Benjen Stark is 12 the first time he gets well and truly drunk.
It is Lyanna who sneaks into his rooms waking him, well after the hour of the wolf, holding three skins of wine.
“Come, Ben,” is what she says, and even half-asleep, Benjen knows that she is in tears.
He sits up, and pulls back his covers, lets her climb into bed with him. He tries to put his arm around her, but she shrugs him off, and offers him his own skin of wine instead.
“Drink with me, Ben,” she says thickly, words slurring just a little, and Benjen is left wondering how much wine she’s already had.
He sips at his. Father always allowed them one cup at special feasts, and kept a watchful eye on them to ensure that they did not drink all of it. Benjen had taken just three mouthfuls of his tonight– one when they toasted to Brandon’s betrothal, one with his meal, and one when they toasted to the surprise of the evening– Lyanna’s betrothal to Robert Baratheon.
Lyanna is not sipping her’s.
She is guzzling it, taking long, deep swallows, drinking, not for the taste of the sweet Summerwine, but to get drunk.
“Lya,” he begins, reaching out to take her hand. He knows she is not pleased by the betrothal. He’d seen her eyes narrow, go the same stormy gray Brandon’s did before he went off in one of his rages.
“Drink, Benjen,” she says sharply, using her fingers to tip the wineskin up to his mouth. “Drink, or I have no use for you.”
He drinks, though slowly, and tries to hide the sting of her words. She glares at him, and he gives in with a sigh. He finishes the skin in five long swallows, and when he finally puts it down, he notices that the room has started to spin.
“I am to be wed,” she says, slowly, deliberately, as though testing the weight of each word on her tongue. “I am to be wed, and I’ve never had so much as a full cup of wine. I thought we ought to fix that,” she says, and drains the last of her wine skin. She barely takes a breath before unscrewing the top of the third.
She pauses with it half-way to her mouth before she is sobbing again.
“Lya,” he says, again, and he hates how anguished his voice sounds. He wants so badly to be strong for her, but her tears bring his own. He sets his empty wineskin aside, and pulls her against him, and this time she goes willingly.
“Would that we were Targaryens,”she says with a hiccup. “I would just marry you or Brandon, and everything would be fine.”
Benjen huffs out a laugh into her hair.
“Why not Ned?” He asks, and he delights in Lyanna’s snort through her tears.
“He’d never approve of me being drunk,” she tells him, but she’s laughing now, and Benjen feels the swell of pride in a job well done. Soothing Lyanna’s rages is no easy feat.
He laughs with her, and she takes his face in her hands and kisses him lightly on his nose.
“Ben, I don’t want to,” she tells him, gray eyes wide, boring into his.
“I won’t make you marry Ned,” he says, and hiccups and Lyanna laughs softly.
“Can you make me not marry Robert?”
The laughter in Lyanna’s voice is gone. She speaks so softly, so sadly, the way she did whenever she spoke of mother. Benjen cannot bear it.
“Shall I slay him in single combat?” He asks her, resting his forehead against hers. “Shall I steal you away, to North of the Wall, so that we can join the wildlings?”
“I could marry the King-Beyond-the-Wall,” Lyanna says with a little smile. “My sons would be princes.”
Her smile fades again, and Benjen squeezes her hand in his.
“Father thinks I don’t wish to be wed, or to mother children because I am too wild,” she tells him. “He doesn’t understand.”
“You want children,” Ben says slowly, beginning to follow her logic. “Just not with Robert.”
“I want wild Brandons, and solemn Neds, and sweet Benjens,” she tells him, solemnly.
“What, multiples of each?” Benjen says, and is pleased with she gives him a playful swat. But her smile fades again, just as quickly as it had come.
“I want a little Lyarra. With dark curls like Brandon, and a smile like yours.”
“But not with Robert,” he says, and the look she gives him is so pained that Benjen’s heart breaks anew.
“But not with Robert,” she echoes, dully.
There is nothing he can say to her.
He heard the argument she’d had with Father after dinner. He wouldn’t be surprised if all of Wintertown heard, so loud were the shouts.
