Chapter Text
The first two weeks of grad school make him reconsider every decision he's ever made in his life. He's pretty sure the only reason he doesn't drop out immediately is that mom really wants this for him, and his father is footing the bill. Well, that second one doesn't exactly hold the same weight as the first, but still.
The King's Landing University library is massive, and honestly a little intimidating. KLU is intimidating, after Castle Black. CBU was a small school at the ass-end of the country. Now he's right in the metropolis of the capital, and it's more than a little overwhelming.
In the library, he winds his way through the stacks and the other students until he finds a table with an open spot. The other students already at the table shake their heads no when he asks if the spot is taken, and so he drops into the chair and pulls out the textbook for his Geotechnical Engineering Fundamentals class.
He spends the next hour hunched over his coursework, which always makes him feel a bit better. When he's actually doing the work, he feels confident. It's those times between that he doesn't, when he thinks too much and gets in his own head. He's just editing an answer on his laptop when he realizes there's someone hovering over him, and he turns his head slightly to see a girl leaning over his right shoulder to look at his textbook.
She's stunning, is one of the first things that flits through his mind, but he doesn't have much time to dwell on that because she sighs and says, "boring," like she's annoyed or something. Which is ridiculous, because she's the one invading his personal space.
"Do you mind?" he asks, and her head turns, eyes moving from his textbook to meet his. They're a deep blue, and they widen in what looks like surprise.
Jon doesn't get a chance to dwell on that, either, because the student in the seat next to him looks up in confusion and asks, "what?"
I was talking to her, Jon almost says, because it should be obvious, considering she's still leaned over and her auburn hair is hanging like a curtain between them, almost obscuring the other student's face. But the other student isn't looking at the girl, he's just looking at Jon, confused.
Jon looks at the girl again, the surprise in her eyes, edged with something almost like desperation, and he thinks - ah, fuck. Not again.
"Sorry, nothing," Jon says to the other student. "Talking to myself. Bad habit."
The other student nods and goes back to his studies, but the girl says, "no, not nothing. You can see me."
Jon turns back to his textbook, heart starting to pound. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he made eye contact. Didn't mom always tell him not to make eye contact? You have to look past them, through them, or they'll know. But he didn't realize she even was one, because she doesn't look like the others he's seen-
"Don't ignore me," she says, and Jon does his absolute best to pretend he didn't hear that.
He cannot get distracted by a ghost right now.
"Hey!" she says, and suddenly his shoulder feels cold, and he knows that if he looked, her hand would be there. Trying to shake him. Trying to get his attention. "I know you saw me," she continues, and he grits his teeth. Something's different about this one, she isn't getting easily distracted or forgetting he exists. She feels sharper than the others he's seen.
When he doesn't answer her still, the cold disappears from his shoulder, and he thinks - finally.
Only, no, not finally, because she hasn't left - instead, she's climbing onto the tabletop, moving right in front of him on her hands and knees, and even though he knows better, he still winces when her knee lands on his laptop's keyboard.
"Stop pretending you can't see me," she demands, putting her face right in front of his, and Jon struggles to maintain the illusion. Her knee is on his keyboard, her hands are planted on the pages of his textbook, and those eyes stare right at him. He knows that what he should do is continue on like normal, and eventually she'll move on. He just needs to keep studying, but somehow, he can't quite bring himself to move his hands through her to get to his stuff.
It's a vile feeling, moving through a ghost.
"Please?" The tone of her voice changes. Gone is the demand, the excitement; it feels like he can hear it drain out of her. "Please look at me," she whispers. "Please. Please see me."
Jon squeezes his eyes shut.
When Jon was a little boy, mom had sat him down and told him that their family had a special gift. A polite way to put it, since it's not really a gift. More like a curse.
"It's normal to want to help them," mom had told him, holding his little hand in hers. "It's normal to be curious and want to talk to them, but you can't. You have to pretend you don't see them."
"Why?" Jon had asked.
