirely left, hasn’t died somewhere out there in London with falling buildings and falling bodies.

But it is as easy as that, just like that.

She smiles slightly, a little nervously.

“Of course.”

[stark-blood]

Jeyne doesn't make much of it, and he's thankful for that. He's not quite sure whether he'll stick to this decision or bring it up again eventually, but for now the promise of a fire is enough to banish that particular worry.

He puts his hands flat against the table and gets to his feet. She watches him stand as if he were a lame horse, but she says nothing, still, and when he moves for the door, she follows him.

They call this house a mansion, but it's really just a glorified a townhouse - taller than it is big. Out from the kitchen is the hallway with its family portraits and it opens up quickly into the living room with its fire place. Theon's disappeared from where he'd been sleeping on the couch in the night. Robb wonders where he's gone and if Jeyne would know. There's a stack of blankets underneath his father's grand piano - at least they haven't taken that apart for firewood yet. Apart from that, the room is largely empty.

He stands awkwardly in the center of the room, eying the ashes under the grill and wondering how long ago it was that they woke up to make some food. Jeyne stands, still a little nervous, at the threshold and when he looks back at her, it's the first time he remembers that they are almost at a height. Somehow, she shrunk in his memories. Does that mean something?

"Theon says you've been burning the furniture, and the books," he starts, feeling the cold more strongly now she's not standing right next to him. "How much is left?" How long until we have to move on?

[stark-blood]

your city is a wilderland | stark mansion | open to sansa, robb and theon (jeyne, ygritte)

[wicked-bloods]

She leans on the doorframe. Part of her wants to lie. It would be easier that way.

“They mourned you.” I mourned you. Did you mourn me?

Best not to mention the look in Ygritte’s eyes when she was confronted about hiding the news. In her anger, Sansa had interpreted a small part of it as relief.

“Theon missed you as much as I did.” She does not say that he cried, cried like he did after he told her his mother had died.

“We-” and the word comes out choked, and she stuffs the rest back down. “It’s been hard.”

[stark-blood]

He plucks at the quilt beneath his cheek.

"Yeah, well..." he drifts off, wondering when he will close his eyes. It was hard for me too. There's no reason to say it aloud. She's his sister, with any luck, she still knows him enough to be able to tell what he's thinking most of the time. It's obvious how much he wants to prolong this. She'd much rather be down by the fire.

"You look a lot like Mum now, San," he says, out of nowhere. "You shouldn't worry so much. She always looked worried, remember?"

[fireskiss-blog]

it only hurts if you say ow | ygritte, robb (jeyne, theon, sansa)

[fireskiss-blog]

She nearly does it, presses the tip of the night in closer and sticks her tongue out ever so slightly, the same way she did when she used to slit the throats of rabbits caught in her father’s snares, or concentrated on a difficult paper.  There’s a brief moment of not thinking, of instinct, of bright red blood welling up against steel and skin but something catches inside her and she pulls away.

Jeyne.

My Jeyne.  Our Jeyne.

She sighs, slides off him until she’s sitting in the drift, snow soaking through her jeans, melting against the heat of her skin.  Her heart races in her chest, and there’s a thin ribbon of crimson trickling down over his Adam’s apple; they’re both still alive, though she can’t imagine how.

Her knees slide up under her chin, and she hugs them to herself, where the pulse beats steadily under her skin, and wonders vaguely if she’ll catch her death out here, and if that’s even a bad thing.  She does not look at him, not at all, but stretches her eyes out to where the sun glints off ice and steel.  The whole world’s gone hard.

“They’re fucking, you know.”  Her teeth feel like ice in her mouth and she runs the pad of her thumb over the knife blade, absently, unable to feel the slice.  

“Theon.  And Je—”  She can’t bring herself to say it at all, though she’s known for weeks.  She glances down at her hands, alarmed at the blood spilling over her fingers, white spots of bone showing through the cut on her thumb.

She turns to him, eyes wide, finds him staring at the red in the snow.  ”It didn’t hurt, not at all.”

[stark-blood]

He stares at her, not for the first time utterly bewildered by her behavior... she always was a wild one, out of place in the prescribed pattern of his life, in the arranged table settings for family dinners to which Jon inevitably dragged her. He watches the shine of the blade as it snickers across her palm, and the red blood dripping down into the snow. He brings a hand up to the soft burn against his neck, but the cut is small and not worth the trouble. He brings himself up to sit and then scrambles onto his knees beside her in the drift. 

