( Birkan Sokullu, cis-male, he/him ) HARK! I believe the heralds are announcing the arrival of BENJEN REED, the 41 year old, RULING LORD of HOUSE REED OF GREYWATER WATCH. They are known to hold loyalty towards HOUSE STARK/THEIR HOUSE/THEMSELVES and little birds sing of them being STEADFAST & WARM-HEARTED. When one dreams of them, images of "murky water catching gold morning light, a fire kept burning past midnight, mud on good boots and no apology for it" comes to mind. However their RECKLESS and STUBBORN nature can make for difficult times. Time will only tell what their true intentions are. { Sabina, 25, she/her, ist, N/A }
full name. benjen reed.
titles. ruling lord reed, lord reed, lord benjen, benny boy (only by his close friends and kin)
age. one-and-fourty
gender. cis man (he/him)
marital status. widowed (emotionally), legally he is separated from his wife.
religion. the old gods and the new.
affiliation. house stark · house reed
face claim. birkan sokullu
height. 6’3.
eyes. hazel.
hair. brown.
moral alignment. chaotic good.
mbti. ENFJ. enneagram. 4w3.
positive traits. Magnetic, observant, playful, resilient, intuitive, devoted
negative traits. Performative, insular, avoidant, hypervigilant, melancholic, repressed.
parents. lord melwyn reed and lady jonelle reed (nee dustin) (deceased)
siblings. lady/lord/liege _____ reed, lord/lady/liege reed, lady utp (nee reed), lord/lady/liege _____reed
spouse: open! pls do contact blog (@thestonepaladin to discuss in detail!) children: marcel reed, meera reed (deceased).
ONE. THE HOUSE THAT MOVES.
Greywater Watch has never been taken.
Benjen Reed learned this before he learned to read. Before he learned to swim, which in the Neck was the more pressing skill. His father told him standing at the water's edge, one hand on Benjen's shoulder, watching the castle sit on the dark water like it had always been there and always would be. "No one has ever taken it," he said. "No one ever will."
Benjen was five. He believed him completely.
He was a loud child. Theatrical. He performed elaborate plays in the marsh for his siblings, who tolerated this with varying degrees of patience, and for the birds, who did not. He climbed things not built for climbing. He had a voice that carried further than was ever strictly necessary and opinions about everything from the age of three and no particular interest in keeping them to himself.
His mother called it spirit.
His father called it exhausting, but he said it the way men say things they are secretly proud of.
What nobody called it, because nobody had a word for it, was the other thing. The way Benjen could go completely still in the middle of all that noise. The way he watched people. Not rudely, not openly. Just quietly and with great attention, filing things away somewhere behind his eyes that he would not take out again until he needed them.
He was his father's eldest. He understood what that meant young.
At ten years old, he was sent to ward at Winterfell.
TWO. THE PLACE WHERE WINTER FALLS.
He arrived in autumn. The trees had already gone bare and the sky sat low and grey over the walls and Benjen, who had grown up with water on all sides and mist in the mornings, looked up at Winterfell and felt, for the first time in his life, genuinely small.
A boy came out to the yard.
Nine years old. Dark-haired. Arms at his sides. He looked at Benjen the way you looked at something you were still deciding about.
Benjen looked back. He did not know what to say. He was ten and had just ridden for days and the keep behind this boy was enormous and grey and nothing like home.
"I'm Maeric," the boy said finally.
Maeric nodded, once, like this confirmed something. Then he said, "Are you hungry?" and walked back inside without waiting for an answer.
Benjen followed him. That was more or less how it started.
Edwin found him the next morning. Seven years old, smaller than his brother, with a gap where his front tooth had recently been. He appeared in the doorway of the room they had given Benjen, looked him over with great seriousness, and held out a piece of bread he had clearly taken from the kitchens without asking.
"Maeric said you might be homesick," he said.
Benjen was not homesick. He was ten and would not have admitted it even if he were.
"I'm not homesick," he said.
"Right," said Edwin. He sat down on the floor anyway and ate the other half of the bread.
They trained together. They got into trouble together, the specific trouble of boys left largely to their own devices in a castle large enough to get genuinely lost in. They found every room they were not supposed to find. They dropped things from heights they were not supposed to climb. There was an incident involving the kitchens that none of the three of them have ever fully explained to anyone, and by unspoken agreement never will.
Maeric was quieter than his brother. More careful. He thought before he spoke in a way that Benjen, who had never thought before speaking in his life, found equal parts baffling and worth paying attention to. He did get angrier easily, and sometimes Benjen’s antics made Maeric smile a lot easier. A truly worthy audience of his stories. Benjen dedicated himself to making sure everyone smiled around him.
Edwin said whatever came into his head and it was usually funnier than it had any right to be. Benjen was somewhere in the middle and louder than both of them and they balanced each other without knowing they were doing it, the way children do.
He learned Winterfell the way he had learned the Neck. Not from lessons but from living in it. The corridors that were warm when they shouldn't have been. The yard at first snow. The hall at a feast. The silences, which were different silences than the ones he had grown up with.
He did not understand the silences, not at ten, not at twelve. He began to understand them at fifteen, sixteen, when he was old enough to hear what was not being said. The weight of a look across a table when certain names came up. The set of a man's jaw when he thought no one was watching. The North had not forgotten Torrhen's knee. It had opinions about what that meant and those opinions had edges and they lived underneath everything like the hot springs lived underneath the stone.
Benjen said nothing. He was a guest and he knew what he was.
He rode south through the Neck in early spring with the water high on either side and he was a different person than the boy who had arrived with nothing to say and followed a nine year old inside because there was nothing else to do. He had things his father could not have given him. He had Maeric, who was not easy and was worth it. He had Edwin, who had never once in eight years stopped being funny. He had eight years of a place that was not his and had become part of him anyway.
