sevensneakyfoxes:

YOU CLEARLY KNOW MY JAM

–

The trail of blood starts at the bottom of the stairs.

It’s not the
first time Sansa’s seen blood on the white marble floors of her childhood home,
but the last time, it had belonged to her family, the streaks leading into the
living room where they’d staged a macabre scene with the headless bodies.  

This time as she climbs the stairs and follows the thick blots of it to
the master bedroom, staining hardwood now, she knows that none of this blood
belongs to a Stark.

Jon’s been hunting again.

(I can’t decide
if that cousin of yours is more dragon or wolf, Petyr had said to her
before he’d answered the knock on the door and sold her out to Ramsay Bolton.  
Dragons may burn everything down, but wolves… you like the taste of blood,
don’t you?)

Once upon a time, the Stark name meant something.  
Honour.  They drew blood when necessary, but they weren’t cruel.  They ran a
business – a family – on the belief that loyalty to your pack was paramount.  
They didn’t rule through fear like the Targaryens or double-deal like the
Lannisters, and in the end, they paid for their honour.  No one escaped, not
even the last two Starks.

The girl that had flinched at the harsher side
of their life – the bruises and the blood and the death – had died right
alongside her family, stacked with their bodies left for her to find.  Ended by
a Bolton knife and a sickness that had been festering long before she’d found
her mother’s severed hand resting on the piano in the living room, the same
piano she’d sat with her mother at for years and learned to play
on.

Now, Sansa has a taste for blood, too.  

When she steps over
the threshold, careful to avoid the splatter of blood with her bare feet, Jon’s
eyes meet hers in the mirror of the bathroom that used to belong to her
parents.  Her mother’s cracked jar of face cream is still sitting on the counter
next to a pool of bloody water that Jon has splashed onto it.  They’d broken it
when he’d fucked her up against the mirror a few days ago after she’d stitched
closed the knife wound on his shoulder, the bruises on her neck still fresh and
dark.

Now there are long finger-shaped bruises on her thighs to match, on
the left side of her hip where he had to hold her up to keep her from sliding
off the counter.

Jon was supposed to be the one who got away, too
Targaryen for the Starks and too Stark for the Targaryens, the get of a
blasphemous union between two powerful families at war.  A union that had gotten
both of his parents killed.  Targaryens killed kin, but the Starks didn’t, and
Jon had grown up under Ned, but not part of the business like the other
boys.

Now, the blank-eyed man scrubbing out his wounds in front of her
over the sink is the last of them.  Better at it, too, from what she’s seen.  

“Is he dead?” Sansa asks, moving beside him and leaning her hip against
the counter.

Jon nods.  "He didn’t go easy,“ he added, pulling a piece of
glass out of his knuckle and letting it drop into the sink.  She can’t see any
wounds on his other than the cut-up state of his hands.  The blood in the
hallway seems to be from his leather jacket, left discarded on the floor by the
shower, and his boots, both soaked in the blood of their
enemies.

“Good.”

Lifting his hand to cup the side of her face, Jon
leans in and kisses Sansa, messy and deep.  When he pulls away, his hand falling
back to the sink, she feels the wet trail that his own blood has left behind on
her cheek.

(He’s a wolf, Sansa had said as Ramsay’s grin mocked
her from the door, trying to keep the fear from her voice.  She wouldn’t
give him the satisfaction: not now, not ever.   And we always take our pound
of flesh.)