He wonders if he gave her the idea. She was so cold before and now there's colour in her cheeks. (Maybe this is why the creatures of ice and snow come for them: the only warm things left in this frozen wasteland.)

Robb strips off his gloves and picks up a handful of snow, taking her open hand and packing it in against the cradle of her fingers to draw the blood back. He holds her thumb against it, closing his hand around hers, tentatively. It'll need more than that... the cut was deep, but Jeyne can see to it. What do they tell her though?

"What do you mean, 'fucking'?" He feels as bitterly cold as the snow in his hand, now. The blood is starting to seep through, but Ygritte doesn't look at him.

And why have you done this? is the question he does not ask. Why does she carve her knife through her fingertips if not to feel some pain? He finds it difficult to swallow, thinking of how stoic Theon was in the night, of Jeyne's apologizing. He feels sick but he pushes it down.

"Ygritte," he says, loudly, yanking her out of herself.

The details are all running together in his mind in some panic. He can't discern one memory from the tangle of the others, but he remembers this same sinking feeling and the way Theon had been rebucklingly his jeans in front of a disturbed bed at the hospital. Sansa had looked upset then, and Robb had fought hard to keep the expression off his face. And Jeyne had gone to see her mother...

No. She hates Theon and Ygritte hates him, always has. (Always? No...?)

He grins, shaking his head, "I don't believe you."

[stark-blood]

just damage control for a walking corpse like me | jeyne, robb

[gentle--hearts-blog]

“Because I shouldn’t have left you,” she says quietly, “Not at the tower, not that night after the Targaryen party. Not ever. If I’d somehow known that it was all going to end this fast, I never would have but I shouldn’t anyway. And yesterday you were dead and now you’re alive and you’re here and knowing you’re out there isn’t enough, hope isn’t enough. Jesus, Robb, you’re a fool, you’ve always been a fool. I haven’t seen my mother in months, I shot Raynald, or whatever was left of him, through the head myself and just yesterday when I saw you I thought I’d be doing the same. I don’t know how much time we have but I don’t want to spend these years or months or days just waiting to die, I want to be with the people who are left, the people I love—”

She breaks off, flushes at that last. She had said it before, that night in the hospital bed (and that had been a different man, a living one and he still hadn’t said it back).

“I’m sorry,” she says, “that was out of line. Of course it’s up to you. If you want to go, go.”

[stark-blood]

Since he woke up, the cold's been seeping into his bones, crawling up his sleeves and slinking down the collar of his father's coat. He's used to that feeling, of waking up cold and finding no where else warm to go. It was maddening, at first, the same as walking down streets where there used to be cafes and bars while going whole days without food, but he gets used to it. Like it's a fact of life.

He feels cold still, when she's finished speaking, but it hurts like his burns are still open underneath his clothes.

"I'm sorry about your brother," he mumbles. He hadn't really ever had the chance to like Raynald; the most time he ever spent with him was when he came around to pack up her things and take them away. He wonders if she ever had the chance to speak to him again. (He can't leave Sansa. He really can't). He'd been missing still that last night in the hospital. I'm sorry, I should have asked. That's what he'd said when they were standing out in the hall, and then... God. He can't look at her again. It's hurting again, and they're still married.

He leans back in his chair, bringing himself back in from the way he was hunched up over the table. It comes back to him, jarringly, that he'd given his wedding ring to his mother, once she'd talked him into finally taking it off. It's probably still in the house somewhere.

"It's cold," he says. "Can we make a fire?"

[stark-blood]

just damage control for a walking corpse like me | jeyne, robb

[gentle--hearts-blog]

“Jesus christ,” she says, “you can be so stupid sometimes.”

He stares at her, blue eyes wide. She can’t tell whether he’s shocked she’d speak to him this way or whether this is simply how he looks now—blank, raw, frozen.

“You think nobody cried when you were gone? You think everything was easy until you showed up and threw it all off? And you—it may not have been easy but we’ve survived, we’ve gotten through, because we’ve had people. We’ve had each other. We may not have been all of each other’s first choices to end the world with before—god knows Theon and I have little love lost, but we’ve had people. I’d never be so arrogant as to claim you need me specifically but you need people, you do, and we’re what’s here. Maybe you can live out there, keep yourself above ground, I don’t know but can’t you see—you’ve been alone too long. You’re still breathing, you’re still alive, you’re still human. You’re not above the rest of us, you’re not invulnerable. Maybe I can’t help you, maybe that’s beyond me but for the love of god—you’re dooming yourself out there. Don’t do this.”

