Frigid
Written for Day 2 of @jonxsansafanfiction‘s Twelve Days of Shipping Challenge: “Keeping each other warm.”
Jon grits his teeth as he gingerly lowers himself into the steaming bath Tormund drew for him.
Under normal circumstances a warm bath is a luxury. But right now Jon does not welcome it. Just the opposite. He was so cold for so long today the water’s heat is almost unbearable, stinging and biting at his chapped skin.
He’d been outside, exposed to the elements, for more than ten hours before Tormund and Gendry found him in that cave north of here. By the time they got him back to Winterfell his body was so cold icicles were forming inside his beard.
Tormund wouldn’t allow Jon to do anything else until he promised to spend the rest of the night in a tub full of water as hot as he could stand.
As much as Jon hates the idea of soaking in a hot bath all night while there’s still so much to be done, he’d grudgingly agreed to do as she’d instructed. Tormund knows better than anyone how to keep a person alive after nearly freezing to death. Besides – as reluctant as Jon had been to agree to this, he knows his dying is the last thing anybody needs now.
Wincing against the pain in his side, Jon leans forward to grab the damp cloth Tormund draped over the opposite side of the tub before leaving.
But even that small movement is too much for him. As soon as he inches towards the cloth Jon can feel the fresh stitches in his side pulling taut against his raw flesh. He shuts his eyes against the pain and groans, easing himself gently back against the tub’s edge.
He knows he’s damn lucky to be alive. He reminds himself to focus on that as he struggles to tamp down his frustration over everything else.
But he also needs to find Sansa. Soon. She wasn’t there when they brought him back to Winterfell. He needs to let her know he’s all right. That he’s alive.
Especially given how he left things this morning.
No sooner does he think it than Sansa, as if on cue, materializes inside the doorway to his small room. She stares at him, eyes so wide it’s like she can’t believe she’s really seeing him, in the flesh, and not a ghost. Her jaw is clenched – from nerves, or worry, or anger; or maybe some combination of the three – and her lips are pressed together tightly in a thin line.
Someone must have found her and told her he was back. And then she must have come to him immediately, straight from her bedchamber, because it’s nearly midnight and she’s wearing a thin cotton nightdress and nothing else. It only goes down to her mid-thigh, and despite the fact that Jon nearly died on his stupid mission today his eyes still linger just a beat too long on her beautiful, bare legs.
By the gods, he is pathetic.
After what feels like an embarrassingly long time Jon finally manages to tear his eyes away from her body. He glances down at his hands, slowly turning into prunes in the water, and opens his mouth to say something. But then he closes it again when he realizes he has no idea what to say. Or what she even wants to hear from him.
To his relief, Sansa jumps first. Just like she always does. “You’re back,” she says simply. Her words are so quiet he almost can’t hear them over the thudding beat of his heart.
He nods. This, at least, is something he knows how to answer. “Yeah,” he says. “I am.”
The right corner of her mouth quirks up into a half smile. Jon decides that’s probably a good sign. Or, that at least it’s a sign she hasn’t just come here to kill him herself.
“Can I…” she begins, but then trails off. Her eyes dart to the far corner of the room. A faint blush starts to rise on her cheeks, and she fidgets with the hem of her nightdress. “Can I… um. Come in?”
Jon’s stomach does an odd, but not entirely unpleasant sort of flip at her question. His eyes go wide in surprise.
“You want to come in? Here?” His voice is much squeakier than it usually is. He can’t help but cringe at the sound of it.
It isn’t that Sansa’s never seen in him in various states of undress before. It’s just that it’s been about ten years. And Sansa has certainly never seen him like this before: half-frozen, filthy and exhausted, soaking in a bathtub wearing nothing at all. Jon is completely exposed to her right now, totally vulnerable – and legitimately terrified for the first time all day.
If Sansa is half as surprised by her proposal as Jon is she doesn’t show it. She only shrugs, though she still won’t look at him. “Yeah. I thought I could… I don’t know.” She goes back to fidgeting with her nightdress. “I thought I could maybe… help you. Or something.”
Jon blinks at her. “You want to help me?” he asks. “How?”
She sniffs and looks a little offended. She still won’t meet his eyes. “They told me you were hurt,” she says, by way of explanation. “And I can smell you from here. Didn’t they clean you up when they brought you in?”
Jon looks down at his legs. They’re completely submerged in the warm water but they’re still covered with thick splatters of dried blood. And not just his. “Pretty sure their only goals were to get my body temperature up and my wounds sutured.” He chances a glance at her. “They wanted me in hot water the rest of the night and probably figured I could take care of the cleanup myself.”
