Chapter Text
House Rules
Prologue
Ned’s voice booms down the hall as the door from the garage closes too hard. Cat glances up at the painting on the wall that vibrates every time her husband or Robb slams it too hard. It makes it crooked over time. She’s always having to adjust it back.
But there are worse things women have to complain about, and she would happily have her baby boy back home slamming doors and knocking his hockey bag into her walls, so they need a retouch if it wouldn’t mean giving up his scholarship that he’s worked so hard for.
“In here,” she calls back.
His heavy footfalls announce his approach as she shuts off the kitchen faucet and pushes a bowl of glistening berries to the side. Those footfalls will only get heavier as the season gets underway. It’s getting to be time to talk about hanging up his skates, but Ned doesn’t like to talk about that.
The worry she only feels in regard to her children and husband announces itself in her chest at the thought. Not today. Another day.
He smells like acrid rink coffee when he bumps into her counter and drags over a stool, scraping along the floor.
She bends, reaching for the drawer full of neatly folded white kitchen towels. She doesn’t want her hands to drip water on the floor. The hardwood has a tendency to spot.
“How was the team meeting?” she asks, as the drawer closes softly—soft-touch self-close, it was one of the details she insisted on when they redid the kitchen.
She doesn’t mind the noise, but where she can eliminate it, she will.
“Good. Met the rookie.”
“Jon Snow?”
When the Direwolves drafted him, the local media went crazy, hyped that poor boy up to levels that could either go to his head or ruin him. Ned escaped most of that. It helps to be a defenseman. It had landed on his brother, Brandon, instead, and then he didn’t end up panning out at all. Hopefully, it all turns out better for this kid: for his sake and the Direwolves’.
“That’s the one,” he says, easing onto the stool with a grunt. Those sounds project his age, and that thing in her chest zings again. “Good kid. Serious.”
There’s something about the way he stares up at her from behind the counter that stops her in her task.
She braces herself on its bullnose edge. “And?”
“Works hard. A couple of guys have skated with him already. They like him. No entitlement. First one on, last off type.”
“That’s nice,” she says slowly. “Should make your life easier.”
She knows what Ned likes: a kid who’s willing to block a shot come January. Talent only gets them noticed in June when the room is talking picks.
“Seems like a good teammate.”
There’s something else he doesn’t want to say. “Yes?”
“He should bunk with us this year.”
He has the good sense to lower his gaze.
“Absolutely not.”
His hand smooths over the marble counter. “Cat.”
“I know you always want to help them, but he’s practically the same age as Sansa, and Arya not far behind.”
And handsome. She’s seen his face as much as anyone within the viewing area. Dark hair, dark eyes, tall—no.
He sinks his weight into his elbows. “They won’t bother him.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.” Ned can be so naïve about the girls. “It’s a terrible idea.”
Reckless.
In a year, this rookie will be gone. The girls will be here, in the wake of his mess.
Hands clasped before his face, his thumb and middle finger swirl his wedding band around. “He just needs some structure, someone to teach him responsibility beyond the rink.”
“Fine. Great.” Her shoulders lift and fall. “No argument here.” They’re babies thrust into a professional space and clueless. She’d want as much for Robb. “But we took the last one. Davos—”
“I couldn’t do that to him. Marya already has her hands full.”
Cat can appreciate that Marya has a house full of boys, but Cat and Ned have two at home and the girls besides, and the memory of sharing her house with Theon Greyjoy is still fresh enough to force her arms to cross over her chest.
There were the girls he sneaked in through the back gate, Rickon’s new vocabulary, and that time he got sick in her kitchen sink. That was something to wake up to on a Sunday. A charming boy, despite everything, which only made him more dangerous.
And they always eat her out of house and home.
“He’s living in a Residence Inn in Winter Town, and the last thing I want is him ending up sharing an apartment with Pyp or Grenn. That’d be a disaster.” His hand smooths another arc over the counter. “Just think about it, Cat.”
“Ned Stark, I could think about this for a solid month, and there’s absolutely nothing—nothing—you could say that would convince me to host that boy for the next year.”