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He would say it seems like the end of days - but even the routines marking the patterns of time seemed to have dissolved, melted away, to reveal - what, he does not know. It was only the tic of habit that made him marshal order in the remains of the castle, and the same force in others that made them follow.
And now his body feels strange. Slipping into his direwolf’s skin he knows; is familiar with the pulse of that hotter thicker blood and the pad of his paws running on the earth. But now...it's as if the outlines of his body were blurring, like the shimmering heat that tricked men lost in the desert - or so Old Nan had told them. He is alternately cold and hot, light and heavy - and a faint music pulses behind his ears.
“Are you ready?” says a voice behind him.
“Ready?” he replies as he turns to the voice, the word feeling thick in his teeth.
“Yes, Jon. They will be here soon - but everything is laid out now, for you.”
Jon squints at the figure, trying to put it into focus as it gestures to a sword resting near the fireplace. Red curtains became red hair, and shadows became limbs. Ridiculously, his heart begins to beat madly as she moves toward him. I’m here at the end of the world and I’m supposed to fly a dragon against an army of Others and I’m scared of a woman in red?
(kissed by fire, says the music that’s coming from somewhere or is it his mind?)
She places one hand on his arm and another cups his cheek. He feels her looking at him but he can’t quite make her out, and -
“How many miles we all have been.” The hand on his cheek slides back into his hair, weaving into the knots. “But I’m glad I’m here with you now, here at the end of all things.” Jon both hears and feels the growing sounds outside the door, the clang and coming tide.
“I know you have to go. I know what you have to do, and it’s alright, I won’t stop you, and I know you’ll be strong and do your best and we’ll win” - her voices rises at the effort not to cry - “it’s just - I wish we were all already together, in some other world but this one. I wish for us never to be parted again.”
She steps back and her hand leaves his face. “I wanted to give you something, but so much was burned or broken. I found this, though.” She pulls a bundle out of her pocket and presses it into his hand. He looks down. It’s a doll - proportions rather off, truth be told - a boy-doll with black hair, bound together with bark and cloth.
“It’s you,” she says. “We were supposed to make dolls to practice our sewing, and Arya insisted on trying to make one of you. I told her she was being silly and stupid” - and Jon can hear the high clear notes of her grief in the music that’s growing louder - “so she yelled at me and said she hating sewing anyway. But she kept it, and you should have it now.”
(stick him with the pointy end needles the music, and now it is the tang of his grief that he tastes)
His hand curls around the doll. A gong sounds, and Jon looks, and she’s finally in focus: Sansa, his Sansa, crystal clear. Her beautiful face. River-blue, porcelain, summer-snow and berry. His bright-flower little sister and his unexpected woman-wolf, and as he kisses her, her tongue tastes both sharp and sweet.
She pulls away first. “We are with you, Jon,” and the music is all around him now. “We are in you, always, all of us, and we will never leave your side. Never, not ever, do you understand?”
And he does, but all he can do is nod, and he is unsure if he is still wearing his skin or not, because he doesn’t know how his arm suddenly came to be holding that sword by the fire, and why the sword feels a part of him, and the music feels clear and close as he pushes the sword through Sansa’s body-
(kill your Nissa Nissa and let the Hero be born - that’s new, he thinks, absurdly)
-now he’s sliding down onto the floor with her, blood smoothing the folds of his shirt and she’s smiling, still smiling at him and forgiving him and he’ll die now too he’s sure - but he doesn't, because he’s watching himself from a great height, a small figure holding a burning sword on a field of ice, and he wants to laugh at it all, all of it, love and night and fire and snowballs, and he can hear Sansa’s voice in the strange song around him - he can hear them all, and he knows it’s all alright, and he’s ready. Here, at the end of all things.