Mom had smoothed back his hair, but hadn't answered. Instead, she had gone to the bookshelf and gotten out an old photo album and opened it up, then pointed to the picture of an old woman. "That's your great aunt," mom had told him. "How old do you think she is?"
Jon's nose had wrinkled. The woman was old old. Wispy white hair and too many lines on her weathered face. "Like a hundred?" he had guessed.
"She was forty six here," mom had said. That also sounded old to Jon, but he was pretty sure his dad was close to that, and his dad didn't look like that. "You see, your great aunt spent her whole life trying to help spirits move on. And while that is a kind thing to do, it comes at a cost. The more you interact with them, the more you try to help them, the more they… Well, they don't mean to, but they drain you. They can't help it."
Mom had shut the photo album and taken his hand and said, "so you have to ignore them. Never help them."
The ghost is persistent.
He had made the mistake of reacting, and he curses himself for it now. But those pleas had sounded so sad, he'd flinched. A mistake, because even though he'd plunged his hands through her to pick up his stuff and pack it up, she had seen it, that one moment of weakness.
"I knew it," she says, excitement back in her voice, following after him as he slings his backpack on and walks as quickly as he dares towards the exit. "You can see me! What's your name? Mine's Sansa."
Sansa. It sounds familiar, though he can't place from where. It's only as he's shoving open the library doors and his eyes catch on the Student Union bulletin board in the vestibule that he remembers he's seen her name and face plastered all over campus.
Sansa Stark, missing since 14 July.
"Fuck," he curses under his breath - another mistake, because she hears it. He's supposed to be ignoring her.
"They could have used a better photo of me," she grouses. "Whoever picked that one out-" the sentence trails off, and Jon can't help but look over at her, where she's staring at the Missing Persons poster of herself. "Probably my mom," she finishes, that sadness is back in her voice. The one that pulls at something deep inside of him.
You can't help them, he tells himself. Repeats the words his mom and his grandmother have told him his whole life. You can't help them. You can't waste your life helping them.
But that explains why she's different - most of the ghosts he's run into are obvious, they look like ghosts. Skin pale and tinged with grey, eyes hazy or completely white, hair limp and colorless, the tips of their fingers black, their voices gone hoarse until its lost altogether. The longer they walk the earth, the more they fade. Jon thinks eventually they must fade away entirely, or there would be way more ghosts roaming around. That always made him feel better, the idea that even if he couldn't help them, they would eventually move on. But it still must take a while, just based off the clothes on some of them.
They might be able to move on eventually, but Jon still thinks it's a terrible fate, to linger for so long all alone. When he looks at the girl again, all he can think is that she'll spend the next however many centuries wandering around this campus, looking for someone to help her. But no, he can't think about it like that. You can't help them.
He walks out the second set of doors and into the King's Landing heat. It's almost October and it's still warm here; up in Castle Black, it will probably snow soon. There's a sudden pang of homesickness that he doesn't feel like dealing with right now. He's already got enough on his hands, with this persistent ghost who won't take a hint and leave him alone. He decides to go back to his apartment because he doesn't have any more classes today and he's hoping that she'll get bored and stop following him.
Except she doesn't. She gets on the shuttle bus with him, standing in the aisle next to where he sits. Ghosts don't scare him, he knows they can't touch him, but it's still unnerving to have a constant presence hovering in his periphery.
"Do you live on campus?" she asks, as the shuttle begins to move.
"What's your major?" as they get off at the stop right around the corner from his place.
"It looked like some sort of math thing," as he waves his key fob over the reader. As usual, it takes two tries to get the stupid thing to register, but then the light goes green and he's able to get into the building.
He answers none of it, still hoping she'll get bored and leave. In vain, it seems, because instead, she follows him into his apartment, and for the first time, he feels very aware of the state it's in.
"Yikes," she mutters, looking around at the barren apartment.
"I just moved in," he says defensively, which ruins any and all pretense that he can't see her.
At the acknowledgement, she turns to him and grins. "So you can hear me," she says, looking a little too pleased with herself.