She takes a tentative step into the room. And then another. There’s less than three feet of space now between where he sits and she stands. His eyes widen again.
At last, she looks at him. “Can you, though? Take care of the cleanup yourself, that is?”
Jon looks towards the damp cloth at the other end of the tub. He closes his eyes and sighs resignedly. “Um. Probably not all of it, no.”
That’s all the encouragement Sansa needs. She closes the short distance between them in two strides and kneels beside his tub. She grabs the washcloth with ease and dips it into the warm water. “Then let me help you.”
She brings the cloth to his bare legs, but he lets out an involuntary yelp before it reaches him. She freezes, hand suspended in midair less than an inch from his body. “You don’t need to do this, Sansa,” he says, his words tumbling over each other in a rush. He knows he probably sounds like he’s panicking, but in the moment he is panicking, and he’s doing it far too much to care what he sounds like. “I’m sure Tormund will be back any minute now. He… he can help me.”
Sansa sits back on her haunches and regards him carefully, one eyebrow raised. The way she’s sitting causes her nightdress to inch up dangerously, and Jon has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep his eyes on her face where they belong. “Tormund is out patrolling the grounds,” she says. “With Gendry. There’s no one here but me.” Apparently deciding the matter settled, Sansa dips the cloth into the hot water again and wrings it out. “And besides. I’m better at this sort of thing than they are.”
Despite the knots of nervous tension roiling in his stomach Jon can’t help but chuckle at that. “Oh? Is that so?”
“Mmm,” she confirms. Jon suspects she’s trying to look, and sound, haughty. But she’s smiling in spite of herself. “I’m definitely better than they are.”
Without another word, Sansa presses the warm cloth in her hand to one of Jon’s legs and begins to gently scrub away the visible remnants of this horrible day.
Jon has, of course, washed his own body many thousands of times before. Until now he’s always thought of bathing as a perfunctory chore; a thing that must be done before he can get on with more important things. Never in his life has he thought of bathing as something pleasurable – but right now, as Sansa gently scrubs his legs clean with the soft washcloth and runs the palms of her small, calloused hands over his highly sensitized skin, he has to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from groaning aloud.
She is thorough and methodical with him, and yet gentle, leaving no part of his legs untouched. As her palms brush over the skin behind his knees with the washcloth it feels like every single nerve ending in his body is centered beneath her fingertips.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she says quietly, but no less forcefully for that as she slides the warm cloth up, skipping over his torso completely and finding his forearm.
She doesn’t clarify what she’s talking about. But there’s no need. He closes his eyes as she works and moves over him, the dual conflicting sensations of physical pleasure and guilt over his earlier actions tangling together unpleasantly in his gut.
“Sansa…” he begins, weakly.
“Just… don’t,” she says again. More sharply this time. “All right?”
He’d left Winterfell this morning like a coward, not even bothering to find her to tell her he was going on this dangerous mission. Not even bothering to say goodbye, even though he knew there was a chance he would never come back.
Doing this sort of thing – leaving before anyone who might care he was leaving woke up and discovered him gone – was a common enough thing for him to do before he came back to Winterfell and everything changed.
But everything is different now, somehow, with Sansa here, though they’ve never discussed it. The way he acted this morning was a strange, new kind of betrayal, and he knows that. It terrifies him, if he’s being honest, the way Sansa’s somehow wormed her way into his life, into his heart, without either of them ever planning on it happening. She’s gotten by every one of his defenses just by being herself, and he’s never been more scared of anything in his life.
It was this fear that led him to slip out of Winterfell before dawn this morning, before he’d have to risk seeing her and saying goodbye.
But how can he explain any of this to her when he hardly understands it himself?
So he doesn’t try.
“I won’t do it again,” he says instead. Resigned to it now, though the thought of having this inexplicable connection to Sansa worries him no less now than it did this morning. “I promise.”
Sansa’s hand pauses briefly on its journey across his clavicle, but that is the only sign she gives that she understands the significance and weight of his words. She recovers quickly, and continues to run the damp cloth over his neck, across his shoulders. Down his back. The water is still very warm but the press of her hand to his skin causes a trail of gooseflesh to rise up on his arms all the same.
“Good,” she says, nodding, as she continues to move. “I promise I won’t either.”
As she pours a cup full of warm water over his head, and threads her dexterous fingers through his dust-matted hair, he decides that for now, it’s enough.