She pauses.

“You’re not dead,” she says, “you’re not one of them either. You’re alive. You’re a person. You have a name. Don’t forget that.”

[stark-blood]

"Alright," he sets his teeth together. "Say I stay."

Again, he's not sure why he doesn't just leave and walk out the door into the snow. It'll make no difference in the end, who understands why what happens, because they'll all die one by one. Closure isn't their game so why doesn't he just embrace the fact and leave her standing there with precious crumbs clinging to her sleeves?

"Say I stay," he starts again, "another day, another week, the rest of my damn life, what difference does it make? I'll still end up leaving, whether I walk out or something drags me out and paints the snow with me. Everybody leaves. What difference does it make if it's right now or a year now? If I go now you, I don't have to see it if they take you, or Theon, or my little sister, first. If I go, you, Sansa, me, at least we can-"

He stops himself before he says it, biting down on the silence and tasting it, bitter. He's tried to burn that word out with exhaustion and starvation; it does no one any good in world that is only white and dead and unchanging. 

"-hope," his voice is withered when he says it.

[stark-blood]

your city is a wilderland | stark mansion | open to sansa, robb and theon (jeyne, ygritte)

[wicked-bloods]

“Don’t.”

She didn’t want to fight with him about whose fault it was; did it matter? They were here now and had to make the best of it.

Her hand squeezes again, and she remembers when they were little, and she would have nightmares. Vague dark shapes coming to snatch her away, her parents away, and she would wake up scared of the shadows in the corners, clutching her little stuffed wolf and running to Robb’s room.

He had helped scare away the nightmares when they were shadow, but flesh and blood took more than hugs to vanquish.

The tone in his voice is strange, and she sits up reluctantly, cheek cooling rapidly in the air. Dreams.

But she wants to sleep in the same bed, to keep him safe and warm against the outside cold. Losing him again was not an option. The pack survives, Dad had always said. He was dead, the pack was dead except for them.

“I’ll stay upstairs, then. Call if you need me.”

One last tightening of her fingers before letting his hand drop onto the bed, and she stands. There aren’t words to say what she wants, that she loves him more than anything now, that she would take care of him now as much as he had taken care of her.

Maybe it was better she didn’t speak.

[stark-blood]

He shifts up against the pillows before she goes. The brass fixings in the bedposts jangle - he almost cracked his head open when he was six, trying to jump and touch the ceiling. Sansa had been the one who screamed and roused the alarm when he fell.

"You're okay, Sansa," he says, and the light is getting even darker now and he can barely see anything but her outline against the door. "How are the others? How's Theon?"

It's all coming back to him in that mental yawn before he collapses into sleep: that group survival isn't just about everyone holding their own. He never had to worry about Jeyne; she was always the most responsible, sufficient person he knew, and she had Ygritte. Sansa had Theon, and Theon had... no one.

He swallows, and his throat is dry. We're in this together. Now and always. But first we get her out. That was what he said when they'd run, and regardless of who was responsible, that promise had been broken. And now, if he could manage to get up and slip out and into the snow before dawn, he was going to break it consciously. And he hadn't even spoken to Theon.

[stark-blood]

your city is a wilderland | stark mansion | open to sansa, robb and theon (jeyne, ygritte)

[stark-blood]

“No.”

He says it quietly, already turned away with his head against the pillow and even though he’s tired, so very very tired, he can’t yet shut his eyes because this is his father’s side of the bed and it takes some getting used to.

Sansa doesn’t move, and he’s thankful for that. He didn’t really mean that he wanted her to leave.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, lying still. “I wish I knew when this would be over. I wish I could end it for you. This wasn’t supposed to be your life, was it?”

He still remembers her coming to the empty flat on that day when the heat was clinging like a film. Every window in the place was open, the doors slamming randomly in unfeelable drafts, and his little sister had bruises on her arms and even then, when the sun was out and the world was warm, he could do nothing to help her.

[wicked-bloods]

She sits level with his waist, reaching out with her hand to gently clasp his own. Sadness doesn’t seem right; he could not protect her from everything now. This was not a problem solved with screaming and fights and threats.