"I didn't invite you in," he grumbles, shrugging his backpack off and dropping it on the kitchen counter.
"I'm not a vampire," she shoots back, hands on her hips.
That makes him pause and, trying not to grimace, he asks, "do you… know what you are?"
That sadness creeps back into her eyes, and he hates the way it makes guilt stab through him. "I'm dead, right? I'm a ghost, or a spirit or whatever."
"Yeah."
She nods, arms crossing over her stomach. It makes him notice the Winterfell U tee she's wearing, with a pair of jean cut-offs and pristine white Keds. That's what she died in, he thinks. Wherever her body is, she's likely wearing that - unless someone changed her after. He doesn't want to think about that.
"Winterfell?" he asks, and her brows furrow in confusion. When he points at her shirt, she gives a short, humorless laugh.
"It's my brother's," she says, her hand bunching in the material of it, though he doesn't think she realizes she's doing it. "I stole it from him over winter break." Then, with a noise he thinks might be another laugh, "I decided not to go home for summer break this year. I should have gone home."
"What happened?" Jon asks. He can't help himself. He's never spoken to a ghost this clear and coherent before, and there's a strange combination of guilt and pity and disgust and morbid curiosity all tangling up together inside of him.
"I can't remember," she shrugs. "The last thing I remember is getting in an Uber, and the next thing I know, I'm wandering around campus and no one can see me or hear me." Her bottom lip trembles and she looks away from him, eyes going distant. In that moment, she looks so lost. "It took me a while to accept it, but I know I'm dead."
He needs to let this go. Tell her he can't help her and that she should leave, but…
But he's never seen a ghost so clearly. She looks so human.
"Do you know where you were going?" he asks, against his own better judgment.
"I was going to go break up with my boyfriend."
"And then the next thing you know, you're dead? What a coincidence."
She looks at him again, steady and unflinching. "No, it's not. He killed me." She says it so matter-of-factly that it makes him blink.
"Oh, I thought you didn't remember-"
"I don't," she says. "But Joff did it. Or he paid someone to."
Jon rubs at the back of his neck uncomfortably before walking into the kitchen and grabbing a glass out of the cabinet. He almost asks if she wants something to drink, before he remembers. "You seem sure. There a reason for that?"
When she doesn't immediately answer, he turns around to look at her. She's watching him, almost like she's studying him. Then, slowly, she pushes up the baggy sleeve of the too-big Winterfell U shirt, and Jon sees the dark, finger-shaped bruises on her upper arm. She does the same with the other sleeve. Another handprint bruised into her.
"Joffrey doesn't like being told no," she says.
It makes him sick to think those bruises will be with her forever. Or, at least until she fades - in a hundred years, or two, or three. However long it takes. Eventually she'll forget about them. Eventually she'll forget her boyfriend's name. Eventually she'll forget her own.
"I can call in a tip," he says. His mother's warning voice is distant, overwhelmed by the rising need to help her. To save her from that fate. Maybe he can't help every ghost he comes across - most are too faded to help, anyway, but she isn't. She's sharp and clear and she remembers details. "Maybe if they find your body, you can… move on."
"Move on," she repeats. "What does that…" Her voice hitches. "Where would I go?"
"I don't know," he admits. "I don't know what's beyond this. But what I do know is that it can't be any worse than wandering around forever."
Her arms are folded over her stomach again, hands gripping the fabric of her brother's shirt as she takes that in. After a while, she finally says, "a tip won't work. I'm sure he's already a suspect, but they won't do anything about it. His family is too rich."
Jon rubs a hand over his face, because of course. Of course her shitty, abusive boyfriend is rich. And she's right, they won't go after someone like that without overwhelming evidence, and even then they may not.
He should tell her to leave. He should tell her he can't help her. It's too much. Too risky. He should be focusing on his education, not running around playing ghost detective. He should remember his mom's warnings. He should listen to logic.
"Okay," he nods, realizing that he's already made a decision, that logic has completely gone out the window. "I'll find your body myself."