He still writes to them. They still write back.
Five years ago Maeric took Winterfell. Benjen was thirty-six. He wrote a letter and sealed it and sent it north and did not tell anyone what was in it.
THREE. OH, MY SWEET DARLING, THE STARS YOU MAKE.
He was not supposed to fall in love with her. That sounds worse than it is. She was not forbidden, not unsuitable, not anything she was not supposed to be. She was the daughter of a sworn house, a crannogwoman of the deep Neck, and she had a laugh that Benjen heard across a crowded hall one evening and turned around to find the source of before he had made any conscious decision to do so.
He made a fool of himself, initially. This is known, and it is known because he told it himself, which is either confidence or a lack of shame and Benjen has never been sure which.
She was not impressed by him. This was new. He found it interesting. He found her interesting, more to the point, and he told her so with the directness of a man who has always found honesty simpler than strategy.
"You say that to everyone," she said.
"I don't, actually," he said.
She looked at him for a moment. "I know," she said, and walked away.
He thought about that for three weeks.
He married her two years later in autumn, in the marsh, with the Watch moving slow on the water behind them and half the Neck in attendance. He had prepared words. He had been preparing words for months. He was good at words, had always been good at words, and he stood there holding her hands and looked at her face and every single one of them left him completely.
"I know," he managed, eventually.
She laughed. The Watch moved. The water caught the light.
Meera came two years later in high summer. She arrived loud and absolutely certain of herself, which Benjen felt was appropriate. She had her mother's mouth. She had his eyes, his way of going still in the middle of noise. She had, from the very first moment, her own particular gravity.
He held her in the first hour and she looked up at him and he understood, with complete clarity, that he had not previously known what it felt like to be undone by something good.
He called her his star. He was aware this was embarrassing. He did not care at all.
FOUR. WHAT THE WATER TOOK.
She had been asking to see the Watch move for months. Every morning, every evening, variations on the same question delivered with the persistence of someone who had correctly identified that persistence worked on her father specifically. He kept saying soon. She kept asking. He took her out on a morning in early spring, when the mist was still on the water and the light was just coming in grey and flat over the marsh.
She was laughing when she went in.
He remembered this afterward with a precision that will not negotiate, will not soften, will not be reasoned with even now. Not just her face. The sound. Full and completely hers, and then the water where she had been, which was still in the way that water is still when it has just closed over something.
He went in without thinking.
The Neck is cold in all seasons. In early spring it is a cold that has no interest in you at all. He went down as far as he could go.
The crannogmen pulled him out. What state he was in when they did is not something any of them describe. In the hours after there was nothing in him where feeling should have been, just a blankness, just the particular silence of a place that has had something taken out of it.
Marcel was three. He asked for his sister in the simple way of children who do not yet have a word for gone.
Benjen answered him every time.
FIVE. MY STAR FADED AWAY.
His wife left in the months that followed.
He did not fight it. He stood in the doorway of Greywater Watch and watched her go and then he went back inside to Marcel, who was three and smelled of sleep and needed feeding.
There had been words before she left, quiet things that cut deeper than any scream. She was right in her way, and he was right in his, but that mattered little when the ground between them had turned to peat and rot. They were two people standing on different islands in a rising tide, calling out through the fog until their voices went thin, only to realize the water had already taken the path back. You can describe the drowning all you like, but the lungs still burn the same.
"I can't stay," she said. It was the only honest thing left between them.
He looked at her, the damp air of Greywater Watch clinging to his skin like a second shroud. He thought of a dozen pleas to keep her, but a Reed knows you cannot anchor the tide.
She vanished into the mist.
He lingered in the hall until the chill settled in his joints. Eventually, he moved to the bedside where Marcel lay. His son was small, a tangle of limbs beneath a furs, dreaming of nothing while the world shifted beneath him like the floating islands they called home.
He woke when the sun hit the moss. He kept moving.
Marcel learned to walk where the solid ground surrendered to the muck, with Benjen hovering close enough to be a second shadow. By four, the boy had developed a tongue like a whetstone and opinions on everything from the taste of frog-legs to the way the wind turned. He lacked his father’s penchant for the dramatic, possessing instead his mother’s blunt edge and a way of watching the world that was unnervingly still. Benjen looked at things to understand them; Marcel looked at things to dismantle them. He only ever needed one look.
Benjen loved him with the same terrifying gravity he had loved Meera, and this time he knew exactly how deep that was, and he stood at the edge of it every day anyway.
He never called the boy anything that would make a man blush. He thought plenty of things that would, of course. Sentimental rot about the curve of the lad’s jaw or the way he held a spear, but he kept those buried in the peat where they belonged.
He has announced that he is too old to be read to, with the certainty of someone young enough that the certainty is still touching. Benjen has received this information and adjusted accordingly. He talks to him instead, about the Neck and the crannogmen and the history of the house, and Marcel sits and listens with the face of someone pretending this is ordinary and not quite managing it.
Benjen is forty-one. The correspondence arrives and requires answering. The men need riding out with. The councils need sitting. The letters go to Winterfell and come back from Winterfell and somewhere in the texture of all of it, reliable and without guarantee, he finds something to be glad about. The mist on the water in the morning. A letter in Edwin's handwriting. The particular face Marcel makes when he thinks no one is watching him and something has made him laugh.
Some mornings it comes without effort. Some mornings he goes out to the edge of the water and stands in the cold until it surfaces.
He still talks to the bog. He is aware this is strange. He does it anyway, standing at the water's edge in the early morning the way his father stood there once with a hand on his shoulder.
Greywater Watch has never been taken.
He gets up every morning. He keeps the fire going. He is, by the measure of his world, still standing.
Most days that is more than enough.