Maybe this would never be over. Maybe winter would never leave, and they would freeze inside the house, one by one, and be carrion.

The thought does not scare her; it makes her angry, that she should give up so easily.

“It’s not your fault. Nothing’s your fault.”

Her hand tightens, and she leans over to embrace him, head resting on his chest. The beat of his heart is still there, a steady thud thud thud against a frail cage.

“I’ve made this a life, Robb.”

It is thankless, but it’s worth living.

[stark-blood]

He's not expecting her to move against him like that and he nearly bristles. But she's his little sister and she's the reason he's here now and he won't push her away when there's so little time left. Her chin notches in his ribs and when he sighs his lungs compress too quickly.

"No. No, that's not true," he mutters.

A lot of things are his fault. He made too many mistakes to keep it all together. His father might be a collection of rotting meat, still, if he'd had the guts to fix that. They couldn't go back to the hospital because of him. They couldn't get the boys. He didn't tell Jeyne he loved her before the end. He didn't tell Theon either. They stayed in the city because he died there and now they'll all die here with him.

"You shouldn't sleep here," he says, stiffly, remembering the little curved cuts on his arms from clutching himself in his nightmares, forever thankful she didn't make him change for the night. "I have dreams sometimes."

[fireskiss-blog]

it only hurts if you say ow | ygritte, robb (jeyne, theon, sansa)

[fireskiss-blog]

Ygritte pants, skin burning where his fingers had dug into her layers of cotton, and thinks that when he grins, it’s like baring his teeth.  The winter has changed him, like it’s changed all of them.  She’s wrapped the snow around her like a blanket until it’s seeped into her bones; she only ever feels warm when she’s next to Jeyne.

But here’s Robb Stark again, beaming at her like a man who thinks he’s already, spitting bright blood onto the ice.  Cocky English bastard, she thinks, and without realizing she’s moved, she barrels into him, taking them both down in a cloud of kicked up snow and flying red hair.  When she raises her head again, she’s got both knees on his thin chest, and the knife from the waistband of her jeans at his throat.

The smile she graces him with is sweet, almost innocent.  ”I’d slit your throat, Stark, if it wouldn’t break your wife’s heart.”

Ice from her hair drips onto his face, and he blinks, mouth open, breathing in the heavy, shocked silence.

Her laugh is high and bright, like ice shattering on stone.  ”Oh, fool,” she spits at him, eyeteeth pointed, vicious.  ”Do you think we need you?  Do you think we ever needed you?  How do you think we’ve been getting along with you dead?  How do you think we keep warm at night?  Do you ever wonder?”

[stark-blood]

Her hair drips in his face and he twists beneath her when she calls him fool. The knife came at him out of nowhere, which was an oversight, but he's had no practice. He's not used to humans being so vicious... but he feels the point of it against his chin.

Oh, I'd be gone, too, if it weren't for her heart, he thinks, but he laughs it back instead, matching her tooth for tooth. Snow is soaking into his back, the hollows of his ribs and the backs of his knees. It's the stupidest thing to do, be exposed like this. Funny, really, how he can feel so cold and yet his body's still running somehow, hugging all the heat down to his bones where it does no good.

"What do I care, as long as you're keeping warm?" he huffs, hot breath clouding up and dissolving into the air. That's all that matters anyway. Heat. Food. Shelter. Hope's optional but not advised. Her knees poke against his chest and he twists again, but not enough to let the knife slip.

"Go on, then, kill me," he goads her, grinning because the alternative isn't an option, "I'm dead already. Spill a little blood and we'll both be warmer for it."

[stark-blood]

just damage control for a walking corpse like me | jeyne, robb

[stark-blood]

There are three little lines etched into his parents’ kitchen table now and his thumbnail is going ragged.

Yeah, well that’s Theon, he thinks to himself, slowing. He was always so brittle he might as well break and the night before proved nothing different. It was in that first week alone that Robb had told himself to act more like him. Maybe that’s the problem. (And Theon is the man of this house now, after all).

“Are you trying to pay me a compliment?” he asks, still not looking up, hiding from it, really. “I would have hoped you felt it. I felt it.” He starts digging a fourth line into the wood. “I went back to the Tower every day for a week and then I went east, all the way to the Dogs and thought I’d work my way back and find you somehow. Didn’t expect it to take this long. And then I never expected it, and now I don’t feel it anymore.”