You are a Stark and you will act with honor, Rickard Stark had shouted at his only daughter.
What honor is there in selling your child away to a stranger, Lyanna had screamed right back, bold and unafraid.
The girl that sits in his bed now is defeated. There is no comfort that Benjen can give her.
He kisses her forehead, her nose, her cheeks, and then very lightly, her lips.
“I swear by the Old Gods,” he says, though he knows he has no such power. “All your children will have the curls you desire. They’ll be wild as Brandon, and as trustworthy as Ned. But they will have your smile.”
She offers him her smile then, and he gives her one in return.
“And of you? What will my children have of you?”
“My love for you,” he tells her, and she buries her face in his chest and sobs until she falls asleep.
Benjen Stark had been drunk many times since, but he had not thought of that night in over fifteen years.
Not until he comes to Winterfell at Ned’s behest to greet King Robert Baratheon, first of his name, and finds Jon well and truly drunk smiling up at him with Lyanna’s smile.
It hurts, gods it hurts, and worsens when he sips the Summerwine in his nephew’s cup.
Lyanna is an ache that never stops, that even the cold beyond the wall can only slightly dull. Sitting here, with her son, worsens the ache in his chest so painfully that Benjen thinks he may die right there. He would welcome it, if he meant going to rest beside his sister once more.
It strikes him that Jon is the same age as Lyanna was that fateful night. His chest constricts painfully, especially when he realizes just how far he’d had to walk to find Jon.
His nephew had not been given a place at the table. He says a silent apology to Lyanna. He wonders if she can hear this conversation, hear her son, all the way from the crypts.
Selfishly, he hopes she can’t. Lyanna had suffered enough heartbreak in her short lifetime. She need not suffer more. She’d cry to see where they had placed her son.
Then Jon asks to join the Night’s Watch, and Benjen can hear his sister’s pained sobs echo in his head. He struggles not to cry.
Maester Luwin says bastards grow up faster than other children, Jon says, and this time Benjen cannot keep the frown off of his face.
You are not a bastard, he wants to tell the boy. And your mother would have hated either of us being in the Watch.
Jon continues to plead his case, using a Targaryen prince as his cause, and Benjen marvels at it.
Does he know, Lyanna? He asks his sister silently. Have you told him in a dream?
It is not until Jon says a bastard can have honor too, that something inside Benjen breaks.
There are many kinds of honor, Benjen wants to tell him. There is honor in letting a woman refuse of betrothal, he thinks bitterly. Honor in keeping a secret. Honor in telling the truth.
He thinks he might tell the boy right then and there, Ned’s secrets, and Cat’s jealousies, and King Robert be damned. Lyanna’s son sits in front of him. The boy deserves to know before he signs his life away.
Lyanna deserves grandchildren, he thinks wildly. Her Brandons, and Neds, and Benjens. Her Lyarra.
He opens his mouth to tell Jon, but movement at the dais catches his eye, and he swallows them down. He has already let down his sister. He cannot let down the last sibling left to him.
He tells Jon as much, as much as he can, without giving it all away. He tries to imagine how Lyanna might say it, and calls Jon son.
The weight of the word is heavy on his tongue, Benjen feels aged far beyond his thirty years.
I’m not your son, Jon says, and damn if the words don’t cut more cruelly than any blade. Lyanna’s sobs echo in his head.
I am so sorry, Lya, he tells her silently. Would that he had run away with her. Would that they were Targaryens. Would that Ned had never gone to the Vale.
More’s the pity, he tells his nephew, and means it more than any of the other words that have ever left his tongue since the day Ned rode home with Lyanna’s bones.
When the boy runs out of the hall after shouting that he’d never dare father a bastard, Benjen ignores the looks from the men at the table and drains the entire flagon of Summerwine.
He picks up another, and stands, maneuvers his way through the hall as quickly as possible, pausing only to pick up a torch from one of the sconces on the wall.
With the torch in his left hand, and the flagon in his right, he heads straight for the only place he wants to be. The place he wanted to stay, if he were ever honest with himself.
He is going to get drunk with Lyanna tonight.