He glances at her again, at her still, fragile face coloured by exhaustion. It’s hard to discern how it was before now; before means before the Tower these days, not before the hospital or before she left. He memory freezes, telescopic, but he thinks that, even while she was having doubts, when she kissed someone else, he never did lie to her.

“I’m leaving,” he says, clearly. “I’d appreciate it if you told Sansa you didn’t see me.”

[gentle--hearts-blog]

“No. Please don’t. You can’t.” His head lifts, instant, defensive—he seems already angry that she would even try to tell him what to do, that she’d presume.

“I can—” he begins and she shakes her head.

“Of course you can go, nobody’s stopping you. And I understand if you don’t want to stay for me or if you don’t think I matter. But Sansa, she’s—she’s held up well, I suppose but not if you leave her again, not after a day, that’s cruel, Robb. We’re not her family, not even Theon, she needs you. I don’t know if this is about me or about Theon but please don’t take it out on her.” She pauses. “Look, I know you’re not the same anymore, none of us are but if there’s anything I can do to help you, to take care of you. Or if you just want me to leave you alone, even, I can do that as well. I know you probably want nothing to do with me, but I still care about you and if there’s anything, however insignificant, that I can do to make things better—”

She reaches out, considering for a moment cupping his hand in hers but she thinks he would not like her to touch him. She draws back.

[stark-blood]

Robb can't look at her while she's begging. It's like he only has two modes, taking her in and shutting her back out again. All he can think is just stop, stop, stop. It's not what he wants to hear - that's not the argument he wants to think about.

"That’s cruel, Robb."

He swallows it down - he doesn't like that. And who are you to lecture me on the art of walking out?

Then she reaches out; she's been so still he'd've had to be facing the wall to miss the movement. He sort of flinches from it, inwardly, and she draws back, independent of the fact, and drags his gaze with it.

What it is he's feeling exactly, he isn't sure, but he stares at her, nearly glares at her, and then he half-laughs.

"It's not you," he starts. "It's not anyone. What happened... that was no one's fault, so I shouldn't be angry." He's not sure where he's going with this all, but he curls forwards and leans against the table again. There's a crack in the floor above them as the house settles back down. "But I am angry. Funny, yeah? I don't remember ever getting so angry before."

He straightens back up again, and his spine cracks this time.

"You're fine without me and I'm fine without you. It only makes it more difficult my being here. No one has to cry through the night that way. I don't want to find out what's changed, you don't either. Sansa will figure it out."

[stark-blood]

just damage control for a walking corpse like me | jeyne, robb

[gentle--hearts-blog]

“No. I guess not,” she says. “Theon’s been a mess, of course.” She wonders whether to mention Jon, who is alive somewhere with a hole in his shoulder that Theon put there. Not now, it is too soon  and Theon will think she is trying to win, after all of this, to cut lines in between the two of them. Would he still, after these months? There was something impersonal about the two of them, strictly tactical. She never knows what to expect with him, not really. (He’d seemed to shoot Jon as easily as a walker, bang bang and then done.)

Then there is her and Theon, of course—she tries not to think of that, to push it away. It hasn’t happened since they’ve gotten to the house. She’d thought of it as a stage, something passing, something finished and she wonders if Robb would see it that way. Would it matter?

“He’s hardly held himself together, really. I don’t think he’s very good at living without you.” She pauses. “Sansa’s held together well. I mean, she shouldn’t have to, but she does. And I just—I do my best, I suppose. I mean, I’m not pretending it’s the same as it must have been for you out there, but it’s not been easy. I don’t think any of us are really the same. Even Ygritte, funnily enough.”

[stark-blood]

There are three little lines etched into his parents' kitchen table now and his thumbnail is going ragged.

Yeah, well that's Theon, he thinks to himself, slowing. He was always so brittle he might as well break and the night before proved nothing different. It was in that first week alone that Robb had told himself to act more like him. Maybe that's the problem. (And Theon is the man of this house now, after all).

"Are you trying to pay me a compliment?" he asks, still not looking up, hiding from it, really. "I would have hoped you felt it. I felt it." He starts digging a fourth line into the wood. "I went back to the Tower every day for a week and then I went east, all the way to the Dogs and thought I'd work my way back and find you somehow. Didn't expect it to take this long. And then I never expected it, and now I don't feel it anymore."

He glances at her again, at her still, fragile face coloured by exhaustion. It's hard to discern how it was before now; before means before the Tower these days, not before the hospital or before she left. He memory freezes, telescopic, but he thinks that, even while she was having doubts, when she kissed someone else, he never did lie to her.

"I'm leaving," he says, clearly. "I'd appreciate it if you told Sansa you didn't see me."

[fireskiss-blog]

it only hurts if you say ow | ygritte, robb (jeyne, theon, sansa)

[fireskiss-blog]

Bile teases the back of her throat as he speaks, and she feels her muscles tense, wanting to curl in upon herself, to make it as hard as possible for him to crawl back inside her and lay claim to her bones.  She shudders, tugs on the sleeves of an old flannel shirt that might have once been his.  The thought makes her want to rip it off; he’s touched every part of her life but her skin and now he’s even there, always, always there.  Is there anything that’s hers?  Anything that Robb Stark won’t lay claim to?  Even Jon was his in end, more than he was ever hers.  She wants to shout until the whole of London falls down on him again, but the words are stuck somewhere under her ribs, where he used curl his fingers.  They’re tucked inside his gloves, now, and nowhere near her, but he’s there just the same.

She thought she might have had the chance to get rid of him, if she tried hard enough. 

There is a bolt of irrational anger at the edge to his voice, like she should somehow manage to run into his arms and kiss the soles of his snow-caked shoes like the others did, like he doesn’t realize all the pain he’s caused them by leaving, and then coming back.  He’s so blind he doesn’t know, she thinks, and her rage is cold, like swallowing snow, spreading through her stomach.

Before she knows it, she’s thrown away the ax, crossed the yard to him and punched him.

“Who the fuck are you to come back here?”  Her voice crashes against the house, and icicles break off and smash against the patio.  She shoves at him until he’s half buried in the snow.

“You were dead!” she yells, ignoring his wild, confused blue eyes, or the wedding ring around his finger.  ”You were mourned and you can’t just come back here and expect everything to be fine, not when you’ve done nothing and I’ve been keeping us all from dying!  You don’t get to act the fucking hero.”

[stark-blood]

She catches him on the side of the head and he goes down fast on the ice and snow, not expecting her to come barreling at him. He tastes blood, though it's his head that's burning, so he's sure he's bit down on his lip.

Ygritte is shouting over him and he wipes the blood away before he looks up at her, blinded, still, by the instant. Instinctively, he reaches out and grabs her at the bend of her arm, tightening his gloved fingers as his jaw clenches shut.

Yes, yes, it all makes sense, that all feelings fester in time, and she's looked at him like an obstacle, an idiot, for a long while now. Why? For letting Jeyne walk away? For driving her out? For Jon? What is it? She practically snarls at him.

He's not sure if he's trying to pull her off her feet or just scare her, but either way she jerks back with a shout and though he lets his hand go loose, it gives him the leverage to stand again, and then he is laughing.

"How long have you been waiting to do that?" he grins at her, wiping his lip with a knuckle, squaring off against her in the snow. He blocks her way back inside but she does not seem the flighty sort.

"Oh, Ygritte. If you really wanted me to be dead, you wouldn't have the dropped the axe."

[stark-blood]

your city is a wilderland | stark mansion | open to sansa, robb and theon (jeyne, ygritte)

[wicked-bloods]

Her hands smooth over the cloth as she hangs it on the bed frame, palms covering deep red stains that she knows to be blood.

It would have bothered her, before.

“She’s sleeping. Or that’s what she said.”

She pulls the comforter up from its place at the foot of the bed, and Robb dutifully lays down so she can cover him. It’s a maternal gesture, to tuck him in, and she sits down at the edge of the bed when she’s done.

“Do you need anything?”

[stark-blood]

"No."

He says it quietly, already turned away with his head against the pillow and even though he's tired, so very very tired, he can't yet shut his eyes because this is his father's side of the bed and it takes some getting used to.

Sansa doesn't move, and he's thankful for that. He didn't really mean that he wanted her to leave.

"I'm sorry," he says again, lying still. "I wish I knew when this would be over. I wish I could end it for you. This wasn't supposed to be your life, was it?"

He still remembers her coming to the empty flat on that day when the heat was clinging like a film. Every window in the place was open, the doors slamming randomly in unfeelable drafts, and his little sister had bruises on her arms and even then, when the sun was out and the world was warm, he could do nothing to help her.